Van Disaster

Has a full science kit, antennae are also protection if it rolls ( which is why there's a few ) but it takes concerted effort to flip it anyway. I've no idea how to actually get it anywhere other than throwing it out of a cargo door though.

I was pretty sad when I watched the last landing, mostly because I thought "well now what?" but seeing what SpaceX are up to, how ambitious they are and most of all how they seem to be actually progressing like they planned for has really filled the gap - and in the long term I have some hopes for Skylon, although as it's British and I'm British I'm 99% sure it'll just get sold overseas because we're atrocious at funding projects like that, and turn up in some different format. Hats off to NASA for Apollo - I'm just about old enough to vaguely remember Apollo-Soyuz - but after that the Shuttle just sucked all their innovation away, it seems. Given the black hole of it's operating costs, not too surprising. The shuttle might have done many things averagely well, but it did only need to be one proven launch system to do them all rather than having to design and maintain several.

I have three at the moment, partly born of experiments. I make heavy use of Fustek parts in an attempt to keep part count down ( and use it all up with solar panels, usually... ). Low Kerbin station ( 90km ), fairly heavily used at the moment. Canadarm module ( which has lost it's docking port somewhere ), fuel pack, orbital crew transfer shuttle, docking size adapter ( I seem to have lost the tug it's meant to be attached to ) and inevitable spaceplanes docked. -- Top Kerbin station ( 205km ), assembly area and launchpad for future missions. Once usable part count goes up, anyway, right now it's just about usable for fuelling. Local tug, more Canadarm modules, solar arrays, couple of fuel tanks and a xenon tank pile docked. And of course a spaceplane. Mun station. To service Mun, obviously, not that I've done anything with it at all yet. The arm thing under the solar arrays is a micro docking truss for probes/satellites.

I didn't actually actively enable part clipping - once I get something ( engine, intake ) attached to the tail piece which is actually the awkward part, it just mounts itself on the wing leading/trailing edges. It's possible that something in the process turns clipping off though. In times past I've used a cubic strut but I'd rather not have the active parts inside the wing ( I don't mind structural components ).

This pack is worth it just for the giant wing, although now I note Taverius has changed it all... still, gigantic spaceplanes ahoy! it made it to space finally. Getting it from atmo->orbit was rather less hard than getting it to the transition point, required a fair bit of rocket assistance on the way up... I suspect there's a couple of tons of struts on it too, will be interested in any changes to stiffness.

I have had a little success using flaps on swept wings split between forwards & aft of what one might call the average lift axis in an attempt to balance moments, but it's hugely awkward trying to build wings like that with the stock bits - I just wondered if someone had found a nice solution already. Would FAR flaps still behave if they were only attached to lifting surfaces second-hand? like if they were attached to a mounting bracket of some sort, or a hydraulic ram?

Yeah, I have a whole family of Mk3s ( there's some a couple of pages back in this thread ); only really come into their own if you use fuselage mods though. Aside from the B9 kit I just installed & haven't had a decent look at, the Mk3 is where I usually start for *any* aircraft that actually has a proper function other than just being an aircraft.

Thirded the exploding wing issue. I'm really liking the kit though, thanks for the work I got my behemoth airborne to some extent; the fuselage sections have some rather odd clipping/warping issue at the joins at certain angles, shows up as the black arcs in this screenshot. Is it possible to FAR-enable the cockpits in the distribution, btw? I'll edit them myself anyway if there's nothing that will clash, but it would be convenient if they came like that.

"Sometimes". Strutted it to three other large components & it still falls off randomly. The wings apparently won't lift the aircraft anyway ( it's a tanker ) so back to the drawing board regardless

This stuff looks fantastic, but no matter how many struts I add, every time I drop this on the runway I get this Using the FAR versions. I'd use a different tail as I don't need the door, but there doesn't seem to be one.

I use Ferram's aero mod and have been for months so I can't remember what the default physics are like, but it sounds basically like you a) have too much weight ( possibly from adding more fuel ) and you're burning rocket fuel too early or from too low a speed. Wings are lightweight and at high altitude the drag is neglegible, adding more might help you gain a bit more speed before lighting the fires. If you're using nuclear rocket engines - please do, aerospikes are not a great solution for Kerbin at least - then you more or less want a 1:1 relationship with jets, unless you're just using two jets because one would result in symmetry problems. Add more air intakes - air is a fuel, you can assume it's ducted around the airframe so it's not entirely beyond the bounds of probability ( although it'd be nice if someone added reductions in airflow if the intake was at a ludicrous angle to the engines ), that way you'll get more altitude out of the jets. Lastly, jets can feed off rocket tanks so you don't absolutely need seperate jet fuel tanks.

Cardgame - I experienced that ( still can ) with some wings with reversed triangular structural wing pieces. I'm not sure off the top of my head if they expose an edge of a piece as part of the leading edge, but removing that section of wing cleared some really violent oscillation on every wing I tried. Am I right in thinking flaps move the CoL of the section of wing immediately in front of them forwards slightly? or is it just that extending a plain flap ( I have occasionally managed to make a split flap but not often ) shortens the chord length? I can't seem to design a satisfactory wing with flaps using the default parts that won't immediately pitch the plane up or down if it's not on the verge of stalling, tips or examples would be really appreciated. Even if I take care to balance the aircraft before adding control surfaces it usually wants to depart from level fairly rapidly on flap extension...

And on that note, wings tend to flex more than other components anyway, so even before they're generating enough lift to start moving relative to the fuselage they're likely to make your landing gear a little wobbly. I tend to fit canards to most planes - other than some go-anywhere STOL ones with light wing loadings or really small ones - because they're positive lift generators when you pitch up, rather than elevators which push down and in this case load your landing gear even more just when you want it loaded less. Also helps pitching up in the upper atmosphere where you want every scrap of lift, but that's a different matter. Canards are inherently unstable though - like balancing a stick from the bottom rather than letting it dangle from the top - so used carefully. As a last note OP, try and make your plane pitch up slightly when it's at rest on it's wheels, you may find it'll take off sooner than you think.

Well that might depend on the fuel - as far as I remember jet fuel is pretty easy to handle, oxidizers ( Skylon uses what presumably would be a considerable quantity of liquid oxygen ) on the other hand are a whole new thing and I'm not sure I'd want them around somewhere busy like Heathrow . However yes, they can make some good use of existing infrastructure, there's airfields all over the place. Just in the UK we're still closing military airbases, and some of those have gigantic runways.

There's a massive advantage to using spaceplanes on Kerbin vs Earth, in that you can get most of your orbital speed just with jet engines. If you can get your plane over the hump of around 40km altitude and still be going up then you're probably laughing all the way to orbit. Spaceplanes can have a larger proportion of their weight as cargo because they're getting lift from wings for a lot of the way up rather than the engines overcoming drag *and* providing lift - I have a 74t plane ( fully fuelled & otherwise empty ) which has so far lifted 25t to 100km orbit, I've not got anywhere near that efficiency out of a rocket yet. I tend to mostly use mine for shuttling Kerbals around - having a couple of designs for anything up to 18 saves me messing around - and launch hardware on rockets still as my cargo spaceplane is rather limited physically. I'm trying to design a piggyback cargo plane for taking bulky but relatively light things like large rovers to orbit, but there are some really horrible issues to overcome there; quite apart from simple matters like loading it, there's nasty thrust asymmetry once you're not bearing weight on the wings.

Edit: double post was queued.

Indeed, really useful that. I like spaceplanes. Small crew shuttle at the bottom - takes four crew, would probably reach Mun if I tried although I'm not sure about getting back without fuelling. Bulk cargo carrier at the top, takes 25t to LKO so far, still refining it. 18 passenger shuttle on the right, there's a couple of related cargo designs which I lacked the FPS to get in the shot

Not an area I've really gone into either, other than ground-skimming craft which can't really fly. Gave it a few goes - I use Ferram's aero mod so things are probably a bit different - and ran into horrendous stability problems, so ended up having to use Mechjeb. Still, some progress: One air intake is *massively* more than you need at low level, you could probably run ten engines off it - FAR was reporting 1500% of required air. Likewise as the air density is so high you hardly need any lifting surfaces with that power/weight.

Deorbited my first station, wasn't being used at all & just hurt fps. Looks like it enjoyed the process too... The crew took refuge in the rather cramped confines of my low orbit station - intended as a refuelling stop - so I had to construct & send a large plane up to get them. Docking it with a cargo plane also docked at the time was an exercise in FPS death... -- This is just what it is.