Tex_NL

Very well possible your plane will become unstable when the tanks drain. But be honest, what is more important at this very moment, stable flight 50 km up in the atmosphere after 30 minutes of flying? Or actually getting of the ground and fly? My last piece of advice: Stop trying to build an SSTO spaceplane for a while and concentrate on basic atmospheric flight. Keep it small and experiment with things like wing size and landing gear placement. You need to learn how to crawl before you learn how to walk. Only then should you attempt to run.

Not exactly. Since that time a lot of meteorites have crashed into earths atmosphere. In theory material from those meteorites could have ended up in people.

Thanks, that helps a lot. First of all your CoL is still WAY too far behind the CoM! Secondly (still a bit hard to see) your rear landing gear is also too far behind the CoM. The faster you go on the runway the more lift you'll generate. Since your CoL is far to the rear all that lift is trying to lift the tail. (Imagine you've attached a piece of string at the CoL and lift the plane from there. You're plane will hang nearly vertical nose down instead of near horizontal.) When the tail is lifted all that carries the front is your single nose gear and your plane starts to fall, and steer, either left or right. Commonly known as wheelbarrowing. To make your plane stable you'll need to bring the CoL forward. Either by moving your wings forward or as I've already said in my earlier post that can easiest be achieved by adding some canard wings near the nose. About the rear gear: Let's assume you did have your CoL just behind the CoM that you still would have difficulties getting off the runway. To raise the nose you would have to lower the tail of your plane. But you can not lower the tail because that's where your landing gear is. The closer your landing gear is to the CoM the easier it is to 'rotate' your plane. Unfortunately, if you go too close it becomes instable again. Edit: After giving you plane a closer inspection it looks like you could use bigger wings as well. 70+ tons with those small wings? I doubt it to be airworthy even IF it was properly balanced.

Can you please so some pictures from the side. Current pictures make it near impossible to judge the CoL, CoM, CoT, landing gear relations.

A Kerbal-cannon shooting your Kerbal straight up. Catching him in a funnel attached to an inverted U shaped tube, dropping him on a platform. This opens up some really interesting possibilities.

??? You can type a text on your iPad but you can't type [noparse][/noparse]?

Any excess metal/fuel that can not be stored is lost.

The recycler turns a ship into metal and fuel. So yes, you need sufficient metal storage to be able to recycle a ship. Edit: Ninja'd

Four options come to mind: 1: Sheer dumb luck. 2: Actively search by flying low and keeping your eyes open. 3: SCANsat. Scan the planet from orbit. 4: www.kerbalmaps.com And keep in mind not all easter eggs are anomalies to be found by scanning. Examples of two eggs (both are no longer in the game) that could not be found by scanning were Car Sagan's face on Tylo and the infamous Magic Boulder around Ike.

Center of lift is way too far behind the center of mass. In this configuration the tail will lift and the plane will start to fall over, steering either left or right. Easiest solution: add some canard wings to move the CoL forward (to just behind CoM) and it will take off just fine.

Time to bend the rules beyond breaking point. The KAS cables are there just for stability, they serve no function in getting to the top. The tower is rather flimsy. Jeb standing next to the tower he's about to scale. Jeb has taken his place in the seat next to the command pod. Now comes the really nice part. Leave the seat. POOF Jeb is suddenly standing on top of the tower. Simply jump down to the platform and board the upper pod. Obviously I did not use an actual rocket but as long as you have a command seat at the base and a solid structure directly above it this exploit works. Simply leave the seat and your Kerbal will be placed at the highest point directly above the seat.

Many thanks from this side as well. That nasty NaN did indeed not return. Keep up the good work.

Suggestion: When asking questions like these quote the original message. It's been a while since RoboRay posted in this thread so there is no way to know what images you're referring to.

In Star Trek this would perfectly describe the Picard Maneuvre

That images does not show a capture without input! The blue line is your current orbit. It shows you've entered Layhte's SOI and will be leaving again unless you make that 11.4m/s burn. I admit: it is close but this is NOT a capture described by xcorps in the first post.

Getting captured into an orbit without doing anything is in fact pretty easy. Most of us do it all the time; gravity assists and aerocapture. BUT .... it won't be a stable orbit. Getting captured into a stable orbit is as Einsteiner correctly said impossible (as long as we ignore the rare math errors 5thHorseman mentioned). With an aerocapture obviously you will fall back into the atmosphere again unless you raise your Pe. If you use a gravity assist sooner or later (it could be on your next orbit or it might take several years) you will have an encounter again with a wide variety of possible results.

If that last bug is that pesky NaN I talked to you about you'd make me a happy camper.

Please correct me if I am wrong here or if this has already been discussed/suggested. The current clouds are 'just' a spherical texture rotating around the planet. And volumetric clouds are generated based on that texture. Right? Since PNG files can be animated what stopping this mod from using an animated cloud layer? Imagine clouds or even complete weather systems forming and dissolving in front of your eyes. OK, making a seamless looping texture might be difficult and it will be significantly bigger than a static one, this should be possible. (As long of course KSP/Unity can handle animated PNG textures.)

These new, fuzzy clouds look very interesting and realistic. But how do they look 'close-up'?

Don't worry, it wasn't a quad ninja. It was just a triple ninja. Don't you mean a Kerbin day, a mere six hours?

The Oberth effect is not about making your transfer as close to the planet as possible. It is making your transfer when you're traveling the fastest. As it happens you're traveling the fastest when you're in a low orbit, close to the planet. In a low orbit you're often traveling faster then when you were during launch. Edit: Double ninja

Time to dig up a Manley golden oldie:

An exact heading on a spherical body is not always working. Over short distances it works just fine as the surface can be considered to be flat instead of curved. But over large distances to a target far beyond the horizon the direct path isn't a straight line but rather a curve in multiple dimensions. Your exact heading will change over time. You can test this yourself with a desktop globe and a piece of string. With the string plot a course from the USA west coast to western Europe. They're at similar latitudes so you might expect a plane to fly due east but as your string will show the shortest route goes over the north pole. A plane will leave the USA west coast heading north east but reach Europe heading south east.

I remember something similar. One guy was isolated in a room and was only allowed to use IVA view. He was also not allowed to leave that room. A few others where next door serving as mission control, only using map view. They did a successful real time Mun landing and return.