Vanamonde

If you can arrange to make the front landing gear taller so that the plane sits nose-high on the runway, that helps generate lift for takeoff. Control surfaces mounted at the front and/or back of the plane will also help with rotating the nose, but don't overdo it because that can make the plane unstable. What do your planes look like?

No, ids are invisible unless you are shooting them with blasters, as illustrated in my avatar.

Some suggestions: Too many control surfaces actually start yanking the plane around in violent shakes instead of making it more maneuverable. Try putting the control surfaces farther from the COM instead, to give them more leverage. Small control surfaces up front may help with your nose-down issue, but so will taking those two upper engines and moving to the same spot but under the wing. There, they will apply a bit of torque to help hold the nose up while under thrust. You don't need that many wheels for a plane that size, so you could remove some of those. And putting a spacing part between the fuselage and the front wheel will raise the nose while sitting on the runway, which helps generate lift for takeoff. What kind of trouble were you having with landing?

It always gives me a big happy to see people using my rockets! And yes, it's not Apollo-style because that's much more complex than a mission needs to be for the distances involved with Kerbin's moons, and the rendezvous and dock it would require are too difficult for most newbies anyway. So burn the middle stage all the way until just before landing, eject it from a safe height (a few hundred meters), and then the lander should have plenty of fuel to touch down and bring the crew back. Good luck!

You will never live it down, unless you strut it.

I just made this silly-looking thing. It can hit around 250m/s at wavetop height, but when I tried to cram more engines into the design, the speed increase was marginal while the control problems became atrocious. With 9 engines, it only just reached 280m/s, but could barely get off the ground and lurched around violently. There seems to be some kind of asymptotic speed limit for jets at low altitude, somewhere around 300m/s.

I sent Katateochi a PM to get back to you about that with what he knows, but it may be a number of hours before he sees it (it's the middle of the night where he is). But I believe the only way around the problem is to rebuild your ship, avoiding those particular strut types.

Katateochi did some experimenting, and it seems to be caused by the cubic and/or octagonal strut pieces. I haven't the faintest idea why, though.

Yes, it has to do with how hard the local gravity is helping the wheels get traction with the ground. Wait until you try it on Minmus. :-\

That marker is primarily for docking, because it tells you the straight-line direction to the current position of your target. That is useless for anything more than a couple of kilometers away, because of course everything is in motion and will no longer be at that spot when you get there.

This is a robotic fuel tanker that can deliver an orange tank to over 300,000m without needing to tap the tank's own capacity. The ship has a couple of foreward-facing spotlights to aid in docking. The design has been tested on dozens of flights, and I've been using it to refuel my interplanetary ships for months. OBSOLETE! Find the much larger version here.

The most common reason is that you've forgotten to set your throttle to zero.

This is an old one but it's one of my favorites. I call it... Wreckagehenge.

Submit 2 more posts. When your post total reaches 5, the forum software decides you are not a spambot, and shortly thereafter the restrictions on your account will be removed. However, the attachments system isn't working properly, so you'd be better off uploading your craft files to a service like Mediafire, and using the link they provide in your post. I'm only talking about the descent rate, the vertical component of the plane's velocity, as indicated on the gauge at the top of the HUD. If that is over 10m/s, you stand a very good chance of breaking parts off of your plane when you hit the ground.

That's the thing with newbies: they don't know stuff. Like how to spell iMpatient.

Your parachute attachment points are below the center of mass. Once the ship is hanging from the chutes, the body of the ship is acting like a pendulum. You were fortunate that ASAS and RCS were strong enough to right the ship again before landing, and to hold it that way against the pendulum effect.

Yes, they are one of the random surface features that appear when you have the "terrain scatter" option turned on, like trees, rocks, and grass patches. They were added in .17 (I think), but for some reason are MUCH less common in .19.

Then worry not; landing is quite difficult, and crashing then is not a sign that you're a bad pilot. Extend the landing gear, aim for a flat patch of land (the runway is MUCH harder to hit), and keep your descent down to about 10m/s so the plane doesn't take damage from the impact. Throttle back most of the way to reduce your contact speed, but depending on the plane's design, you may need to throttle back up a little to help keep the nose up. (These examples I've given shouldn't need that.) Once you touch down, throttle off the engines. You can apply brakes with the B key, but if you overdo it the plane may flip over on its face, so apply the brakes on/off, on/off. Then just wait for it to roll to a stop.

Pyromaniacal, how did you crash? Did you turn on the stability assist mode with the T key before taking off? And try letting the plane climb for a while before you try to maneuver, to give yourself a bigger safety margin with the ground.

They've actually got a considerable capacity, but I didn't want new players to be left wondering why the ships became inactive if they derped around too long. Anyway, I'm not a big fan of solar panels because you wouldn't be running the lights unless it was dark anyway, and the panels can't charge in the dark. And besides, as I noted, the orbiters will recharge while they're docked. I made the ship before we had probe cores, but actually, I don't want to make the segments any smaller than they already are because the purpose of this ship is not efficiency, but ease of handling for a new pilot. Both segments are much larger than necessary for this task for that reason. The mothership is the size it is so that its easy to see and hit, and the orbiters have those big fuel tanks to give them some bulk and inertia, so they move smoothly rather than flit around like mosquitos. Ladders might not be a bad idea, but considering the shape of the ship, laying a continuous chain of pieces would add considerably to the part count. Besides, EVA is good for you. It puts hair on your chest. Thank you for the suggestions, though.

Rather than adding rocket fuel, try increasing the speed you attain in the jet phase of the flight with more engines and or intakes. The same amount of rocket fuel may then be enough to circularize.

Usually people can help you quite a bit if you post a screenshot or two of your plane, but if you would like examples, I posted a couple of them that are very easy to fly here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25413-Trainer-and-Example-Aircraft-for-Newbie-Pilots

One upside of the forum blowing up is that my oldest screenshots are shiney and new again.

I didn't want to crowd my post with too much in the way of instructions, but just so you know, you only really need RCS for translating, and ships of fairly large size can rotate themselves without using RCS fuel, just on the magic torque of the command parts. Anyway, I'm glad my ship helped you. (Though at some point we will have to have a stern talk about sticking a mod part on my pristine, stock ship design. )

Okay, so I rebuilt my old post (lost in the forum collapse) where you can practice docking with a ship that is already close to its target. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25425-Help-with-Docking-A-Trainer-Ship-for-Newbies Maybe you could try docking, releasing, re-docking from increasingly large distances.