Van Disaster

So, yeah - still can't pin down this "stuck" business, but aside from the occasional complete lack of response, now I'm having a hard time getting any of my aircraft to hit the VS setting ( this is after I put saner easement entries in ). Most of the time they'll sit around +-5m/s of the setpoint for several minutes and eventually wake up and attempt to match the setpoint finally. I think that is probably the same issue to be honest. I've messed with the scalar setting and Ki on a bunch of craft, and got absolutely nowhere. It looks like horrible integer windup, but my VS controllers generally have an integer gain about 1/20th of the other two at best so I'm really not convinced.

I generally recommend Pilot Assistant to replace SAS for aircraft, it's WW2-ish autopilot levels in that you can set a heading and either an altitude or a rate of climb ( and now it has a speed hold ), and that's about it. It takes a lot of the irritation out of keyboard control of aircraft without removing most of the interest. You do have to tune it a little, though.

Want me to dig my 0.25 spaceplane lifter out with it's 278t payload? even had more nerfed engines than most people use and a bug in the wings that took 30% of the wing area off. Can't do this, can't do that, blah. I use FAR because it's logically consistent, so everything else I use has to fit too, or it's just boring. If you really want to kill SSTO launchers, use bigger planets - nothing else is going to make multistage launchers necessary. The Reaction Engines two-cycle atmospheric engine - it's a turbofan up to supersonic & then it's a ramjet with some tech derived from SABRE - is called Scimitar. I've got something basic running but I might just try doing it for AJE.

FAR has the option to show your actual effective airspeed - which varies with air density - using that at high altitude is quite illuminating because it goes awfully low, and your stall speed doesn't change. FAR panel in flight -> airspd settings -> choose your poison. You could always make another install to mess with it - I have 5 at the moment although they share most of their actual files due to linking across directories.

Well, actually yes - I forgot how fast rockets did get to a stable orbit, although my big rockets tended to chug along pretty slowly too - upper stage TWR is usually < 1 which is fine, but not actually necessary.

I've put entire stations up in spaceplanes, but yes the time to orbit is usually at least 3x a rocket. 64x is my next port of call once I have a stable install...

This isn't static, thankfully, but: every time I flip to the map view I get this expanding white disk centred on a vessel if I zoom, only for the duration of the actual zoom process. I've also got a rather annoying flashing white shape every now and then in the actual flight scene which might actually be centred on something in kerbin orbit, I guess. Odd thing is all I've changed recently I can remember is removed collisionfx. I'm sure I've actually come across this in previous versions, but no idea what it was caused by. Edit: narrowed it down a bit to something to do with my station: turning everythign that looks emissive off hasn't changed anything, so now I'm at a bit of a loss.

More station testing. Constructed a carrier spaceplane to take return-only shuttles to orbit, launched one: Consequently launched a docking module/escape hatch section to attach the escape shuttle to, and refuelled the station. Unlikely to be docking anything that big at it again anytime soon ( not until the next refuel, anyway ). Next up a bigger fuel dump, an orbital dockyard in a really elliptical orbit, and something to transfer between the two. Unless I fix Minmus first, then it can be my usual dockyard...

That won't do anything to reduce drag - you have to put them in a part which is recognised as a cargo bay, part clipping by itself won't shield anything. You might have centralised the drag, though.

Landing VTOL planes - or more to the point stopping them, I'm terrible at designing something that wants to stop flying controllably.

Skylon-type engines are airbreathing rockets rather than scramjets ( although at that point what is a jet & what is a rocket starts to get a little blurred ) - and they're looking at most of the payload being liquid hydrogen, iirc. That's with jet levels of specific impulse in airbreathing mode. However if you try a spaceplane in RSS full size you'll also end up with it being mostly fuel, and then you go back and look at rockets again

All of them, and I regularily use Mechjeb, although only the ascent AP + node execution would be anything resembling an autopilot. I might try the autoland again if I have to regularily make the same landing over and over.

SSTO launchers don't require jets ( or wings ), I think there's two sets of definitions clashing here... it's not just an issue with jets. You can easily SSTO just about *anything* thanks to the physical makeup of the planets. Full-size RSS is not actually fun though, I've found personally. I'm not sure completely thrashing jets is the answer here - what they do need to be is *way* larger, especially the Rapier - that thing shouldn't function at all without a cooler. Jets with performance anything close to the stock ones should probably take up most of the fuselage of a Mk1 plane instead of being an afterthought stuck on the back. Not quite sure what to do about jetspam for first stage vertical launchers, if there's anything you can do... and none of that makes SSTO ( and indeed fully recoverable ) rockets any harder either. But, so what.

Just off the gantry/~80m/s, whichever is last, I usually attempt to do an actual gravity turn. Unless it's a winged rocket, then it's a bit flatter to actually make use of wings. FAR ofc.

Problem: how to loft a crew escape shuttle to the station, given it only has RCS thrust out of atmosphere? Solution: strap it onto another spaceplane.

Fuel is a very small percent of real life rocket costs too. It's Kerbin's size which does it - you can SSTO just about any launcher, although really huge rocket stacks are probably more efficient with one lower stage at least. And yes the stock "jets" are daft.

I think most people design payloads to fit their existing craft in FAR - optimising FAR spaceplanes ( as opposed to throwing one together that just happens to work ) is a reasonably involved and quite time-consuming process. If I have something that won't fit in a plane then I'll put it in a fairing & stick it to the top of a rocket. - - - Updated - - - Yeah... no. For starters the MM patches aren't multiplicative, one replaces the other ( aside from B9's basic jet, which actually increases the thrust +4% ) so no they don't nerf on top of each other - the only thing that may mix up is the velocity curve, and B9's is *less* of a nerf than FAR's. Having dumped my DB out it's using the less restrictive version, so yes that's as good as it gets. "B9: crap mod"? not even going to bother.

What size plane are we talking? mk1 size or mk3? going ballistic extra-atmosphere with stock turbojets with a Mk3-size craft would seem to want enough turbojets that you might as well use a rocket... Did a quick& dirty conversion of a medium B9 plane with turbojets & nukes, obviously not enough turbojets: They run out of puff rather fast, that's ~half takeoff thrust. Would behoove Squad to make a bigger Rapier for 1.0, I think. Edit: actually they're ~50kN at takeoff which seems a bit low even after FAR's got at them. Think I'll investigate what's going on there... I should point out that it's not the plugin that nerfs engines, it's a modulemanager patch included in the FAR distro. You could just not use that & have your stock rated engines still.

If the rapier wasn't a thing I'd still be using turbojet/nuclear combos - I spent a long time using those even when B9 Sabres appeared and occasionally still build one for the hell of it. I've found generally that just swapping a turbojet for a rapier seems reasonable ( and well, I use big B9 sabres for big craft now anyway ). FAR turbojets are not going to get you that near orbital velocity on Kerbin though ( they can on Laythe if you're patient! ). If you have a high wing loading - if you're building large you tend to end up with a pretty high wing loading anyway given current parts don't favour blended wing/lifting body designs - you're not going to get much out of intake spamming - you won't have the speed to get enough lift out of the wing to get any higher without going faster. Using SABRES I'll switch at 25-30km, at that point I can't go any faster, and I've got to the point that pitching up more isn't actually gaining anything.

Turbojets: *Heavily* nerfed. The basic jet won't get you supersonic, the other one is probably about half it's power and runs out at around 1300m/s. There are strong reasons for this though, given how the rest of FAR works. Rapiers are still suitable engines for spaceplanes. The rest of the guidelines, forget it. For sanity's sake you want a minimum jet TWR of about 0.3 but that's pretty flexible - if you have a really slick low-drag design you can go lower. There's no real guidelines about control surfaces because that's also dependent on your design - fortunately FAR gives you a couple of tools you can check your craft with, you don't even have to understand them too well, just enough to either know "red is bad" for the static tab, or what shapes are bad for the graphs. Wing area - well, divide the total area by the craft mass and you'll get the wing loading, higher means higher takeoff/landing speed but compensates by being lower drag ( relatively ) because you have less wing for the overall size of the craft. Countering that, you'll need to fly higher AoA angles which will increase drag again. So you can see there's no simple rules. Generally if I was to try and analyse how I think I've got enough wing - I look at the top of the plane, imagine it has straight wings who's span is about that of the fuselage, imagine their chord length is about 1/4-1/3 span and then start morphing that area into a suitable wing shape depending on the craft. Really though I just look at something and go "yes, now that has enough wing I think" and then check what AoA it will fly at for a few target speeds. My flightplan for a heavy spaceplane goes "preset 12deg pitch hold on the runway" using Pilot assistant SSAS, and fly that to space obvously if it needs it I'll adjust so I don't fly too fast or slowly at different altitudes - too fast down low and there's possible damage and it's a waste of fuel, too slow up high and Lift/Drag goes a bit too far towards drag. Deorbiting I start about half an orbit back, put peri about 15km over the landing site, and generally just stay flat, making sure I don't go over 40k Q ( dynamic pressure ). You don't need to bleed speed doing aerobatics if your descent profile is nice and gentle. Spoilers are just aerodynamic braking devices. Flaps also slow you down, but they also provide more lift at lower speeds - they're giving part of the wing a higher angle of attack. If you put them off-centre of CoL then they'll work like elevator surfaces & pitch the plane around, so you'd better have some good compensating elevators. Rockets: 1.2ish TWR, start turning at 80m/s or so - if you've got a good rocket you can turn all stability & guidance off and just give it a nudge at that point, and it'll go all the way to orbit by itself - just keep turning. Ballpark of 45-50deg over at 10km and pretty much all the way over at 28km. dV for very low Kerbin orbit 3000-3800. Is it worth switching? well I've been using FAR since about a month after I started playing, back at possibly 0.18.3 ( I had the demo before then but I don't remember when I got the full game - but that's some idea of timespan ) when I got frustrated that the stock aero just didn't make any sense, and never regretted it once aside from when it had the odd bug itself . Nobody can say how close the new stock aero will be to FAR, but I suspect a lot nearer to FAR than the current one, so hey give it a go. Don't bother with NEAR though, it was created as a joke

I did just notice the SPH TWR ( 0.31, that's ok with FAR - you'll take 30 mins to orbit but it's enough to get you to engine changeover ) is probably *with* the rocket engine - that engine is probably 3/4 of the thrust, pull that off and see what you're left with. I don't remember what an orange tank weighs so I guessed at it, that's the nearest craft size-wize I have at the moment if you want to check wing areas and so on. Would take another 20t up in that, any more and I'd switch to a four-engined version just for sanity. @Eddiew: is that stock or FAR? because that is considerably less wing than a FAR craft generally likes.

Sounds good especially the multi-tag thing, I just noticed how useful that would be.

B9 pWings The cockpit you'll have to wait on until I get round to finishing/rebuilding it

I've got a few hundred tons into orbit with a twr of 0.24 under FAR ( not recommended! it took two complete circumnavigations to get to altitude to flip to rockets ) - a lot will depend on the cD of the aircraft, and that is quite dependent on what AoA it can hold as well as it's shape; all this is stuff current stock users will probably have to worry about come 1.0. FAR nerfs stock turbojets very hard. That does bring up a good point - does this ship have enough rocket power/dV to manage accelerating to orbit from probably around 1300m/s?

My FreeBSD box appears to be able to run linux binaries natively, although as it's a server I've not tried X11 apps ( and there's never been a reason to do that either ). Can you get BSD GPU drivers?