Blu_C

You may also try making your rocket not quite as tall (perhaps with some SRB's assisting the initial climb). In my experience the new Aerodynamics makes tall skinny rockets more likely to tumble. I suspect that additional low stages may help stabilize by increasing drag at the tail end of the rocket.

You need to turn it on in the debug menu.

Alright, here is what I have found: #1) This isn't your problem but it will likely cause problems for you upon launch. You need to put a decoupler between your engine and the fairing. The fairing base does NOT act as a decoupler and will block the engine when you activate it, making it so you are unable to get thrust from that stage. #2) It looks like the fairing piece is bugged out somehow. You should have something that looks like this upon attaching the piece: So on your rocket try removing the fairing piece completely and start from scratch with a new part. When what you have looks like the above you should notice that now you MUST build the fairing around the payload, and until the fairing is closed that is all the game will allow you to do. In order to do this simply move your mouse and you should see the fairing trying to match what you are indicating. Once the fairing is above the payload you should be able to create a point which will signal to the fairing base that this is the last "piece" of the fairing and will close when you create it. I created an album if you need help: Fairings - How To Once you have done the above you will be able to grab new parts to attach to the bottom of the rocket. Was that enough or are you still having problems?

Ok, give me a moment to try and replicate what I am seeing here.

There are some mods (Mission Controller 2 is the one I know of) which allow you to specify your own contracts. There are also contract pack mods which may cover this, though I do not believe that any have been updated to 1.0.* yet.

Nobody can help you yet because you seriously aren't providing enough information. The picture you gave is a good try, but it doesn't show us what is going on. In order to actually help we need to be able to see the problem so as originally requested please provide 2 more pictures: 1- Showing the problem area from a 45 degree angle from ABOVE. 2- showing the problem area from a 45 degree angle from BELOW. Straight on isn't letting anyone see.

Doubtful, because you need to get the tanks into orbit first, which means launching a rocket, which means paying for all the parts and fuel for said rocket.

MKS integrates with TAC-LS with modules which will work for this purpose. It is a pretty hefty mod though with TONS of parts.

You can do a different EVA report over every biome: Water, shores, grasslands, highlands, mountians, tundra, poles, badlands, desert (I think that is all of them). You can get most of those from an equatorial orbit and each of those is worth new science. You can also run materials bay, goo, crew report, and EVA report from high orbit (though you won't get biome specific data for the biomes below you). To get to high orbit be above 250km. Also keep in mind that for experiments like Goo and Materials Bay you may be able to re-run experiments for more science (though less than the initial run).

Try removing the fairing piece and attaching a completely new one. Then attach the rocket before building the fairing around the payload. You may have accidentally clipped the part making it so you don't have a bottom node to attach the rest of the rocket to. If that doesn't work make another post in this thread, and maybe also give a picture of the problem from a couple different angles (above and below would be useful).

Having Air Breaks take damage when subjected to a certain threshold of aerodynamic forces isn't a bad idea at all. Also, on a similar topic, it doesn't look like the aerodynamic model handles them being partially occluded by other parts, which also amplifies their usefulness. Simply making it so an airbreak that doesn't have full airflow only gives a very small portion of its breaking potential would go a long way to fixing that. That said, keep that gif. It is funny as hell.

Your thrust spikes may actually be the engine functioning as intended. Turbojets function better at higher speeds. You'll notice that until you hit Mach 1 they are significantly less powerful than a regular jet. I suspect RAPIER works similarly though I haven't tested it myself. All that said, those max thrust values doe seem rather absurd to me. XD In my experience you want to stay under around 1km/s until you are above 25k-30k. Space planes are TOTALLY possible, I have made several already that are capable of achieving orbit without problems, but you are pretty much going to have to throw away everything you thought you knew about how to do it. Personally I've stopped thinking it as building a plane and instead think of it as a rocket that just happens to get past the first 20km using jet engines. Which means bringing waaay more oxidizer than I am used to (although I am starting to consider a try with RCS engines. Sorta wish there was an inline version of those).

The debug menu isn't a mod, it is part of the stock game. ALT+F12 in windows will bring it up (Option+F12 for Mac). In there is a whole bunch of tools useful for debugging from cheats to sliders. I wouldn't mess with most of it unless you know what you are doing as it can change the way the game behaves quite significantly (up to stuff like turning off gravity). That said, there is an option in there that will make it visualize how much different parts are heating up.

That is really hard to answer without seeing the craft. One very real possibility is that the rocket is getting excessively nose heavy or that you have a huge amount of drag on the tail which can make it difficult to deviate from the prograde vector.

In the administration building you can also use various programs to get different effects. One really popular one is to get reduced reputation from successfully completing contracts in exchange for earning more money.

It has happened to me exactly once, but it was basically a freak incident. A lot of things need to be going on at the same time for this to happen: 1) You need to currently be 'controlling' one of the things, otherwise they will be on rails and will not hit each other. 2) You need to not be time warping. When you time warp physics is not enabled and the objects will just pass through each other (though ending time warp with them inside each other will make them both explode). 3) The orbits need to intersect. In my case, it happened with a space plane that was launching satellites. I in a harmonic orbit with the plan to release the satellites and allow them to circularize under their own power. Left the space plane in the orbit for awhile to wait for the KSC to rotate to the ideal landing position and just as I was about to make a burn one of the comsats I'd launched on the mission came by and blew off the back half of the plane (and itself). Was really surprised, but since I hadn't changed the plane's orbit AT ALL I was pretty much asking for it. You'll notice, though, that I pretty much had to set myself up for it to happen.

I'd have to fly it myself to be sure, but I came up with several ideas: 1) You are over-thrusting while under a lighter load. I sort of doubt this is the problem, though, as under the new aerodynamic model it is much less significant than it used to be. 2) With those heavier loads you have a TWR of around 1.5, which is what I tend to build my rockets with. In that case the effective payload of your space plane is probably going to be similar to that of a rocket (you know, 90% of the mass needs to be lost on the way up). I'm going to guess that the plane as a whole weighs something on the order of 80 tonnes with no payload (judging by the screenshot). How much of that is fuel? Any weight you can cut from the craft's total weight will probably help you a ton in the long run. I might even go so far as to try and take smaller wings (you will be MUCH lighter when landing so it may be ok). If necessary any weight savings can maybe even be put into fuel. 3) It may be a fundamental flaw with the design. I don't SEE anything wrong, but I tend to favor smaller space planes using the MK2 parts, so this is a bit outside my usual scheme. If that happens to be the case I might recommend taking more RAPIERS and fuel with the base craft, maybe even pushing the TWR up as high to a maximum of 2.5 with sufficient deltaV to reach orbit and then some.

Hmmm... it looks like you should have plenty of thrust. What does Kerbal Engineer say your t/w ration is and your deltaV? I'd be curious to know though I doubt either of those is the problem. I'd especially like to know when you swap over to rocket mode. Also can you describe exactly what you mean by not being "quite able to make it"? Are you getting suborbital? Able to start circularizing but not completely accomplish it?

If you are returning from a low orbit carefully then you won't have problems. It is when you are doing a steep reentry from a high orbit (or into a thick atmosphere) that you will find you need a heat shield.

That plane should be easily able to make 20k. In fact I would say that it is over engineered. Drop the regular jet engines (they are just going to add weight for what you need) and maybe drop some fuel (oxidizer first, jet engines don't use it). From there here is what you do: Climb at about 200m/s until an altitude of 10k, at which point you are going to go full throttle. Climbing still is fine at this point, but try to keep from getting above around 13k. Then, once you hit around 500 or 600m/s you need to nose up to about 45 degrees, or even higher. Keep full throttle until around 900-1000m/s, then adjust throttle to maintain that speed (do not go too much above 1km/s or else you will explode). You should make 20k easy. If you are still having trouble try taking less wing as well.

No, if you are playing career mode you will have to upgrade the SPH at least once to get access to basic action groups (and upgrade fully to unlock custom action groups).

All the "mass" of the fairing is considered to be in the fairing base at this time. I expect that is probably what you are noticing. Yes, this means that there is no advantage to ditching the fairing sides. Another minor detail I am hoping will be addressed in the next patch.

Can you give a screenshot as an example please? Seeing it may help people know exactly what is going on.

Sort of. Currently in the stock game better antennae use more electricity when transmitting but transmit data significantly faster. Beyond that they all behave the same (as such most people tend to bring the basic one unless going for aesthetics). There are mods that give the different antennae different ranges, or mods like RemoteTech which also make them line of sight only necessitating the construction of satellite networks.

Returning from lower orbits is easy without a heat shield (or if you have an engine between you and the air). For things like returning direct from Minimus, or when trying to land on Eve, you need to be much more careful or actually take a heat shield. One alternate method that I've been using is air breaks. These are absurdly good and if you have them deployed at higher altitudes they will bleed off a ton of speed before you reach the thicker portions of the atmosphere.