Van Disaster

Ah, yes, building maintenance parts into station sections would suit me fine - I would have MM'd a KAS container into a fixed part to do that already but at that point I might as well have just attached the parts to the section directly...

It's even more complicated for spaceplanes by us needing to be going at max jet velocity by the time we arrive at whatever height we run out of jet acceleration, but going too fast too low brings dynamic pressure too high & burns excessive fuel up through drag loss... For lower powered stuff I usually just leave it at 11-12 deg pitch angle until about 15km - any more than that usually just increases AoA rather than any noticeable change in rate of ascent - and then reduce it to 8 until it stops climbing, and then gradually go back up to 12-13 & transition when I can't get any more out of jets.

This is looking rather good indeed; I think I'll give the next version a shot once these few bugs are gone However, moving containers around "manually" in space is not so far-fetched, and it's something I've made use of building stations by dragging a container over to a section of station & attaching stuff to a segment to turn it into a temporary craft. Having to keep going back & forwards to the other side of a station would be fairly horrid, and building an entire container craft with a KAS anchor is a bit much for a few parts maybe just make them too heavy to cart around on a surface?

I would suspect there's an ideal EAS, flying a constant Spc Excess Power looks like it'd eventually have you pointing straight up given the way it climbs as you do.

I suspect you could tell FAR to change the wing's parameters on the fly, but that would again need a custom plugin. If you want to see how to pass initial parameters to FAR then check either of the procedural wing mods; updating it during flight I don't know about, because I don't think anyone's done it yet. The problem with IR is basically weak joints and unsuitable models, I'm fairly sure both could be solved with a custom wing glove model.

Helps even more when you build the ship offworld As people have said, only lifting fuel for one direction of a return trip is a total gamechanger. The other thing is, you don't have to base your space program just around trips to and from KSC anymore, which your original post didn't consider.

Or the third option is to shift a significant amount of lift to fixed canards - which is just the reverse of a conventional tail. This is less stable in some ways but does come with the advantage that to pitch up you add more total lift rather than reducing total lift, and also you can set it up so the canard stalls first which will drop the nose & automatically unstall everything again. Whatever you do I think you need to spread your lifting surface out more longditudinally.

My feeling would be to replace the horizontal controls by a bigger fixed front stabiliser with seperate control surfaces as a start.

Well, certainly looks promising. Still stalls at 50m/s but some quite absurd AoA is possible.

The runway is just as bad... landed 200t on it at a sink rate of about 1m/s, the runway explodes *after the plane is fully landed*. Has happened several times... usually the first time it's in scene since game start I think, though.

V*(L/D) is used to work out when you're going to run out of fuel, I think. Pics are worth a thousand words! the coefficients are detailed in the help button & the FAR wiki, but Mw is the pitching force applied by the plane's downward movement - I assume this is relative to the plane, so any AoA will have a downward component even if your altitude doesn't change. Positive means pitching the nose up will encourage more nose pitch up, so if you don't catch it by applying an equalizing pitch-down force it'll backflip, too high negative and you won't have enough authority to counter it & raise the nose. CoM behind CoL will mean a positive pitch moment is being applied all the time ( levers again ) which is a naturally divergent state and needs active countering somehow - designing a plane which changed the ratio of lift provided by the wings & stabilizers and had positive Mw at low AoA and negative at higher AoA would actually be a rather interesting design, but I don't know how to do that If it's red at Mach3/25km I suspect your predicted pitch angle is so high that the relative position of CoL & CoM has gone the wrong way; might want to either get there more slowly & build up a little more speed, or add some more wing. The payload's CoM won't matter, if it's part of the plane it's all one system & the resultant CoM is what matters ( until you unload it! ). @eddiew: if you have a > 1 twr you don't even need a runway, might as well go straight up & forget the wings, even.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/98205-0-25-ORIGAMI-foldable-antenna-dishes-for-RemoteTech One of those is huge, the antenna with the blue lights in this. The other one is a foldable one which won't fall apart in the atmosphere ( if it's folded ), iirc. Both should be handy for OPM, assuming they still work - no reason they shouldn't tbh. I dropped RT for 0.90 so I didn't test.

Hm, having some hard to quantify issues handing over from SSAS->PA at the moment - will PA ghost whatever control system you're using if it doesn't have control itself? I think maybe it's taking over control expecting a neutral aircraft when it's not actually neutral.

Parts work fine, I'm sure I've seen a patch for older career somewhere - however I don't think they're balanced for current career? not sure, given I don't actually use career. The greenhouse needs a modulemanager patch for whatever lifesupport mod you're using if any, doesn't do anything by default.

Not just fins, any control surface - all the surface is is a lever system where the amount of deflection is the force, but it's a common fault to not pay attention to leverage and then wondering why control surfaces can't keep a plane pointing straight. The shape of a wing can also be seen in terms of leverage, but that's a little harder to put into a simple description. Edit: took an illustrative shot; this is a pretty small plane, I stuck a mk1 fuselage piece and a stock tailfin on the top for comparison. This is the minimum size fin I'd look at using, and even that is not terribly laterally stable - although this is actually a spaceplane & it needs a large fin for low density atmospheres. I'd probably use a big fin anyway, though.

Control should be ok if the engines have transitioned to something vertical and the rcs is active, as long as the wings hand over lift together. I use B9 pWings at the moment, there's something a bit odd going on there with MAC changes too, and I've even been through the source of that dll to try and trace it and can't see anything...

VTOL transition to hover, in this case; I have endless trouble trying to stop flying in a controlled fashion, usually because one wing stalls first. You could use it for lift dumping if you're trying to land in a hurry, but it might be more sensible to just go round again

You can stall control surfaces seperately from whatever you attached them to, which can get interesting when you're trying to stop something back-flipping... but also helpful if you want decent airbrakes. @tetrydis: presumably that works the other way then, so if I wanted to stall a wing I could just stall the leading edge control?

You can put pretty large wings on your rockets, even - https://imgur.com/a/ussfe - just on that thing which would be pretty slick as a standard sort of rocket, it saved ~300dV to orbit, and that was 0.25 FAR which had no skin drag.

@capi3101: B9 pWings are standalone, you don't need any of the B9 mod to make them work. I build tails out of pWings unless it's a really small plane and I can't be bothered, a couple of the tail pieces are all I have left of stock ( or anyone else's ) fixed wings.

As long as the existing controls move together it should be ok, I think - if they seperate at some point you might end up with biplane effects. Leading edge controls work just like simple flaps as far as I can tell, basically just a section of wing at a different AoA. I think whether that section is stalled will affect the section directly behind, so it does sound like a way of increasing AoA without stalling, as leading edge devices should. @blowfish: from using aero vis at various mach numbers with one of my craft with too-long span, I'm pretty sure mach angle doesn't come into any drag calcs. Mach angle at mach 5 is something like 11 degrees, my outer engines should be like parachutes...

@Ferram: So FAR thinks the front node of the second piece is in front of the nosecone, effectively? ( or merges colliders or something and ends up with an open front node, I guess ). I wonder if just tweaking the nosecone attach node Z would help... guess I'll see. Cantab, I'll second the procedural wing suggestion, especially for deltas, you can need some huge control surfaces.

SilverFox's weather mod might be in a state to do dynamic clouds by now, I don't know where it's progressed to at the moment.

Still discovering neat things you can do... I wish there was an actual texture atlas & you could choose a UV offset to get sets of different styles. Must install some C# environment, I guess.

Discovered a funky little easter egg-esque feature of B9 pWings. And yes this is SSTO even if it doesn't look like it. I can't seem to find a showcase for either general aircraft or spaceplanes-which-aren't-SSTO :S not sure if starting a combined one is a good idea.