foamyesque

Ok, so, with the changes to the Spark engine back when 1.7 was released, my old design still doesn't quite manage it. The extra weight in the engine of itself increases the mass by 0.03t, and that means more fuel had to be added. Fortunately enough, the old layout deliberately had fuel removed. So, I rebuilt the machine and burned a pile of time balancing it out and re-learning the ascent profiles. The extra mass on the bottom hurts the aerodynamic stability, which was a real pain. Also, I notice the OP says 'no clipping to exploit physics' here. For full disclosure, I used the translation tool to center a single Spider engine for my upper stage, in (roughly) the same spot as you'd use an Ant. I would consider that allowable as I am not getting anything for free, e.g. dragless parts or such. Ascent profile was a full throttle launch, tipping to 5 degrees. At 100m/s, change the SAS to prograde. At 200m/s, throttle down to 66%. At 9km/fuel draining from the upper tank, throttle back up to 85-90%. At 11LF remaining in the upper tank, go to full throttle. At 10LF remaining, jettison the lower stage. Prograde hold to raise the apoapsis to ~68-70km, then switch to hold-attitude, and maintain a constant apoapsis of just over 70km. Done correctly you should get the apoapsis and periapsis trading places about one second before you run out of electrical power for the probe core. Part inventory: 1 small nosecone (0.01t) 1 OCTO2 probe core (0.04t) 2 full Oscar-B fuel tanks (0.45t) 1 Spider engine (0.02t) 1 TD-06 decoupler (0.01t) 1 Z-200 battery (0.01t) 1 Spark engine (0.13t) Total mass: 0.67t. Total funds: 2,670 (the probe core being 1,480 of that :D) Some screenshots -- flight was unfortunately rather busy so couldn't take 'em en route, but VAB, pad, and orbit in both map and main view are here:

I see nobody's yet managed to beat my old 0.645t unmanned flight I should try and see if I can replicate that in the current version. There've been changes to the rocket parts since then, I believe.

It's been a while since I was at Eve, but near the oceans I've never, ever seen any ore to mine in the first place.

The trick there is a winged lander. Works best with ISRU so you don't need to carry absurd amounts of wing coming in, though.

Pretty much. The only real downside is getting them up in the first place -- cargo diameter constraints can be a real hassle on ascent. One useful thing for taller landers not already mentioned, if you find you need them, is to pack reaction wheels to fight rotational torque. It's a kludge solution, though.

Personally, as a self-imposed challenge, I try to avoid docking mismatched craft elements if I intend to move material through it: I will dock tanks to tanks and crew to crew (with major structural pieces, e.g. the adapters, available for either). Basically if I can't see how a thing could go from on place to another, I don't let it do so. But the game doesn't care. You can run ten billion gallons of fuel a second and fifty kerbals through an empty girder somehow :p

Air drag isn't the only thing impacting rocket efficiency, though: you also lose energy to gravity, and that's mitigated by having more thrust. Gravity drag on a Kerbin launch usually predominates unless you're launching particularly awkward payloads and/or have tremendous TWR, so staying at full throttle helps.

I make a bigger payload :v Alternatively, some Thumpers or even Hammers, if you're launching something small, will usually bring launch TWRs up to something useful if you're a little short on thrust. I usually don't bother with crossfeeds on the grounds that I *want* my core to burn its fuel so's it has a desired TWR once my boosters are jettisoned.

As always, I maintain this is a kludge solution that avoids thinking about the aerodynamic/wheel loading interactions that are the actual root cause.

If this is a relatively small inclination change, and you're going from a circular orbit to a circular orbit, your best bet is to raise your apoapsis to your desired circular orbital distance, and to execute your burn to do so when you're crossing the equator in your current orbit. This will mean that the apoapsis of your transfer orbit is also on the equator. You can then execute a combined inclination change and circularization burn at it, and since you're going as slow as is possible for the inclination change, it will use the least amount of dV to shift things, without increasing the dV required for the orbit raising & circularization.

I've hand-flown continuous-burn to orbit without throttle-down, but a coast-reignite is a.tremendously simpler and b. enabled by the low orbital velocities (and consequently gargantuan upper stage TWRs) in KSP.

I submit that there's no such thing as 'too much delta-v'... just 'not enough payload'. :p

The X shape impacts the direction of the lift vectors, though, and as a result has higher induced drag for the same net lift. A flat bi-wing layout, like an equals sign (=) is more efficient if you need more lift than a single wing can give you (because of warping, floppy joints, fairing restrictions, ground obstacles, etc).

Point is, you can't use that to get a reliable range estimate, because it shifts so much. Really, the only way to *know* a craft's range is to burn it 'til it's dry and see how far you get.

That rate can vary pretty tremendously depending on altitude, speed, and throttle setting (particularly if you can throttle down as you burn fuel load).

Screenshots would go a loooooong way towards allowing specific advice. If you have Steam, you can use it to take screenshots via F12 and use it's built-in upload service to share them. Otherwise you can use KSP's ingame capture tool and upload them to Imgur or wherever. That said: There's four main things I have found that tend towards floppiness and that a couple of struts will solve: 1. A lot of stacked parts in short succession. This is particularly obvious between stages, since you're usually going tank-engine-decoupler-tank. A pair or trio of struts running from the lower decoupler to as high up the tank above the engine as is feasible will make it far more rigid. 2. Boosters, especially as they burn out, and lots of other things mounted radially, like to twist in various ways. Struts on the nose and tail hooking it into the main stack will usually stop, or at least strongly mitigate, this. 3. Complicated payloads, particularly spindly satellites and so on, will flop on their connection points under manouvering stresses. A couple of struts to widen the connection or attach it to fairing/cargo-bay walls can solve a lot of headaches. 4. Multisegment wings usually need some spacetape to make them move as a unit, not warp ridiculously, or not tear off from the fuselage. Exactly where to hook them together depends an awful lot on the wing layout and isn't as simple as the other three cases. Also wise is avoiding, as much as feasible, really long, spindly things and excess nodes. Life is a lot easier if you're putting your fuel in one -32 2.5m tank instead of 8 -4 1.25m ones.

Sell it as DLC, bam done. I'd expect there'd be a market for it. Personally, I'd like Through the Fire and Flames to start playing on planetary entry, and Don't Stop Me Now as you accelerate to orbit :v

That's true, but it *can* improve your aerodynamic stability by putting your heaviest bits at the nose, and as most rockets are in fact launched pointing up....

I've actually been poking at this, and I'm going to engage in some raw heresy by not using a Terrier upper stage.

I took a poke at an Eve sea-level launcher, but ran into game engine limits -- specifically, part counts blowing past 2000 that cause my copy of KSP to crash

I've driven rovers on Minmus, but honestly flying on it is *much* easier. You can keep the wheels for landing gear and short-haul stuff, but if you're travelling any distance at all, fire up the rockets and put yourself into an orbit or suborbit hop. You can make a dozen of those with a trivial amount of fuel.

It's a weird display glitch and seems to happen when you turn them on with action groups. If you toggle the drills off and on again individually you'll get the rate displayed again.

You can, in principle, do this with chemical rockets, but it'd be a beast and a half. You need a mass ratio on the order of 900. My sketched out attempt ran out of room in the VAB :v

Uh, 1. I intentionally took all the screenshots at zero thrust (well, almost zero -- the Junos take a bit to wind down); 2. The engines on the shuttle have a massive pre-built gimbal, so the thrust vector does not go through the CoM, and so required the aerodynamic stability to fly at all; 3. The Juno engines aren't mounted on the CoM either, they're somewhat below it. You can see that because with just the tiny bit of thrust left, KER is still reporting thrust torques.