Mic_n

No more so than Windows 8 was Windows 7 with a (different) GUI. Actually, probably less, now that MS has actually updated the internal numbering system again and "Windows 10" is looking like it will actually be version 10.0 (Vista was 6.0, 7 was 6.1, 8 was 6.2, 8.1 was 6.3 and earlier versions of 10 reported 6.4). In fact, that change of major version number from 5 to 6 in the XP->Vista jump was one of the prime reasons for that OSs compatability issues - a very large number of apps out there just freaked out when they saw a version number that wasn't 5. We might be in for a similar round of issues with Win10 now that it's happening again. Doubtless there are plenty of developers out there who haven't learned. What's that report as internally? I think 9xxx builds were still showing as 6.4 in system properties. If that version's showing 10.0 and running KSP fine, I'd be confident in saying "I'll be fine". I'd be pretty confident of that anyway, but that'd make me more so

Just to make sure and get it out of the way: the only place that'd work is Kerbin itself or Laythe, those are the only atmospheres jets will operate.. Air intakes pointing retrograde don't work, though.. or.. are exceedingly limited in their effectiveness... anyone who's ever had a spaceplane tumbling out of control at high speed and altitude can attest to the engines cutting out and coming back on as it spins retro- and prograde. For your purposes though.. remember that the intakes and engines are totally separate parts and need not be connected. Intakeair is a global resource provided to the craft as a whole, and consumed from that whole by the engines. There's no reason you couldn't mount an air intake to one node of a bi-coupler and an engine to the other to use for braking if you wanted to. I can't imagine a scenario where you'd actually want to use that, though. Even without airbrakes, you should be able to aerobrake with your lifting surfaces to a pretty huge degree, and in your final descent, parachutes are absolutely going to outperform engines for that purpose weight by weight..

technically, if you launch at the right time, you don't actually need to establish that LKO, you can just blast straight out from launch straight into the transfer and save the circularization burn. I'd guess that time is pretty much around 'moonrise', maybe a little before. Haven't really bothered with it that much.. my spaceplane launcher is already efficient enough for me.. to the Mun and back for ~18,000 bucks suits me fine.

Hrm... out of "loophole!" curiosity, do those 'attachment nodes' include the rocomax (and "not rocomax") hubs? If the physics just ignores "node attached" items for drag, then those 6-way adapters can mount four new stacks perpendicular to the existing stack orientation...

Personally I like to make the dive from a little higher up... the turboramjets don't really start spooling up until about 12km, the rapiers a little higher. Climbing a little higher initially can let you get into a higher thrust envelope to begin with, meaning your dive doesn't need to be as large and you're not having to climb back out of it at an altitude where your engines aren't really working so well. Really depends on the plane a little, too.. if you've got a high TWR thing you might not even need to dive at all..but if you can keep on climbing through to about 15-17km before dropping into the dive (need only be a few degrees), you'll probably find your speed picking up considerably as you climb and then zooming up through the dive. I haven't really crunched the numbers though, but it feels better to me.. but like I said, it can vary from craft to craft.

doesn't really need to be everywhere... That range represents what's referred to as the "physics bubble", and that's only really important in atmosphere, where aerodynamic lift and drag need to be modelled.. otherwise craft can just be thought of as a point mass "on rails", ie in a fixed orbit. Maybe when they upgrade to a newer engine and can handle multithreading they can increase it more, but at the moment they're a little limited in just how many physics calcs the system can process.

do whatever you want to do, it's a sandbox! Stick some sciency stuff on a probe core and make a satellite. Put the satellite on a bigger stick and send it to the Mun, or to Minmus... or to Duna, or Eve, or Jool and its moons. Make a plane, fly it around, crash into a mountain.. Make a plane that files around and ejects science pods that parachute gently to the ground. Make a truck make a train make a boat whatever you want! OK.. so.. I suppose the "core" of this game is orbital mechanics. So.. build yourself a rocket and put it in orbit. Then try to work out how to adjust that orbit to send your rocket to the Mun, then turn that back into an orbit there, and then land, and then reverse the process. Once you've got that sorted.. try putting another rocket into orbit, then sending one up to meet with it.. to dock and refuel and continue its journey. Maybe that one has some mining gear on it you can take to Minmus where you can set up a mining base.. then you can refuel a little rocket and send it back home. Honestly, it's a sandbox game - you can kinda do whatever you want with it. Find yourself some inspiration and let your imagination go nuts. Put it down and you'll likely find yourself come back to it later on, it's one of those sorts of things. Also, Scott Manley - go watch him on youtube.

losing winglets? my spaceplane lifter doesn't even lose the solar panels on the nose during re-entry! You guys are coming in waaayyyy too hot.

Yup. Think of it this way. Airbrakes work by creating drag - putting an aerodynamic surface against the oncoming flow of air. Your entire craft is an aerodynamic surface. You can create that same drag by just turning it a bit. Heck, in the upper atmosphere, point the damn thing straight up. Actually, depending on how much control authority you have, that's a strategy you can run with the whole way through re-entry. Point it prograde, pull straight up, turn on SAS and just let it try to hold. As the atmosphere thickens up and the drag gets heavier, the craft will try to come nose first (assuming you've built it right, otherwise the tail end may try to come around.. still not necessarily a bad thing since you've generally got engines there and they can deal with that heat really nicely anyway).. But you're slowing down as much as possible as high as possible, which spreads that heat load out over a longer time rather than just having a giant burst it needs to dissipate all in a hurry. That, and don't put your Pe down too low. Keep it up nice and high and just let it drop as you aerobrake in the upper atmosphere. If you're coming in from a high AP, it might take a couple of passes, but that gives you a chance to cool off in between. I find around 40km is a nice height for a Pe.. good amount of braking and not too much heat buildup.. Once you've done it a few times you start to get the hang of predicting where you're going to land based on your craft, your starting AP, all that sort of thing. Re the previous post: I don't mean to sound like an ass, but burning from 70-40km is astoundingly wasteful when you can just use all that atmosphere to aerobrake. Burning at that point means you're carrying fuel for it that you don't need, which means you're lugging that around the entire rest of your mission, which means you're increasing your fuel needs exponentially. Your craft should be basically dry when you come back in.. maybe a little there for emergencies, but that's about it. Instead of pointing your engines forward from 70-40km, try pointing your belly there, and use all those lifting surfaces as a whopping great airbrake in themselves. You might not notice it much, but there's still plenty of air up there to slow you down.

Yup.. sorry about the ambiguity there. The Rapier is still a 2-in-1.. I was just describing the 'progression' from turbofan to turboramjet to the rapier's airbreathing mode. The Rapier really doesn't work at all well until it gets up to speed. When it does though, it delivers more thrust at higher speed and higher altitude than the turboramjet (which in turn outperforms the turbofan). Nerv/Turbos are certainly intriguing, but it's a difficult one to get right... the turbos aren't much good beyond around 20km and 1000m/s (plus or minus a bit), which still leaves a lot of acceleration and a lot of atmosphere around for the nukes to push through, and they have a lousy TWR to do it with. The more you add, the more weight and the more drag (very significant since you're in the middle atmosphere still). I haven't played around with the combo much in the 0.9+, but I haven't managed to get it right yet. After having run even turbojet/ion engine combos previously, it's a big change.

Yup.. the big difference isn't really in the aero, it's in the engines.. they now have both altitude and velocity curves.. the rapiers are now more than a dual-mode engine.. You basically have a turbofan, a turboramjet (think SR71), and then the rapier in air-breathing mode is something like a mild scramjet.. they each work best in their own areas and then peter out.. the rapiers work at the fastest speeds and highest altitudes, but it's still nothing like what you could airhog in the old days.

smart a.s.s. Absolutely true though... you you can get up to ~2600m/s, you'll soon find yourself going so damn fast that gravity can't keep up with the curvature of the ground you're moving across, and you get to be flying HitchHikers Guide To the Galaxy style... falling but missing the ground. Which is also known as "in orbit".

Yup.. KAS can let you 'hose' things together, with connectors and ground points and the like. Though as mentioned, the Klaw is also an option. As to compressing suspension.. the lander legs and landing gear have the option to lock out the suspension (can't remember about rover wheels, though I think they do as well?). Might be worth trying that, though I don't remember whether that locks the suspension where it is or at full travel.. you might need 'sets', where you can deploy a longer set of gear to hold your wheels off the ground (hence at a fixed length), lock those ones in position, then retract the 'stilts' to sit at a reference height.

Haven't checked it out myself, but would you be able to do it with fuel lines feeding in? Personally I do the "click the 'do not use this resource' button" method, but I'm curious now. It's an easy one to forget. As has been mentioned, you can also manually transfer fuel back into it before separating, but if your lifter is suborbital then you may not have a lot of time to do that. Remember, if you want to maintain that fuel balance as well (ie transfer from symmetrical side tanks on your plane back to one on your lander), you can select multiple 'feeder' tanks as well as the target, then just hit "in" on the lander tank, it'll draw from the other tanks equally. - - - Updated - - - I understand the change.. not only for fuel balance but for the odd way fuel did actually flow some times.. trying to work out why a particular engine couldn't get fuel from a particular tank could get a bit complicated on spaceplanes where the tanks weren't all strapped together in a nice neat column and having to run fuel lines all over the place to get it moving the way you wanted... But yeah, it does make payloads a little awkward. It'd be nice to have an option on separators to prevent that jet crossfeed though.

"enough lift" ie: "it depends". Speed & altitude are the biggies. The higher the speed and lower the altitude, the more lift your wings will generate. With enough thrust and angle of attack, ta-daaa it's a rocket and who cares about wings? NB KSP (stock, at any rate) wings aren't airfoils and don't generate "lift" as you might think of it. If they're pointing prograde, they're not pulling you up. They'll slow your 'slip' through the air column though and will help you move your heading vector, but unless you mount them 'pointing up a bit', they're not actually going to make your aircraft rise. A craft with wings bolted straight ahead and sitting level on the runway will not lift off of its own accord, no matter how fast you go or how many wings it has. In other words, there's no real answer. How much lift you need for what? just try it and see what feels right for your purposes.. it's massively unscientific but I honestly can't think of a complete answer to satisfy all the options.

That's where the buttons in the lower left come into play.. Centre of Mass, of Lift and Thrust (can't remember the order). With a plane on top of a rocket, you're generating lift (and drag) up there, with all the weight at the bottom. That's a sure-fire recipe for disaster. You need to get your centre of lift back behind your centre of gravity(/mass) and keep it there.. don't forget that without intervention, fuel burns from the furthest source first. That usually means the top, and it means your centre of mass shifts backward as you burn. Considering the weight of the engines, it can be rather difficult to keep your mass anywhere but at the bottom, so you need your centre of lift to be back there too. A fairing to cover it is still going to be causing a lot of drag and trying to flip you over. Basically, you need wings at the back, and they need to be creating more (significantly more) lift than those at the front. But... There's an alternative solution here. Your payload (the plane) need not be mounted on top. Maybe you could radially attach it lower down.. though you'll need to compensate for asymmetry then. You could also stage radially off it.. it's less effective with the new aero, but the old 'asparagus staging' can inspire a winner here, letting you mount stages on belly and dorsal surfaces (symmetric there) as well as wingtips. More drag than a single candle, sure.. but it helps keep things in check. Basically, think a bit more 'space shuttle'. That's a damn tricky design to recreate in itself, but take it as inspiration. Also Foxter... is that thing going to Laythe or something? Awful lot of dV you have there for not a whole lot of payload.

Well, in my current career mode, chugging along as it is, I just Rescued Bob from the Mun, where he'd landed a little heavily on a previous mission. I used my unmanned SSTO lifter (capable of carrying a 9T payload to 80x80 LKO before de-orbiting and landing) to take that 9T two-stage (transfer/de-orbit+ lander/return) module, along with a little science gear (science jr, goo, thermometer, barometer). Just worked out the numbers, and the actual mission to the Mun and back cost me 17,730.. basically the longtank, lvt-45 + separator crashed into the Mun plus fuel. Everything else was recovered. I reckon that's pretty damn decent. Could be better with more access up the tech tree, but with no rapiers or Nukes and considering I got me some sweet science in the process, I think it's pretty good.

certainly does. However if you think about it, those "engines" are really just nozzles. An actual turbojet engine is way longer than that. If you want to make those small designs "right", you should put a nacelle, pre-cooler, structural intake or just a chunk of structural fuselage in front of them. Together, they're "about right". Or, you could use a fuel tank and just ignore that you're violating fundamental laws of science having both fuel and engine occupying the same space and time by pretending that fuel's actually in the wings, which is something we generally (with a couple of notable exceptions) can't do.

Err... yes and no. As I said... my little space hopper I invented had NO thrust. no rocket engines left on it at the time and still too high for the jets to even fire up, yet I was still able to glide (and glide quite well) at ~30km. The new lift model (using v^2 properly) really emphasizes that.. You most certainly can use high-altitude lift to your advantage. I'm thinking you could probably test it out by getting an AP up to 30km, hitting that AP, locking to a zero degree AoA and burning. Any increased vertical velocity at that point is purely due to lift. You're only going to be raising your AP through velocity when it's at the other side of your orbit. To be clear, absolutely yes - thrusting prograde while "on the rise" is the most efficient way to raise your Ap around.. But lift lift can still play a significant part. Times like these I wish I could get the mechjeb ascent guidance to work right for spaceplanes to get some repeatable test methodology, if only to satisfy my own curiosity about more and less efficient methods.

On the subject of which.. has anyone actually confirmed the drag of lander legs? It seems very hack-y to exclude them, but there isn't really much of an option to get around them other than to encase them in a fairing, and every time I've ever tried to use a fairing it's seemed more trouble than it was worth.. maybe an "undersized" stack at the base of the lander to let the legs 'tuck in' behind a straight fairing would work? I dunno... it's an annoyance. - - - Updated - - - but as to the original question... yup. Fins to keep the back at the back, and keep it relatively prograde to minimise drag trying to pull it around. Or Moar Control Authoritah. Fins/Gimbal/Reaction Wheels.

I noticed that when I inadvertently took an 'easy' contract for some observations on Kerbin.. which were basically down at the south pole.. one above 18km, one below, and one landed. Had only the basic turbojet unlocked at this point so nothing other than rockets that could get up that high.. which meant I could either cruise to the pole at ~mach 1 (erk), get the two low ones then kick in a rocket and climb to the last, or (the option I went with) make a kind of sub-orbital lifter.. Was in space, out of oxidiser & having dumped the boost stages to be in pure 'plane' mode but still a little short of my destination... But I was very pleasantly surprised by just how much lift I could still get in the upper atmosphere, even with a relatively 'underwinged' craft.. more than enough to keep me above that 18km limit with plenty to spare. So yeah, there's still a lot of lift to be had in the upper atmosphere. Just because you can't harvest oxygen from it any more doesn't mean it doesn't have something to offer.

Take a look at some of the SSTO/spaceplane threads if you want some ideas/inspiration... http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/118470-1-0-2-Any-hope-left-for-SSTOs http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/123135-RIP-SSTO-long-live-SSTO It's certainly very different to what it used to be, but still do-able.

How so? Unless it's just a matter of "I'm impatient and just want to get it over with" (which is fine if that's how you want to do it), then "not enough time at Ap to circularise" is just another way of saying "my ascent profile is too steep and I'm not carrying enough horizontal velocity". IE it's a symptom of what's already been suggested earlier in the thread. If you're still having to burn once you've passed your Ap, you're wasting fuel you should have burned earlier. Back in Ye Olden Days you used to be able to circularise a spaceplane orbit with ion engines, and I can't think of a more "time poor" option than that. Admittedly with the new model I don't think that's really viable any more (though I'd love to see someone manage it), but the principle is still the same. The more speed you build up with those delightfully efficient air-breathing engines, the less you need to spend on rockets, the less oxidiser you need, and that beautifully exponential weight saving kicks in more and more.

That one? Nope, that's the ladder drive, and it's alive and well. Basically, kerbals climbing a ladder and bumping their heads on an object imparts a force on that object, with no counter force on the ladder they're climbing on. That means with a sufficiently light craft, a kerbal constantly climbing a ladder and pushing against some bit that's connected to it, they create a constant thrust. Not much mind you, but on a sufficiently light craft: enough. Pretty sure that one was an Eve return. Possible, but considering the thrust generated and acceleration, along with the fact that it seems to break under time acceleration (x2/3/4 physics accel, not 'on rails'), it takes some pretty serious patience.

as far as altering your pitch in flight... I'm presuming that's due to the centre of gravity shifting as you burn fuel? If that's the case, you should just be able to shift fuel between front and back to rebalance it. You seem like you know what you're doing, but from memory it's alt + right-click on the fuel tanks in question, you can then use the "out" and "in" buttons on each slider as needed. Note that you can push from "one to many" or pull from "many to one" with that, too..