Vanamonde

From upper closer it looks like:

SRBs in the game run for 30 seconds, but a flight to orbit takes 12 minutes or more, and flights to the moons last for days. They might more sense for you guys who are using mods to put small satellites in orbit and that kind of thing, but my feeling is that if my multi-day mission requires SRBs to get off the paid, then it needs a redesign rather than a brief boost. I haven't used them since my initial experiments revealed how quickly they burn out.

CannonFoddaUK: These are the coordinates of my landers at the arches. West: 12deg/25/min/26sec N by 39/10/24 E. East: 2/27/57 N by 81/20/44 E.

Ha! All you doubters who said I'd never get this thing to orbit, you were... well, you were right. But Bsalis did! Thanks Bsalis! I see that you added 2 rocket tanks to the engine nacelles, one rocket tank and an aerospike to the back, and a couple of struts to help steady the outrigger wheels. Anything else? Oh, and the rockets tap 2 of the jet tanks through fuel conduits. I knew it was close to the fuel needed to orbit, but couldn't figure out where to squeeze in a couple more tanks that wouldn't ruin the balance. Of course I've tried strutting the wheel mounts, but I hadn't strung the struts all the way to the fuselage. It seems to make a big difference, and it's steadier on the runway now. Now that I have one that can finally get to orbit, though, I'm discovering other issues. It's about as easy to turn as the Empire State building, which snuck up on me because it actually handles pretty well in atmo, so as I was putting it together I didn't develop a sense of just how big the thing was becoming. Another new problem is that I have almost no practice landing the things because I couldn't get them anywhere from which to land. Empty of fuel and gliding, though, I'm pleased to see it can sustain a descent rate of about 7m/s for quite some time. In my test run just now I misjudged the de-orbit burn, had to double back, and ran out of jet fuel, having to ditch 68km from KSC. But that was after coasting for another 13 minutes after running dry at 8000m. Did you by any chance try to land it? I have no idea if the gear will stay on under the strain of its weight. My feeling is, if you can't take your hands off of the controls for a couple of minutes at a time without something bad happening, it's not a finished aircraft. Anyway, thanks again!

A full Kerbin sets during my first Munar orbit rendezvous: crew rotation on the orbital research station.

I couldn't try your big plane because it requires a mod I don't have. But when I tried your smaller one I got a strong and extremely consistent roll to the left. That's less common than the right roll, but I have seen it in my planes occasionally. That's a very odd and interesting wing you put on that thing. It seems to work well, but it does have A LOT of overlapping parts, and that might be contributing to the problem. (Incidentally, I think you'll find that plane easier to control if you remove the outer pair of ailerons. KSP planes roll very easily, so those are making the plane flip around kind of violently.)

That just kind of happens now and then. It's part of playing the game while it's still in alpha development. You can make your rockets a bit sturdier to prevent unwanted flexing, but there's no way to stop it completely. If it gets really bad, quit the flight and start over, but by going to the VAB first rather than using "restart flight."

Thanks Sal_vager, but that was the first thing I tried. P does activate the navigation light mod installed on the same ship, so the key is working, but the floodlights just sit there. I mapped it to an unused key and tried again, but still no photons. Supernovy suggested deleting and re-installing the whole cart mod to try to reset things, but ugh, I'm too lazy to try that right now.

And if you forget, they have little gray triangles on them, pointing in the direction the fuel flows.

I've also noticed in .16 that my aircraft tend to very slowly roll to the right, and I think there was at least one other person who reported this as well. Happens on radically different designs, at varying altitudes and headings. Avionics mode slows it but doesn't stop it. But it's such a slight thing that it's hard to reproduce consistently, which is why I haven't submitted it as a bug report.

L is already used for turning the cart to the right, but I just tried it to be sure, and it didn't activate the lights. I also reset the lights' key mapping to one of my own choosing, without result.

Hey guy. Here's some of the feedback you were asking for: You don't have to kill a Kerbal to make room on the ship. You can EVA him and then "end flight" him, which really does the same thing, but is nicer to the Kerbals. Matching the altitudes of the target object's apses is necessary, but as you saw, you'll still miss by miles if you don't match the positions of those points as well as their heights. I know you did that eventually, but it would save time to do it up front. And the orbital planes have to match, too. The thing is, when you're zoomed out on map view the two paths may look close, but for rendezvous, the difference has to be almost too small to see even when fully zoomed in. Lastly, I can't imagine that there's any way to rendezvous while going opposite directions at orbital speeds. Your closing velocity in that video is going to be about 5760km/hr. You'll be trying to snag Bob while he's zipping past you faster than the fastest jet ever built can go. If you try to slow the ship to match him, it would take close to twice as much fuel as you burned reaching that orbit in the first place. As for the video itself, is the third part supposed to hop back to the earlier parts? I got confused about where you were in the process. Maybe edit out some of the slow parts? Anyway, I hope this is helpful.

Thank you again Supernovy, that's progress. But I'm not there yet. I can put the little yellow pieces on a vehicle now, but they don't seem to turn on. I tried H, O, P, and U, without result. I attached them to a cart-based vehicle, and the cart's lights came on with H, as usual, but not the floods.

Wow, that's embarrassing. I was just looking at the K challenge, and most of those things are small enough to serve as hood ornaments on mine. Did give me some ideas to experiment with, though. Well, you see, that's where my weird compusliveness comes in. The whole idea of a real spaceplane (as I understand it) is to use air-breathing engines and wing generated lift to save a lot of rocket fuel on the way to where rockets are required, so that's how I want to do it. Even if that works in the game, it feels like cheating to me.

I started putting wheels on wing mounts to keep the things upright AFTER they started diving to the side, but it does seem to have helped when I moved them to the fuselage. I don't know what you're saying might be the problem with the placement of the wing, but if it's the angle of attack issue, I fly it in a nose-up posture that keeps it generating lift. With fewer than the 6 jet engines, this plane at least fails to generate much speed or attain much altitude. With them, I get to 15,000-16,000m and around 350m/s before igniting the rockets. That way, I figure it's achieving about what a first stage would do for a conventional rocket, while using much less fuel. I don't see how I could reduce the rockets, either, since there's no getting around the need to generate a certain amount of delta V. Now this is the part that's going to sound ridiculous; I did start small. But they seemed to need another engine to get up to speed, and then more fuel for the additional engines, and then more wing to lift that mass, etc., and next thing you know, it's gone from sailboat to supertanker. That is mostly why this one's got a weird COG. I added to that cantilevered beam at the front to balance the weight of the engines at the back. And odd as it may look, it actually flies straight on the rockets up to and in vacuum, and only gets unruly if I try to turn too sharply during unpowered descent. So thanks for the feedback and I'll play around with those ideas, but I'm afraid I still don't see how I'm going wrong.

Thank Captain Skunky. He's the one who gave me that tip when I was having problems.

Thank you, but I wasn't kidding about being new to mods. What goes where? Use small words, and possibly diagrams and hand gestures.

Oops. Just noticed in the original post that you have the game in the Windows "program files" folder, which can cause weirdnesses. Create a new folder, call it whatever you want, and move the game there. I don't know if that will make persistent easier to find, but it will avoid problems with ship design saves and stuff. If you still have trouble, use the search under Windows start and tell it to look for persis*, or something like that.

It's under saves/default, and it's persistent.sfs. I can never remember where it is, though, so I just search the folder for the truncated form "persis" and it finds it for me.

My experimental spaceplane broke apart on landing. Or so I thought until the smoke cleared, when I saw that the body of the plane was flying away after dumping the cockpit and some other parts. Having divested itself of that bothersome flight crew, it flew steadily and landed itself gently and upright a third of a kilometer away: That's the capsule in the distance.

I can routinely put landers on Mun & Minmus, put rovers on Mun & Minmus, stations in orbit around all 3 worlds, I've got some good airplanes, and I can rendezvous in orbit, but after 3 months of playing KSP almost every day, I STILL can't make a decent spaceplane that can actually get to space. Here's my best one so far: Craft: http://www./?8ps5r8r23dp3pzi Takes off from runway without (miraculously) diving off the side, then flies on jets to about 15,000m. When it starts to lose momentum I hit the rockets and climb at 60 degrees. It can get up to about 120,000, but only attains about 1600m/s. On descent it flies well on the jets, but before the air is thick enough for them, it can flip around and drop tail-first if you try to change attitude or heading. Now my problem is, this is as far as I ever get with any of my SSTO designs, and I get stuck here again and again. Any change I make from this point on only makes it worse. I think this one could actually make orbit if I could just increase the rocket fuel supply, but any attempt to do that causes a) the dreaded dive to the side on takeoff, followed by parts shaking/scraping off, or it can't get off the ground and shakes/scrapes apart past the end of the runway. What the expletive and I doing wrong?

I downloaded the floodlights, but I'm still pretty new to mods and now I don't know what to do with them. There's just the parts folder but no plugin, but inside that there's meshes and stuff. What now?

Just a suggestion: you're trying to come down with the ship upright and cancel your horizontal velocity with RCS. That takes a long time with the tiny thrust of the RCS, and the RCS tanks run out quickly, which I suspect is why you're weighting your lander down with several of them. What I like to do is ride my descending arc down, always burning directly toward the retrograde marker. This counter-acts vertical and horizontal velocity at the same time, and does it using the greater power and fuel supply of the main engines. In fact, if you think about the geometry a bit, steering toward the retrograde marker means you will always eventually reach a zero horizontal speed (assuming you start from a sufficient altitude). There's no fine-tuning of steering needed until you're just about to land, so while I do use RCS for landing, it's only for a last-second braking. As an added benefit, steering toward the retrograde marker means you can align the camera along the axis of the ship, and get a pretty good idea of the spot you're going to land upon.

Also, it's VERY hard to get from Kerbin's surface to orbit, and then it's AMAZINGLY easy to get anywhere else from orbit, because you're not fighting atmosphere and so much gravity. Going from zero to ~2200m/s just gets you to Kerbin orbit, but then just another 800m/s will get you all the way to Minmus. So I suspect the trouble you're having is that you're keeping the heavy thrust going too long. Once you get up to about 70,000m/2000m/s, the curve of your projected orbit will start changing more quickly, so watch it on the map screen and back off the throttle as you approach a closed orbital curve, and then you won't overshoot so much.

New personal best: flew ~47,000km and set her down 20.8m from the target... ... for crew changeover at the (tiny, stock) Minmus research station.