Znath

I've got a precooler as the main body for my fighter jet and this design's been able to circle the globe nonstop at mach 3.5-4. It's a rather small jet so maybe that helps with the heat, but it works for me.

I was inspired, so I took my favorite jet out to Sandoland to see the rock piles

Made a minimalist stunt plane I've been able to touch the landing gear to the sides of buildings and "vertical land" due to how the control box lets it turn on a dime.

Yea they pretty much explode or spin out if you turn it all on. It's mostly for cosmetic purposes and fun

My fighter jet that was crippled by 1.0 can now go mach4 about half way around the world without range extension tanks or slowing down. Before i had to crawl along at mach1 and carry a ton of fuel with me to even get half way around the world. I may now be able to go completely around with just my original "Extended range" version with two cans instead of 6.

Rockets are mostly linear and tube shaped Lightsabers are mostly linear and tube shaped Why aren't I doing this more often?!... well it's kind of pointless. But it's neat what you can do by clipping some parts together. I don't know if anyone's tried this, couldn't find it but still. I thought it was a fun idea.

Tweaked my fighter jet a little more, as of now it'll go half way around the world sustaining supersonic flight. It's incredibly agile and stable. Anything I try to mod on it aside from adding another fuel pod just makes it worse. So far I have yet to build anything more enjoyable to fly around be it for a fake bombing run or seeing how close I can fly to buildings.

In my career game I did this. I over-made a satellite with 3 baby probes and flew it to jool. At some point my over reaching caught up with me. I was out of money, layoffs, almost ready to just give in and give up. Then a mission came up "Gather data from around Tylo. Flew my probe from Jool over, got a bunch of money. Another mission comes up "Gather data from blabla" long story short. My fleet of idle probes hovering around each of the planets saved my program. So really, this isn't cheating, it's what NASA does all the time. The more life and missions you can do with a single probe, the better. That's why Curiosity has so many sensors and instruments to experiment with. It's a long-life probe to gather tons of data.

This is my current Mach4 capable jet The wing-tanks are range extenders. With those I can get about half way around the world through atmospheric flight. But not at full speed of course thanks to the lovely heat-bars. It survives remarkably long at full speed though. And for some reason, the way it's designed, the top fins always stay intact. So upon breakup, it can glide with its tail fins for an incredible distance using the 40 fuel the main body stores as emergency reserves. . . . The annoying thing is it seems any flight past 1000m/s is highly unstable. To get that picture, I loaded the game and decided to fly west to Sandoland. Got within sight of the shores and decided to ramp it up to 1000 since my parts were all doing ok. Crash.

In my opinion there should be special parts for hypersonic flight. I'd like to try to build some kind of scramjet-like vehicle to reach mach10, but as of yet the game falls apart past 1300m/s... which granted my current top-speed jet is faster than the SR-71... but. I'd like to be able to do more. I know they don't want people to just do something like (if they added high temperature wings) have giant ships covered in hightemp wings land anywhere anyhow. So maybe I'll have to settle for lousy mach4 for now. I just wish the game would stay stable as my wings and parts superheat. *** to be clear I'm talking about atmospheric flight. I've always liked experimenting with jets in this game, it seems to be a majorly under-served part of the game. After all, how many easter eggs are there in space? Kerbin has like...3 you can visit.

Built a giant barrier in front of my supersonic jet fighter and it seemed to work. Limited my speed to 1000 but kept going,... Some things started to overheat but never did. Re-activated a fuel tank to keep going and.... crash.

I've had some heat related crashes too. Of course I'm pushing the envelope. That's the point of the game right? I get to about 1300mps and things of course start overheating and breaking. So when my wings broke off I was still partially operational and I figure "screw it" and throttle up. Getting back to 1300mps, I get back to almost overheating, run out of fuel and.... game crash.

Something you could try is mining pods with a probe and a battery attached to the ore container. So when you fill the mining pod up, undock it and attach a new one to fill. It'd require a fairly complicated system is the downside to that. You could make trailers at the launch site and pick em up and then detach them later to "sell" each of them later. I'm having trouble mining without the drill instantly overheating and basically gaining no ore.

With only the first three things researched on career mode. Landed on Minimus without any guidance systems and minimal parts. The return mechanism consists of the four rockets on the cabin. Took about 5 tries of reloading to "hit" Kerbin.

Mine was my first to land on a celestial body and return. I've only got like three things unlocked on career mode so it was pretty dang risky. That's my lander To get back I used half the remaining fuel then activated the rockets attached to the cabin.... yea. It was basically loading him into a gun and lobbing him back to Kerbin.

Latest iteration of my rovers. I've been away for a while so all my old landing-gear based rovers were obsoleted. This one is built for high climbs on Duna so it has the ion thrusters carried over from my old Iris program. I managed to take this one from the south pole to the edge of the ice so far. And this guy is the Gigas II I'm thinking of putting lights on it next time... oops Landing it was a royal pain, and it landed with 2 tanks worth of fuel left. Which isn't much considering the giant rocket that got it here. It's a rover right now, but I'm going to land some Kerbals to drive it eventually. So it's a base/rover.

Finding one Kraken proves that there's a breeding population of them somewhere. My guess is beyond Jool somewhere. So you'll just be flying along and you'll break up for no good reason.

I think you actually just flew too close to the sun is what happened. Most ships start burning up or overheating easily as they get close to the innermost planet.

Yea the idea of a space elevator is you use the elevator to take parts up into orbit without a launch. The elevator itself uses the earth's rotational force to keep up. Basically a geosynchronous orbit satellite with a long cable down to the surface. If you can build a craft piece by piece in orbit, then you don't have to worry about pesky things like air resistance on the launch. It gives you more freedom in your ship design as well as more stability in the design. I'd like to see something like that in KSP really, but short of mods, not much so far. Until some development comes along where you can haul parts up with a shuttle and assemble things in space.... The only way you'll get massive ships is with mods, or launching them with obscenely huge game breaking launchers. If we could launch from orbit, it'd mean we can make extremely huge starships.

What's the thing people edit to get the 3rd purple orbit? I remember seeing something about it but I was on another computer and now I can't find it again.

They found one kraken, that only proves there must be more out there. I've had it hit me before too. Just randomly floating along then suddenly "wow what's that debris so close to me"... oh it's my engine.

I'm an engineer and even I don't go calculating my insertion points and exit velocities. That's work! I probably spend a lot more time getting to Duna than some people because I don't wait for a specific window maybe. The game for me is just for fun. Like it's fun to try to get to a geosync orbit maybe, or seeing how big of a satellite I can launch. But in the end it's a game for fun. If I start complicating it, then it gets less fun. It's great to make a big accomplishment though. Like don't get me wrong, I tried really hard to get to Duna. And when I made it back, I was excited as when I had beaten just about any games' bosses. I just didn't plot out my whole course of action beforehand. It was a lot of "ok lets match orbits and wait for them to match up" and reloading the game when I missed. To me the biggest challenge of the game isn't matching an orbit, the landing, or anything like that. It's building the craft and determining. What do you need? What don't you need? My Duna lander consisted of 5 fuel tanks, 1 nuke thruster, 2 big parachutes, 1 small one. And it was able to return. I've seen bigger ones that didn't make it back.

Tweaked my lander a bit more for a Duna return mission. I already stranded Jeb there because I didn't have the fuel to make it back my first time. I call my standard launch system the Taurus5, so this is the "Taurus5 N2 D" N2 because it's my 2nd nuclear design D for 4th mission of this mission type At first I added the two tanks near the front, but that wasn't enough. Then I added 2 more half tanks to those front ones. Then added 3 big solid boosters to the launch stage. As tempting as landing on the polar caps was, I opted for a more equatorial landing to save fuel... I set my approach to bottom at 10000m which forced the craft to skim the atmosphere longer and burn off a lot more energy. The two side fuel pods then deployed two large parachutes.... I swear those things open at the last minute to scare you on purpose. Ok... thought I had at least ONE with me on the surface... I did land, walked around, I think I landed in the most boring area on the whole planet, a shallow crater surrounded by hills and plains. It was a miracle I made it, but on the other hand... nothin to see. I tried to save as much of the ship as I could... but I was comin in a bit fast at 15m/s so I dropped the rest just before landing. The nuclear engine was crushed, I'm sure the core was intact, we'll know soon as they dig it out of the ground. I just noticed the fact it erased my time because I got out at the end. Lets just say it was a 5 year mission... took dang near forever. I wish the time warp had one more zero on it.... Also, is this the smallest Duna lander?? I landed with approximately 3 full tanks worth of fuel left with two empty halves. Basically, the top picture is what I left Kerbin orbit in. 5 whole tanks 4 halves 1 nuclear rocket 1 rcs tank 4 landing gear, 2 big parachutes, 1 small one, the cockpit, ladders.. think that's just about it.

A lot of quicksaving and loading for me. Intercepting an orbit isn't bad as long as you're not too low or too high. There's apparently mods that will show what you need to do for a good orbital interception, but I don't have those right now. My method of getting out of Kerbin's orbit is doing an approach to Mun and trying for a gravity assist then thrusting as I begin to leave it. If that's not enough to escape, I let the craft fall back down to Kerbin and thrust off again until I can achieve an escape. After that I wait until the lowest part of the orbit to thrust again forcing the peak into Duna's orbit. After you get that far, it's just a matter of intercepting it and making sure your orbits are lined up. My biggest problem now is getting back! I can land on Duna with almost 1 full tank of fuel... unfortunately this is barely enough for me to get to intercepting the Kerbin orbit. My next design has 2 more 1/2 tanks and 2 more large solid boosters on the base. I haven't tested it yet, but hopefully it won't explode, and hopefully those two changes will be enough. I don't know if the single nuclear thruster has the power to leave Duna with the extra weight though..

I couldn't get the orbits to sync up so it took me hundreds of days to get there! Nice on being able to return though. I just barely was able to make it TO Duna. It'll be a long time until I can make it there and back, my computer's too slow to have a huge launch. My lander's made of 1 nuclear engine, 4 fuel tanks, 1rcs. It has enough fuel to make it there, but not back. So I might modify it a bit and see if that works. I found that 3 parachutes was enough to land me on the surface. I also went for a low angle of entry so that I could skim the atmosphere to slow down more to save fuel. Otherwise you have to burn the rockets longer and waste energy. My parachutes didn't really help until under 10000m anyway, but they're really helpful even in Duna's thin air. But set your trajectory so that your orbit bottoms at like 10-20km so you'll gradually slow down using the atmosphere rather than engines. With a large ship you might go for the big parachutes too not those small ones. I think if you used the big parachutes, you could save a ton of fuel.