RoboRay

Define "better." They may have different stats, but which one will be "better" depends on a lot of variables. I mean, which one is better, a Mainsail or an LV-N?

If you're going to obsess over childish things that one egotistical "kewl kid" supposedly said, I think you're going to find much bitterness in life.

My first Mun landing... 0.16, I believe, around August/September 2012.

I keep debris under control by... Staging when Pe is 20km or less, so the booster is removed. Use a probe pod and battery on booster stages that reach orbit, so I can deorbit them with the leftover propellent. Discard transfer-injection stages on a collision course with the destination body.

Nobody ever showed them F5/F9.

There are parachutes with stack nodes on top in NovaPunch. Or, you can also create your own out of stock parts, if you use part-clipping...

The seats are one-kerbal open command pods that come with the DEMV Mk3 motorcycle mod.

Full album of the rover delivery via skyrane: http://imgur.com/a/emtDj#0

Great mission report. This thing is very close to working, and I see from your next post that you did get into orbit with another design. I'll make some suggestions on this one, anyway, since I like the design. If your climb-rate is low, you're probably too heavy for your thrust and/or lift. More thrust isn't an option if you're sticking with a single jet engine (and I recommend that, for one-seat craft), so you can try adding some wing area. If your Center of Lift is well behind the Center of Mass, you can try adding some canards up front, too. They can be helpful, especially if your craft is otherwise very stable to fly. Those two long 1.25m rocket tanks are really heavy. I bet that's the source of your insufficient thrust/lift. LV-909's are really efficient motors; they don't need a lot of fuel. Consider replacing those tanks with smaller rocket tanks. That would also move the drag from your intakes further back, which would add aerodynamic stability. Learning to cut back on fuel to improve performance (which reduced fuel consumption enough to more than offset the lost fuel) has been one of my hardest lessons to learn. I'm still struggling with it a little, but I'm getting better, with smaller, lighter designs each time. Here's my current best performer, with two seats and weighing in at 12 tons wet... About intakes... you don't need that many. Excess air beyond what your engine requires doesn't help you, and the extra drag is hurting you. I'd cut the clipped intakes out completely and put just one on each side, where you have them stacked. Those are probably enough (I've gotten planes with one intake per engine into orbit, you just burn more rocket fuel as you can't get as high on the jets). If that's not enough air to cruise at 20km+, then add a second pair back on. Congrats on your success with the Albatross, though!

Delivering the Hermes rover to the Mun via skycrane:

You burn more fuel in total stopping at a higher station to refuel, but your craft can be smaller and less massive because it doesn't need to hold as much fuel at one time. I have a fuel depot out beyond Minmus, barely still in Kerbin's SOI, but it's really only useful if my departing craft needs another 1km/sec of delta-V on its mission.

It's just for kerbals, hauling seven of them to orbit and back. But if you dock it in orbit for refueling, it can get to Duna and back: Mission Album: http://imgur.com/a/rvkwl#0 More details and the .craft file download here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/26778-Pegasus-SSTO-inspired-by-the-McDonnell-Douglas-DC-X-Delta-Clipper

Indeed. Any kind of SSTO design is always going to have limited cargo capacity, however, especially a reusable one that you return to KSC. Heavy cargo should be lifted with conventional rockets.

Heh, yeah, those pictures just seem to pop up all the time here. Right, it's the velocity that matters, not your altitude. The general rule of "burn as low as possible" is just a side effect of lower orbits having more kinetic energy (higher relative velocities), and most people are referring to the parking orbit from which they are starting the transfer burn. But an elliptical orbit gives you an even higher relative velocity at the same Pe, so each kick actually becomes a little more efficient than the last due to the fuel possessing more kinetic energy on each pass. Departing Kerbin, I try to do my burns for 20 degrees or two-minutes on either side of the angle, depending on if I'm using Protractor or the Maneuver Nodes. Assuming your parking orbit is 100km or less (or, about 30 minutes long), that works out to about the same distance around the planet. Beyond that, you're expending a lot of thrust off-axis, making it less effective. It's really bad if you don't do kicks for long burns. Think about it... if your orbital period is 30 minutes and you're making a 30 minute burn, half of your burn will have part or all of your thrust pushing you away from the direction you're trying to go. You're still increasing your Ap (and your Pe, too, which is just wasted fuel) from the planet, but the effect on your transfer-orbit velocity (in respect to the sun) is partially counterproductive. This makes your transfer burn even longer than what you should need, so you must burn even more fuel.

Depending on your orbital altitude, around 2 minutes. The exact amount isn't critical. What matters is making sure you do the same amount (in time or in degrees) on both sides of the ejection angle (or maneuver node). So, if you goof and start a kick late at only 1 minute from the right angle, just end that burn 1 minute after passing the angle. It's no big deal, as long as you balance them.

That one is a pretty decent start. Here are some things I believe may allow it to perform better... Straighten the wings so they are flat to the ground. Add wing area, preferably toward the tail (a rectangular wing section on each side, shifting the triangular sections outward might work). Replace the vertical stabilizer with a smaller, less draggy one. Remove the forward canards unless you simply cannot control the craft without them (forward-mounted aero controls tend to be destabilizing). Add more engine intakes. A bicoupler or tricoupler on each side, where the current intakes are, is usually an easy way to fit more in. Replace the aerospike with an LV-T45 so you've got gimbal-control. (Alternatively, keep the aerospike and add an RCS system that you activate when entering the thin upper atmosphere.) It looks like you've got four tanks of jetfuel, which is excessive. Replace one of those tanks on each side with a nacelle or fuselage section. Adjust your landing gear positions so that the plane sits on the runway with a slight nose-upward attitude (this helps you get off the ground more easily). Note that ram inlets are the only intakes worth using on spaceplanes... the others work much better than the rams down low, but only the rams collect useful amounts of air at high altitudes. Using the radial scoops, for instance, you'll find that they gather almost no air at 20km up (right click them in flight to see how they are doing in the current conditions, instead of just looking at their stats on the ground) but still produce vast amounts of drag. Use the Avionics Package for your entire ascent, especially once you get into the thin air where your aero controls don't have much effect. It will really help keep you pointed in the right direction. If you're still not getting into space, please return with pics of your changes.

Nobody's calling you a noobie. Spaceplanes are hard. I attempted, failed, and gave up on spaceplanes several times before I finally figured out the very narrow band of tolerances that will result in a working design. There's nothing wrong with going back to having fun with vertical rockets until you're ready to give the planes another try.

Well, looking back at that list, if you're not getting into the air before going off the end of the runway, you're in the "too heavy" or "not enough wing area" categories. Possibly the "rear landing gear is too far aft of the center of mass" one, too, which I didn't mention above. As to safely reaching orbit and tumbling out of control during reentry, most likely you've burned off enough fuel that your center of mass has shifted too close to or even past the center of lift. A contributing factor is almost certainly all those draggy jet intakes way up on the nose. Lots of drag on the nose? The craft naturally wants to turn around and point the other direction. This is why the arrows you shoot from a bow have the fins on the tail and not up at the front. That thing is also, frankly, way too big and heavy for a one-seat plane. It's got more engines and more fuel than my cargo-hauler SSTO. If you cut the weight of a spaceplane in half, it's at least four times as efficient. Try smaller designs. Much smaller. They are far, far easier.

Well, I was going to try to offer you better help, but since you're refusing to post pictures of some specific craft you've tried then I guess I can't. Nobody can give effective specific answers to general questions; not without a lot of luck in hitting the right answer, anyway. But the usual problems are: #1 It's too big and heavy. #2 It doesn't have enough wing area to lift it (which is often related to #1). #3 It doesn't retain positive stability throughout the flight (usually due to center of mass shifting or simply poorly positioned aero controls.) #4 Thrust is not applied symmetrically to the center of mass. Having no idea what kind of planes you're trying to build, I'd suggest staying very small. You should be able to make a single-seat SSTO spaceplane that weighs considerably less than 10 tons, using a single turbojet, two or three ram inlets, a jet fuel tank, a couple of smaller rocket fuel tanks, two to four of the little orange 24-77 radial rocket motors, and a modest set of wings that are positioned in a way that maintains positive stability.

The distance scale was shrunk down for gameplay reasons. Maybe try Orbiter if you prefer the real-world distance scale and the correspondingly longer, slower events like launches?

Yeah, the problem is definitely not pod torque... flipping over would be a pod torque problem, but not sliding around sideways. Driving on the Mun is like driving on ice. I would be thrilled with replacement part.cfgs for the stock rover wheels that adapted them to use BobCat's plugin. I'll try to play around with that myself, if nobody more knowledgeable does.

Unless you plan to dock it back on there later (and I can't see how you could) you don't actually need the docking port on the rover. The "base" port on your lander will hold the rover in place like a decoupler, until you release it.

In very rare cases, part clipping seems to apply a rotational force to craft. I've only encountered it once (maybe, I'm not sure if was actually the clipping doing it) out of at least a hundred designs with part clipping, though. So, it's pretty close to a non-issue, unless you just happen to assemble something in just the wrong way.

Yes, exactly. This is what your resulting orbits might look like if you do a lot of short kicks... Actually, it doesn't. The Oberth effect is derived from the kinetic energy of the fuel you're burning. While you do have a higher kinetic energy in low circular orbits than in high circular orbits, an elliptical orbit with a low Pe is actually better than a circular orbit at the same altitude, because you're moving relative faster at Pe than you would in a circular orbit. That kinetic energy has to go somewhere when you burn the fuel, so it's added to your craft's velocity. It's pretty much always more efficient to do Pe kicks than one long burn, not only because you're applying more of your thrust close to the ejection angle but also because your velocity is higher when you're making the burn near Pe on each successive orbit.

Yeah, that's the one I played around with a while back. I think there's another one out there with bigger bags, but that one should work.