Mudwig

You can do even better if you ditch the conical payload adapter and dock the Orion to the lander before TLI. It would be even more effective if you could decouple the conical section from the payload base and ditch that also. You'd need to be creative to avoid creating space junk though.

You need to rotate the wings forwards until the lift direction widget points straight up... or as close to straight up as it can get. It should glide really well after that.

@benjee10 If anything, delays and redesigns are both well within the spirit of Orion. Looks amazing, BTW. The new SM looks especially nice!

Out of curiosity, I re-calculated all of this double-barrel Delta IV stuff with the 'actual' stats - according to B14643.de - and it's actually a lot worse than my haphazard guesstimates. I was way off. LEO - ~32.7 tons = +14% over Delta IV Heavy. GTO - ~15.4 = Only about 9% more. The upper stage is still a massive bottleneck, even on the actual Delta IV Heavy. It just doesn't do enough of the work.

Quick, back of the napkin math (using guesstimated, approximate, probably incorrect numbers, because I didn't feel like looking them up) says roughly ~39.5 tons to LEO and ~17.5 tons to GTO. It really depends on how much you'd have to loft it to achieve orbit (probably very) and how much of your available delta-v was wasted in that process (probably a lot). So, it seems like a fairly modest uplift over Delta IV Heavy. The extremely low upper stage TWR (assuming it's an off-the-shelf 5m DCSS) would make this super impractical, or maybe even impossible, to use for anything resembling it's "maximum" capabilities and it would likely require a new, or heavily modified, upper stage to really be useful. Just way too much booster and not nearly enough upper stage. It's sort of like a t-rex powerlifting; It's little arms just can't keep up with it's beefy legs. Somebody with better math skills and more accurate numbers would come up with more accurate results, obviously, but the ballpark numbers tell me it's a bit of a dud.

@CobaltWolf @Zorg I love the marker lights on the new bits! They really add something that I didn't realize I was missing.

Has anyone ever encountered this bug with the Lunokhod cameras? When I detached from the lander, they just stayed in position, floating in space. It's only the node attached ones, I should note. I do have a lot of mods installed, so it could be and likely is a conflict, but I've never experienced this with any other parts. The lander used to be where the cameras are, but it's currently chasing after it's dreams... which are apparently over that way.

They're more stable if you hot-stage them. If you're doing that already, it also helps to lower the thrust of the 1st stage booster. I tend to aim for a max vacuum TWR of 4:1 or a SL, launch TWR of somewhere between ~1.5:1 and ~1.8:1 according to Kerbal Engineer when launching with solids. With the thrust lowered, it'll stage later and atmospheric density won't be as high, so aerodynamic forces will be lower and less likely to induce somersaults.

This whole configuration worked so much better than I ever thought it would, except I forgot to include a crew, so... yeah.

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but it also helps a lot to angle the wings forwards. Just turn on the center-of-lift display widget and rotate the wings forwards on their axis ( local mode rather than absolute ) until the lift arrow points straight up. It should glide much better after this is done.

The white one looks fantastic. It would probably also match really well with Nertea's station parts pack.

@computercat04 SAF shouldn't make any difference to stock type fairings and honestly, I use most of the same mods that you do, so I don't think any of them should be a problem. i had heard of fairing issues being a thing in 1.11 ( or maybe it was 1.10... I'm still on 1.9.1 ), so it could just be some sort of incompatibility with that KSP version. I noticed your fairing was also super wide, relative to the payload. Did you have clipping issues, or were you able to make straight sides as well and just not able to close it?

@computercat04 I just made a quick and dirty Straw Man ( the top anyway ) and tried causing problems with colliders and whatnot by deploying and retracting parts and using the nudge tool and I couldn't replicate the problem. Do you have any other mods that affect fairings?

@Beale Oh, cool. Thanks! I'm not even sure I could emulate that with current parts. A small RCS pod and some monoprop will have to do for now. Smerch should be a cool addition. I've just been using Block G. ( with Vulkan also )

Does anybody know what the roll control setup was supposed to be on the Energia-M? I've looked around and can find basically no information about it. None of the photos of the structural mockup have attitude control thrusters or anything. At least not that I've seen. I suppose I could just use the Polyus RCS pods or something, but I'm still curious what was actually intended.