georgTF

That should be leftover code from previous versions of KSP that handled intake drag differently. There should be no effect to closing intakes in 1.0/1.0.2 I'm also keeping an eye on the thread hoping to see new solutions. Currently also trying to get this twin turbo/4 nuke into orbit. It's almost there, but in athmosphere flight and wing configurations have been problematic. It wont be easy to refuel it either, but it should have lots of liquid tanks and 240 thrust with minimum deadweight. It can't actually ascend with full tanks, but that's neither here nor there. I did build a tourist ferry by redesigning the previously posted Double Trouble design and changing it to a twin turbojet. It can carry 5 tourists to a Minmus landing + Mun orbit after refuelling in LKO. Can also land on the Mun if refuelled on Minmus. No longer single-turbojet craft admittedly, but spun off from ideas cropped up in this thread. Two jets are needed once the mass of the craft grows too large i'm affraid.

Launching into inclined orbits when KSC is under/over the plane of the orbit is indeed a nice solution. Personally those are not the hardest satellite contracts. The absolute worst for me are sat orbits that are too close to another body, usually the Mun. Getting the orbit without getting collected by Mun's SOI seems to require both timing and patience, and those things are sometimes in short supply with me. Anyway, for anyone struggleing with Kerbin system sats, here is a powerfull yet cheap solution. It can easily be fitted with a return capsule for manned missions although at a cost of some DV. I'm thinking Mk1 capsule + small tank + small orange engine would be heavy enough compared to the mass of the sat. Might even be better to use the Ant engine. Then again, the craft is overkill for simple equatorial orbits on Kerbin or the Mun. You might not even ditch the 909 engine unless you have some oddball retrograde, inclined orbit requirement. The craft as is, is mostly made up of fuel and gains efficiency as it sheds fuel/mass. I haven't tried it, but a Duna mission may be possible. Though it's mainly designed as a all-in-one solution for ANY orbit in the Kerbin system. Simply tack on whatever science bit is required by the contract and lift. Base cost is around 10.000. Enjoy. Craft link: Sats Done Cheap II NOTE - Start pointing to the horizon immediately after launch. The Kickback booster accelerates so hard that you'll only reach about 60 degrees before supersonic drag makes steering difficult. At that point let the booster burn out, wait for the flames to die down a bit before breaking the protective shell. Once high enough and slow enough not to suffer overheating (it all happens very quickly) break the shell and stage the orbital engine. Complete the coast to Apoapsis and circularisation at your leisure, then go wherever the contract tells you to. NOTE 2 - Allways keep a solar panel facing the sun once in space.

The way i've tried to deal with it was by adding small cubic struts as heatsinks. Not sure how well you can see it in the screenshot [click for full size], but there's 6 cubic and an octo structural piece in the bay and their purpose is just to draw heat away from the probe core and radiate it away. Science equipment and cores especially are poo at radiating heat so eventually it seems a lot of heat end ups dumped into them. The heat is distributed evenly but other parts are better at radiating heat, so add more such small, fiddly parts at little cost. In the bay ofc, you don't need drag, even if you're not fuel-critical, increasing drag just to have more ...erm, radiation would possibly accumulate more heat due to air compression/friction. This isn't a sciency plane, but i have no decent screens of that one. It has all sciency bits in the bay except Jrs and the gravioli detector. It gets hot enough eventually that i have to land just to cool off, or fly at night.

Well done. Shame about the landing legs, but that's back on Kerbin, so who cares. You might improve your design by adding more nukes instead of jets. In fact Turbojets + Nukes might be the way to go. It won't be easy, and no, i haven't done it, but something like 4-6 nukes could reach LKO after a turbojet push to about 1100-1300 m/s. The chief reason i'm suggesting nukes is that jet engines will be dead weight in space. More nukes also means more thrust and you'll need it during ascent. They have very good Isp in high altitude (~790) so you won't waste too much fuel, and you can fully use them in space. If you try this, you will need more wings as Falconer's KerbODactyl demonstrates. Though that is a single jet design. [edit] Sorry, i just made a generic reply. I kinda forgot this was a challenge. my bad

Quicksave (F5) before you de-orbit, then try a few practise runs. Reload with F9. Without a clear readout you need first hand experience if you want try seat-of-the-pants suicide burns. I do them often enough when i've used the same craft several times. Bear in mind that craft mass and engine thrust change the exact way to do the maneuver. Gravity too, but that one is obvious. Personally, i waste more fuel due to picking an uneven landing site and then correcting, than i do to less than efficient, semi-suicide burns.

I've had ramjets flame out at >1400 m/s though not on the more succesful designs. Going that fast usually means a flat, depressed trajectory which comes with a huge price in heat and possibly drag loss. Though as long as you're fighting drag with an efficient engine, you should be fine. As for ramjet vs shock, i saw a post about it recently and i'm not convinced either is a clear cut winner. They both seem to work fine. Wing lift vs wing drag? yeah drag is no friend of yours, but not having lift forces the plane to fly with a higher Angle of Attack. This moves the thrust vector off prograde which robs you a lot. If you need a certain amount of life to acomplish the goal, then pay the price in drag. As long as it's worth it... it's worth it. Besides, wings are about the least draggy parts in the game. Lift is also going to come in handy when diving to puch through the sound barrier. Not having enough tends to drop the plane too steeply or it once again suffers from thrusting off prograde by a few degrees. That is a crucial period of the ascent and i'd want it to go as smoothly and as quickly as possible. [edit] There comes a point when pushing too much weight on a single turbojet becomes an excercise in frustration and possibly efficiency as well. Certainly when using the Mk2 fuselage where both the single and twin fuel adapters are similar so the only price is the mass of the extra jet. As well as it's uselessnes in space, but if you just want to lift stuff into orbit a twin TJ + n Nukes build is probably the optimal way to go. There will be no problems going transonic for starters, and if damn near 50t can reach orbit on a single one, then an interplanetary SSTO will work wonders with two. Still, a tremendous achievement there. Well done on pushing the limits!

Surface docking is often frustrating. Partly because it's difficult to align the docks and you need a lot of field test and returns to VAB/SPH to correct dock position etc. But a bigger problem is gravity. Fuel transfer, which is a major reason to use surface docking in the first place can cause docks to mis-align. Once you transfer fuel between craft and undock, you may find it impossible to dock them again because one of them is now heavier and it's dock sits lower than before. Similarly the other craft is lighter and it's dock moves up. This problem can strike even before you dock them. If you test docking on Kerbin and succed, you may fail at docking the same two craft on Minmus for example, because the gravity is much weaker there causing suspension to compress less. The ideal way to perform temporary surface docking is to use a clawed tanker vehicle and design vehicles that will be targetted by the claw with enough clean space for the claw to attach. The claw doesn't like landing legs, sticcking batteries, panels or such small and fiddly parts. Finally, never driver a vehicle into the claw, as that is a surefire way to cause major issues. Due to game limitations and my previous experience, i try to construct "base" buildings as self sufficient, wheeled vehicles without any intention of ever docking them together. Wheels because it's easier to move it on it's own power once i decide it's not in the perfect location. I also keep the part count low at the expense of aesthetics and prefer to keep no "buildings" closer than 3km to each other. There have been very strange bugs regarding craft docked on the surface. Going back 2 years i remember having problems and usually explosions. The game doesn't like having the ground nearby when calculating the new CoM of the combined craft. Even worse if one was substantially lighter than the other, or used lightweight parts between it's own CoM and the docking port (for example to extend or raise it's position, clear wheels/other parts). Kraken summoning almost guaranteed if one craft used clipping, even minor clipping. I've had a 5t rover flip and launch a 80t fuel tanker almost a kilometer high after docking. This was on Kerbin. Docking ports are weird and buggy. Juniors are worst offenders in my experience. So in the end i try to avoid docking altogether and use claws for surface refuelling. As wonky as claws are, they are safer!

To embedd imgur albums do: {imgur}album name (it will be the last part of the url, like "qqtwu" for example) then close with {/imgur} but replace curly brackets with normal ones (i cant otherwise i embed your album and you can't see the code). Now for the plane. Holy cow that is astonishing! Just today i was struggleing to push a 19.2 ton 1TJ / 2 nukes design and running into all sort of problems. I have been very cheap with wings and your succes proves i was horrendously cheap. Kudos on the victory, that is, frankly abnormal! But in a good way.

That is delicious enough to eat. Great work!

Here's why the "lost in space forever" comment still may apply: Low Earth Orbit velocity is >9400 m/s Earth Escape Velocity is 11200 m/s I don't know what lunar escape velocity they used, but it seems plausible they needed to make a single burn to leave the Moon and position themselves at a correct point for Earth athmosphere capture. If at that point their velocity relative to Earth exceeded 11200 m/s then they certainly had only one chance to return or would be lost to space. Not interstellar space, but they'd end up in some interplanetary orbit. The Kerbin - Mun - Minmus system is modelled differently and it seems to be a lot easier to transfer around. Esp. with OP fuel/engines and patched conics. Not to mention quicksaves. And still we get it wrong very often. I'd still like to know why the return craft had to risk a such a dangerous trajectory. If that is indeed what happened.

The claw is for collecting junk drifting through space. And to avoid "surface docking" also know as the pain of a thousand pineapples inserted violently somewhere uncomfortable yet still less frustrating than surface docking. Using it elsewhere can summon the kraken so it's safer to use docks.

Happens. You need higher rep to get the offer. I only got one in over a year of career mode. A kerbal crashed on Minmus and one in Mun orbit. Yeah ok, i can't count very well, no need to mock me. Anyway, the one on Minmus was in a Cupola and it was a challenge designing something that can descend/ascent under it's own power, move short distances on the surface, claw something small and flat, and somehow be lifted from Kerbin without toppleing the rocket over. I managed it but the design turned out to have issues with a "magical" area in front of the claw. I carried it over to the Minmus Science Bus where a return lander fitted with parachutes took it back to Kerbin. Where it crash landed because it caught "not enough paracute-itis ". The one in Mun orbit was a mobile lab. I got to keep the kerbal immediatley but the contract would only be fullfilled once both the kerbal and their pod were landed back on Kerbin. Not neccesarily at the same time, but you need both to get paid/rep. Clawed surface recovey spider ScienceBus with parked utility craft

Keep that plane handy. Building planes is so frustrating that i sometimes go back to my own simple TJ racer just to vent some anger. It's nice to have a plane that goes! Anyway, you have two problems with a high altitude, high speed plane. The lag in throttle response of the engine, and the few parts the plane is made of. More complex planes have more parts and therefore more or better heatsinks. If you make a high altitude screamer dedicated to science try using an extra fuel tank or two, just to absorb/radiate heat. This craft is entirely limited by heat. By that i mean i will be forced to land to cool off long before i'm out of fuel. It's an old build and i'm sure improvements could be made. I made it to deal with the Kerbin athmospheric contracts. There's also a smaller one that can make larger suborbital hops but is less usefull at altitude. The throttle response is just something you have to get used to. Once the turbojets go nuts at supersonic speeds, it takes them a few seconds to stop providing thrust and then the plane still has to suffer drag for a few more seconds before it slows down enough or you pull up. Airbrakes are also usefull, but there is a nice cruising altitude and speed you have to experiment a bit to find. I'f i'm honest though, i'm far to impatient for that. I'd rather go suborbital even if it means taking on heat on the way up and down. Or not bother with athmospheric contracts anymore... :\

Oh, i didn't realise you were aiming for Duna. I thought it was going to operate in the Kerbin system. Well since Duna has some athmosphere, you can use parachutes to help land it there. I still question the wisdom of lugging 5 useless and quite heavy engines all the way. Not to mention the fuel tanks needed to achieve a stable Kerbin orbit. All part of the challenge i suppose.

For large, assymetrical, lightweight or otherwise mass-annoying payloads that won't fit into a fairing i just bite the bullet, accept that i can't use an efficient lift and go slow straight up until well clear of aerodynamic interference. Strut the hell out of it for good measure too. Lower TWR helps in cases where one attachment node is overwhelmed but that can also be taken care of with struts. Aerodynamic effects are far worse and together with the wobbly nature of the beast almost guarantee rocket flippiness. You can avoid them by lifting up above the air, then burning for orbit in a less efficient ascent profile. Very late "gravity turns" may be frowned upon, but they have their uses. Another enemy is SAS. If you lock SAS, the craft will almost certainly begin to shake itself apart at some point, which is another reason to go slow. I lock it for initial liftoff, then release while the rocket climbs through the "locking SAS will shake it apart" zone, then try to engage in brief periods that help keep the thing pointed up. But yeah, the solution is to waste fuel. Just waste fuel. But obviously, not for fun, but for profit. Or science! Actually, for orbit! In these examples fairings large enough weren't available yet, or i lacked other tech that could help. I did get them up, though they were very annoying.

To be fair the complaint was that it's too easy to stack multiple contracts, launch a single sat, and complete all contracts with it.Then again, it's just as easy to access the cheat menu and enable infinite fuel. And again it's just as easy not to do any of the above. Just depends on what the player wants to do.

70.000 profit isn't a lot. In fact it's almost worthless if KSP playtime is limited. It does depend what you need money for. As mentioned, i need to raise >3.5 million and 70k is a mere trifle in that case. Stacking multiple contracts on one craft was the main issue, and wheter or not that's cheating. I think it does feel a bit cheaty but on the rare occasion you use it, it's probably nice that the option exists. You are simply not likely to need to abuse the bug often enough, the oportunity is not likely to show up often enough nor is it profitable enough to try to earn a bunch of money that way. If you're going to cherry pick contracts to get 2-3 sats in neat, similar orbits, you could earn roughly 220k but the job would possibly take longer then had you launched 3 separate rockets to earn roughly 200k. [edit] If you take the average worth of a sat contract to be 80k Average cost of a sat that can be placed anywhere in the Kerbin system, including the pesky retrograde inclined or polar orbits is 10K This gives you profit of 70k If you stack two contracts the profit is 80+80-10=150k but that's only if the orbits are somewhat similar, otherwise you may run out of fuel. Also, if one of the sats needs to reach Minmus while the other is aimed at a retrograde LKO, you may be on margin with fuel and cetrainly wont be able to use the same orbital injection vehicle for both. All that rabbiting is just to show that if you used 2 rockets the final outcome would be 80+80-10-10=140k. So did you just do a needlesly complex mission for 10k? Even with 3 sats, the difference only comes to 20k (230k with "cheating" vs 210k earned by playing it straight.) The difference is miserable which is interesting because it feels like a cheat despite not paying that well. I fully expected to lose control of the craft once the contract was completed. Sats and bases for other agencies are completely ridiculous if they are still mine to control, remove or whatever. I shouldn't be expected to pay maintenance, and would like an option to delete clutter, but the way it's been implemented is absurd. The upshot is, that you can fully control what happens next, rather than the game forcing you. If you want to maintain foreign agency junk, you can do that. If you want to remove it manually, that's an option. Just delete it? Why not. Move the sat to another position and claim another contract? Up to you entirely. You do have the option...

It is cheaty, but it doesn't pay too well and frequently contracts will have oddbal orbit requirements. I like that the possibility is there and would personally only take advantage of it when strapped for cash. Aside from the R&D 3rd lvl upgrade, i haven't felt the financial sting too much so i think i'd be too bored to abuse the loophole.

Well i worked on a spaceplane that had enough fuel to orbit Mun or Minmus and it could even land on Minmus. It was a twin turbojet + aerospike design that could seat 5 passengers (+1 pilot), BUT it required refuelling in Kerbin orbit in order to go anywhere. Going straight to the Mun and back would be considerably more difficult to pull off. BTW if you're having trouble with Munar landings, try Minmus since the cost in fuel of both landing and return is cheaper than the Mun. Dv required to get there is not much more than the Mun. Maybe once i get a refinery on Minmus, i could take tourists there, refuel, THEN land on the Mun and return to Kerbin. Quite a dull mission, but i'd do it once or twice. At any rate, not using Kerbin orbit to refuel SSTO handicaps them a lot, and the price of replenishing a fuel depot in LKO can be offset by a contract or two. That said, kudos on getting a non-refuelling SSTO design! For medium (15-30t) or Mk2 SSTO craft it's probably swept wings. You don't want a lot of them esp since Mk2 fuselage provides lift. It mostly depends on where you need to place the Center of Lift, so it's not 100% certain that delta or flat wings are superior. It will allways depend on the design. Wings tend to be OP and it's a pretty good idea to try to use them to position the CoL roughly where it needs to be then use additional winglets or elevons to make the craft controlable.

Easy with a rover or plane. Not so easy with landers. What i do, is try to use the craft's navball to guess which direction i should walk/jetpack in by tilting the craft in the direction of the marker. Then EVA in that direction and hope to enter the area. Some areas are viciously tight though. Having learned how tricky those contracts can be, i try to remember not to try them without plenty of extra fuel for navigation/errors or without a rover. But hey! Finally there's a use for the tiny rovers and rover wheels. EVA trackers!

[allegedly] You can switch off an option in the graphic settings. Edge highlighting or something or other. Search the forum or google. There is also a mod. I switched of the graphic thingy and find the memory leakage substantially less noticeable. [/allegedly]

Planes that are mostly tanks and have a greater wing area tend to be relatively large and light when coming back down. Another factor is the distance between CoM and CoL and wheter or not the plane can keep a high angle of attack without stalling. I try to re-enter at something like 70-80 degrees at 70km to get maximum drag and keep the nose up as long as possible. Lift/drag can sometimes completely negate re-entry effects (which is a bit unrealistic but KSP isn't perfect) to the point where a plane must dive down to avoid a high altitude stall. Such a design would have no need for airbrakes. OTOH some of my planes had great difficulty keeping the nose high enough and could not "bleed off" airspeed before descening into the thicker part of the athmosphere. At that point it's virtually impossible to avoid high friction heat so either the wing profile needs to change (which i'm sure we'd all hate to alter) or airbrakes should be added. Airbrakes placed on the top of the airframe also tend to pivot the plane nose up for extra drag. But yeah, long story short, depending on wing design, drag and CoM/CoL you might not need an additional airbrake. And by chance a lot of designs featured were exactly like that.

This is what others have suggested i try, including KerikBalm and is similar to Rune's explanation of how to get the most out of turbojets. They pack a huge punch but in a relatively confined area of the athmosphere and it's neccesary to somehow break through the silly drag buildup. Normally you could just use another jet, but this thread is about single designes, and a turbojet in space is a waste, so why carry more than you need. BTW, it does not require patience at all. The jet does all the work, and you don't have to touch the controls at all. Also no losses due to pulling up at high speed. The buildup in airspeed automatically takes you from level-ish flight to a sub orbital trajectory. [edit] And more often then not melts something, but in those cases it's better to pick a slightly higher angle of attack. Assuming no other issues, either high temps due to friction, or turbojets getting out of their comfort zone too soon will be the limiting factor. If i'm limited by one extreme, i try the other until i find a sweet spot.

GoSlash27 mentions nuclear LF only SSTO, i swear i'm not interested, later i find myself frustrated by the very thing. I got Nerd sniped! I did get a plane out of it though, at a small-ish cost in sanity. As i fooled around with the nuclear option, i found that the CoM likes to drift backwards as fuel is spent partly due to the nuke's mass. The solution was to place it as far forward as possible. This then makes it a little bit difficult to place wings in a way that makes the craft controlable. Several frustrating issues with takeoff and bad manners in general followed. Eventually the plane morphed into a neat design that handles heat well, has decent Dv, and flies ok but nor great. I think the tail is too large and the craft doesn't really do anything except carry two kerbals into orbit, but it's a decent baseline. That's what i'll keep telling myself at least. I did forget fuel lines and didn't carry batteries or solar panels (which shows how much faith i had in it at the time). I added those to the craft after the flight. Flight: (Nuclear engines are bound to the RCS action group) 1. Full throttle on the runway, don't pull up until it hits about 170 m/s. It's very lazy at takeoff. 2. Fly up to about 8-11km. It may be neccesary to dive a bit to punch through the sound barrier. 3. Aim for a very shallow climb of <5 degrees AoA at ~10km, get supersonic and let the turbojet work. It should build up speed and the craft will rise automatically. 4. Once you hit peak airspeed, activate rockets. The craft is a bit sluggish so athmospheric heat isn't a huge deal. NERVA heat is. 5. Monitor heat and Ap. Once you raise Ap to >70km cut the engine, coast up and circularise. 6. Cool off, and re-enter. My personal re-entry point is above the eastern edge of the large Kerbin crater. Burn retro until the trajectory drops down to the large island further east of KSC. This usually drops the craft about where it needs to be to reach KSC, though i often overshoot it. Here is the craft file, and thanks yet again to this wonderfull thread and all contributors.

At the moment i am working on perfecting 2 designs based on a single TJ that i see as usefull and possibly superoir to twin TJ builds. One to carry 6 or 10 kerbals into 75x75 LKO without bothering with docks or refuelling. Just easy up, EVA hops to the station, and easy down. Let dedicated, non-athmospheric shuttles do the rest. I hate LKO but planes need refuelling to be usefull, i do like orbiters, and shuttling crew around the system is a fun thing to do. For a while at least. If i can get a decently high orbit out of a taxi-plane, i can move the fuel depot higher. The other is supposed to have tanks large enough to visit Minmus, land there and return with up to 6 kerbals. Also carry some sciency doodads or whatever. Landing on the Mun may be out of the question, but orbiting could be ok. Mun is easily visited and exploited for science with small rockets so that's not a huge problem. This plane requires refuelling in LKO and seems to be working. I goofed during refuelling and failed to fill 220 units of LFO and missed the return from Minmus by Dv 60 m/s. I guess it can work but can't prove it yet. Both designs use Twitch engine clusters which are less efficient but do not require side tanks. Satelites in Kerbin system seem to be better of using a Kickback booster + 909 to get roughly where they need to be. An Ant engine can do the rest. I don't feel like bothering with a SSTO launch + return + landing on the runway to save maybe 1-2K cash. I don't know what else would be worth trying. I haven't tried nukes so maybe a LF interplanetary design would be a nice thing to try. I'll probably get distracted working to unlock ore refining and building a Minmus "launchpad" station for interplanetary stuff. This thread has become very helpful regarding SSTO or other spaceplanes, so thanks everyone for contributing knowledge. Rapier or other comparisons are also helpfull, please keep those up as well.