FinalFan

My lander took off from Minmus and put itself into a prep orbit to return to Kerbin; it was a low orbit but I checked the trajectory in map view and it looked like it had comfortable clearance. But as I followed the ship, its altitude above the surface dwindled to 87 meters before increasing again. Well, whatever, I made it ... but then I had another close encounter a mere 26 meters above the surface! Map view shows a gap between trajectory and surface that should plainly be bigger than that. Conversely, in the past I've seen the path sink into the "ground" on map view while I was still a hundred meters up. I had thought it was just because I was suborbital and "close enough" to the ground, but now I'm wondering if it was the same phenomenon in reverse. Is this a known issue?

It's only after reading this that I connect the recent heat issues with the fact that I have an Eve mission en route in my career ...

I've been advised that this is the place to post SSTOs. Big Plane to Anywhere https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1875714661 (Nice try, Bill, but I don't think this is what they meant by "long range ISRU craft"...) I've been fooling with this for quite a while, and recently I decided to inflict it on the world. It may not have as much chrome or avant garde cred as some people like, but I think it's stylish in its own way. It carries 6 kerbals and has all the standard science and a science lab to examine it in. It makes LKO with 2800+ dV still in the tank (as of 1.8), and holds 4600+ after refueling with two large drills (4700+ if it's practical to launch on just the NERVs). The design isn't very minimalist; if anything, it's focused on having lots of bells and whistles: for example, it has two front wheels because one is better for taxiing (can steer) and the other is better for wilderness takeoffs and landings. It's been fantastic so far for doing all kinds of missions in Kerbin SOI (I got a surprising number of requests for 5-kerbal capacity thingamabobs); it's also en route to Jool but said Kerbin missions are slowing down the clock. I'm pretty happy with it, but welcome any constructive criticism.

I'm just spitballing here, but I want to share a thought about why it might be that there is so much trouble over "only" 350m/s. First, let's consider airbreathing mode. This is the "easy" part, not in terms of designing it or flying it but in the sense that the very efficient jets give you a huge head start on the dV you need for orbit. Let's say the jets do all the work of going up to 1200ms, and 2/3 the work of 1200-1500m/s, for 1400 out of 2400. (More than 2300 because orbital speed is higher at lower altitude. For simplicity I will ignore the altitude and atmosphere and hope it isn't too far off.) So you're going east at 1500 (surface) and need to be going 2400 (orbital) and you get 175 for free (surface speed assists orbital speed). That leaves only 725 dV that the rockets need to supply, plus 100 they already did for 825 total; and the rockets are always less efficient than jets and also less powerful on a NERV spaceplane like yours is. Now you want to go west instead, and the difference in dV of orbiting the other way is only 350 (2400+175 instead of 2400-175), but it's not 350 added to 2225, it's 350 added to 825, or a more than 40% increase in the work the rockets have to do! No wonder you had trouble, when putting it that way.

Is that, like, the biker-gang alter ego of Wernher von Braun?

RADIO Remote Assembly Device In Orbit Note: this name assumes that it can be operated remotely, i.e. can build and launch probes without kerbals in the facility.

SkyVAB For the historical pun. I was also going to propose Orbital Construction Dock, but I was beaten to it, so it's got my vote.

After reaching higher tech tiers, I use the Flea almost as often as I use the Reliant. (The Swivel, on the other hand, still occupies a genuine if narrow niche for my vehicles when I want a cheap second stage and the Cheetah isn't strong enough.) You know, what would really make the Flea more attractive is a built-in decoupler. I dimly recall that a big reason I stopped using it was that the decoupler cost twice as much as the booster. It probably just seemed like a stupid waste of credits. And there's precedent now with those Making History capsules. On the other hand, that's just an extra complication for people trying to learn the basics of the game, so it's probably best not to have it as standard equipment, but possibly an upgrade as in your idea.

Thanks for the advice. With SAS off, it has a slight to very slight nose-up effect above 300 m/s. Basically, I'm satisfied with its controllability in normal flight. But I was wondering if I was contradicting any community-identified "best practice" with my placement of the CoM. There could be a situation I haven't considered where it's horrible, you know? [edit: Or relying on fuel placement to be stable during aggressive reentry could be considered a crime against kerbalkind.] If it's just known and identified tradeoffs like "better for low and slow (e.g. landing and takeoff), but you have to be a lot more careful on ascent path" then that's fine. What kind of rules of thumb can I use to guess at my center of drag? For instance, the CoM is about 60% of the way towards the back from the front; is that relevant?

TL;DR: is this generally considered a "don't do this" type of thing for spaceplanes, or just a tradeoff? Hi, I've been refining a Mk3 "do-everything" spaceplane for a while now (all science, ISRU, amphibious, etc.) and I'm wondering if I'm making a mistake with the balance. The default CoM is very stable and just a tiny tiny bit forward of the CoL, but I understand that although these being very close makes the plane more maneuverable, it also makes it more vulnerable to loss of control. My question is: is this generally considered a "don't do this" type of thing for spaceplanes, or just a tradeoff? —Liftoff/landing: CoM and CoL being on top of each other is good here, right? —Ascent: CoM being somewhat ahead of CoL makes the plane more stable. But if it seems pretty controllable then is there a reason to worry? —Reentry: CoM being somewhat ahead of CoL makes the plane recover from aggressive reentry profiles. Is it reasonable to say "I expect to have some fuel left to create this condition for reentry" or is that considered a bad design? (It needs 10% fuel to ensure recovery from radial out position) Basically, I like the idea of maximum agility (for a Mk3 spaceplane) but I don't want to overlook a fatal flaw.

Like many of you, I've experienced serious issues with landing legs having excessive bouncing. But it's important to remember the promise of landing legs. I landed a probe on Minmus lately on a slope and this happened: I came down vertically and the legs automatically evened me out. It was beautiful. Hopefully this is what we can have right from the beginning in KSP2, and new players can experience this without bitter memories of landing leg shenanigans.

It's very unfortunate that the demo can no longer be obtained through ordinary channels. However, it can still be found online without too much trouble. For instance, if you put download ksp demo into Google, you'll get a bunch of results, primarily from people on this forum asking how to download the demo (lol), then the KSP website, steam, etc. Ignore these. Further down the list you find some third party downloads, and these are still functional. Just pick one that's not too disreputable. For example, I've never had a problem with softonic's files, but it's a bit of a chore to navigate through all the false links (that take you to ads instead) to get to those files. I tried the demo from softonic; it worked fine, and my computer hasn't caught fire yet.

I still hear people talk about CKAN, so probably that is still the thing to use. But honestly, it sounds like so much has changed that it might be worth considering starting from scratch: play with the base game for a little while, and then add things back in, instead of deciding what mods to cut back on when you don't even know what it is they're replacing.

See, that's the thing, I don't use any mods, so I'm just wildly flailing around when I try to answer his questions lol

Whoa, relay network was new as of 1.4? I must have bought the game right as they introduced it. One of the biggest things for people that lived through the updates was that one of the Making History engines, the Wolfhound, had super OP Isp for an LFO engine, but they nerfed it somewhat so that doesn't matter to you. (420 to 380) Honestly, I haven't been following the updates all that closely so I'm a bad person to try to help you. But I'm really stoked about the updates that are coming soon! 2.5m SRBs at last (no more clusters of 4 kickbacks for me), being able to edit action groups while on a mission (and review what they even are!), and more. I'm assuming that when you say KAS and KIS features are in the stock game now, you are referring to delta-V and TWR readouts being shown for each stage. [edit: I totally agree with VoidSquid: while I struggle to think of huge, attention-grabbing changes (other than the expansions), there have been lots and lots of smaller, just-works-better changes, and it should add up quite nicely. Oh, at some point they slightly changed Eve's atmosphere, but it might have been before you left and it wasn't drastic.]