White Owl

I'm still thinking about an aviation milestones mission chain... would it be possible to add goals like min/max altitude, speed over ground, and total mission time? Ideally, I'd like to start with a mission to simply get an unmanned probe up to 1000m and back, then work up to manned high altitude flights before actually trying for a manned space mission.

Ah, makes perfect sense. I love this mod!

Looks like I'm the designated thread spammer for the moment. Does the recycle option refund 75% of the total launch vehicle cost, or is it smart enough to subtract things like droptanks, SRBs, spent stages, or anything else jettisoned like that?

Remember the real shuttle glided like a brick. Sounds like you're getting closer and closer to an accurate model!

LOL! I'm actually thinking about cutting the starting budget to almost nothing so I can't even afford a rocket to get out of the atmosphere. Start out with very small, simple aircraft, and goals to reach a certain altitude or airspeed, or land a kerbal at specific coordinates. Edit: After playing around with numbers a little bit and thinking about things, I suggest making oxidizer much more expensive than liquid fuel. That will better represent the difference in cost between an airplane and a spacecraft.

Can I suggest that instead of making up a new resource with the umm... controversial first letter K, we instead mine for blutonium, which is already in the game?

I am going to have some fun with this! My video series is really stalled out and I was feeling a lack of direction. No more! I very much agree with the earlier idea of having some separate mission chains/trees. Cooking up some ideas for an aviation mission series before even reaching Sputnik I... My cheapest ready to go spaceplane costs over ten times the starting budget! Guess I have a reason to build some rockets now. XD

Okay, here's a thought about varying the pWing thickness. Since we already have controls to individually vary the length of the root and the tip of any given pWing section, with thickness automagically scaling, how difficult would it be to make the same kind of control setup to vary the thickness of the root and tip individually? I imagine in this case, just leave the automagical scaling alone. For that matter... I like how holding G lets me move the tip around in the horizontal plane. How difficult would it be to do the same thing in the vertical plane? That would smooth out the angle changes for dihedral; eliminate those ugly gaps between wing sections.

Already posted this one in the procedural wing thread, but I'm so happy about it I have to show off here too. Anybody still using those silly old-fashioned wing parts seriously needs to get with the times. PWings are where it's at.

It isn't really curved. The wing is made up of several segments, each one at a slightly different angle. I also have no reservations at all about clipping multiple parts through and/or completely burying them inside wings or structural components. My plan is to share the last two designs, packaged together with the requisite mod list and a few custom parts. It's all still a WIP. The goal is to use spaceplanes to launch everything needed for an entire space program. I also have a couple of functioning spaceplanes that'll do SSTO from a runway takeoff. One carries passengers, and the other a small 1.25m payload. Those two aren't as pretty, though; very utilitarian.

More options is always good, but keep in mind how useful very thick wings can be. With this mod and FAR, you can create a very close approximation to a true lifting body, and hide all sorts of equipment inside the wing roots. Personally, I love that we can finally have curved wings. That's something that has been missing from KSP for far too long.

I love the B9 styled pWings. They're fantastic.

I'm wondering if the fix might be as simple as placing some part like a thin plate at the front wall of the bay, and telling FAR that part is a aerodynamic nosecone.

The Angel's first test flight, and she may be the sweetest handling craft I have ever made in this game. Making a pWing to match this pack was a genius idea. Next step: strap on a big-ass external fuel tank and pair of boosters, and see if she'll orbit and reenter.

I like the SABRE engines! However, it doesn't make much sense to me that the intakes are under the aerodynamics tab, the intercoolers under structural, and the engines themselves under propulsion. I suggest that placing them all under propulsion would be much more user friendly.

Say what!? Some kinda sneaky ninja update?

I'll note that I'm seeing some strange behavior with these wings in reentry. Several different space shuttle designs have shown a very strong tendency to yaw completely out of control, while a shuttle with basically identical wings made with B9 and stock wing parts will fly straight. I don't have any craft files to share yet, since I use so many customized parts... Right now I'm just wondering if anybody else is running into a similar issue? Of course, this is with FAR installed. Just thinking about it now... maybe I'll experiment with a mostly pWing craft, but common wing parts as the vertical stabilizer, or vice versa.

The new parts are pretty and all, no question, but I want to know more about this feature. How does it do with space shuttle style asymmetric mass? I assume all engines on a given craft need the same plugin installed.

Glad you like it! The Eagle mkV (until I think of a better name) has been designed from the ground up to function similarly to NASA's space shuttle, with external fuel tank and two giant SRBs, using parts from easy to find mod packs. Many of those part stats have been tweaked with the Tweakable Parameters mod. I've made functioning shuttles before... but I really want to share this one with the whole KSP community. Past shuttles have used DR powered hinges to manually control the engine gimbal, but this one doesn't need them. I have the center of thrust aligned close enough to the center of mass through the whole launch, whether the shuttle is empty or carrying a 60 ton payload in the cargobay. Yes, I am very damn proud of accomplishing that. The shuttle is stable enough to make a standard takeoff from a runway and fly normally in the atmosphere, powered by two SABRE engines which also act as OMS. I'll be honest and say that reentry is giving me some instability problems... but I have ideas to take care of that. Still very much a WIP. My eventual goal is to release the craft file, packaged with a mod list and the very few custom parts required, so that an average KSP pilot will be able to use this bird without having to learn any crazy tricks first. Nazari1382 is making some giant SRBs for this project, the landing gear needs a cfg edit to resize the stock gear bay and start in the retracted position, and I'm using a cfg edit to add the TorqueCompensation plugin from the Tiberdyne shuttle to one of KW's 2.5m engines. Other than those three parts, everything else can be found in various mod packs. Edit: Actually, it's looking like that fancy tail arrangement just won't ever be stable enough for reentry. I'll have to go more conventional.

The only way to fly an airplane was to get the C7 mod pack, construct the plane pointing nose up in the VAB, and launch vertically like a rocket. The landing gear was fixed in the extended position because animated parts weren't possible yet. The landing gear also may have looked like wheels, but were actually skids because true rolling wheels weren't possible yet. With no maneuver nodes, my first time returning to Kerbin from the mun was a blind guess... point it more or less thataway and burn until it kinda feels right. I escaped the mun's SOI, did some stupid burn in some random direction, reentered the mun's SOI and freaked out 'cause I didn't know which way to go, or why.

I've been wanting to make a tail like this for a while now.

KW works just fine with .20.2, and has well made payload fairings from 1.25m all the way up to 3.25m. It should work for you.

Oof, I just realized my mistake and was coming back to edit the previous post, but you're too damn fast! LOL False alarm. The problem isn't necessarily with this mod. I used Tweakable Parameters to add fuel and oxidizer to a couple of wing parts, stuck more wing parts to the tips, and hung engines on them. Since your wings crossfeed fuel just fine under normal circumstances, the bug most likely is with Tweakable Parameters. Nothing to see here; carry on. Feel free to smack me upside the head if you like. Edit: Here's a new thought. I'm using several pWing pieces to make a wing with kind of complex geometry. When I adjust the size of one small wing piece, I have to be very very careful not to allow my mouse cursor to stray onto any neighboring pieces. It's fiddly and occasionally frustrating work. Would it be possible to make some kind of lock, so that a given piece will be safe from accidental edits?

The cfg file does have crossfeed enabled. That's why it's a bug. Just a small quibble, anyway.

I'm rebuilding a shuttle using these pWings. I'm ecstatic about the freedom to create exactly the wing shape I want... but there's one small bug. None of the pWing parts are crossfeeding fuel, so I have to run fuel lines all over the vehicle.