GeneralDisorder

Out of interest, I plugged in an extra fuel cell in the cargo hold which almost doubled up the dV. Went to the Mun, circularized, returned to Kerbin and landed at KSC. No landing on the Mun though... yet. Another challenge! Back to the drawing board...

Thanks Overfloater! Edited. @LABHOUSE: Both are designed for LKO, so dV is limited. The Cargo SSTO without payload has a dV budget of 1000 in vacuum. Should get you to the moon if you can time your take-off correctly. Don't think you'd still have enough to circularize there though...

Hi All, Thought I'd share some of my creations in version .25 Firstly a pretty 'standard' cargo SSTO capable of lifting a decent amount of cargo (I'd say 3 to 4t). For kicks, I made Jeb an Ion Bike to cruise around on up in space. Craft file here (version with MechJeb here) Next up is one I'm really happy with. I've been mucking about with VTOLS since .20 and I've always wanted to create a VTOL SSTO that still looks like a plane. I've seen some nice examples out there (levelord's in particular), but here's my own attempt. You can of course take of and land normally as well as vertically. Craft file here (version with MechJeb here) For those of you who are wondering how to fly an SSTO, I'll try to give a quick overview specifically for these two craft, but the principles remain the same for others... There's probably a lot of guides out there, but I still see a lot of questions about it, so I'll give it a go along with a craft to guide you. Action groups: 1 = Jet engine 2 = Rocket engines 3 = VTOL engines (obviously only for #2) Simple. First of all, I want to express to all who feel intimidated by SSTO's, that they are really quite easy to fly in KSP. With these two craft, after you take off (in whatever way) you want to keep your throttle at 100% and pull up your nose to about 30 - 35 degrees (Your heading obviously being 90°). Then you wait (or use time acceleration, but be careful for the 'bumps') until you get up to about 25 km. From about 25 km you will want to start to slow down your ascent a little. Drop your nose to 20 degrees and not long after you will hear your engine thrust drop off slowly. You should be going around 1000 m/s at this point. Don't worry if you're off a bit. Now you need to keep your eye at the top of your screen. More specifically at the vertical speed gauge to the right of the altimeter. It's probably pointing north at this point, indicating you are going upwards at about 100 m/s. Now we're going to start 'chasing our apoapsis'. This means we're going to want to get our vertical speed down to a more relaxed pace. Essentially bringing our apoapsis as close in front of the craft as possible. Drop your nose to about 10 degrees and you will start to see the vertical speed drop rather rapidly, so ease it down by occasionally pulling up a little, keeping your nose pointed between 10 and 20 degrees. You should be around 30 km at this point. Don't worry if you're lower, there's plenty of fuel, so practice increasing and decreasing your vertical speed. Also if your vertical speed drops below 0 for a bit that's OK. No worries, plenty of fuel... Just ease it back up without going into panic mode and pulling up at a ridiculous angle. Remember: "You're a leaf on the wind, watch how you soar..." Now we accelerate... Keep your vertical speed somewhere at 10 m/s all the way up to 35 km. At this point you'll be going around 1900 m/s and your engine will produce a low whine right now (still giving about 70 kN of thrust). You will find that to keep the same steady 10 m/s ascent, you will need to start tipping your nose down. You're almost at orbital speed after all. So don't be surprised to see your nose go down to between 0 and 5 degrees. At about 36 km your speed display will probably switch to orbital mode and you should be somewhere around 2300 m/s and rising. At approx. 37 km you will start to circularize your orbit and start to push up your apoapsis away from you, all the way to the other side of Kerbin. For the last phase, we're going to squeeze every kN of thrust out of our engine and assist with RCS to push up our apoapsis above 150 km. At this point, your nose will be below the 0 degrees in an effort to stay in the higher atmosphere for as long as possible. Mind you, you'll still go up at 10 m/s or more. At around 39 km, your engine will cut out for the first time because it fails to find enough air to keep it going full throttle. Now you need to throttle down until it fires up again and repeat this process as you go higher and higher. Ever reducing your throttle until you finally run out of air (can be as high as 50 km) You're free to use RCS to push up even higher, but your apoapsis should be over 100 km even without RCS. Now you just coast up to your apoapsis and fire up your rocket engines to circularize (which should take about 100 m/s dV) On a final note, the Cargo SSTO needs some fuel redistribution before coming back down. I'd advise to put any remaining fuel and oxidizer in the tank directly behind the cargo hold. Fuel balancer mod will help here... The VTOL always flies true. So thank you for reading this, I hope it helps and I always appreciate constructive feedback. Enjoy flying!

I don't really understand the fuss some people are making about career mode being too easy or broken or that stuff isn't in the right place in the tree... Maybe I play things 'the way they were meant to be played', but I've been having a nice progression, with parts unlocking at the 'right' time (at least to my feeling). I do prefer manned missions over transmitting over and over again. I'll send out a few crew reports occasionally, but in my opinion, sending a probe somewhere and just transmitting until you've squeezed all science from a spot is a dumb way to play the game. I'll leave planes and rovers out of the discussion for now seeing as the game is mainly a 'rocket-to-another-moon-or-planet' simulator. Don't get me wrong. I love planes and have built my share of planes, vtols, staged spaceplanes and sstos, but my main focus is on getting to planets and moons with rockets... My progression so far: - Suborbital flight - Orbital flight - Mun landing (forgot to take samples!) - Minmus landing x2 - another Mun landing to get those samples - A combined Duna + Ike mission (2 ships, 3 crew total, Bill visited Duna while Jeb and Bob landed on Ike) Planning, building and flying took me a nice amount of pleasant game time and I'm now at the point where every tech upgrade costs about 500 science. I am now planning a Laythe mission, where I want to get at least two Kerbals to set foot on the surface and live to tell the tale back in the KSC pilot lounge. Contrary to some, I've been rejoicing in the loss of Mechjeb. While it may be a bit annoying not to see your stage dV stats, the fact that you have to rely only on your own skills to do it all is such a reward on its own. And grabbing a piece of paper and a pencil and doing some really basic calculations can get you a long, long way. Rendezvous does take some more time without MJ, but I'm willing to put up with that. Training is good. MJ is fine in sandbox, when you are shooting up rocket after rocket to finish that humongous, 10 module space station you're building, but I highly recommend playing career without. So while I'm an experienced player, I haven't finished the tech tree yet (though I have pretty much everything I need) and that's a good thing. There's no prizes for being first anyway ;-) Keep it up Squad!

Actually, you can recover torn off science parts as debris in the space center and you will still get the science points. Just saying, as long as your part doesn't explode... :-)

You can still recover or terminate flights in the tracking station.

If you play vanilla, the only option available to you is the maneuver node system. You can use it to get an initial fix on your landing site, though you have to compensate for atmospheric drag and a little for rotation of the planet. I tend to be in the map view a lot while landing and using the navball to adjust my course until I'm really close to the surface (and if all went well, the target). It takes some practice runs to accurately judge the amount you need to compensate and correct, but quicksave and quickload are your friends ;-)

Hi fellow spacefarers, Been lurking on the forums for a while now and decided the time was right to make a grand entry. So without further ado, my kerbiculum vitae (highlights): - Started KSP at version 0.14, crashed some stuff. - Got into orbit... somehow - Got to the moon, crashed on the moon... (at 400+ m/s) - Landed on the moon - Landed on minmus - Rendezvous'ed some stuff in LKO (no way to dock at the time though) - Got out to Duna (hard stuff without maneuver node system, but doable once I figured out when to go) - Visited some other planets and moons - Had lots of fun mapping the hell out of everything (<3 mapsat) - Started building humongous spaceships in pieces which I would dock together in LKO. - Got frustrated with burn times for huge 2fps megaships. - Started scaling down and getting some nice results. - Messed around with rovers. - Finally started building planes, first successfull SSTO - First successfull VTOL - Built a refueling spacestation network in 0.20 (1 in orbit around every planet and several moons) - Seriously considering savegame editing to port the results of my efforts. So far I did 'other things' in about every other version. In between these came a lot of reading wiki's and forum posts. I consider "Doctor Rendezvous" to have taught me how to do it right. Each time you see this theoretical stuff come to life in KSP is a joy. I'm a limited mod user. Mainly MJ for the info and the smart ass during orbital maneuvers, MapSat though not recently. Have yet to try FAR and TAC for the VTOL's and SSTO's. That's probably going to be my next move. My convictions: - KSP is wonderfull - Squad is genius - I have way too little time to play - It needs MOAR BOOSTERS! Thanks for this gaming jewel

I agree with bsalis. It takes a while to master. In my experience, getting the balance of your plane just right also does wonders. I had the same problem when approaching 0 m/s horizontal speed. It would slightly dip forward and pick up speed again making me overshoot. Once I completely balanced my VTOL out it was considerably easier to keep in one spot. My plane is a little bigger though and the smaller your craft, the more precise you'll need to be. My two cents