Immashift

I'm using every popular mod out there and I only had to drag/drop the TAC Fuel Balancer folder into gamedata. I did delete the version 1.1 folder I had from before though. It might do wonky things if you leave them both in. Unsure.

You are my hero. As the guy above me stated: Thank you x100. This mod makes the tedium of interplanetary travels much, much better. No right clicking around clicking the wrong bloody tank and having to figure out which one you wanted to transfer from again in the first place.

Somewhat of a stopgap for those with the bug/issue whatever, is just restart the game. Overlay should work well then for finding/using deposits.

Umm. Jeb's expression flying that pile of tanks. It's so very like him. Honestly, the weirdest designs that can't possibly do anything productive except explode are both the most fun, and the most uniquely KSP.

What I love about that thing is that it's a puller design. Always more stable than rockets in the back. Trickier to launch though.

I think this counts. Uses a number of B9 parts. I'm planning on taking the grand tour with this ship after it's refueled enough to make the Mun: (click for full size) Going into this design I wanted the craft to: Launch as one ship with booster stages. Lander with at least half the capacity of the IP stage, for ease of refueling. Reusable rover attached to the lander. I think I've accomplished what I set out to do, though the real test will be the tons of use it'll see in the grand tour. The design is somewhat inspired by Katateochi's grand tour vehicle, which is on YouTube. Planning on making a grand tour thread with piles of pictures in the next day or two.

That's... a lot of orange tanks. TWR for that must be tremendous...ly horrible on NERVAs. Rovers aren't that bad. Just make a simple probe based one and stick some seats on it. Make it low enough for right click menus and you're golden.

@Neolegends - That's pretty damn decent. I was a fan of the way Katateochi clipped his VTOL engines into one of the tanks to hide them really well, yours sort of stick out a bit more obviously. In my own testing I can suggest the LF-A30 engines from I believe KW Rocketry. Actually it might be from NovaPunch. In any case it has 285 thrust with a 375/380 ISP in air/vacuum, which is insanely good for the pile of power the engine provides. 4 of those, 2 on each end of a VTOL craft can lift almost anything. Lot better than the 120 thrust 290 ISP crappy radial stock engines you've got there. I REALLY love the way you used tricouplers. I think I'm gonna have to play with them a bit more in my designs. I know that Katateochi used NovaPunch adapter plates, which are the same thing, except much more compact. The stock couplers look really good though. I'm still having issues with a reusable rover -> lander docking mechanism. At this point it's just trying to compact it enough to make it fit inside the lander. @ Katateochi - Yeah I do have the KAS winch with the arm and such, my problem was, if I attempt to reuse the lander docking port to connect the rover back up for liftoff, eventually I have to use the docked mode, and then the DR hinges flip out. I had one attempt on the KSC runway where the hinges glitched so badly upon docking that they tore the lander in two and flung the rover 300m into the air to explode on landing. Pity I didn't take a screenshot though, cause my sides hurt from laughing so hard when it happened. Also, your grand tour videos: Sure I'd love to see it continued, but it'd also be really cool to redo them with current KSP. I wanna see your take on reusable landers / rovers, cause mine are almost always overbuilt. In any case, keep making KSP videos, they're great entertainment and give me some good ideas. May own grand tour ship, somewhat inspired by yours, finally in orbit. I'll be doing a thread with tons of pictures soon. Unsure how my comp will handle KSP and video, but we'll see:

@Amphiprion - The plane isn't QUITE done yet. I have yet to reach orbit. It's made it out of the atmosphere, but it had some control issues I've worked out. Should be good to test orbit now. As for how much I can land it on, I'm not sure. Moons absolutely, Laythe / Duna absolutely. Tylo.... Unsure. It may or may not have the delta V to do it. The problem with VTOLs in my experience, is that I can perfectly balance them in SPH, but when I actually get out there and fly it, it makes it a couple minutes, and then the fuel imbalance eventually overcomes pod torque / SAS and it hopelessly tips backwards or forwards. So I can balance the plane to VTOL OFF of a planet's surface with a full fuel load before it converts to rear engine flight, but a VTOL LANDING coming in from interplanetary space with barely any fuel left is incredibly hard to balance. Even if I somehow balanced it for running on fumes... then with a full load it's imbalanced. The best way I can think of to land a plane as big as mine on a body with no atmosphere is to come in butt first, use the main engines angled retrograde to kill velocity, and then land as gently as possible on the landing gear rolling backwards. My plane has gear on the tail for precisely this maneuver. I have yet to test this out though. As for the drill. Sitting on the runway, the drill goes through the floor, into the ground and has the drilling animation. Though I need to fly to a kethane deposit on Kerbin and see if it actually picks it up, I do believe it will. Anyway, yeah screens of your wing construction would be awesome. You can see in my last post I'm using the ginormous wings. Though they give tons of lift, they're a bit big for my taste. Just make it harder to roll the craft around in space. EDIT: Well, I tested my revised version of the interplanetary kethane plane, and it made it to orbit With absolutely zero fuel remaining. I didn't do a good job circularizing so I blame it on my own ineptitude that the plane is in this somewhat eccentric orbit, but it's orbit nonetheless. Now to refuel it and attempt a mun landing. (clickable) We were talking about VTOL on the plane - I thought I'd share this - my only successful VTOL kethane lander to date. Hovered a few feet above the KSC runway for 2.5 minutes till fuel imbalance overcame torque. More than enough time to take off of a moon and switch to the back engines only for horizontal flight: The vertical rendition of that - LKO capable in one stage, scrapped for two reasons - A) Part count induced lag, Jeb's fat head couldn't squeeze past the couplers:

@Amphiprion - Your Single Stage to Duna plane. I'd love to see how the wings are put together. I just cannot for the life of me get any decent wing shapes out of the B9 pack. I'm testing out a variant of your design. I wanna see how much stuff I can actually land it on. Instead of an arm with a drill, I'm using a small cargo bay with all my kethane stuff stowed away. Apparently the drill works through the floor of the plane. Grand tour in a spaceplane... I think it'll work. Especially since you gave me the idea of the aerospike on the front for lifting the nose in a vacuum. Might take it a step further and make the thing VTOL off of moons. We'll see. EDIT: I wrote down a problem in this edit I was hoping for an answer to, but I solved it myself already. Suffice it to say that on large planes, the weight of landing gear, and especially an aerospike on the nose of the plane can actually make it sort of imbalanced. Especially the TT multiwheels landing gear. Stuff is heavy... I solved the problem by putting RCS tanks on the top of the plane about equal to the mass of all the wheels and stuff combined. Plane holds a steady pitch now Still need better wing designs though. Current design (clickable):

Man you guys always have such elegant looking ships. Personally I'm looking for a way to REATTACH a rover to a lander. I'm a heavy mod user and I can do it with Damned Robotics, but it looks ugly most of the time and take too much space. Wondered if you guys had any cool designs for a rover that can reattach to be taken somewhere else. Putting ports very close height wise works till you have uneven terrain, and squatting the lander by retracting the gear can damage a tiny rover. I haven't seen any docking ports that can extend manually any decent distance. Perhaps I'm missing a mod or somthing I should be using. I saw someone here using the KAS to do it, wondering if it actually sticks all the way back into space.

I've been trying to build a version of that rover that can redock with a large lander and take off again. Apparently the arm is a little too lightly built to actually hold it together lol, sorta spaghetti's around like nuts. The hinges also do some weird shenanigans when you try to make the rover a part of the lander again. Also found that rover to be a bit tippy. He doesn't go very fast in any of the vid scenes, and I'm thinking parhaps the original is tippy too

Good for you! When I tried that, I was about 4 days into playing KSP, and it took me reloading my save from 5km up about 10 times before the swoop to horizontal actually worked without lobbing off the rocket on the back. I wasn't skilled enough to use RCS. I actually use RCS in docking mode, cause I'm the most comfortable with WASD for translation. Problem is I can't control the main engine while translating, so I had to sort of juggle switching back and forth. It worked in the end though. Try what I have in that picture - put rover wheels on the front gear that don't touch the ground while the gear is down. Your plane can function as a rover with the gear retracted, and it goes pretty fast too. I wish we had retractable rover wheels so it didn't look so weird though.

I remember the first challenge I attempted with a spaceplane was to land my modified aeris on the mun with just the back rocket - no VTOL or anything. Was definitely a challenge, you have to sort of get really close to the ground, give yourself slight positive vertical velocity, and as you shed it and start coming down, deploy gear and pitch horizontal. Some people prefer landing gear on the back of the plane or some of the tiny radial rockets to land on the mun horizontally. Your choice - but my way is more fun

Huge fan of your grand tour video (continue it dammit!). When I saw this get posted I really didn't think it was gonna be THIS epic. In your video... around 6:05 - 6:30... that perfect hover. Honestly I was amazed it hovered that well. I realize it was using MJ to keep heading/pitch but damn lol, I can't get any VTOL to hover that perfectly. Any suggestions? I'm trying to build a kethane mining lander with a 1-3 person rover capable of taking off and being fully reusable. Your cargo module got me thinking of perhaps putting the rover and kethane rig in-line with the lander horizontally rather than tacked on the bottom like 99% of the landers I do. But, again, I think there's gonna be massive balance issues, so suggestions there if you have them would be cool. Anyway, amazing video - quality is even better than your grand tour, perfect music as always, although... nothing beats that Gilly launch in the tour video Keep making videos for KSP!

Here's what I'm currently working on. Still need to do ladders and rework the fuel lines & struts. It's LKO capable with no assistance. I set that as a benchmark to land on most of the planets/moons. Converter and drills are sort of hidden, so is power generation. But it's all there. The purpose of it is to act as both a lander and a rover, capable of refueling its mothership, which will be taking the grand tour

The stock aeris is -okay-. You can reach orbit with it and dink around a bit, that's it. I'd recommend a 70x70km orbit as a first goal. It's exponentially easier to get a spaceplane to minimum orbit rather than shoot for 100x100 right off the runway. At least that's what I've found out. Here is my go-to SSTO. It's a heavily modified version of the Aeris 4a. Yes there are double wings on the back. It's to put the CoL behind the CoM, as without it, it struggles to pitch off the runway. I added intakes and gave it some more fuel capacity. This one also has rover wheels on the front - when the front landing gear is retracted, the rover wheels contact the ground, and you can steer/drive. Lower the front gear again to go to flight mode. I have parachutes on it for vertical landing because I've been testing putting vtol engines on it, but that's still a work in progress. The way I like to control things is to have one button switch from atmo flight to space flight. By this I mean when I hit launch, I right click activate on both my turbojets. Then when I hit the point just before flameout (for this plane that's 27km at 1300m/s roughly - I get entry effects on ascent ) I hit one button, and it shuts off turbos, closes intakes, and activates the rocket all at the same time. Ease of use. My flight profile for ALL spaceplanes is: Take off, point 45 degrees up. At 13km begin leveling out, finishing leveling at around 18km. Accelerate as much as possible. When it looks like the plane is struggling to gain more speed, pitch to 15-20 degrees. At flameout (you have to test this so you can pin it JUST before the jets cut out) switch to space flight mode. Pitch back to 45 degrees till apoapsis is reached. Coast to apoapsis, then circularize. You can conserve some fuel by feathering the throttle past the flameout point to get more out of the turbos, but honestly my SSTOs arrive to orbit with so much fuel left I really don't care to do it. No planes aren't that hard to do. It's just a lot of people can't seem to do it apparently, so it's considered hard. :/ Honestly I think the hardest thing to do with planes is create one from scratch that: A) Does not wobble to destruction while attempting to take off. Is actually able to lift its fat self off the runway without waiting to drop off the end for lift.

Absolutely he's helped me out. Mainly in the docking area. I started watching his videos 2 days after buying the game (was .18.4 I think back then). I had gotten to orbit already, but was having trouble not zooming by whatever I wanted to dock. His tutorial taught me not to aim at what I want to shoot for, and to use a point of reference for alignment, as well as how important proper facing is for RCS (as in up is up, down is down). Now I can dock pretty much in my sleep I've also used his videos for design inspiration.

Whatever the current version is, is working fine for me in .21

Hrmmmm. Rocket parts... plane parts... Damned Robotics.... Tracks.... Yes, I do believe it's almost time to create a Gundam in KSP.

Back when I started using remotetech 6 months ago or so, there was a bug where you couldn't have Mechjeb and RT installed on the same craft. Hope that isn't back. Later we got a button that let us give Mechjeb control. When launching, look for a RemoteTech window on your screen, and make sure "MechJeb Control" is selected.

I've had that a few times and it's usually solved by either switching to the VAB for a sec or another vessel, or in some cases relaunching KSP. I doubt it's Kethane causing the issue. Do you actually have a command module on there? Sorry for obvious questions, but every time I have this problem it's something really simple.

My own fairly heavily modified Aeris - Slightly air-hoggy, screams its way up to orbit with absolute ease with almost half its fuel left: Fun entry effects A second before rocket takeover: Obligatory orbit shot:

Rescue..... craft? So I'm not supposed to make green smears across the surface of the mun with my failed rockets?

Those missing part errors usually mean you're missing parts.... Those parts are specific to the Nova Punch Remix mod.