Temstar

As I understand it, anything radially attached (and not inside fairing/cargo bay) is treated by the game as in free airstream. It's a pain in the ass for rocket design but in your case clipped canard should work. Only one way to be sure though

I never launch anything with NTR or RTG unless: it's intended to be recoverable, eg RTG as power source for spaceplanes it's not going to any of those "no deorbiting RTG/NTR" places: eg a nuclear powered low Kerbolar orbit probe or probe escaping Kerbol system it's on a vehicle that's intended to be infinitely reusable, eg nuclear powered interplanetary motherships I use to have a modular nuclear propulsion stage for moving large things like space stations around Kerbin SOI, complete with its own dedicated recovery craft when I decided that the propulsion stage has "reached End of LIfe"

I follow the Clean Space Policy - everything that goes up have to have a plan for deorbit, particularly upper stages. Ejection stages generally get crashed into where the payload is suppose to go S-IVB style. No deorbiting RTGs or NTRs onto Kerbin, Laythe or Duna, no crashing fired NTRs into Mun or Minmum either. I'm fine with firing NTRs in atmosphere though since these are solid core design and their exhaust is not radioactive.

Yes canards in front do work as control surfaces, in fact if you want to use canards behind the CoM you have to reverse its controls to make it work as canards are explicitly designed as control surfaces that go in front of the CoM. Ideally if you could figure out a way to move the CoM forward just by moving existing parts around then go for it. Don't sweat it though - I suspect canards will be enough and in any case adding deadweight to your plane just to move the CoM around seems like quite an inelegant solution to me. To keep the CoL well behind the CoM just nudge the main wings back slightly - the canards only contribute a little bit of lift at the front so a tiny shift by the main wings could easy compensate for that.

Imagine your average empty rocket stage, if you drop it down from orbit which end tends to fall first? The engine end right because the engines are heavy and empty fuel tanks are basically big metal balloons, so the stage naturally wants to orientate itself heavy end down as it encounters air. So why doesn't SSTO spaceplanes flip during reentry so their engine end fall first? Three reason: SSTO spaceplanes tend to have less engine mass relative to the rest of the craft, since they use lift in the lower atmosphere they can get away with a lower TWR at launch SSTO spaceplanes tend to have some heavy stuff like cockpit at the front to counterbalance the engines SSTO spaceplanes have wings and control surfaces which give them control authority in atmosphere to keep them pointed right way forward Now consider your shuttle: You have an extreme amount of engine mass relative to the rest of the craft, as Vectors are large engines in a deceptively small physical package. If we forget about the SRBs and ET for a second and instead replace your cargo hold with fuel tanks and try to launch that then you will have on your hands a winged rocket with excessively high TWR Give point 1 above, your cockpit and hitchhiker are insufficiently heavy to counterbalance the weight of the engines, which is why you see a CoM that is clearly towards the back of the craft Given point 2 above, you need a lot of lift at the back which means big delta wings at the back. This then results in control surfaces mounted in a position that makes them hard to control pitch Point 1 and 2 are easy so let's talk a bit more about point 3. If you imagine your fuselage as a lever with the CoM as the fulcrum, the control surfaces is then the torque that can be applied to this lever to make it rotate about its fulcrum. With say your average subsonic passenger jet the CoM is somewhere close to the middle of the fuselage. This means the control surfaces on the tail have a very large amount of mechanical leverage so only a small amount of torque needs to be applied to make the plane pitch up or down. In your case the CoM is towards the back and your control surfaces are also at the back of the plane attached to the delta wings. This puts the torque very close to the fulcrum with a very small leverage, which means huge amount of force must be applied by your control surfaces to pitch up or down. So all else equal this design doesn't have much pitch control authority. Now when you use large AoA during reentry what you're doing is deliberate put the wings in a stalled state to generate drag. Whilst this is good idea for slowing down and spreading out the heat load it also means you're further reducing your pitch authority since your control surfaces will also be in a stalled state along with the wings. So once it's time to transition to level flight they generate very little torque to pitch the nose down, hence you continue to fall belly first. The solution to this is canards. Canards won't help you with point 1 or point 2 (well they do actually, but not enough to matter), but they do help with point 3 since they will be at the very front of the craft a very long distance away from the CoM so they enjoy a very large mechanical leverage for pitch control. Having canards at the front also means you are now generating more lift at the front of the plane during level flight, which means you could move your main wings and the big control surfaces further back on the fuselage if you want to maintain the current CoL, which then further increases their leverage and pitch control. If you don't want to ruin the shuttle look clip your canards inside your cockpit. I had to struggle long and hard with this same "CoM on the ass end" problem recently with an even more extreme example than your shuttle: So even more engine than your shuttle and even less weight at the front than you as it's unmanned. Finally managed to make it fly nose first in lower atmosphere by: Making the front heavier by using the SLS tank at the front. SLS tank is 9 tons when empty, much heavier than an empty mark 3 tank Attach canards all the way at the very tip of the craft for extreme leverage CoM quite far in front of CoL, making it excessively stable. Without control input this thing flies like a lawn dart - it always automatically try to return to prograde when there's no control input.

Some places like Eve are not practical for suborbital hop to go to different biomes, for those a rover is useful. Eve just happens to also be good for rover driving due to it's high gravity and solar energy flux.

You can still achieve level docking port with legs if you lock the leg's suspension before final deployment, or at least that's what I'm been told. Paging @Rune, he would be the expert at this.

You don't work for SpaceX do you?

We really need a picture of your shuttle to probably diagnose the problem. But if I were to guess, your shuttle probably have a lot of engines at the back, something like three Vectors or a Mammoth. And you don't have much weight at the front of your shuttle, maybe you don't even have a mark 3 cockpit in front and this is instead a probe controlled shuttle? And what you are doing is entering the atmosphere at high AoA to reduce velocity higher up in the atmosphere and spread out the heat load over a wider area, but once you hit denser air you're having trouble dropping the nose. Are my guesses correct?

I think the main thing is delta-V and TWR. You need more than 1 TWR to lift off and you need somewhere about 3500m/s of vac delta V to reach orbit with safe margins for a new player, assuming of course you're not using vacuum only engine on first stage. Barring extreme cases like a flying barn door or clearly structurally unsound design, if you have these two numbers you automatically know if a rocket can reach orbit or not without even have to do test flight. Unfortunately Squad is steadfastly against giving these two numbers away so one would have to rely on mods like KER.

If you have EVA capability you could always just get out and push. Every time you jump back inside the capsule your EVA fuel is refilled for free.

Spaceplane can be purely rocket powered too. I even have ones capable of horizontal take off from the runway and then reach orbit all on rocket power in a single stage. The same plane could have taken off vertically and save some delta-V but meh. The reason I say this is because jet engines don't become worthwhile for SSTO spaceplane purpose until Whiplash, or at best Panther on afterburning mode. The turbofan engines loses thrust at too low of an airspeed that the little bit of delta-V they contribute is offset by the disadvantage of then having to lug them all the way to space on rocket power.

Not for 1.0.5, I'm waiting on 1.1 and see how that shakes things up. I'm busy working on other cool stuff meanwhile, a new launch vehicle family. Here's a sneak peek:

Keep in mind this kit was originally created for 0.21, some fine tuning might be needed for today's KSP. That said, the fuel tanker rover was loaded using a giant landing stage from which it was suspended under: Once landed, it's just a little drop to get the rover down. The rover attaches to surface bases via a special rover docking bay: Docking is either via the top-down docking port as in this picture, or it drives the horizontal docking port on its back end onto the matching one on the rover docking bay.

I know there's a tendency to characterize kerbals as filled with childlike curiosity but pretty dim witted, what with their rockets made up of non-insignificant amount of parts "found by the side of the road". But in your head canon just exactly how competents are the Kerbals at this rocket science business? For me, it seems like a species who have mastered nuclear physics, some kind of quantum mechanics (hence negative Gravioli) and can put together enough heads to start a space program can't really be that stupid. Either the kerbals have a lot of geniuses among them that's much smarter than the average population, or else the average kerbal is actually pretty clever. Sure they approach science and engineering in a much more "hands on" way than us humans, but they must also be learning rather quickly from all the rockets they blow up, else their society would have never progressed beyond the "sharpen sticks -> stab mammoth" stage.

Hmmm I wonder, you know how the Sentinel IR space telescope from Asteroid Day is used to detect objects beyond its own orbit around Kerbol? If you place an IR telescope beyond Eeloo's orbit would it be able to detect Kuiper belt objects?

I've seen it defined this way: Set the origin of your coordinate system as the singularity of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. Set your homeworld (say, Sol) as the zero degree line. Then all other stars can be defined using three numbers: Distance (in the length unit of your choice) from the center singularity Angle relative to your homeworld, eg "the Susan System is 23 degrees, 47 minutes and 26 seconds counter-spinwards" (relative to your homeworld) Distance from the galactic plane (above or below, with above as defined as looking down at the galaxy and see spin in clockwise direction), where the galactic plane is defined as the disk where the highest concentration of the galaxy's mass is located. Or alternatively the plane of your home system's orbit around the galaxy, if it's relatively close to the plane of the highest mass concentration. Due to stellar drift the accuracy of the coordinates will graduate degrade so they have to be updated from time to time. It's probably not a serious problem though since our own GSP coordinate also degrade over time due to continental drift, but we can live with it. Still, it won't work well for extreme cases like S2, but I suppose those stars are not so interesting anyway as they are in a region that would be extremely hostile to life.

Don't worry, I have something to release this week that will change the way you think about rockets and shuttles. It's all done and tested and everything, just have to make up the flash graphics for the presentation.

Did someone say small mun lander? With landers this small you can design them to just be one use and throw away and carry one as part of your instrument on your big lander: So you just land somewhere interesting, climb into the little flyer, do a suborbital hop to somewhere else interesting, fly back to your landing site, ditch the little lander and return to orbit with the big lander.

I have wired keyboard and mouse for my desk and wireless ones for the coffee table.

It's not that hard to experimentally work out the compensated ejection angle though. I recall back in the days there was this mod called Protractor that made this very easy: What protractor did was to show the phase angle, current ejection angle, delta-V for the transfer burn and closet approach all on a single line. With a very low TWR craft such as this one here what you could do was save the game. Then perform the burn at 0 degree ideal ejection angle and then when you complete the burn note how many degrees off course you are from the ideal ejection angle. Then you load your saved game and just do your real burn that many degrees earlier. Here for example I'm going to Eve and I need to start my burn nearly 17 degrees before the ideal ejection angle to compensate for TWR. And here's the result: Eve SOI entry without ever having to go into map mode.

Oh oh I know this. I saw someone work this out - a ship like the real life Space Shuttle has a SOI smaller than the hull of the ship itself, as a manned spacecraft has a lot of empty space within unlike a dense ball of rock. There is no stable orbit around the space shuttle on the outside and once you get inside the shuttle some of its mass is now above your head and the gravity they are causing is cancelling out the gravity caused by the material below your foot. In fact if you think about it, gravity is actually trying to tear the space shuttle apart instead of trying to get it to coalesce into a tiny ball. The reason is that different parts of the space shuttle are individually in different earth orbit and the orbital speed difference means they want to fly apart. The space shuttle only stays in one piece because the electromagnetic forces that keep the material rigid is so vastly stronger than earth's gravity.

It's not 50/50, you should start the burn later than the 50/50 time. The reason is the during the burn your orbit steadily shifts towards the ideal ejection path and your TWR increases. At some point starting a burn earlier than node time results in an ejection angle that EXACTLY match the ideal ejection angle and that's what you want. Of course under this condition although your ejection angle is exactly correct you will be displaced position-wise from the ideal instant velocity change orbit. But we're talking about a change in position on the order of kilometers over a trip that will take months so it's trivial to correct. The hard part is to work out the correct time split. The burn definitely start later than the 50/50 burn time but the exact timing is different for each ship and probably different again even for the same ship but different burn lengths. Think about it this way: if you want to go to another planet and transfer window is here, you ideally want an instantaneous velocity change relative to Kerbin's orbit around Kerbol in prograde or retrograde direction. But even if you have a magic engine that could give you this instant change in velocity you still do not do the burn exactly at Kerbin midnight or Kerbin midday because as you coast your way out of Kerbin SOI Kerbin's gravity will curve your path so that it starts to deviate from the ideal Kerbin-Kerbol prograde or retrograde direction. So instead you do your burn earlier, somewhere around the Kerbin terminator to compensate for Kerbin's gravity bending your flight path. Split burn around the node is the same idea. you start your burn earlier than the ideal ejection angle suggests to compensate for Kerbin bending your path while your engines fire. The most extreme example of this idea is the spiral orbit: Here you have an engine that has a TWR so low it needs MONTHS to complete the interplanetary ejection burn. So what you do is point your ship prograde several month before the transfer window and fire up the engine. As you engine fire over the month you slowly build up velocity and spiral out in an ever wider orbit until you finally build up enough velocity to escape the SOI right as the transfer window arrive. It's not hard to work out how long you need to fire your engine for to get escape velocity. The hard part is to figure out where about in LEO/LKO should you start your burn so that just as you reach escape velocity you also eject out of the SOI in the correct direction.

Yeah in that situation don't follow the node marker, instead just follow prograde + any normal/anti-normal angle you need. If you thrust with an offset from prograde you're losing delta-V to gravity drag. How early you should start that burn before the node depends on your TWR (and so your burn time) as well as the amount of TWR change during the burn. There's unfortunately no general solution to this problem.