Daniel Prates

@Well VERY GOOD dude! Usually when people use stock IVAs to fill in gaps in mods they end up looking terrible, but it does look great! They fit very nicely.

It seems clear that there will be parts to build the Ariane 5, but the probes, will there be new parts for them as well?

I too think its amazing and wonderful that this still works. Doubt: it is clear to me that larger wings generate more lift. But thicker wings, as in Real Life, will generate more lift at the expense of more drag, withing the same wing area? Or the game does not compute that?

Wonderful @Beale. Letting this go is proving to be harder than you thought huh?! Thanks, many thanks.

Guys, if I prune a part, and delete the mod, if I reinstall the mod I get the part back, right?

Oh no, this last one I used another one, not the FOAB again. My guess is that one is indeed broken.

I love those two mods. They give a good reason to have stations in far away bodies for training purposes.

That is how I do it too, the droping rover has an unmanned command module and an antenna. And a source of EC. I set the chute to auto-deploy on release, fire and forget, and return to KSC and land. The pod will land and await you there. To avoid messy results I fly in circles above it until it lands.

Yes, there is a limit. They are science experiments, somewhat like the others. So there is a finite amount of sci points. There are also three arm sizes; only the larger one can get all of the science in one go. Tbh its more like an incentive/pretext for you to build rovers, as landing a craft with an arm, just next to an anomaly, can be hard (but doable). The anomalies in kerbin are rather dull; however all bodies have anomalies and the rewards scale up accordingly. Iirc you can also do EVA reports next to them. PS: I have been calling them anomalies, but I think the correct name given to them by the devs is "features", to differ them from the non-scienceworthy things like the mohole, the saucers, the mun arches etc. Features render science, anomalies don't. PS2: check this post I wrote a while ago, where I comment a dropable feature research walker with an arm:

Yep. You have to use the new science arms to collect science from them. North of the KSC, across the bay, you will find several.

In more recent ksp versions, I adopted as a rule to have both drogues and a main chute. It is easier to have safer landings. Wasn't like that earlier.

Yeah besides, now you have the researcheable anomalies like the Baobab tree, maybe you saw a shadow of one.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi Lisias, you're my only hope.

I only mentioned this so that people can see how wonderful TW is, and the colossal scope of creativity it allows. It is in very good hands with Lisias.

Wow, that looks like an Edwards Base kinda of desert runway. What mod is that?!

@Sebastiaz managed to build this using SXT's floaters pus tweakscale, which used to be possible and now sadly isn't. Look @Lisias, we talked about this some time ago.

Another test! This one was dropped from 8.800 meters. It hit water and detonated; perhaps because this time I activated physics range extender (which was off during last test). What a cloud! By now it is probably going above 12.000m. It started dissipating soon after that. I will try a couple of high-altitude drops with and without PRE, to see if it makes a difference.

Haha! Oh yeah, that is 75% of what I meant by good water landing characterisrics. Really, spaceplanes are not my thing... as in real life, dumb rockets get the job done cheaper. But most times I tried out SP designs, they ended up being water landers. You have (waaaay) more landing space, less parts, a more permissible window to work with. It however absolutelly must be: buoyant; slow staller; sturdy on contact with water.

Oh right, this thing! Cool that it is back!

Ok, new test, this time a failure! The plane is a supersonic strategic bomber more or less inspired on the Convair Hustler... ... and the payload, the FOAB: The drop has as target the southern coast just south of the KSP (come to think of it, with a bomb this size, it would have destroyed the KSC). Altitude was around 15.000m, speed mach 2.7: And ... a failure! The bomb dropped allright with BdA commands, but did not detonate, it just crashed against the water surface. I am left wondering: a) does it have to hit land to explode, water is no good? b) there are some 'engage distance' settings, does that matter, i.e., if it is dropped from too high it will not explode? PS .... some great screenshots nonetheless huh?

@overkill13 I totally agree with all that you said, also in the other posts. As a matter of fact, I don't think a craft quite like Pteron here would be feasible in real life. Lifting bodies were experimented enough to be clear that they are ineffective craft in low speeds. In fact, the real-life space shuttle still has a lot of wing to help out and it could be considered a partial LB at best. Pteron here, in real life, would have like 90% of it's lift coming from the body and the rest from the tiny wings, so comparing to real world parameters, it would be a very, very fast lander. It is silly to guess numbers at random but imagine a think like that landing at 250, 300 kph or so. Still, this being a game, I am all for Pteron becoming a rational, feasible craft, since KSP allows for some margin of imagination. I think that your comments pertaining CoM should be tested, and on top of that, I would at least give it more powerful engines to come closer to a powered landing. I would also diminish the lifting capabilities so that it feels more "real", forcing you keep it faster in order not to stall.

Waaat heheheh...but it does! Indeed I am not so much a spaceplane guy, but most of my SP designs are water landers. For one there is a lot of landing room, then there is the part saving, and as long as it can be controlled well in low speeds, it won't break up. Make sure it is buoyant tho.

To be honest I only made water landings! I was not able to reach the runway in any of my attempts. Sloppy of me, the flight characteristics of the Pteron are not so bad that I couldn't have landed properly if I have wanted to. By accident though, I did discovered that it is has good water landing characteristics!!!

It merits some thinking though. Lifting bodies are not very good lifting devices, the wings help a bit but in general they have high wing (in this case body) loading. The challenge you face is to cfg higher lifting capabilities for your body + tiny wings for better gameplay (which would be unreal) or to cgf lower lift capabilities for more realism (which would make the thing harder to land, since it comes way too fast for a safe landing). In my tests it starts stalling at around 55m/s, a bit above that perhaps. In my book that is proportional to great lifting capabilities, but does it match what the eyes can see? That snubby little thing probably couldn't provide that much lift, by looking at it, if you compare to other craft you built that are capable of not staling whilst doing 60m/s. That is just a generic impression of mine, tho. And then we return to the drag issue. I still think this shuttle "feels" a little too slick and dragless considering how it looks like, but then again, if you make it more draggy and at the same time you change the lifting properties of the parts, for sure you will have an unflyable craft: one that can only stay aloft in higher speeds, but that losses speed very quickly - making controlled approaches a very, very hard thing to do, 'cuz the window is very tight. Note that I am not suggesting you change anything, just bringing up some concerns that would certainly be raised if this were a real-life design. A real craft like yours would have put engineers on their toes; the small wings and stubby body would probably give poor lift properties, resulting a high stall speed and high wing loading, and at the same time it would probably be somewhat draggy, making it lose speed rapidly. It would demand a perfect landing approach; coming in too far or low and you would miss the runway, and too high and you would overshoot it, with probably no chance of a go-around. Now consider this. a) The MiG 105 had provisions for a powered landing, if I recall correctly. It was meant to glide all the way down but if a miscalculation happened, the engine could give it some powered capabilities and help it reach the runway (perhaps even try a go-around, I am not sure). I have tried that with your Pteron; what I found is that the two engines provided with the mod can give it an extra boost but not sustained flight; at best they slow down the deceleration rate, but it still loses speed markedly; b) the real life Space Shuttle also suffered from the issue of having too high landing speeds (as, I think, all lifting-body craft must suffer from that malady) and it countered that problem by the means of drogue chutes. Where I am getting at: too-fast flying birds can counter that with drogue landing chutes to land easier; too easily-stalled birds can counter that with engines that boost it somewhat towards a powered landing if necessary. So why not increase the power of the two engines and put a place there in the rear where a stock chute can be placed? If you want all parts to be included with the mod, hijack the stock vanilla radial drogue and change it's size a bit so that it fits the rear somewhere.

Cute little thing! I gave it a try. I have a few observations: 1 - This thing deserves a dedicated IVA, even if it is a simple one. 2 - The drag characteristics deserve some analysis. I glided all the way down to 1000m, lower than that even, and was still supersonic! A thing looking like that should be way slower when it reached the lowest altitudes, it should have bled more speed by the time it fell under 1km altitude. Imho, at least.