foamyesque

I'm not seeing any reason for the radially-mounted girders. What's the story there?

Yes, but they're so rewarding when you get it right. Nothing quite compares to dropping several hundred tonnes of hardware on Eve like a bat outta hell

The correct number of parachutes is 0. Use wings

Aether.

Er, whoops. :v

I can't believe that this is still a thing. It's been years, people! Anyway, to add to the corner cases, there are circumstances -- landers being the most obvious one -- where you would desire a lower-Isp engine over a higher-Isp one purely on grounds of the TWR; so you could have a mainsail pushing nukes that push reliants or terriers or whatever. Likewise, ion engines, despite their ridiculous Isp, should generally be the last thing in your stack :v

Yeah, looking at the other images, your nose gear seems to be too far beyond your CoM. For a tail-dragger you want 'em just barely in front of your CoM, just enough so's that you don't faceplant on landing.

This looks like (though I can't see the gear in your screenshot) a classic wheelbarrow problem, which is almost always caused by an interaction between your aerodynamic forces and your front gear. Specifically, it occurs when your main aerodynamic lift is behind your gears and so as you speed up, the gears take more and more loading. This moves your center of drag further and further forward and rapidly overwhelms vertical stabilizers. Sometimes you can get away with just tweaking the friction of the wheels, but that always feels like a slapdash patch that doesn't really address the root of the issue. I would suggest taking the horizontal stabilizer off and putting a (minor) fixed angle on the wings, five degrees or so, potentially less given your relatively large wing area. Then adjust them along the length of the craft so's to put their CoL just ahead of your CoM, and put your nose gear directly underneath that (as you're building a tail-dragger). Once you've done that, you can then put back the horizontal stabilizer to pull the overall CoL back behind the CoM for standard stable flight. The result, adjusted properly, should be a tail-dragger that will rotate to level and then take off with minimal or no command input beyond the throttle.

Bah, all these tail-sitting landers. Build a plane. It solves a number of interrelated issues: It gives you a means to brake on entry to manage your heat profile, it gives you control over your landing point (very useful for ISRU approaches), it gives you a low CoG and wide footprint, which are ideal for landers, landing gear is sturdy, delivering rovers becomes a breeze with cargo ramps, you can explore the planet via ISRU refills, and you can lift off with a TWR < 1. The liftoff is less efficient on a pure deltaV than a straight ascent, but it's worth it. I like a three-stage setup: A core two-stage element to execute a reasonably standard vertical-ascent->gravity turn profile, and a third stage that contains all the aerodynamic elements, landing gear, etc.

Eh, a good suicide burn -- difficult to execute by hand, but with mod assistance plenty feasible -- can get pretty close to the ideal dV for a landing. Landing in a specific spot can be done basically free provided you inject into an inclined orbit directly (or, for marginally more, immediately on entry of the Mun's SoI), it's just a matter of patience and time.

@GoSlash27: 6km/s is pretty high for a Mun transfer. I personally wouldn't do it in a SSTO, but the extra 800m/s you're alotting as a fudge factor is going to have a serious impact on whether it is possible or not. What're your numbers on a bare-bones flight?

Put your lander in a fairing. The difference it will make will be extraordinary.

The tricks with docking's final approach are these: 1. Point your docking ports normal and anti-normal to your orbit (on an equatorial orbit, that means North/South), using the 'control from' to make sure you're aligning the docking ports and not the ship. That means that your docking adjustments should have the least possible impact on your orbits, since you're effectively trying to do a plane change, and it also means that they will never change direction relative to the horizon of your navball, which makes it much easier to align them. 2. Once you've set the alignments, ignore everything except the navball. The main view is a distraction; the navball is everything. Your job is to get three markers to line up: The center of the navball, the pink target marker, and the green prograde marker. The trick here is to 'herd' the target marker with your prograde marker; the target marker will always try to slip away from the prograde marker (unless they're precisely lined up), so what you want to do is chase the target marker into the center of the navball by putting the prograde marker on the same line, but further out from the center. This will guarantee that you will be lined up and oriented to your target port before you get there, though you might be floating only 10m from the thing. Once the target marker's centered, just put the prograde marker inside of it and gently thrust forward. At this point, if rotational relative to the docking port is important (usually isn't, but can be), you can then pay some attention to the main view in chase mode to fix that.

Well I mean people say that but

I run with an X-52 myself, which I've always found perfectly adequate to KSP's needs. I'd also like to register my disagreement with the no-rudder school -- I am personally a fan of both fairly substantial vertical stabilizers and moveable rudders on those v-stabs. This is partly because I like derping around with stunt flying, but I've also found them very useful during re-entry and final approach. On a spaceplane's flight up you can trust to thrust-vectoring to steer you but re-entries -- especially high-angle S-bank ones -- can load you with a lot of adverse yaw that it's wise to be able to counter.

Unfortunately, my full screenshots of the ascent profile are lost. Peculiarly, the Mammoth engine powering it is generating much less thrust than it used to, which means I can't even refly the mission to demo for you. Gotta rebuild the entire vehicle. That's gonna be a pain.

Heatshields are for the weak

Ignore the people saying it can't be done. It's possible, though tricky, and it feels incredibly cool when you do. A checklist of things you need to remember: 1. Use parts with the highest possible thermal tolerances, all the way across the board, but especially if they're either on the underside or near a leading edge. Mk3 stuff is ideal for this purpose. 2. Enter unloaded. You're planning to use ISRU so you should be close to that anyway. This will save you having ridiculously overbuilt wings on takeoff. 3. Don't enter directly from a flyby. You will explode if you try. Instead, insert yourself into an atmosphere-skimming Eve orbit -- 100x100 puts you just barely above it. I use a burn to do so because it saves piles of playtime, and given your flight plan you should be able to do so easily as well. 4. Only drop your periapsis just a bit; 80km is more than enough. 5. You must be able to maintain a high angle of attack (45 degrees+). This means that your craft needs to be controllable even when all your aerodynamic surfaces are stalled out. Heavy duty RCS is very useful here (and can in fact be muscular enough to act as landing engines on e.g. Minmus). 6. You need to be able to bring it back to conventional flight once you're down below about 1.5km/s. Again, heavy duty RCS is helpful. Between this & #5 you also need very careful attention to your aerodynamic design; try and make it just barely stable for maximum agility. 7. Be prepared for lots of explosions in the testing stage. Oh, and a horizontal Eve launch to orbit is plenty possible too. The nice thing about a spaceplane takeoff on Eve is that you can ignore the TWR > 1 requirement of a vertical launch and instead pack a larger amount of fuel until you jettison your wings. I generally build so that I get rid of them once my Eve TWR has hit around 1.5, pitching to vertical as I do, somewhere around 8km for a sea level launch. From that altitude and with the speed already accumulated you could proceed to orbit on a single stage, potentially, but I've found a two-stage approach works much better.

The Mun originally existed as a part created by @NovaSilisko as a 'try to put something impossible into space' challenge. I put it into space :v The first wings in the game were built by C7 and eventually incorporated into the base game when they joined the team. Prior to the existence of wheels you had to use skids, but on the plus side, the ocean was a runway of infinite length and flatness (though also as hard as concrete). A lot of the 2.5m parts take inspiration from the old Sunday Punch part pack, if I recall correctly. The ability to swap between symmetry modes in either the VAB or the spaceplane building was originally in Editor Extensions.

Wings, man, wings. Landing gear is stupidly sturdy, a horizontal landing keeps your CoG nice and low even if you're long and skinny so's you don't tip, all your bits and Bobs are within a single ladder's reach of the surface so's you can efficiently disembark/ISRU/go roving, and your launch TWR doesn't need to be ungodly huge. Also, it looks pretty danged cool.

My own experience is that the best way to get truly massive Eve vehicles down in one piece is to put wings on them, but it takes extensive testing to get the aero- and thermo- dynamics of the entry correct.

I brought back four, in a Mk3 cockpit. First stage was winged drop tanks, to haul me up to proper rocketry altitude without needing TWR > 1, feeding a single mammoth; second stage, the mammoth on a conventional stack of tanks with some wings on for aero stability; third stage, a poodle-powered microshuttle, which met up with a tank left in Eve orbit and acted as the Kerbin lander. Needed a couple more mammoths to get off Kerbin's surface in the first place, but those were winged and recoverable boosters that I landed back at KSC.

The Mammoth is the way to go. With clever design you can do a sea-level return and only need to discard one engine.

Stupid is the key word there Lemme see if I can find my old screenshot... ah, here we go:

I dunno. It made landing some kind of planes pretty difficult -- they just wouldn't stop. When they started gaining both speed and altitude with a deployed parachute and no thrust, I knew I needed to report it :v