Xivios

You made the fuselage smaller but the wings are still on the very ass end of the plane. Trying leaving it longer, moving the wings further ahead, and adding a conventional tailplane, minus the rudder (but including the vertical stab) Rudders are a good idea in theory but KSP\'s current way of deciding if a flight control surface reacts to an input or not makes their use very difficult, because they almost always fight the player when rolling the plan, when a player tries to roll right, a rudder will try to yaw left, and vise versa.

Center of lift directly on center of mass probably works well in KSP, but it\'s not entirely ideal, or rather, it\'s unrealistically ideal. Center of lift behind center of mass makes a plane more stable, tends to pitch down, helps prevent stall and makes the plane easier to recover if it does stall. I don\'t know if KSP can model a stall yet though, but if the aerodynamics get overhauled it might be worth a consideration. At any case, if pinning down the exact center of mass is a pain, then center of mass ahead of center of lift is the next best thing. This means wings far back. But it does make a plane harder to take off. Rudders would be a good idea in theory, but right now it\'s probably one of the only solidly bad pieces of advice Temstar has given you, the rest is pretty solid. The reason is this. KSP couples ALL control surfaces together - there is no difference to KSP between an aileron, a rudder, or an elevator, if the control surface can at all affect an axis it will try to. This creates a VERY BAD relationship between the ailerons and the rudder. The rudder usually sits on the rear of the vertical stab, or is the vertical stab if you use an all-moving tail. The end effect is the same. Imagine the plane now, as a series of levers around the center of gravity. The rudder is way out at the back, and has a long lever along the yaw axis, giving it great yaw authority. This is exactly what you want, right? Well, usually. Imagine the ailerons now, way out on the ends of the wings, same deal, long lever along the roll axis. But the rudder, it still has a little leverage on the roll axis too, doesn\'t it? But not much, it sits just above the fuselage, which puts it just above the roll axis. So it can affect roll, but only a little bit. Well, KSP sees that it can affect roll, and will treat it as an aileron when you try to roll. So you roll right, perhaps, and what happens? Right aileron goes up, right wing drops, left aileron goes down, left wings rises, all good, but the rudder, trying to roll the plane to the right by pushing over the fuselage, deflects left...fuselage swings left. So here you are, trying to roll right, probably with the intention of turning right, and the aircraft is trying to turn left. This is called Adverse Yaw. It\'s a minor issue, in the real world, the Wright brothers ran into it, that the rudder is supposed to correct, but in KSP, it makes it worse, to an insane degree. Odd thing though, that with such a simple aero model to begin with, adverse yaw is pretty minor anyways, and the rudder is that much less important! So skip it, because it will only make your life difficult in the meantime.

I\'ve noticed a few large aircraft of mine spawning with the nose pointed slightly to the left. Could be a matter of KSP\'s positition on the runway,

Canards as parts are just named, they can be used as all-moving tails too, for example, which is pretty useful, or even all-moving wings, which isn\'t a great idea, but then the Kerbal\'s aren\'t known for their great idea\'s anyways. Canards as used as the name suggests helps keeps the nose up, gives the plane better pitch authority, and can be used to tweak the center of lift. But they can make planes hard to fly. If it flips end over end after installing canards on the front, move the canards further back to reduce their authority as well as move the center of lift back. If the plane doesn\'t pitch well or pitches down too much, move them further ahead. Doing the same with the main wings will have a similar effect, though even more greatly so.

Center of lift behind the center of gravity is the single most important part of building a stable plane. Having the center of pressure behind the center of gravity helps too, and this usually comes naturally as a result of the wings being far back as well. But I don\'t blame you for troubles getting into space, I\'ve only sent one horizontally launched craft into orbit, and it was more rocket that plane when it got there.

I wouldn\'t glue those extra propellers on. When dealing with conventional propellers (ie, not fans, propfans, or scythe bladed props), 2 bladed propellers are generally most efficient. Multibladed props only really exist because there is a limit to how quickly a prop can be spun, go too fast and the tips start to go supersonic, which creates immense noise, and immense drag, and is very innefficient. If your engines have power to spare at this point, and your prop pitch is as aggressive as you can make it, then the only option at that point is more blades. But trust me, those little electric motors don\'t have that problem. If you glue more blades on, it\'s going to spend more energy swinging plastic than moving air, and it\'s going to spin slower. Electric engines produce more torque at lower RPM\'s, but more power at higher RPM\'s. So with more mass, more drag, and less power going to the props with 4 blades than 2, do you really think the 4 bladed prop will see any advantage? Probably not. I would also skip the landing gear for the same reason, weight and drag. Every gram makes a difference on these little planes.

Even the big engine will fit if you\'ve got the benefit of cleverness. Forgive the graphics, I\'ve yet to bother upgrading. Such a PITA. Anyways, you can see daylight under the big LFE here. Here it\'s side mounted tanks in a tricky spot where they attach lower than the central tank, thus lowering them enough for the legs to extend beyond the LFE. But this craft had a possibly related problem where the LFE would detach when resuming a previously started flight, even if it was already spaceborn.

ET phone home (it points to KSC)

Kerbin doesn\'t have any seasons, that requires it\'s rotational axis to the tilted in regards to it\'s orbital plane.

No, you don\'t. OK, you want to line up one orbit with another, put them both on the same plane right? There will be two points where the orbits cross. The altitude will be different, but they will cross. In fact the MunLander1 in you picture is pretty close to that point right now. That\'s a node. You want to burn at the node. To make it fuel efficient, make the node the apopsis of the elliptical orbit. Which means you\'ll want to burn prograde at the opposite node, which will move the periapsis to that node - where your ship currently is - and move the apoapsis to the opposite node. Then you\'ll want to burn at the correct normal at the first node - which is now your apoapsis. So, burn prograde at one node to create your elliptical orbit, burn normal/antinormal at the other node, which will be your apoapsis,to accomplish the plane change, then burn retrograde at the other node - the periapsis - to circularize the orbit again. At least that\'s the theory.

What you are asking for is quite probably the most fuel-intensive manuever you can possibly do around a single orbiting body. Seriously, I think going to the Mün and back might require less fuel than a full 90 degree plane change. But the quick and dirty of it is to burn at a right angle to you current orbit, example, if you are in a perfectly eastward orbit, you\'d burn north or sourth, and in a perfect polar orbit, east or west. This is called your orbit 'normal' and 'anti-normal', the normal being on the left of prograde and the anti-normal to the right. Exactly what normal you burn towards depends on which way you want to move the orbit, and this is made worse in that, as the orbit moves during the burn, so does the position of the normals, but we have exactly 0 normal markers on the navball (why Harv doesn\'t add them, I do not know), so once you start the burn, you\'re guessing until you re-check with the prograde or retrograde markers, which are the green circle and green X\'d out circle respectively on the navball, and move 90 degrees from that. Now as to what will happen when you burn is pretty easy to visualize, as long as the orbit is roughly circular. Imagine the orbit as a ring, which isn\'t so hard because the map view displays it as such already. Now imagine that ring is mounted to an axle, such that the axle passes through the center of the ring like a pair of opposing spokes on a wheel. One end of the axle passes through your ship. The other end passes through the point on the exact opposite side of the ship. Now up and down are kind of relative terms in space but visualize that one side of the ring is 'up' and the other side 'down'. And remember that all this time your ship is in orbit, the direction it is orbiting in is 'prograde' and the direction opposite its movement is 'retrograde' and so the imaginary spoke/axle is rotating like a wheel. If you burn on the normal, the orbit will tilt on the axle such that the half the orbit that you are heading towards will move 'up' and the other half will move 'down'. And vice verse on the anti-normal. For low and therefore fast orbits, it might be more fuel-efficient to burn into a very elliptical orbit, do the plane change at the apoapsis, where orbital velocity is low, and then burn back into a circular orbit at the desired altitude. The same concepts apply, but are a little harder to visualize, and you must place your apoapsis at the correct spot for the desired plane.

Depends on how the budget is set up. One of my favorite PS2 games is called 'Warship Gunner 2', it\'s a sequel to Naval Ops: Warship Gunner. These games let you build your own warships, ranging from small and agile Destroyers to massive Battleships and Aircraft Carriers. The first game (which I don\'t have, but want) made you pay for each part for each ship - expensive enough for reusable ships that were only built once, and a scheme that would prove to be a real drain on any money-making with one-time use space ships. But the second game had a scheme that I think would (with suitable tweaking) work very well with KSP. Parts were researched, not purchased, in an R&D menu, and cash earned in missions was used to start and speed up research - once researched a part would be freely available in unlimited quantities and would (usually - some parts had prerequesits) unlock the next part in the research tree. Singular parts would also be collected as the missions passed, and could be used in limited quantities until the part had been researched properly. This game had 1500 different parts though, I don\'t know how well the idea would work with much less parts.

Efficiency is highly overrated =P I will take a reliable and easy to use rocket over an efficient one any day.

If you can, redesign it with 1 ASAS module, the ASAS module enacts no force of it\'s own, it only controls other, existing control devices, therefore, any number of them greater than 1 is wasted weight.

I\'ve been doing some testing on 0.14.1 and chutes attached to boosters seem to be perfectly capable of saving the boosters when set in the same stage as the decoupler, and I\'ve done no edits. However, boosters are usually used up while still travelling vertically, and if their surface speed happens to drop very close to 0 as they stop ascending and begin descending, the chute will disappear.

I scarcely remember my first time, it was so long ago. Was a bit before .14 came out, and so I didn\'t have lander legs. Used the movable fins instead. It\'s still probably the most capable lander I\'ve built, actually, and certainly the largest. I aimed for one of the large dark spots on the mun (somebody on the forum had said it was flatter than the rest of the mun), guided it down, following the retromarker as carefully as I could. I remember that I forgot to use RSC, and so had a larger lateral velocity than I did in subsequent landings, but it was a stout craft, it touched down, I killed all power, and for the first time ever...nothing fell off of it. I rejoiced, showed anyone who I could find, and took off. Actually made it back to Kerbin too. I have a screenshot of it too.

Going to 5x timewarp and then back to 2 or 1x should do it, since rails doesn\'t allow rotation. But it\'ll probably start to rotate again as soon as a force is applied to it.

I think ToD is Time of Death. I\'ve seen it filled out in recently deceased crewmembers, but it\'s usually a 0-0 for surviving crew.

Aside from most of the information being fairly common sense, decoupling still-burning SRB\'s is a very, very bad idea. With the radial decoupler they are likely mounted to behaving the way they do, the SRB will nose inward and take out the rocket and everyone on board. A better option is to keep the nose above the horizon as long as you can, burning all engines to maximize altitude, cut liquid engines with X when the nose drops below altitude, and then jettison and drop stages as quickly as possible as soon as the SRB runs out of fuel.

Yeah, the Horizon method is very good and always works. You can, with some experience, learn to 'tweak' the parabolic orbit by shifting the apoapsis, but it\'s not really necessary. As soon as you enter the muns SOI, it\'s very easy to enter an eastbound or westbound munar orbit by watching the map view and burning either east or west until the periapsis appears on the desired side - just because the mun is a fairly small dot doesn\'t mean the navball artificial horizon/compass doesn\'t work - east, west, north and south still have a lot of meaning even when the ground is so far away. Incidentally Kerbin will be to the east from your position, which is why KSC pro and retrograde marks also work at this stage. It doesn\'t take much fuel to do s as long as your far away from the mun when you do it, ideally, it would be done by a proper timing of the initial injection burn, but it\'s much easier to see with the map view when you enter the muns SOI and at that point you\'re still far enough away to correct it how you orbit the mun without burning much fuel. A mid-course north or south burn can even help to reduce the inclination off the equator, but you probably won\'t fix it entirely until your in munar orbit. I\'ve also noted that a fresh persistance file will allow a fairly direct ascent with no Kerbin orbit if you pitch over about 30 degrees east and hold it there until apoapsis is at munar orbit. But that only works for your first launch, or a demo launch.

That, and run a couple of fuel lines from those tanks to the central tank, and suddenly you\'re carrying 3 more tanks of fuel. Or 6, if you want to go all out.

Um, no, it\'s not. The navball switches to 'Surface' from 'Orbit' automatically when you descend to a certain altitude, I can\'t remember what the switch is on the Mun, but on Kerbin it happens around 30,000 to 32,000 meters (which is almost exactly when my mun rocket looses it\'s first stage, hence my memory of it), and you can switch it back and forth by clicking the display. When the navball says 'surface' and you\'ve nulled your lateral movement, you are synced - you are descending/ascending/hovering in a vertical line relative to the surface. Easy as it was before planetary rotation was added.

I prefer a combo. My lander does have a gimballing LFE, but it\'s also got an RCS array for horizontal velocity nulling and an ASAS to help the whole mess along. Namely, the ASAS can keep the thing damn close to perfectly vertical, without worry of poorly-placed RCS pushing it over when trying to translate. End result? Translational movement is probably under 1m/s at touchdown.

I dunno about that. My C2D, 4Gb RAM desktop smokes my Core i3, 6Gb RAM laptop when gaming. Reason is simple. Even an old Radeon HD4850 kicks the crap out of a Intel Integrated GPU. What sort of GPU does that laptop of yours run? If it\'s running Integrated, then yes, Laptop is your problem. In other news... It\'s not really a bug, it\'s an odd effect of the lighting engine. Shadows are only drawn a certain distance from the camera, in an even circle, to save on resources, but they can be cast from unlimited distances. So what\'s casting a shadow so large, so far away, that\'s it\'s eclipsing the entire lander and drawing shadow for as far away as the game will allow at those settings? Kerbin, that\'s what. It\'s a solar eclipse, you can\'t see it in that picture but Kerbin is blocking out Kerbol and casting it\'s shadown over the entire area, perhaps much of the mun itself, but the game\'s setting mean that the shadow is only being drawn in a fairly small area around the camera, leaving the rest of the mun strangely illuminated.

It\'s also a flawed concept, in fact, Wikipedia has a very nice article on exactly this, the Pendulum Rocket Fallacy (and before anyone jumps down my throat for using wikipedia, note that the article is referenced). That said, making it work definately qualifies as Kerbal to me 8).