RoboRay

You don't need a high TWR, if you plan ahead. I had to start my mapping probe's ion engine for the orbital insertion an hour before even entering Moho's SOI, but I managed the capture.

That's a nice trick for nosewheel steering. I prefer putting my avionics package out front, though, by sticking the little truss piece just below the point of the nose. No parachutes. Parachutes encourage Jeb to not bring my expensive plane back.

I usually don't care for the silly things people post, but that bus is just fantastic. It needs a little "VW" logo on the front.

A little off-topic, but if you're looking for a good landing site on Eve with minimal delta-v requirements for relaunching back into orbit, I don't think you can do any better than this mountain. The relatively flat top is 5km above sea-level and just 5° south of the equator. This results in less than half the aerodynamic drag from launches near sea-level while preserving nearly all of the benefit from easterly launches near the equator. More pictures. I lost the LAT/LON coordinates to the forum meltdown, but if you enter a low equatorial orbit you really can't miss it.

It's not just how many wings and control surfaces you have, it's how they are arranged. The position of your landing gear is also a big factor on takeoff speeds. Post some pics of your craft?

Reinstall it but follow the directions.

That the object continues to exist visibly doesn't mean it's undergoing physics calculations.

Hate to rain on today's posters, but this thread is from September. I really wish Squad had simply did a full wipe and started from scratch rather than rolling the forum back seven months.

I don't know if I would agree with that. I've built longer craft where the CoM and CoL were both very near the tail and were perfectly stable and handled nicely. Like I said above, I think a fundamental problem with your design is that it's short and wide, and you seem to be trying to fix it by making it wider rather than longer. While that kind of design is workable, it's much more challenging to make stable than a more conventional design that's longer than it is wide. I really suggest setting that design aside and learning with a smaller, simpler craft, then returning to perfect that design when you've mastered the underlying principles.

Oh, you should see the countless wrecks and abandoned craft of mine dotting that peninsula. There aren't any comprehensive guides to building SSTO spaceplanes, I don't believe. Just general rules... The lighter the better. Doubling the weight makes it at least four times harder to design and fly. You don't add parts (often even fuel) to improve performance... you remove them. Use multiple ram inlets for each jet engine, and ignore the other air intakes... those are for airplanes, not spaceplanes. Put your aero control surfaces as far back as you can. Flight controls near the middle of your craft do nothing useful (just roll, and most KSP planes have more roll authority than I want anyway due to pod torque). Don't put controls at the nose unless there's no other way to make the thing controllable. Front canards make it easier to handle but also much easier to tumble out of control. In my experience, a single jet engine per 10-12 tons of craft mass is sufficient. Throttle back as you reach high altitude and begin to run out of IntakeAir. You can still accelerate with the throttle reduced, and your engines need less air to keep working. The faster you go, the more air the rams gather, so the higher you can go, which allows you to go even faster as drag decreases. Ensure your craft has sufficient controls (aero, RCS, whatever) to get the nose pointed upwards at around 45 degrees even in the thin air at 25-30km. Once you start the rockets, you need to climb up out of the goo as fast as you can, until you can level out again around 50km+ to continue accelerating. Once you shut down the jet engines, forget about flying a plane... fly the same kind of profile you would for a conventional rocket at that altitude and speed.

Several options, really. A radial parachute or two on the side of your command pod should work. You can also use stackable parachutes in mods like NovaPunch, which allow another part such as the docking port to be stacked on top of the 'chute. You can even make your own stackable parachutes (and other equipment) with part-clipping enabled, using this little trick I came up with: While this does work, the mod parts for stackable parachutes work better, as they give a stronger, more rigid connection than the little octagonal truss.

I don't believe the end-points of a broken strut count as parts for physics calculations, on either end.

It's not physically possible to rendezvous two craft in similar orbits without significantly altering one of their orbits. If you've got two people standing still on the opposite sides of a room and they want to shake hands, one of them has got to start walking. Heck, even the little puffs of RCS you'll do during the docking will shift your Ap/Pe several kilometers. And it doesn't matter a bit. Matching velocities during the docking process automatically corrects those changes. That's what matching velocities is all about. People that get hung up on trying to preserve "perfect" orbits during the rendezvous and docking phases are the ones that struggle the most and the longest to learn how to rendezvous and dock. Save yourself a lot of headaches and let that go. Ignore your orbital parameters while rendezvousing and docking, with the exception of making sure you don't actually drop into the atmosphere during the process.

Uh, no thanks. I'm going to stick with the native resolution of my monitor. I have no graphics performance issues that would cause me to reduce it. Transparency issues are from the text blending into the background objects, not resolution problems.

Ah, at last. Pictures are indeed worth a thousand words. All those control surfaces longitudinally parallel to the CoM are actually doing nothing for your pitch control. The only effective elevator control you have is the two winglets on the jet engine nacelles, and they don't actually do much. You appear to have nearly no effective rudder control, either. And having all those lifting and control surfaces near the CoM actually makes the design less stable, not more. Lengthen your design, more like a real aircraft, moving the control surfaces further aft. You can put a pair of canards up front, if you need them, but try to do without as they contribute to negative stability. Longer planes are inherently more stable than short ones. You can build short designs that work, but they are much harder. Start with longer designs. Also, if you're just learning how to build SSTOs, I suggest skipping the passenger compartment. Smaller, lighter craft are far easier to design and fly. Here's some pics of my first (working) SSTO experiments: More at http://imgur.com/a/hWYVx#0 This is my current two-seat ground-to-orbit taxi, which weighs in at half the size and mass of my earlier designs: More at: http://imgur.com/a/z2gqN#0 Try to design craft that look more like real-world planes. That actually does help, as the same general rules apply.

I tested MJ2's landing autopilot three times on Kerbin from 100km+ orbits and got one right on target and two that were hundreds of km off. The guidance indications are correct, if you do the maneuvers manually, but MJ2 seems to ignore them sometimes and just do whatever it wants.

It varies with the craft design, really. But the absolutely gorgeous MS Paint work up there is a good starting point. I usually have mine a little further back with full fuel tanks, with the markers not quite touching.

Your craft is out of balance (it may have become out of balance in flight due to the Center of Mass shifting as fuel is burned off), is not positively stable and the air has become thin enough that the control surfaces are no longer able to counter the instability (make sure the Center of Lift is slightly behind the Center of Mass throughout all phases of the flight), or you have a thrust asymmetry issue (make sure the Center of Thrust vector is lin-line with the Center of Mass indicator). Also, having ASAS and Avionics is pointless. Avionics is a weak ASAS, and is ignored if you turn on an actual ASAS. You probably want to leave off the ASAS and just use Avionics on a plane. Planes are hard compared to rockets. Don't get discouraged and do keep experimenting. You'll get it.

Yeah, I imagine there will be weighted IntakeAir values at some point. Divide the number of intakes by the number of engines, and assign the individual intakes an efficiency percentage on a curve so that individual intakes become less effective as the total number of intakes per engine increases.

The Crew Manifest mod allows internal transfers between modules.

Nobody is calling you a liar. I have no doubt you put a craft into a circular non-perfectly-equatorial orbit at 1500m. The point is that it's eventually going to encounter higher terrain as the Mun rotates. The collision may take a lot of orbits, but it's going to happen. Heck, I've done surface-touching orbits once, when I had a probe's transfer stage get stuck on the probe due to a misplaced decoupler. It took a few tries, but I eventually managed to smash the transfer stage against the peak of a mountain while leaving the probe intact and able to continue its mission.

They're great for low-altitude airplanes. They're about worthless for high-altitude airplanes and for spaceplanes.

Data I can't read isn't very useful to me. There needs to at least be an option to reduce or eliminate the transparency. It's not urgently needed, but it definitely needs to come eventually.

Like I said, you're just picking arbitrary numbers for your "reasonable" limit. I find four intakes to be easy mode. Try one or two if you're concerned about "reasonable" realism. This is a sandbox game. There's no justification in posting peanut gallery comments about how people should use "more reasonable" designs when they build things that are unrealistic, but neither does anyone need to be impressed by the accomplishments. If they're having fun doing things their way, and we're having fun doing things our ways, it's all good.

I agree about the menus. Transparency looks pretty, but it's not very usable. I find myself moving windows around so that I can read them against the background.