zarakon

Screenshots? If it has large wings that are only attached to the fuselage at one point, then I'm not surprised. There was, and possibly still is, a bug where not all connection strengths are as equal as they should be. In most cases it's not noticeable, but there are designs where it becomes very obvious. One of the obvious cases I've seen is in planes with long wings, one will sag more than the other. I think it has something to do with how the craft has to be constructed from its save file one part at a time. So two parts that are placed with symmetry won't actually be added at the same time, and somehow that can lead to them being treated slightly differently.

Take the "FyCvk" from the album URL and put it in [imgur] tags I think you can also just put the whole URL in tags and it might do the same thing

The only way I know of to get under 30 minutes is to go faster than orbital velocity while constantly thrusting downward to avoid flying away from the planet. One circular orbit at 70km is under 30 minutes, but you'll end up taking longer than that because you're going slower at launch and landing

or {synchronous idle}{null}, depending on how you interpret it!

I don't generally consider something with a command seat as "manned" since it weighs almost nothing. If you use an actual manned capsule, I'll add a note for that. If enough people do it, maybe I'll add another section

Rakaydos, did you just fly straight up and down? Your distance traveled is low

You have discovered the infiniglide "bug" Put enough control surfaces on something, and it can just flap them for extra speed. In the extreme case, you can even achieve escape velocity with no normal propulsion systems

This one time, it happened infinite times so infinite

I didn't fly it very precisely at all. I tried to stay around 60km altitude, but at one point I got over 150km then dove back down to like 30km for a moment before recovering properly. I was also trying to go around 20km/s the infinite fuel one I posted was not the same ship as the non-cheating one. It was just a probe with a bunch of sepratrons

probe, RTG, parachute

Well, the unambiguous measure would be whether your F3 screen says "Landed at KSC". But I dunno, maybe just within line of sight is good enough?

Landing gear has been massless forever. If it wasn't massless, every spaceplane would require some kind of counterweight on the top to keep the center of mass in line with the engines for after leaving the atmosphere

Infinite fuel is kind of fun, but totally silly I just did an infinite fuel run in under 5 minutes, top speed almost 25000 m/s

Here's mine, 23:03 fully stock, other than the engineer readouts I did it a few months ago, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't still count here

I assume that Kerbals enjoy extreme G forces, so I'm doing them a favor by hitting the atmosphere at 5000 m/s

It sounds like it's stock only, "work with what everyone has" I made something for one of these a while ago that I think was able to do it in under 30 minutes. I'll see if I can dig it up tonight

RTG is allowed. It weighs too much to actually fly, since you need a bunch of them to fully power just one engine, but I suppose it could be useful for getting a tiny bit of thrust on the dark side of the planet Batteries are ok, just don't abuse/spam the massless ones Leaderboard updated! Let me know if I missed anything. I also added post links for each entry

Alright, I finally managed to reach orbit myself! Not an SSTO since it's got one drop-tank. I went for a very high TWR of 0.47 at takeoff, 0.61 max with 2 engines. Designed so that the CoM doesn't really move and is lined up with the CoL Made orbit in just 31:04 and was able to land it back at KSC

Really cool, especially the idea of turning while ascending to extend your sun time But there seems to be an odd disconnect in your photos. At one point you're under 40km with less than 50 xenon left, then in the next photo you have over 150 xenon left at 75km and ~450m/s higher speed. Did you accidentally include some images from a failed run? I'll try to get around to updating the leaderboard tonight or tomorrow

Huh, almost looks like a bug

Depends on what you mean If you just mean "extremely maneuverable", then yes you can do that with stock parts by just using a whole lot of wings and control surfaces. If you're actually talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermaneuverability then that's something else entirely. A typical very maneuverable plane in KSP has two main properties: - Lots of control surfaces allow it to turn quickly - Lots of total wing surface keeps your velocity vector lined up with where your nose is pointing so that you don't just drift or spin out The second point there kind of makes supermaneuverability a non-issue. Supermaneuverability describes what you can do with a plane at high angle of attack, when your velocity vector and nose don't line up anymore and your control surfaces and wings don't work normally anymore. This doesn't really happen in stock because you generally design your planes to avoid being able to reach a high angle of attack (with lots of wings) and because KSP doesn't properly model aerodynamics, particularly stalls. You'd want to use FAR to get a more realistic model. Real planes achieve supermaneuverability mostly by using thrust vectoring, which allows control of rotation independent of lift or control surfaces. KSP gives you additional options via RCS thrusters and reaction wheels.

It had never occurred to me that shooting something into the sun is actually incredibly difficult

I can usually eyeball it well enough to land near KSC from low orbit. In general I do my deorbit burn above the desert, and aim for the overshoot of the arc past KSC to be about double the height of the arc at the point above KSC Planning a return from the Mun, or especially anywhere farther away than that, is much harder because Kerbin is going to rotate a lot. You have to figure out how long it will take you to reach your re-entry point, figure out how much Kerbin will have rotated by then, and see if your target and your entry point match up. If they don't, make adjustments and recalculations until they're correct.

probably Lavos

Even if it is possible, it would not end up being fun. Any time you turned on 100000x warp to do an interplanetary mission, everything you have in orbit would get flung out or crash into something because there's no automatic stationkeeping to deal with the n-body perturbations.