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I was trying to imagine what kind of tech the kerbals use in the rest of their life: their cars, their ships, imagining what their trains might look like. Then I realised. We know the answer to that. Apart from a few issues with roll stability, it works very well.

Almost all spaceplane designs end up being a huge heavy cluster of engines at the back, and a huge empty drag-causing cluster of fuel tanks at the front. It\'s like trying to fire an arrow backwards. ASAS plus canards plus very careful flight will get you down, as long as you never stray too far away from keeping the nose pointed along your velocity vector. Alternatively, try to add more wing at the back, or move engines further forward. Neither of those are easy. Bonus fun fact: this is why HOTOL got cancelled and why Britain doesn\'t currently have a space station of its own.

If you\'re interested in tips for improving this thing, I can offer some. The first and most important is this: don\'t bother with the basic jet engine. It\'s not very powerful, and the turbojet engine is better than it in almost every way. For going up into orbit you will want turbojets. The combination of turbojets and aerospike rockets is a very good one, and would likely allow you to get this thing into orbit whole, with only minor changes to its design and no bits dropping off on the way up.

If you pause a flight and return to the tracking station, then resume, the state of the fuel tanks doesn\'t display properly. The amount of fuel in an empty tank stays at zero when the game resumes, but it displays as being full in the staging info.

In KSP, all masses are point sources and so gravity fields are perfectly spherical. There\'s no gravity perturbation. That means that in the game, only air friction makes an orbit decay, and the air stops at 70km up. Above 70km, orbits are permanent. Out in the real world, orbits can decay even around totally airless worlds. Anything rocky has lumps in its mass distribution, which make its gravity field lumpy too. That gives an uneven force on an orbit over time, which tends to make the orbit very slowly more and more elliptical until finally it clips the surface. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)

Excellent recreation and a beautiful takeoff! Very much in the spirit of the original. I approve. After a tense landing (or a long series of failed landings) it is a lot of fun to hit the takeoff booster stages and zoom up into the air with no worries. Cue triumphant music.

Very impressive! You\'ve earned the 10 bonus points, and I have no hesitation in signing the certificate of awesomeness. For my own attempt at the challenge, I tried to place the boosters to resemble the real thing, resulting in a craft that looks ok, but... not so successful in the first testing flight. Takeoff Testing grounds reached, level flight at 200m. Begin descent. Cushion descent... wait! That\'s not descending! I thought you said this thing was safe! Abort landing! Abort landing! Oops. I think this can be made to work if I weigh it down a bit with more fuel tanks and only fire off the vertical boosters one at a time. I will try again.

Venus would be very difficult to launch from if realistic atmospheric effects on the engines were modelled. Atmospheric pressure at the surface is so high that it chamber pressure in a rocket motor can\'t easilypush against it. Even a very powerful rocket loses so much thrust that it\'s not worth using.

The year was 1980. 52 hostages were being held in a sports stadium and a rapid airborne rescue attempt was needed. Helicopters didn\'t have the range or the carrying capacity, so the rescue vehicle had to be a plane, but how do you land a plane in a sports stadium? Their aircraft would have to come in high to avoid hitting the seats of the stadium, and drop incredibly rapidly, then come to a complete stop with zero runway. Takeoff would have to be equally steep, again with no runway. They came to a very Kerbal solution: MOAR BOOSTERS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Credible_Sport Your challenge is to rebuild this mission. Make it work. Fly it successfully. Construct a heavy cargo plane that can land using SRB retros, with downward SRBs to cushion the fall, and then take off again with more SRBs as RATO units. Use mod parts if you like, but doing it with only stock parts gets you +10 bonus points and an official certificate of awesomeness.

I prefer to think that Minmus is a huge corroded brass sphere, with asteroid debris piled up on it, but still with many patches of its surface poking through.

Would that be a Heinkel He 162?

We have a winner! I\'m sure everybody is quite glad to hear that this one was fictional. Flying it is like trying to balance a cow on a three legged stool.

This thing is almost impossible to get off the runway intact.

It\'s easy to build a spaceplane that glides nicely and can land safely, but you need either a balanced design with a tail, or a low weight of engines. Landing vertically on the Mun, you can\'t have either of those.

Yes indeed, as RedDwarfIV pointed out above, my Archer spaceplane can do this challenge in a single stage. I made the successful proving flight yesterday. It is a pleasure to fly it on takeoff and in space, with beautiful handling characterstics under thrust. Sadly it turns ugly in a glide. If you have no fuel for a powered landing, you are almost certain to crash.

It\'s a mix of both practicality and style. I needed a wide base for mounting the landing legs, so that it wouldn\'t fall over on the Mun. Wings are the easiest way to do that. Looking awesome is a welcome side effect.

It has a pair of aerospike rockets too. They do most of the work.

Presenting, the Archer Mk.2: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=14692.0 Single stage from KSC runway to Munar surface and back to land on Kerbin again. All stock. No parts detaching. Many, many quicksaves, failures, reloads, curses, crashes and ragequits. One successful flight.

First, pictures! The full album of the proving flight can be seen here: http://imgur.com/a/blPET#0 Otherwise the highlights are spoilered below A smooth takeoff Orbit with an immense amount of fuel to spare Touchdown on the Mun Descending for landing Safe! If you want to try flying this thing, be aware that it is a tricky beast that will destroy itself at every opportunity unless you handle it well. Tips: [li]Use the ASAS while gaining speed on the runway to avoid flipping sideways.[/li] [li]There\'s plenty of thrust to spare, so ascent very steeply. Activate rockets at about 10k.[/li] [li]Do not retract the landing gear until you\'re in orbit! The landing gear can collapse the wing structure if you retract it in atmosphere.[/li] [li]Land on the Mun with your long axis pointing along the gradient, so you don\'t tip over.[/li] [li]Save before re-entering atmosphere! This thing glides like a brick and you are almost certain to crash more often than you land.[/li] [li]Consider aerobraking into a low Kerbin orbit to let you choose your landing site, because this thing can\'t handle diverting around an ocean.[/li] [li]Use ASAS to avoid flipping in a glide. Keep your nose pointed very close to the velocity vector.[/li] [li]Do not try to turn while in a gliding descent.[/li] [li]Be very careful flaring up before landing, making sure not to max out the pitch controls.[/li] [li]Re-enable the jet engines and give a brief burst of thrust just before wheels hit the ground, to raise your velocity vector.[/li]

That is a thing of beauty. It reminds me a lot of the helijets from the Thunderbirds universe., except yours looks more stable.

A smooth reentry costs fuel. Fuel costs money! Telling my kerbonauts to shut up when they complain about >15g decelerations is cheaper than adding another tank on the return stage.

The parts costs listed in the game currently serve no purpose at all, but I can still have fun with them. Yesterday I set myself the challenge of building the cheapest possible munar rocket using only default parts. Today, the Budget Explorer Mk.II completed its test flight, a perfect run. Pictures! On the launchpad: A safe landing on the Mun: Munar Ejection Burn on a tiny fuel budget: Success! And a safe descent back onto the night side of Kerbin: Cost calculation: 1x Command Pod Mk1 (1*1600) 1600 13x FL-T500 Fuel Tank (13*550) 7150 4x LV-T30 Liquid Fuel Engine (4*850) 3400 2x FTX-2 External Fuel Duct (2*250) 500 5x TT-38K Radial Decoupler (5*1275) 6375 2x TR-18A Stack Decoupler (2*975) 1950 2x EAS-4 Strut Connector (2*250) 500 3x AV-R8 Winglet (3*500) 1500 1x Mk16 Parachute (1*422) 422 Total Cost: 23397

I\'ve always found RCS on a lander to be very unhelpful. It makes the lander turn waaaay too fast, and when you\'re descending on a main engine, you want to make cautious, slow and tiny rotations. RCS helps on a tall lander to stop it from falling over once you\'ve hit the ground and shut down the engine, but the lander here is nice and wide, doesn\'t have that problem.

It doesn\'t take many default parts to get this thing into orbit whole. The first stage boosters aren\'t really built for use as a precision lander. Two seconds after taking this pic, it fell over and exploded.

Using Sundaypunch\'s parts (plus silisko\'s lunar lander leg), it\'s really very simple to go to the Mun in a single stage. The tiny liquid fuel engine is very efficient and a cluster of seven are powerful enough to do the job. It doesn\'t make the return trip though.