Aranthos

Just restarted using this after being away from KSP for a bit, I've got a strange problem where engines show up on the action groups page with the fuel configuration looking like this: http://puu.sh/5GHzq/2b3ec99be3.jpg or this: http://puu.sh/5GHPn/b9be66adf4.jpg None of the fuel options actually do anything when clicked. Tanks seem to work fine, they detect the fuel type of engines underneath them without any worries and also change their contents as expected. I've got quite a silly number of other mods loaded so I'd imagine it's probably an incompatibility. I was just wondering if anyone else has seen it and could save me need to go through them all. Being optimistic =D

Could you try installing TAC fuel balancer and haxxing some AM into the tank on the pad and see if the same problem pops up?

Feature request tiem! The engines work amazingly well for the vertical part of a VTOL's flight, but I've got some ideas on how to improve VTOL steering's usefulness in forward flight. I haven't come up with a way to do this for single-pair engine arrangements (I actually haven't even built or flown one), but something like this should allow double-pair craft to maintain full engine-driven attitude control all the way through the sweep from vertical ascent to forward flight by transitioning from the current control method to one that still allows yaw, pitch and roll control when the engines are brought to 0 degrees for forward flight. It could do this by using direction control of the engines to manage pitch and roll, while using thrust to manage yaw. To transition from one system to the other, it weights the two sets of controls by fading one in and one out using sin/cos curves based on the current angle the engines are thrusting at. I've never worked in C# much so instead of writing a terrible unreadable piece of turd I just pastebin'd some javascripty pseudocode here: http://pastebin.com/T7Drx9wE I didn't go through the roll and yaw functions as well but they're pretty similar so that example should pretty well explain what I'm thinking.

I've not done it with the thermal jet but I have done it with normal turbojets and ion engines. It was a pretty dart-shaped aircraft, not a lot of lift to it. Loads of air intakes jammed on. Basically after clearing about 15-20km I'd drop the nose to 5 degrees above the horizon and just burn like hell. I needed to throttle the jets back as it climbed to avoid a flameout, but by keeping on as much power as I could with the nose just up a little bit it would accelerate to about 2,200m/s, at which point the jets would stop producing thrust (their exhaust velocity now matching the airspeed). They were each producing newtons of thrust, not kN any more when I lit the ion engine. It's easier to do with Mechjeb handling the throttle as it can jets right up to the absolute razor's edge of flaming out so you can get a lot more from them doing that. I'm at work at the minute but I'll see if I can find the craft file when I get home if you'd like?

If you're trying to climb hard when your jet flames out and you swap to rocket mode you'll have trouble since you're fighting gravity more. If you climb to near-flameout and level off, build as much speed as you can on the jets while climbing gradually you'll find your jet thrust will get closer and closer to zero as you go. Once it gets below 28kN (which it will if you're going fast and high enough) flip the switch and you should be quite able to make orbit.

Delta, the research lab should no longer have science as a resource I believe. It should just dump any science it's generated into your R&D lab at KSC whenever you load the vessel with the lab. Disclaimer: I haven't actually got to research labs in the tech tree yet after the .22 update =[