GoDores

If you're serious about wanting to build your own airplane, start here: http://http://www.eaa.org/eaa Find a chapter at an airport near you, and go hang out there on a sunny weekend morning. You'll meet a bunch of people who have built or are building their own planes and will be happy to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the process. You can probably get rides in a few different planes too to see what it's like. Are you already a pilot?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotax

The pilots were either pulling your leg or need some remedial training. You have to slow a single-engine piston airplane almost to a stall, and keep it there, to get the prop to stop windmilling. Step 1 in any engine failure checklist in a single is pitch for best glide. If the engine won't restart at that speed, it won't restart at any other speed. Jets are different because it takes much more energy to get the turbine to windmill, and they're operated much higher where the air is thinner. There can be both a minimum speed and a maximum altitude to attempt to restart a windmilling engine, and the minimum speed probably is above best-glide speed.

I never did a career mode before 23.5. Thought I'd give it a shot. I like it more than I thought I would have.

This. Once you get beyond the simplest of airplanes, managing the autopilot is as much being a "real" pilot as yanking on the controls yourself (and this is certainly true of any real spacecraft humans have launched). I don't really use the stock maneuver nodes, but a system that lets you guess at what to do and tells you if you're right seems more "cheaty" to me than a proper autopilot where you have to know what to do and then tell it.

You can go pretty big in America.

I have a mission to Jool that includes a large LV-N powered transfer stage and a crewed lander, among other components. I forgot to disable crossfeed on the various docking ports before I made my Jool transfer burn, and as a result I burned off the fuel in my lander's first stage. The center tank of my transfer stage emptied first and the remaining fuel is in six radially attached tanks. Is there a way to transfer fuel to my lander equally from the radial tanks on my transfer stage? In other words, the empty tank on my lander is a Rockomax X200-16; is there a way to fill it with exactly 120 units of fuel and 146.67 units of oxidizer from each radial tank, so that each radial tank is left with the same amount of fuel after the transfer and I avoid an imbalance?

XS DVDT 6 letters. Fits on any plate. Better for a sports car than an SUV IMHO. (Technically yours would be XS DADT, but when has jerk been a big measure of auto performance?)

Another factor besides those already mentioned is that rocket programs on Earth don't get their parts from the side of the road, whereas Kerbals do. In stock KSP we're limited to a few given sizes of engines and fuel tanks. So to launch very large payloads we need to use many separate tanks and engines. If we're already doing that, we might as well add the decouplers and fuel pipes to make the booster asparagus and maximize efficiency. But an Earth space agency could just design a larger fuel tank and more powerful engine. The F1 engines powering the first stage of the Saturn V are five times more powerful than a Mainsail, and five of them were fed by a single fuel tank. If NASA were forced to use 25 engines and dozens of "orange tanks" for the Saturn V first stage, they might have chosen to use something like asparagus for efficiency. Instead they just built bigger engines and fuel tanks in a single stage.

So I did finally get things worked out. Further strutting of the payload kept the stack from failing in the center, and after modifying the booster I got a successful launch. On pad: Payload in orbit: To answer the questions in this thread: -The final payload to LKO was about 306t. Mass on the pad was about 2200t and 950 parts. I was getting 1 to 2 FPS on launch; MJ was needed to fly it to orbit. -I was testing the thrust plate design because of the limits of the strength of radial attachments. I've launched up to about 150t with pure asparagus designs but as I got bigger it became increasingly difficult to make a stable launcher. The thrust plate design does seem to be a stronger method of launching heavy payloads, although it still needs a lot of strutting. -The staging was onion, mainly to save on build time. If I had made the booster pure 2x2 asparagus it would probably be a little more efficient, but I didn't want to spend the time setting up the staging. 8 orange tanks and their engines drop off with each stage. -The 12 LV-Ns are less than 10% of the payload mass. They're there to achieve reasonable interplanetary burn times with very large payloads docked to the stage. -The game doesn't currently model aerodynamics very well, or allow for orbital construction (other than docking). When those are implemented, I'm sure everyone's designs will change.

306.35t to LKO. 7 full orange tanks, 12 LV-Ns, and various other bits, for a heavy interplanetary transfer stage (12km/s dV by itself). Used the thrust plate design. 955 parts and a little over 2200t on the pad, and 131 engines firing on launch. On the pad: Payload in orbit:

Thanks. It does appear the payload was separating from the booster and causing the struts to vanish. Additional strutting fixed that problem. Unfortunately the booster design itself had a fatal flaw and I'm having to start over.

I'm having a problem with a new super-heavy lifter I'm trying to build. Basically the struts that support the payload vanish as soon as I hit the launch button. The decoupler between the booster and the payload of course fails immediately and the booster destroys the payload. Screenshots: In VAB On the pad, throttled up, ready for launch Immediately after launching Is this a bug or is something else going on? More importantly, how do I keep it from happening?

The Shuttle Main Engines didn't do anything special. They were initially designed to a certain maximum thrust spec, which was designated as 100% thrust. Later, in testing, it was found that they could safely produce more thrust than originally designed. Rather than redoing all the documentation, programming, etc. to set the new max safe thrust at 100%, they just kept the original max thrust value defined as 100% and designated new higher thrust values at over 100%. That wouldn't really carry over to KSP where engine thrust ratings are defined in-game and no one's writing procedures for anything. If an engine were changed or modded to produce more thrust, its new higher thrust would still be 100%.

I've had the issue with engines randomly falling off the bottom of quad adapters, even when I used launch clamps. I'm not sure why it happened and I never was able to solve it. I had to give up on the design since it wouldn't fly straight with the missing engines. I think the issue is that connection strength doesn't seem to scale up with part size; compact landers and probes can survive impacts that would destroy any real ship, but large rockets fall apart like wet tissue paper even when they appear to be solidly constructed and thoroughly strutted. I'm sure the issue is being worked on for future updates. I've also had my final stage engines get ejected when using Mechjeb. It happens if MJ is allowed to auto-warp; it will go to 4x physics warp while in the atmosphere waiting to get to apoapsis, which invariably causes my orbital insertion stage to shake off its engines and become quite useless. If I disable auto-warp, I don't have the problem. I've gone back to just flying launches manually since I can launch to rendezvous better than MJ seems to be able to.

EVA or the crew manifest mod. Pod transfer isn't currently in the stock game.

You're not doing a gravity turn. You get out of the atmosphere but only at a small percentage of orbital speed, so you have to burn a long time at apoapsis to get into orbit, and as a result a lot of the burn isn't done exactly at Ap, which makes your orbit eccentric. It's even harder because you're using such a low orbit and that gives you little time to circularize before you reenter the atmosphere. Between 8 and 12 km, pitch over to 45º on the navball. Then as you climb you can roughly track the prograde vector. This will vary a bit from rocket to rocket, but by 40 or 50km you should be burning directly towards the horizon on your navball. You'll want to overshoot your desired Ap by 5-10km because you'll still be in atmosphere and it will slow you down a bit. But once you're out of the atmosphere you should be within a couple hundred m/s of orbital speed. You can do a short burn at Ap to circularize and you won't need a minute-long burn that will mess up your eccentricity. A couple more efficiency tips: you could make your launcher more efficient by making the first stage side boosters asparagus staged. There's also no reason to have RCS on in the atmosphere.

This made me laugh so hard.

This isn't right. Adding the same number to the numerator and denominator of a fraction changes the fraction. Example: Ship with 10t fuel and a single 1t engine (no other payload). Mstart=11 and Mend=1. Mstart/Mend = 11/1 = 11. Adding a second 1t engine gives Mstart=12 and Mend=2. Mstart/Mend = 12/2 = 6. Adding engines will increase the mass of your ship and therefore reduce the total dV, so one engine will always give you the most total dV with all else being equal. But a single engine might give you such a poor TWR that you can't make an efficient transfer burn, so there are times when you might need (or just prefer) additional engines for shorter burns.

Floating-point errors. What I do is once I get my encounter, I go into time warp, which puts the ship on rails and locks in the encounter. If it's not where I want, I go out of warp, let it bounce around, and try locking in again. Repeat until you get the encounter you want, and then stay in warp until the SOI change (I usually back down to 5x warp for the shift to avoid blowing past my encounter). The magnitude of the errors decreases as you get closer, so if you can't get the encounter you want, warp closer to the encounter and make adjustments there.

Aerobrake.

Do you have air intakes?

Looks to me like your current trajectory will intersect the moon's surface, although I usually use patched conics mode 0 so I may be misreading. In other words you'll crash into the Mun before you get to the Kerbin escape trajectory. That's not a problem; you can still land from that trajectory if you're okay with landing about where the orbit intersects the surface. If you want to get into orbit first you need to burn a little retrograde (for a retrograde Munar orbit) or a longer prograde burn (for a prograde Munar orbit). In either case you'll need another retrograde burn in the Mun's SOI to circularize and keep from escaping.

Physics pretty much dictates how much fuel you'll need to burn to put a given amount in orbit, based on the rocket equation. I plan for a 6:1 ratio from Kerbin's surface to LKO (burning 6 units of fuel on ascent for each unit of fuel you put in orbit), with engines of realistic ISP. I can do a little better than this but I don't think it's possible to do a lot better no matter how much you optimize your rocket. So unless you use very cheaty mod engines, you'll have to burn through 18 orange tanks worth of fuel to get your three full ones into orbit.

Here's my design. It ended up being a little overbuilt and actually puts about 3.5 orange tanks worth of fuel, plus three large RCS tanks, in a 300km LKO. It seems to be just as fuel-efficient as my single orange tank launcher (~16% mass fraction to orbit). It's actually pretty easy to fly for its size; it will start into a spin in the upper atmosphere but that can be ignored or managed with RCS. It's 386 parts and 966.13 tons on the launchpad. Stock except for Engineer and Mechjeb, although I haven't tried flying it with Mechjeb yet. Picture in the VAB: Shot of the engines from below (I believe I have 63 engines, all of which burn from launch to orbit): During the gravity turn after some staging (the first staging occurs below 500m): Final amount in orbit. As you can see the last boost stage still has some fuel in it, and when combined with the small gray tanks under the main orange payload tanks, I have a total of about 3.5 orange tanks worth. Tanker docked to my interplanetary stage and some new lander hardware I'm testing: