Zacspace

If you're controlling such a huge craft, you'll see the whole thing, but it won't interact physically with anything outside the physics range, if you're approaching it, the whole thing will just disappear once you're 2.5km away from it's root, even if part of it is right next to you, just poof. gone. I've seen people build megastructures like dyson spheres with tweakscale and those behave pretty strangely, but in general what I've said should hold true.

I'm pretty sure no stock engine produces thrust at Jool's surface due to the pressure. I know that's no issue for you, but parachutes are effective to the point that it doesn't matter. A lot of the old land on Jool bugs seemed to ocur because parachutes would slow a craft down so far it would count as landed. I'm not entirely convinced that's not a factor in how the craft I linked above works too.

A couple of questions have come up in this thread that I just so happen to know the answers to. 1 what if your craft was orbiting outside the atmosphere, but was long enough to theoretically reach into it? The entire craft is either in the atmosphere or not as long as the root part it above the atmosphere you're in space. maybe the center of mass, but probably the root part. 2 big long craft extends all the way down from orbit? This is a no go. KSP unloads physics on crafts apart from part colliders at something like 250m away from the root part and unloads the craft entirely at 2.5km. Jool's atmosphere is quite a bit thicker than that 3 landing on Jool in general? Fact. in past versions of KSP an EVA kerbal could just kind of do it sometimes, in current versions you can string together a few glitches and make a floating platform. upon which a kerbal or even a spacecraft can land and count as landed. If you try to just yolo it, there's a boundary inside that just kills you once you cross it, no craft is immune no matter what values are applied, kind of like landing on the sun. ( I hope somebody proves me wrong about landing on the sun) as for the bove mentioned glitches, specifically you want to have: the platform section, the root part 250m below it, and a bunch of long extendable ladders attached underneath with stack separators. The ladders become fixed in place when detached from the stack separators which holds the platform in place. Normally this doesn't count as landed but on jool, maybe because your root part is at or below "surface level" it seems to. Now that the platform is in place, the root part being so far below means that only it's colliders get loaded in when you approach or even land on it so it never falls. Voila, landing on Jool. This craft does it, I haven't gotten around to making my own yet abc123

The last rover I posted was the smallest seriously useful one I've yet built, this one's the largest. The Heavy Refueler. A while ago, I made a cool looking but useless rover with the rovemax wheels. Later I missed a transfer window because my mobile base took to long to refuel my ssto, so I turned my cool oversized rover into an overkill mobile refinery to address the problem. It steers with a hinge in it's center like a front end loader and then since the normal wheel steering wasn't doing anything productive, I decided to abuse the tank steering glitch making this thing hilariously fast. It easily tops 50m/s, though it's virtually guaranteed to suplex itself into the ground at that speed. with a max level engineer its 24 drills can mine ore as fast as a convert-o-tron can convert it. It has 4 convert-o-trons though and can run them all at once if you're carrying that much ore or don't have an engineer.

This is a bit off topic, but it looks like you're mostly here to find mods. For starters look at spacedock.info, it's a community run site that has pretty much all the mods and you can browse through them there. There's a modding subforum here where the more popular and up-to-date mods tend to stay on the first few pages. I think they each have a stickied topic for helping you to find stuff too. We also have CKAN, which is basically a package manager for KSP mods. It makes trying stuff out incredibly easy. If you want a specific recommendation, it's hard to go wrong with Restock.

I recently picked this game back up and started tweaking an old rover that i had built just for fun to see how small I could make one and still have it look car-ish. I realized that I had actually managed to make it small enough to fit in a mk2 cargo bay, so naturally I built a mk2 lander for it and made it into a serious piece of space hardware. The included lander can put it down on most planets and moons, and then pick it up again and either go to another LZ or back into orbit. I submit for your consideration, the Rover Mini S.

I haven't been playing much the past year or so, but I picked the game up again recently and built some pretty impressive spaceplanes. I came up with (probably not the first to do so) a way to shield all my engines in a fairing while still having the bottom of the fairing open and the result has been noticeably higher performance, it reminds me of the ridiculous SSTOs that were possible in the old aero model. These planes are just the tip of the iceberg I think. I could do a lot more with this than just hiding rapiers inside. Hopefully I formatted this post right. Let me know what you think.

I actually don't know how to make a propeller larger. These each have two of the big rotors stacked together for extra torque already and are being pushed pretty much to the limit. ISRU is definitely part of the plan, it'll just come in the form of a separate craft that docks with it on the surface. As for ditching SSTO, the whole reason for this plane is that Eve is the only body in the solar system that I don't have a reusable landing solution for. It's flight profile calls for it to fly under prop power to ~20,000m where the atmospheric pressure is pretty much equal to Kerbin sea-level, probably higher even than that, and then make the run to orbit on those vectors. at the point where it's failing, it's pretty much just a really heavy regular old airplane and the spacecraft part of it hasn't even come into play yet. I thought I had regular old airplanes figured out. In any case, I do appreciate your help. I'll definitely have to consider some more major design changes.

Falling out of the sky is a little bit dramaitic I guess, it just loses airspeed really quickly if I try to climb higher than that, if I'm climbing aggressively as you'd tend to in something that's supposed to SSTO, the effect is that I stall and have to go into a dive to get control again. I can get higher with fewer propeller blades, but then lose the ability to VTOL. It seems to me that there's something unique about Eve's atmosphere that I'm just not understanding.

So I tried to build a tilt-wing VTOL Eve SSTO with propellers. It went better than you might expect, but I have hit a snag. Almost the entire plane is hitting performance targets, but it drops like a rock out of the sky once it gets to around 7000m on Eve, even though it flies fine on Kerbin. I have some theories and ideas, but I bet there's someone out there looking at the picture thinking "you idiot! you obviously didn't consider x!" I hope that person tells me what to sub in for x. If nothing else, I'll post a craft file and hopefully my aerodynamic big-tilt-wing mechanism can be useful to someone. https://imgur.com/h7sp1D9 FYI, the propellers, if pointed into the airstream and stopped from spinning produce a pretty manageable amount of drag, about as much a s a regular control surface. So this is possible to do, just maybe not for this plane to do it.

Hey, I hate to pile on but I think I might have a new variant of this bug everyone's having. The thrust reverser on the goliath engine triggers a rebuild of the ocean for me. My log specifically mentions its drag cube which sounds an awful lot like the mk2 lander can bug mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

I think the sincerest form of flattery might be having one of the oldest and most accomplished builders on the forums have something nice to say about my craft. I built my very first SSTO way back in .20 after dissecting one of your designs, too. I'll be interested to see what you do with landship's wheel arrangement since your surface equipment is usually smaller modules.

Thanks. Those two craft have pretty similar front ends, I feel like the cupola's one of the more industrial-spaceship-looking cockpits we have.

I've never noticed that before, but now that you mention it, they do seem to be clipping into the terrain in your picture.

I'll throw my hat in this ring. Simple Lander III, carries 8 kerbals down and up on Vall or less. I's got all the experiments minus the science .jr on it. Only downside is it needs a kerbnet connection to function. That ends up being more of an interesting wrinkle for otherwise routine landings though I find. Like the guy above, I usually operate these out of a station. pTrevTrevs, Are the antennae under the lander there to restrict suspension travel? Or are they just for aesthetics? Looking pretty good in either case.

This is the page where I used to put all of my best space-things. Still do too, apparently. My favourite things to build are spaceplanes and rovers, so you'll be seeing more than a few of those. Selected Selects: My top 3 favourites of the things I've built. It's all down hill from here unfortunately SP-9 Poleaxe A chibi space shuttle SSTO with ludicrous performance. Comes with a free rover and lander inside for doing a Jool 5* with. *Extensive use of part clipping makes this craft technically ineligible for Jool 5 Exoloper Mobile Colony The biggest thing I've ever built. Carries a rover and a lander on board alongside loads of ISRU equipment. It uses a glitch with the big wheels to drive pretty fast and handle rough terrain. <300 parts! L-49 Laboriosa My only dropship. Designed to do big refueling jobs on little bodies like Minmus or Gilly. Named for the Himalayan honey bee. Spaceplanes Rovers "Other" Not all craft as pictured. Provided with no warranty or implied suitability for purpose. By flying these spaceships you consent to Take-Two coming into your house and using your toothbrush while you're out.

What you are looking at is what I call the Landship, a large mobile base, being deployed by a reusable cargo lander. This is a sort of test run for hardware i've already sent out to Jool but has yet to arrive, thankfully it all worked out. Next that lander will bring down a module of 12 empty large ore tanks and that big rover will dock to the side of it to fill it up, the lander should be able to easily return to orbit with that much ore from the Mun. The landship is slightly cooler than the last big rover I posted here because it makes use of the tank steering bug to reach ludicrous speed under just electric power. The fact that it has the giant wheels and is made out of mk3 parts means it can ususally even survive traveling at those speeds. It's also better at VTOL and it's bigger, too, the only downside is just one drill. Landship Cargo Lander

Hey, You've done fantastic work on this. I used to use this mod when I was running 1.3.1, but since 1.4.x It's been completely bonkers. Observe: I don't know if that's going to work. If it does you'll see some crazy visual artifacts. Usually, the game crashes before I get to the flight scene, I guess I was lucky this time. I have few other mods, the only other one that I reckon should be interfering with the graphics pipeline might be sigma's skybox replacement. I looked several pages back and don't see anyone else having this sort of trouble, just reams of extra-cool screenshots. In case it ends up not being user error on my part, I'm on linux with nvidia graphics. I hope all this doesn't make me seem ungrateful, you've done stellar work.

This is an out-of-date version of my RIg Pig mobile base. The newer ones are a little better, but these ones have the distinct advantage of already being deployed and having had some fancy screenshots taken of them. The top one's from 1.3.1 back when all the visual mods still worked. Due to poor planning, the one on Laythe along with that ssto are currently responsible for all refueling in the Jool system.

Hey all. This is my first post. I've been playing for ages, since .20, and have quite a number of craft I feel are of sufficient quality to post, but I'm not normally a forum kind of person, so for now I'm showing this off. It's all the hardware I'll need to replace both Laythe and Vall station and build about half of a new station around Tylo. It's drive section is actually 2 landers and 2 intraplanetary range crew transfer vessels which pull triple duty as station tugs and service vehicles for landing missions. The landers are cabable of SSTO on Kerbin and should represent the first realistic chance I have of setting down on Tylo. The second one will haul giant ore tanks up and down from Vall, fueling my whole operation out there. You can probably see for yourself and guess the purpose of the 2 spaceplanes and the smaller more conventional lander docked nearer the bow of the ship. All in all, it's specs aren't too impressive for a big interplanetary ship. It's got just north of 2500m/s in the tanks, not fully fueled. Just enough to get itself to Jool with a decent margin for error. It's about twice as large as the next largest thing i've ever built though, so I felt it noteworthy.