rakutenshi

TWR can be very important in space in some situations, i.e. coming in for a Moho capture, you'll need to be able to burn fast enough to capture before the escape window (sometimes you could have under 2 hours to set everything up and get the burn done. Not really hard, but something to consider. )

Would be neat if they made the tweakables allow different fuel. I.e. you could switch to H2/LOX (Low density, high ISP) for one stage and RP2/NH4 for other stages (more compact, but lower ISP) and have the payload stage back to H2 with an NTR...

I was readinging a paper on the Columbia [1], and it seems the shuttle doesn't use a monopropellant RCS system. It has N2 and He tanks in the OMS pods but those seem to be strictly limited to maintaining pressure in the LF/O tanks (removing the need for turbopumps), From the brief: "The OMS engines use monomethyl hydrazine as fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as oxidizer. The propellants are hypergolic." Some of the Monoprop RCS stuff is described as hypergolic... but .. mono can't be hypergolic as that's a feature of highly reactive binary propellants. . KerbMav makes me want the option of equipping the Kerbals with MMU... or I guess it'd be KKUs (Kerballed Kerballing Units) either by a tweakable in the pod or possibly by adding some sort of "enhanced EVA" storage part to the stack. (maybe with that part, there'd be a third button on the character view in the lower right, "EVA, IVA, MMU"... sidenote: @FlamedSteak- about 24-25 deltaV in an MMU, standard KSP Spacesuit? ... maybe 10dV worth. since the MMU contains just under 12kg of N2, could figure maybe 5-6kg of monopropellant should do the trick.. just guessing here, though (Note: I have been known to be completely full of BS, fair warning) Oh and because I simply can't resist (yes, I'm a bad person).. Developer Asymptotes does not mean the first release is fastest, it means the first release typically provides the greatest amount of new content, with subsequent releases typically suffering from a sort of pseudo diminishing returns. My personal "looks forward to most" game feature is going to be when they add Budgeting/Mission completion to career mode. Then it's so on. /ramble.

I'd bet it wouldn't be added until the upgrade to Unity4 is completed and stable, pushing the Space Kraken further back into the dark depths of space.

In KSP we have Asparagus staging because we also have the tall rocket hula dancers. In RL, it's possible to build rockets that connect at more than one simple node point between stages, fuel tanks and engines, so the tall skinny more aerodynamic rockets are far preferred over big squat pancake rockets. Ferram does help with this but once they do their aerodynamics pass, I believe you'll see the popularity of asparagus staging lifters drop significantly. Also, on the note of random engine failures and escape systems. You only need an escape system if you can't press the 'revert button', so I'd think that they'll eventually add a 'hardcore' flag to the career mode start window, removing the revert button (possibly allowing you to revert before liftoff, i.e. scrub a launch), but this is just my random guessing and based on nothing other than my personal 'feel' for the way the game is going.

Mods by their nature in any game will always risk breaking saves, unless there is an update that changes nothing behind the scenes (i.e. just tweaks a couple config numbers basically). That's just the risk you take when modding a game. Would you rather have your mod developer decide that, even though they figured out a much better way to do something, they weren't going to change the mod at all because you don't feel like making all those launches you've already accomplished over again?

I contemplated suicide and didn't play KSP still contemplated.

I really rather like the idea of random seed minor celestial bodies. Given the forthcoming resource system, finding, mapping and scouting out these minor very low gravity bodies could be a very good way to acquire certain rare materials to either help science! things up or even increase your budget/allow building/using more advanced parts. (something like SuperAdvanced Shark Mounted Laser Printer requires X amount of kerbal currency and Y amount of rare printer ink from Asteroid Xerox per unit installed on the craft, additional budget items.. )

Regarding spaceplane/hypersonic aircraft designs.. Most of them use a lifting body delta design, the poster child of this theory seems to be the X-43C of the Hyper-X project. As far as inherent instability, I had quite a bit of luck with a forward swept gull wing design. It was very unstable and I had to use mechjeb to fly it just because otherwise it would somersault on takeoff rotation. It did perform very very well, and initial testing had it cross the transsonic threshold with minimal (negligible) mach tuck effects. I had used the CoM stacked on top of the CoP approach. I'm going to do some experimenting with using flaps possibly to move the center of lift a little further back during takeoff and initial acceleration, then as speed increases, raising the flaps should allow the CoP to move forward slightly to counteract the effects of trans sonic flight. That's the hope anyway. Jeb is loving this research... screaming in terror is very bad when it's jeb doing it. ... after some testing. Flaps only served to move the CoP forward when deployed. .. will have to fiddle more .

It's so inherently unstable that you have to ignite the engines the moment physics activates or else gravity alone will rip it to pieces- and it's still considered a "pretty good design"

The only reason most aircraft are built the conventional way now is because that's what people are used to seeing and (esp. regarding passenger aircraft) feel more comfortable with. A full moving canard design with a swept aft mounted main wing - especially for super/hypersonic designs typically offers superior controllability, with the canards being ahead of the main shock, they tend to have better control authority, and as stated before, the swept wing reduces drag significantly at higher speeds when your aircraft is flying near straight rather than at the 2-5 degrees positive AoA of lower speed flight. However FAR seems to have issues with the shock front calculations over the wing surface, where a delta wing with a longer root cord should improve control authority over a purely swept wing design at mach 1+ (the SR-71, STS, Concord, and Tu-144 all have deltas for this reason). Compound the effects of Mach Tuck with a center of gravity that may not be shifting the way you'd like it to, and you're likely to end up with an aircraft that hits about mach .85 or so, decides space is scary and it wants to get back down to safe altitudes, and refuses to pull up no matter how hard to press the S key or pull back on your joystick. To maintain manouverability at trans/supersonic speeds, many modern fighter aircraft are built with the Center of Pressure forward of the average center of mass, as well as other features that reduce the inherent stability of a design. The drawback is that these aircraft almost by necessity must be controlled by a FCC or similar Fly -by -wire system, that constantly makes very minor adjustments to the control surfaces. We don't really have that option in KSP so we're left to deal with aircraft that may perform wonderfully at low speeds, but generally become very stubborn flaming darts at high speeds. At least that's what i've arrived at through my own research and wonder what this does.

I'd settle for sweep actually improving mach flight characteristics

I did extensive tests last night, culminating in an unrecoverable inverted flatspin, and the sad fact that it doesn't seem that even the infernal robotics pieces with the fairly good strength of attachment simply aren't strong enough to handle the forces placed on a wing spar.

You do get good results with that design, there's no arguing that. Wish P-wings would allow you to thin the wings out. as much as I like the B9 Aerospace mod, I just can't bring myself to fiddle with patchwork wings after using P-wings. I'm considering trying to do a variable geometry SSTO , sorta B-1 style, use a thinner wing sorta like yours and just crank it back when I hit past mach 2 to minimize the drag as much as possible.

I'm just guessing here but your coefficient of lift is probably due to the sheer quantity of wing you have.. looks like a sail plane to me, in a lot of ways. that likely helps with the transsonic bump since your c/l doesnt' drop below drag at .8-1.3 mach. Also just noticed that you were doing the calculations with the AoA at 5 degrees, that does give some radically different numbers than with the nose closer to zero. I did some fiddling about and I think the reason the sweep isn't as important as the thickness of the wing is because the PWing doesn't allow for the MAC to be adjusted independently of the root/tip scale factor, so if you have a long wing, you have a fat, draggy, inefficient wing, so P-Wing + FAR = go sailplanes... hrmf.

I've dealt with this problem partially by using Infernal Robotics/Pwings to make full moving canards to function as pitch trim, it doesn't quite override the mach tuck entirely, but it does help a lot. Ways to help deal with mach tuck also include making the wings more delta than swept (a thicker chord with a swept leading edge reduces the effects of mach tuck on the control surfaces of the trailing edge), building some trim into the horizontal stabilizer/canards (i.e. set trim before takeoff), or simply having more thrust to punch through the trans-sonic envelope before it's much of an issue. as for the loss of pitch authority, try using B9's stabilators instead of normal control surfaces. In the VAB, I make extensive use of the Static Mach Sweep displays. I don't really fully understand all the numbers and everything that it can display but I do know that if you set the maximum value on the mach sweep chart to 6ish, just try to fiddle with things until the green line is above the red line and life will be pretty good.

I build for the sexy until .22 is out to give me my skinnerbox fix. If it doesn't look good coming into orbital dawn, back to the workbench, 20% more sexy required.

Microsoft is giving away free dev kits for Xbox One because nobody will pay for them, the Xbox one is a disaster waiting to happen and most intelligent developers have at very least taken a step back to see just how bad of a trainwreck it will be. Besides, just like the elder scrolls games and fallout series from bethesda.. it's better on PC because mods.

I try my best to make up a word for the name.. my best SSTO's to date have been the Artelos series, managed to get them to a 150km orbit, deploy 8t of payload and land safely back at KSC with fuel and lox to spare... I do like the Roman Numerals, but for major revisions I'll use letters. .. currently on the Artelos D-II

If you use FAR you can make a huge dent in the d/v required due to the fact that making it aerodynamic actually counts... completely optional but due to the lack of the aerodynamic overhaul on the official side, I rather like it.

I like the idea of a trinary planetessimal with a non-grounded barycenter.

I'd be happy with a budget implementation, and a list of goals/milestones as an interim campaign placeholder. Each goal/milestone you check off increases your per-launch budget/number of flights simultaneously active.

would it be able to toggle with the animation and add the build-on node in the VAB/SPH?

roger that. you want a can of spray on kapton... or rolls of Kapton duct tape...

Blackmail Harvester into letting Bac9 make his modpack standard... .. since he's already staff. (love the new space center, same guy)