dnleek

My tanker is a 3200L fuel tank surrounded by 8 800L fuel tanks, so it's length is actually manageable to the point where even the command pod gyros are sufficient to turn the thing at a reasonable rate. It looks like your light tanker but surrounded by 8 of the 800L tanks. And then I put unreasonable amounts of RCS blocks for translation. I actually dock entirely manually, I've not used ORDA for anything other than the fuel transfer modules. Although at this point I'm really just bragging And as for what mission could need that much fuel, well... I haven't actually thought of anything... but maybe I can transfer to Moho. WITH THE MAINSAIL ENGINES

Bigger! BIGGER! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Capacity of 33600L of fuel and 11000L RCS propellant, man was getting it into orbit terrible. Side note: do you need the ORDA autopilot part for RCS transfer, or just the fuel transfer part? Because if you need the autopilot, I gotta put another one up into orbit... edit: just for size comparison, the tanker I use to run resupply missions has the same fuel capacity as the whole Olympus.

Instead of using a fuselage, why didn't you just stack a bunch of RCS tanks together? It'd certainly give you more range, albeit at the cost of a little structural integrity and weight.

Make a spaceplane that is capable of landing on the oceans of Eve (or if you like a challenge, Laythe)! Bonus points if it can actually return to Kerbin.

Someone's already done one better

It's known around these parts as the Space Kraken! Basically, when you enter the SOI of Kerbol, your speed is measured with respect to Kerbol, making it many, many meters per second; so many that the values start to be affected by floating point errors on Unity's behalf. Some parts of your ship end up moving "faster" than others, and it imparts phantom forces to your ship. It used to be worse, the floating point errors used to affect your distance from Kerbol as well! This imparted enough force to destroy some ships. It was fixed by clamping down the altitude to a max value and adding any excess to Kerbol itself, in effect moving the universe around yourself. Version 0.17 will have a similar fix for the velocity errors, and hopefully, the Kraken will finally be banished to the depths from whence it came!

You have to press escape, go to the space center, and use the tracking station to switch back to the pod. It\'s a pain in the ass, but that\'s the only way so far.

I\'ll let you know when I get there

Oh, I just meant to say that Dwight\'s screenshot was clearly taken with a camera from his screen, that\'s all. It seems... needlessly roundabout.

How do you calculate it? It can\'t be as easy as measure velocity before and after, right? On a related note, how much delta-v does an SRB provide, and how much do you need to return to Kerbin from the Mun? I need to know... for science.

Eheheheh... I respec\'d the shuttle a little bit... 8)

LAND ON THE SUN 8) You need some spaceplane achievements, methinks. Maybe landing on the runway, flying across the ocean, landing at the second KSC, etc. Oh, and don\'t forget the monoliths and arches, either.

You know there\'s an ingame screenshot option, right? It\'s either f1 or f2. One of those turns off your HUD and the other one takes screenshots, which are deposited into a folder in your KSP directory. No need to get out the camera. ;P

Personally, for my lander design I have 4 or 6 (depending on what symmetry I like) half tanks with landing legs and the small engines underneath, all attached directly to a central ASAS module. The return stage (pod, parachute, half tank, engine) are then attached to the top of this ASAS module with a stack decoupler. Feels even more like an Apollo style lander since the lander stage stays intact when left behind.

I doubt they were very good pilots if they managed to make it to retirement ;P

This is amazing! Is the craft file you put up stock?

Just line up a bunch of the rectangular wings and use deltas on the ends. Then strut them together since most of them aren\'t actually attached to eachother. In case you haven\'t found the rectangular wings, they are on the second page of the structural tab. Happy building!

I had the same problem. Despite messing around with fuel ducts for a good half hour, I couldn\'t fix it without detaching the offending parts and reattaching them to the center stack on top of radial decouplers. However, I found out that when you do that, not only is the craft less efficient due to the weight, but the fact that the bottom stage doesn\'t last as long means that it performs worse than when the middle thrusters disengage early. Weird indeed. Also attaching a few detachable SRBs greatly improves launch performance.

Sure thing. Just remember to keep ASAS on, and it\'ll handle smoothly, if a bit slowly. You can tap f while turning to turn quicker, but that ends up a little more unstable. There\'s a drogue chute too, if you need it. No cockpit eject option, but you can add one pretty easily.

Ah, I figured it out. I was just trying to pitch up too much since I was too worried about my downwards velocity, and ended up stalling the plane. I just glided it to a safe landing, though it did pitch nose up once on the way down. Ended up rolling to a stop right outside the hangar. I\'m pretty proud of that

How the hell do you land this thing? My version is exactly the same, only I replaced the half tanks with full jet fuel tanks and the tail fins with vertical canards, and every time it hits the lowest atmosphere layer coming down from orbit it suddenly wants to pitch either nose up or nose down, and won\'t stay horizontal. Actually, now that I think of it, the half rocket tank is much lighter... hold on, I have to try some science.

Here\'s my attempt. Turned out pretty stable, actually. Bit tail heavy, but a little trim fixes that right up. I think the dihedral is the key to it\'s stability.

If you\'re using the struts, a safe limit is 4 m/s, with as little lateral velocity as possible. Dunno about the wheels though.