RoboRay

Six hours is like 12 orbits in LKO. If you can't rendezvous to within 2km in 12 orbits, you probably can't do it in more than a dozen orbits, either, so you won't be taking those contracts. It's a non-issue.

Or stick a Mk1 lander can inside the cargo bay (with Crew Manifest or similar mod for moving crew around inside the craft).

Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of pre-release anticipation in this forum. Based on this morning's sample, it would be a Twinkie... thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.

They fit if you don't assume that all three are sitting side by side with helmets on. And they can use the door if they take their helmets off.

Very nice. We desperately need some good Mk3 cargo bays to replace the lost mods. Especially with v0.24 and recovering parts for money back getting close.

Since I'm going to start to have paying for parts soon, I worked out a cheap SRB-only launch vehicle for lofting an Apollo'esque orbiter. The spacecraft can orbit the Mun and return on its own. I'm now working on a lander and transfer-orbit kicker stage to lift on the same launcher to work with the orbiter for Mun landings.

5km or so is my longest spacewalk... never had a need to move between ships further apart than that. I did a 76km EVA flight across the surface of the Mun, though, from a crashed lander to an off-target rescue craft. If anything, I think that's a greater feat than a spacewalk across a similar distance, since I had to estimate a high ballistic arc to lob him into, or I would have run out of fuel trying to maintain a low altitude. Made it inside with like 4% fuel for the jets remaining.

Here you go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3j4wrntt1y18l3a/Angel.craft The only non-stock or SP+ parts are the landing gear, from KAX. It's designed for FAR... no idea how well it will work for anyone flying stock. I set the action groups as: 1 - Toggle rockets 2 - Toggle jet 3 - Toggle intakes 4 - Flaps up 5 - Flaps down Expect the nose to pitch up if you apply the airbrakes without a notch or two of flaps in... the assumption is you will only use the airbrakes on landing approach, with flaps down. You'll need to counteract that if you use the brakes without flaps. Full flaps will try to push the nose down some... the wing is a little too far aft for flaps to not apply some elevator action. The RCS balance isn't exactly perfect, but it's close enough that SAS will hold you straight while translating around. I didn't actually do a test docking, but I don't foresee any difficulty with the docking port up high like that. I don't go supersonic until above 10km and drop below MACH 1 about that height during reentry... transonic handling at low altitude is untested. Angel can reach 34 km and 1600 m/sec on the jet engine. I managed to get no visible reentry heating effects on the way up or back down during my test flights. Expect 250-300 m/sec of delta-v remaining on arrival in a 100km circular orbit. The plane can survive Deadly Reentry if you keep a high AOA and fly steep S-turns to slow down below MACH 3 before descending into the thicker air. My reentries were about 40 degrees nose-up, turning 45 degrees to each side in 60 degree banks, and Angel slows down really fast with the belly and bottom of the wings turned into the airflow like that. I experienced no controllability issues in those high-alpha maneuvers until getting close to MACH 1, when the nose was finally pulled down onto the velocity vector. If you try to plow in nose-down at hypersonic speeds, I fully expect it to MACH-tuck you down and burn you into cinders (but I didn't try it). Have fun!

Cheating! But seriously... you just cannot build things like this without some minor part clipping.

It's just a tiny decoupler, now found in NovaPunch. I used it as the detachment point for on this Mun landing.

The most powerful rocket in the real world. KSP isn't real world, and rockets designed around the real world are overpowered for the compact, extraordinarily dense world of KSP (as previous mod examples like Bobcat's Jool V have so clearly demonstrated). If you put an oranges rocket in an apple world (like the SLS parts do), they are imbalanced.

You can keep the front landing gear underneath a cockpit that doesn't allow straight attachment by attaching a girder to the bottom of the fuselage section aft of the cockpit, extending forward below the cockpit. Attach your nosegear to that girder instead of the cockpit. You may need some struts between the cockpit and girder for rigidity. If you enable part clipping, you can even slide the girder up inside the cockpit so it's not visible.

No, it's not complicated, but some of it (like for the "upper deck" with the cockpit and docking port) involves careful positioning of radial attachment points to vertically shift the longitudinal attachment axis and some other more subtle little things. I like taking people's craft files and disassembling their design to see how they did things, too. I'll try to post it tonight, after I get off work. I want to make some minor tweaks to it first, though... those pictures were just the first orbital test and it only had one atmospheric test flight before that.

Oh, right... Yeah, I'm not one of those guys. I use mods all the time, though I do tend to stick with stock engines unless a mod engine fits a niche that the stock ones have left vacant. Here's my latest SSTO spaceplane design, with mod parts and clipping required: Thank you for the brilliant lander design I'm going to steal.

I built a new ten-seater SSTO spaceplane... the Angel: 18.8 tons wet, 11.1 tons dry.

Ok, I've got a new one, a ten-seater... the Angel: 18.8 tons wet, 11.1 tons dry.

Can you really look at Frank_G's example and say that it's pretending to be sophisticated engineering? I try to do the same kind of thing, making logical use of "empty" space in structural elements and so forth, but I rarely accomplish it as well as he did.

No, that really doesn't "fix" it, just adds to it. If you think the SLS parts are imbalanced (and I agree that they are), you haven't seen some of the mods I've seen. Stock ion and jet engines are simply insanely OP... and yet people make mod ions and jets that are even more powerful. But making something like this or this is "cheating" because a few of the parts are clipped together...

Can you point out some of these "FAR requests" you're talking about where, presumably, FASA parts seem to be broken with FAR installed?

I may have designed a ship or two somewhere along the way that didn't involve part clipping, but that's all it was... one or two. Real-world aircraft and spacecraft are not snapped together out of lego parts... they're blended together smoothly. Some part clipping (through the debug menu or not) is pretty much required if you want a realistic-looking design. I don't clip things where they couldn't possibly actually fit, though... no fuel tanks inside fuel tanks, intakes inside other intakes, or engines hidden inside command pods. Honestly though, even if you do stuff functional parts inside other functional parts in an unrealistic fashion, some of the crazy-overpowered mod parts out there dramatically dwarf the "cheatiness" of part clipping.

If your planes don't roll straight, there's a problem with their landing gear not being attached perfectly straight (vertically as well as longitudinally), or there's a problem with the structure of your craft flexing under load, which causes your landing gear to no longer be straight.

I think Squad has been pretty clear that they're trying to get away from half-implemented new features. They'll add fairings when they will actually do something, which won't happen until when (if) they ever replace the nonsensical stock aerodynamics. Sad he's no longer involved with Squad.

SAS will attempt to hold your orientation if you turn it on while translating in docking mode. So long as the pod/wheel torque is greater than the opposing torque of an imbalanced RCS system, you'll stay aligned.

NASA begs to differ. One set of four quads in a ring around the CoM is all you need for a small to medium-sized craft like a typical lander. They still produce torque based on their distance from the CoM. (The only way they could produce no torque is they were installed at the actual CoM, inside the craft.) In any case, pod torque alone should be sufficient for rotation unless you're building enormous spacecraft. I demonstrate this type of arrangement in this movie. Note the orientation of the RCS puffs as they produce torque to rotate the spacecraft.

Uh, that's what it does.