Fuzzy Dunlop

Hitting caps-lock will activate "fine control" mode, which can help. But it may be that your designs are just dynamically unstable. First thing is the air resistance, which creates a force called drag. Drag always points in the opposite direction to your planes motion. You want things that create a lot of drag to be at the rear of your plane, i.e. the centre of drag should be behind the centre of gravity. If you put high drag components on the front of your plane the air will try to move them to the back - by spinning your plane round. So a big tailplane tends to make a more stable aircraft.

You can just sit on the runway at fast foward till the sun comes up

If you wait till later you will be lower down and the atmosphere will be thicker, which can sometimes mean more force on the parachute. Drag is proportional to speed and air density. Really you want to look at your G meter: the lower the G-force, the lower the drag and the less chance of the parachute being ripped off. That said, the parachute wont open at all untill your in the atmosphere and wont fully open till 500m above the surface. Its always better to have the shallowist possible re-entry. Try lowering the periapsis to just 20km/

If your planes are pitching foward it means the centre of lift is behind the centre of mass. You could put your wings futher foward or move heavy stuff futher back.

I only just found out that you can change your active ship quickly with the [ and ] keys. Very useful for rendezvous - but it also got me thinking. If you can swap quickly enough can you keep multiple planes in the air at once? Take off is pretty scary Chasing is fun Annyone want to guess how this ended? So it is possible - but several things make it very difficult: Problem 1) Anything in the air which gets futher than 2000m from the active ship will vanish, I guess the game dosen't want to simulate spent stages falling all the way down. Solution: Keep your planes within 2000m, a little tricky but not impossible. Problem 2) Swapping from a plane in the air to a plane on the ground will make the one in the air vanish (air-to-air and ground-to ground are ok). This a major issue becuase you can't launch one plane then swap to one on the runway and launch that. Solution: Get your 1st plane moving down the runway and trimmed so it will take off, then swap to the 2nd plane before it acctually leaves the ground. Problem 3) This is a really wierd one. Anything moving on the ground will stop dead once it gets 350m from the active ship. As if the game freezes it. The engines still burn but it just sticks there. Once you move back within 350m it has to accelerate from 0 again. Solution: Make a plane which can take off within 350m. Problem 4) The throttle and trim settings carry across when you swap planes. Annoying because this sometimes makes a plane spin out of control when you swap to it. Solution: Have two similar (or even better identicle) planes I hope someone else tries this out and has some fun with it.

If you want to build a SSTO (single stage to orbit) I recommend building on this skeleton: 5 normal fuel tanks + 1 areospike + 2 Mk1 fuselage + 2 turbojets. Fly that up to 12,000m on the jets alone then fire the areospike. You can turn the jets off after 20,000m.

Good idea, now I made it to the wingtip!

One of my aeroplanes is stable enough to fly without any control imput - if you trim it right it just stays at 5000m flying in huge 400km circles. During a test flight I accidently (honestly it was an accident) sent Bill on a EVA. Instead of falling straight to his death he ended up wedged in the tail of my plane. He finally came loose a few minutes later but this gave me an idea. I added a network of ladders and now the Kerbals can crawl about during flight: Building ladders on wings is suprisingly difficult, and returing to the cockpit is hard. Usually something like this happens:

I\'ve been working on a spaceplane, the Icarus, on and off for the past 2 weeks. It\'s been quite a design challenge but yesterday I finally got it into orbit . Incidently, the actual designation for this plane is the I-10E. There have been over 50 iterations of this design so far, several hundred Kerbals have died to get Jednard, Richfred and Rodald into space. The launch didn\'t go perfectly and Icarus 1 ended up in a highly inclined 100 x 400 km orbit. Since I didn\'t know if I could repeat the launch and I wanted a target to rendezvous with I also launched Icarus 2. If Icarus 2 failed I could try to circularise the orbit of Icarus 1. Icarus 2 launched into a perfect circular equatorial orbit. I decided to de-orbit Icarus 1, but too my horror I discovered that it was uncontrollable in the lower atmosphere. Billy-Bobson and his crew smashed backwards into the ground at over 100 m/s . After mourning their loss I launched a simpler, earlier spaceplane - the Daedalus. Daedalus completed a rendezvous with Icarus 2 and the crews waved at each other through the windows. This heartwarming moment was record for posterity. Icarus is the big one to the top right Then it hit me: the crew of Icarus 2 were doomed. If I re-entered the atmosphere their spaceship would surley tumble out of control like Icarus 1. So what do I do? Do I de-orbit and send them to firey death? Or do I leave them to circle 100km above Kerbin for all eternity?

I\'ve been playing kerbal space programme for about a year now (and lurking on this forums for months) so I thought I may as come out of the shadows and say Hi. Typically all my missions go perfectly apart from one minor setback, something like this :-[