Mic_n

throw it in a polar orbit and you avoid the SOIs of those other planets. Biggest thing is.. for what purpose? If you're going to dock with it, you still need to match orbits so that your relative velocity lines up. You also have very narrow windows.. So yea, it's certainly possible to put it in an orbit as you describe... but why would you?

Grab the Firespitter mod. The 'bomb bay' in there also works wonderfully as a cargo bay. Bolt a winch to the ceiling and stick your rover to it. When you're at your destination, open the doors and gently lower your rover to the ground, tear around for however long you want, then re-attach, winch it back up, close up the bay and off you go again. Works even better if you pair that up with the Hooligan Labs airships. Throw out some grappling hooks to lock your airship down and you can winch stuff down to the surface. I'd actually experimented with little ultralight planes with detachable wings that could fit within those bays... they worked to an extent, but the lack of any ability to properly align wings and body while attaching annoyed me too much to pursue it much further.

it's perhaps a bit counter-intuitive, but it's easier to go _small_ for spaceplanes. Biggest limiting factor is a lack of air at altitude, which means you can't have much thrust from a jet engine, and multiple engines wind up working against you. The thing to keep in mind is that you kinda want to follow a curve, just like a 'normal' launch.. this time though it's less to do with gravity and more to do with air. As you get higher, the air gets thinner, you get less drag, but you have less air to power a jet. However, you can go faster. The faster you go, the more air your intakes can pull in, the harder you can push your engine, the faster you can go. So there's this corridor where you ascend, where you're high enough to have as little drag as possible, but are moving fast enough to keep some airflow to your engines. As your airspeed increases, so can your altitude. It's a tough thing to get right, but it's possible. I'd suggest a lightweight plane.. a single mk1 fuselage tank (or equivalent), single jet engine, and a pair of the short fueltanks with aerospikes or 909s attached. intakes on the front of that and as many more that you can fit as don't make you feel like you're cheating (I just now made one with 4 intakes total, that's do-able). As strange as it sounds, wings are pretty much a waste on a spaceplane. Just some little winglets at the back to give you some control and drag the rear back to keep your nose pointed forward. Trickiest part of that is takeoff, then finding that golden 'corridor' for your plane. Best of luck.

I seem to be having a whole bunch of difficulty actually using these launchpads... I can load something up onto it, but I tend to get some bizarrely awkward spontaneous kraken-like behaviour when I try to launch.. things that work fine on the 'standard' pads going nuts and exploding on a deployed pad.. I can go back to the space center, to the tracking station, and see it "on a sub-orbital trajectory" and can't swap to it.. switch to something nearby and there's no sign of it, use the brackets to switch around between crafts and there's no sign of it.. Is there a knack or something I'm just not getting? Oh, also... protecting it (and things under it?) from damage when rockets are firing off?

Since you need to have the containers there to store ore, metal and rocketparts, it'd be really nice to be able to carry empty ones so you're not having to lug all that extra weight with your pad to your remote site. That or have a small amount of storage built in to the pad itself. Seems stupid to have to carry ore with you to another planet where you're setting up a mining facility... should have empty tanks ala kethane. ...or am I missing something?

it does have a top node, yes... but personally I find it next to useless.. decouplers don't seem to "stick" very well, and the bits left over from support struts stay up there when you open it up. I wound up just sticking it on top of a big-ass rocket, myself.

Just wondering... building in the editor & using the radial connector port.. The inline one I can work with to have something that starts out 'docked' (in this case, a rover) But with the radial, is that possible? if you attach the port to the connector (like the excellent instructions illustrate), then.. well.. radial parts need to mount around the edge of something, so that end of it doesn't really have a 'node' for any other parts to snap to. If you go the other way and mount the port to something else first, then that something else needs to be attached to the craft somewhere else, then detached to move.. and when you detach it to move, it's the root node of that part which you're reconnecting, not the port which is on it. So... yeah.. I guess I've answered my own question. No way to build with a radial port preconnected in an assembly as the example illustrates for the inline?

Never delved into mod making myself, but I'd guess there must be some fairly extensive support in there for the Air Intakes to use. Not just a "breathing capable" atmosphere, but its density as well. Which leads to the idea of some type of kethane-style converter to use the intakeair resource to produce oxygen, to enable "refueling" the supply via the atmosphere?