the_bT

Was not my intention to imply you should write a plugin. Was just brainstorming a little, maybe I should finally cave in and take a look at plugin code myself. As for Parts to make gates from. If they have to be shipped with the scenario anyways, there would be little to non drawback to just cook up something new would there? I'm thinking colored columns 50 meters high (or maybe 70). So you have to go past a blue one on the right and past a red one on the left or something. Obviously below it's top. Would be a little easier than Gates, seems to me it's a bit hard for many pilots... And it makes little to no difference if you want to go as fast as possible because then you stay as close as you can anyways. Maybe (this requires some testing) they could be configured as launch clamps (totally fixed position) and placed through editing the savefile... I could try and cook up a pair of such pillars if there was any interest, without any plugin code for the time being though... Would look (hopefully) similar to this extremely well and not at all ms paint made sketch:

It would work a lot better with proper gates though. Maybe something could be made with a custom plugin? Best in my opinion would be large columns in red and blue which also indicate your current lap time on fly thorough. Don't know if thats possible though... The current gates are a bit wonky, for me they sometimes disappear when flying through. Maybe they could be strengthened with launch clamps? How did you place them anyways

In addition to anything already posted, if you have your control surfaces near the COG they will become significantly less powerful. It's a problem with most of the Delta-wing designs when the COG drifts to the back of the craft. While a craft that is not properly balanced is always at least a bit tricky to fly, if you lack control authority too you are not going to live most of the time. Or in other words, if you have enough control authority you can land anything The further a control surface is from COG the more control authority it will provide. Two things can be done then: 1. Fit control surfaces to the front, which is often easy to do but will not do stability any good. (Though new-ASAS will probably cure that problem) 2. Move control surfaces to the back, behind COG. This is often hard to do in SSTO's though. In your specific design it would probably be easiest to do if you have the wings swept further back and add control surfaces to the tips similar to this:

Some things that help me: 1. Build of a central structural beam, that avoids very wide vehicles on which the wheels look too small. Wider vehicles help with stability though, so you might want to consider that too. 2. Use the structural beams and panels etc. only low down. Low center of gravity helps with stability. 3. Use the small cubic strut thing like mad 4. The big Batteries pack is very useful to fill in odd holes, give some contrast and make your vehicle look a lot better. Try to use the sides too! Also, more electricity is always good. All in all, stability is always a problem (mostly because you cannot connect two wheels with anti-roll bars I believe) and there is not that much you can do about it but keep COG low (not always easy) and vehicle wide (not always nice to look at) Here are some pictures to illustrate:

I don't care about the easter eggs, but rotate the strip 180° and change the ground texture? What good was that for The slopes need to go, they look awful! Easter eggs have probably just been relocated...

I lol'd... About the question, you're asking if I would by a game because it has a certain name attached to it and the answer is no, because it's never a good idea to do that.

This towing business is hard!

Ju-52 is correct. After the craft proved it could land on water, I decided to try and do that with style. The Firespitter floats were to small, so I made some out of structural panels (they did float the wheeled plane after all) Unfortunately structural panel floats do not allow taking of from water because the engines are not powerful enough (landing is no problem as before). The Kerbal engineer has a solution for that though...

Yeah, figured there probably is no way around real prop engines... except there is! Found out I can get this thing of the ground on infiniglide Installed Firespitter props anyways, also fixed the nose and wings a bit. Now it's ready! Also found out it can land on water and take of again, which is a little weird but ok...

Just made this! Not quite satisfied yet, need to find a better hiding spot for the engines...

Going BIG was postponed... Got around in a small craft in 2:58! (no screenshots for gates 6, 7 and 8 because i almost lost it at 6 and had no time)

If you go big, you need to go BIG! Gate 4 seems to be the hardest to get through with this, yet to make it...

If you zoom to an infinite level in the posted chart you will find your slices with size 0 I'm sure

Well I have added a set of wings, so I'm good to go right? Pics or didn't happen This should be 20+20+10+20*4= 130 Also hit VAB 4 times, that would make 170. I can fly a circle between the around VAB without hitting SPH or the Tracking Station, does that qualify as tight maneuverability? EDIT: also tried landing on water and failed hard (Tail and nosecone went KIA)

I'm going to enter the flight I did for the Circumnavigation thread... On runway: On runway again: That plane wasn't even build for a distance record... It was intended for a circumnavigation. Then the health and safety guy demanded that every manned craft build at KSC must be capable to make a return journey. Hence this craft can circumnavigate twice

Why only Bi and Triplanes? I think WW1 saw some Monoplanes as well... Maybe you could do some sort of scoring like with the engines? I also think you should mandate open cockpits. I have this thing lying around If you were willing to accept monoplanes, I'm pretty confident It would fit in, it has a tailskid after all Bonus Pic: Patrol Duty

I got something for you! The beautiful: This is the MiniJin MLV (with an Escape Pod Module for my Station). It proved to be very useful in a broad spectrum of missions. The idiotic: This is MiniJin's big brother, the Jin HLV with two orange tanks as payload. It probably could do 3, but I cant ) The center stack features an engine cluster with 13 LV-T30 and 6 LV-T45. Which wasn't as good an Idea as I had hoped... The payload separates via its docking port, which cannot be seen due to the boosters. Besides the pretty chaotic handling (violent rolling in upper atmosphere, probably due to aforementioned engine cluster) that is the biggest flaw in the design. There is simply not enough space for any useful payload. I originally wanted to lift 150t to LEO but couldn't get further than this without compromising looks. It lifts maybe 100t if you push it. I then decided 100t is too much anyways and build the MiniJin.

In KSP you can press F1 to make a screenshot. They are saved under KSP_Win\Screenshots as .png I think I'm going to try this now...

There might be something in the water, if that is water...

Jeb chilling after a long day at work:

They're not, your capture is just incomplete. As far as I remember, before the main game scene is rendered, the game renders a separate scene with all the planets. After that the depth buffer is cleared and everything else is drawn on top. This capture apparently only shows the second part of that process. Needless to say, the scene that is rendered first with all the planets in it shows only low detail versions. It's basically a 3d Skybox with moving objects in it.

I found that 150 Liquid Fuel (one jet fuel tank) and 2.5 to 3 Intakes per Turbo Jet, 1020 Liquid Fuel + Oxidizer (6 FL-T400) per LV-T30 Rocket Engine and 2 Turbo Jets per LV-T30 work well. Stick on plenty of wing to make it leave the ground and your good. At least if you use one or two sets. I have some problems getting a plane with 4 sets to orbit, not quite sure what the problem is yet, but I suspect lack of sufficiently big control surfaces. I posted a SSTO Spaceplane using two sets (4 Turbo Jets and 2 LV-T30) a few pages back, here is a plane I made today that uses one set. Because it is pretty light and has 4 Intakes per Turbojet, I have almost double the jet fuel I need. Handy for returning to the KSC after botched re-entrys. It is also stable enough to be flown to orbit and back without ASAS. In fact it has to because ASAS is not installed 83 parts, the Horbro Mk I: (Might have a bit more Wing Area than absolutely needed, but whatever...) Earlier Prototype without RCS or Solar panels. Also lacks the Yaw stabilizers: (You know who that is...) Edit: One more Pic, docked with Jaeger Station Fuel Depot: My flight plan with almost anything is pretty much 60° until 17-20k (depends on how many intakes you have) then slow climb until 1100 - 1300 m/s, always with one eye on intake air levels. Ignite Rockets, switch half of the turbo jets off if applicable. Before air runs out kill Turbo Jets and close Intakes, 40° pitch until Apoapsis is > 40k or so, Prograde until it's at target height. Circularize, done.

7 Seat SSTO to ferry people into 100km orbit, all stock. I have a healthy amount of fuel left for rendezvous and docking maneuvers and it is very well behaved in atmosphere too. The only downside is the thrust vector is slightly off COM. Couldn't find a better solution for the tail though, so I just tried to balance it with batteries, RCS fuel, etc. and added an RCS thruster to counter the remaining torque.

A fresh batch of escape pods for my Space Station ready to go. I think that is the best looking stock only rocket I have ever build.

The Unity engine has some capability to create meshes on the fly, however its not as easy as you make it sound. While your suggestion would work if the diameter under the engine is larger than the one above it, if it is the other way around you will get into trouble. And even if you somehow get around that, you are not done just generating the geometric form of the shroud (which is only trivial if you refrain from adding any detail). You will need to generate a texture mapping too. And that can get ugly quickly. If you want the lighting to look right (you do!) you need to generate normals for your geometry. If you want to use a texture with a bump map you need to generate tangent vectors. That is all doable if you put some effort into it. But what is the reward? A shroud that looks better in some situations and worse in some other situations? I agree that it does look weird. It really does. But there is no easy way around. Thinking about it, It might work by animating the shroud model and then lock that animation in one frame depending on the diameters. But the texture mapping would still be problematic. It needs to look good in all situations, nothing looks worse than a distorted texture.