capi3101

Better go ahead and post it - I got close my own self last night; SRB was on top of the VAB, but not on the helipad, so my run didn't count.

True. Though I have a low-end box; the ground around Kerbin in my local KSP instance has a tendency to eat flags for breakfast. Hence the use of something a bit sturdier in my case.

Try sticking a small decoupler on one end, a batt and maybe a few science instruments on the other, and OX-STAT panels on the remaining sides. Instant drop probe for rovers. I use them with my Hellhound rover as ground markers - you drop one on both ends of the runway, another about a kilometer inland, another five kilometers inland, park the rover ten kilometers out and reset them all as bases, and boom: an ILS.

Built a working trebuchet. 100% stock except for an NREP weight. Jeb didn't make it any further than that middle ring...I think it needs moar boosters...... (For the curious, the thing pivots on an I-beam, a small decoupler, and a cubic octagonal strut attached to a launch clamp on both sides. The test weight was set to 25 tonnes at the time of firing and the armature is seven XL girders, with the pivot on the second girder) In career news, I sent my first Moneymaker probe to orbit last night via transporter spaceplane. I'm actually disappointed in the whole flight - powered by a quad of RAPIER engines, the thing didn't get past 27,000 meters and 1500 m/s before it switched over, waaay earlier than it should've. I'm thinking I had too much drag going on, on account of I used Shock Cone Intakes instead of Ram Air intakes for the design. Anyway, I had to borrow fuel from the payload to get the thing into orbit. This turned out to have no effect on the mission - to put the Moneymaker in a specific orbit for a FinePrint contract. Landing the plane was surprisingly difficult - this was a craft that handled beautifully without payload, and one that I was able to land unpowered during testing. I did finally land it - on the runway, but to spite me the game tore off the wingtips off for no apparent reason after touch down (seriously - I was level at that point, moving forward, wings poofed out of existence). I still recovered about √86,000 from the √106,000 launch of the vehicle. Going to have to figure out where exactly its shortcomings are before I try again - by all rights I shouldn't have had the problems I did with that plane...

Actually, I have heard of folks using ions for extra stability (this was a while back, before the ion engines were buffed - they now provide four times as much thrust as they used to!). Does add a fair amount of weight, but on the other hand the endurance of the ions is usually substantially greater than an RCS based system. Plus you don't have to hold down any keys to make it work - you just set the throttle and go.

My decision tree is pretty much the same as 5thHorseman's, on account of the OKTO2 being the smallest and least massive probe core available. That said, I have been known to use the RGUs for final booster stages if they're available, because they are the cleanest looking when placed in-line and you don't need a whole lot of control - just some - to self-clean that last booster stage in stock.

Here come the Visigoths!!! Man the trebuchets!!!!!! For your next trick: Captain Ahab Kerman wants revenge upon the Great White Ass Kraken that cost him his leg! So find ye the Kraken and spear him up his blowhole!!! Okay, so the Capn's got bad eyes - so for safety's sake, find a dead Kraken and plant a flag in it somewhere. Return trip not necessary. EDIT: Okay, this is a bit late since as of this edit somebody's already beaten the challenge - but since I was asked a question via PM, I'll answer it. The Kraken I'm referring to in this case is a specific easter egg on Bop.

Alright...getting back to the second plane design, here's what I can guess. As best I can tell, here's the parts you've got: 3 Mk2 Bicouplers, 2 Advanced Canards, 6 Shock Intakes, an Inline Cockpit, a Mk2 LF+O Tank, a Mk2-Mk1 Adapter, 4 24-77 engines, 3 Turbojets, 2 Delta Wings, 2 Elevon 2s, a Tail Fin for a vertical stabilizer in the back, 3 Small Gear Bays and 2 Reaction Stabilizers. That sound about right? Assuming the fuel tanks are all full and my part analysis is right, your plane's mass is just over 18.5 tonnes - it carries 810 units of Liquid Fuel and 990 units of Oxidizer, and has a total lift rating of 5.9. General rule - you want 1 lift rating for every tonne of aircraft (the actual ratio is 1.15 lift rating per tonne, but the 1:1 relationship is easier to manage and remember). Based on that, you've got about a third of the amount of lift you want for a plane of that mass. EDIT: I've got that backwards - it's 1.15 tonnes per lift rating, or roughly 2.3 tonnes per Delta Wing (lift rating = 2). Another general rule - for Turbojets, you want one per 15 tonnes of aircraft. Since you've got only 18.5 tonnes, two turbojets should be sufficient to do the job. If you're worried about asymmetric flameouts, add rudders - I had a two-engine design with four rudders that did an asymmetric flameout and remained controllable - it even maintained its heading. I still throttled back to get the other engine working again, but I didn't have to correct a flat spin as well. How's the handling on the design? I'm not seeing a large number of control surfaces there, though from what I'm seeing you should have reasonable pitch and roll authority. Yaw authority, not so much... Pretty sure you've got an overkill on fuel, Oxidizer in particular. Unless you're going to the Mun with the design, you probably need about 530-540 units of Oxidizer tops, and that's probably an over-estimate. That said, you're making space. How about landing?

Folks have generally covered the reasons to use planes versus rockets, so I'll just expound a bit on the efficiency front. A well-designed asparagus-staged rocket usually has a payload fraction of somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-18% give or take, this for a vehicle whose only parts might be recovered would be a portion of the payload (if that - if the payload is a satellite, you're not getting any money back for the parts at all). A crappily-designed transporter spaceplane will generally have a payload fraction around 25%, which is the figure I use when I design my planes. That particular lift vehicle can be recovered intact - you will recoup at least some of the cost of the parts when the plane lands (provided you don't botch the landing, of course); land it at the KSC runway or its environs and you'll get a 100% refund. So in that case, you get most of your money back - which makes a plane as a booster vehicle way more cost effective. Naturally, planes are way trickier to design and fly than rockets are. Fortunately, there are guides to help with both the design and piloting aspects. I generally point spaceplane newbs to two places - Keptin's Basic Aircraft Design Explained - Simply with Pictures post (a great place to begin) and to DocMoriarty's KSP Space Plane Construction and Operation Guide (a great place for specifics and ideas on what exactly you can do with planes).

I would suggest switching to docking mode when you drive a rover on principle. With a rover as light as yours and wheels as powerful as the ones you've chosen (for a rover of the mass you've got, both the bouncy wheels and the ruggedized ones are actually too powerful), if you keep it in staging mode the W and S keys will try to flip your rover as well as accelerate the things - and it'll probably be successful, whether that's what you intended or not. Rovers: keep 'em low, keep 'em wide, SAS on, drive in docking mode. Add a reaction wheel and keep the critical bits (core, batts/RTGs, etc.) surrounded by parts with high impact tolerance (like girders and panels)

OP, I haven't got the time this morning to delve into your craft's design and give you as much assistance as I'd like to. I'll just point you to DocMoriarty's KSP Space Plane Construction and Operation Guide for pointers on how to build and fly the kind of planes you're wanting to do. The guide's designed for stock craft. If I get some free time later today, I'll revisit this thread. At a very quick glance, it looks like your design is light on the amount of lift it needs to produce for the mass of the craft you've got.

Didn't do much of anything last night besides contracts. I'm finding that I'm more comfortable with using NavUtilities to line up on the Runway and then going with my old tried and true method of determining where my altitude should be rather than going with its glide slopes. I know I can program in my preferred glide slope into the mod - and I'd thought I'd done that already, but apparently I haven't (or at least, I didn't calculate the angle correctly). Might be time to try again. After my latest Moneymaker launch, I decided that for the next probe I'd transport it up to Kerbin orbit with a DocMoriarty-style transport plane. I got all the maths done on it, built it with the basics and test flew it without the payload. Used TAC to dump out all the fuel and tried an unpowered landing. Made the runway, albeit quite a bit to the left of the center of the strip. She's pretty balanced - RCS Build Aid is telling me the CoM shifts all of three centimeters between full and empty. A little light on the roll authority but otherwise a good plane. I'm looking forward to seeing how she handles with a Moneymaker attached...

I would suggest grabbing the FinePrint mod - a) it'll be stock in 0.90, the contracts are more interesting than stock as a rule, IMHO and c) the contracts pay more as a rule. Combine that with a set of strategies that converts money/rep to science and you might be able to fill out the tech tree without leaving Kerbin at all...

Not much of anything, really. Sent Bob up to rescue Milford Kerbin. Tried to land with NavUtilities. Crashed and killed both Kerbals. Reverted. Tried to land without NavUtilities. No problem whatsoever... I think what's happening there is that I got used to doing something one way and can't get used to doing it the other. NavUtilities is a pretty awesome mod - and still useful for telling me how far away I am from the runway. I think, though I'm trying to follow the guides it gives me too closely...information overload, as it were.

Spent last night generally out making money through lesser activities. Lots of flags, lots of crew reports sent back from Mun and Minmus, lots of crew reports sent back from orbit of Mun and Minmus. I'm up to √3,000,000 now - should be ready to fund my Duna/Ike mission. I did do something of mild interest last night - I combined a FinePrint aerial survey in the vicinity of KSC with a sub-orbital TR-18A parts test with a robotic spaceplane design. I knew going into it that the flight looked a little short on oxidizer, but I went ahead anyway; missions were successfully completed. Now, what I should've done was let the plane come back down on the other side of Kerbin and use the excess liquid fuel to just fly back. What I did do was, after the TR-18A parts test, I went ahead and circularized the orbit thinking I could just deorbit in the right spot and come back in. Fine and dandy, dandy and fine...but the game was telling me the maneuver would take 50 m/s of delta-V and KER was telling me I had 15 m/s left. Once again, I did the stupid thing and burned. KER wasn't lying. Wound up with a wonky orbit with a periapsis just above 70k... So...refueling mission!! Sent Jeb and Bill up in a plane heavy with oxidizer, carrying a winch and a KAS Radial Port. I thought the Liquid Fuel level was a bit short for the mission, but I went anyway... Made a successful rendezvous. Jeb bumped the plane while he was getting the port in place - which I thought was no big deal. When I got him back to grab the winch cable, the target was over fifty meters away and the range was still opening. I did manage to get the winch cable in and docked and Jeb back to his plane - by which time the two craft were seventy meters apart. Doesn't sound like much, but that's still a hell of a spacewalk if you ask me. Anyway, I got the fuel levels balanced out with both craft now (Jeb and Bill's flight probably didn't have the LF it needed to make a successful de-orbit, but at least they had RCS for backup - this way they have a little more fuel for flying). I'll try to land them both tonight if I get the opportunity. I'm just hoping I don't overshoot the runway when I make the de-orbit burns; I doubt either flight has sufficient fuel for a lot of atmospheric maneuvering. At least I know already that in an emergency a Mk-2 cockpit makes a pretty descent boat...if I can land it slowly enough......

I find the RCS Build Aid mod useful for spaceplane construction in general because it will show you your "dry center of mass" (i.e. where the CoM will go when the plane runs out of fuel). That definitely is helpful for when you're looking to determine where the CoL should be. Going to have to try the linear ports; I've been using the standard RCS blocks for my (few) planes that included RCS capabilities. (That's now four endorsements for the RCS Build Aid mod on this thread alone...)

You could try putting one of the little ladders right above or right below the hatch; that may not solve the sliding but at least it'll give you something to grab on to so you don't risk flinging yourself off into space...

Hmm...1,600 is a low switchover speed; that's probably why you ran out of oxidizer. Much above 20k you want your elevation to be relatively shallow - generally eight to ten degrees is sufficient, so long as you don't start heading back down again. Like 'em or not, without enough air you won't get going fast enough or high enough to head to space. 's true regardless of which engine you use.

DocMoriarty answers that - if you're using RAPIERs, assume 39 units of Liquid Fuel per tonne of take off weight and 23-24 units of Oxidizer per tonne of take-off weight. This give you enough to take off, make orbit, fool around in orbit a bit, deorbit and give you some flying time before you land. For any additional fuel you bring (say, if you're planning to use the plane to go fly around on Laythe a bit), you can just use the Rocket Equation to figure out your delta-V like any other rocket.

Last night I fulfilled a bunch of contracts - a couple of flag contracts, a sci contract from minmus, that FinePrint contract to construct a ground base on Minmus (turns out the only thing I forgot to do was wait ten seconds) and another contract to stick a satellite around Kerbin - which I did with a Moneymaker probe. Big contract of the night was to test a KR-2L engine in low atmospheric flight. I built my first parts testing spaceplane for the job - turned out to be the very first plane I'd ever built that required no elevator input to take off. Test successful, landing botched - the same features that gave me a hands-free takeoff also gave me a plane that wanted to bounce instead of land. I recovered most of the plane...flipped over and sans all three engines (including the KR-2L). Still made a profit from the mission, just not as much as I could've made. At this point I have three contracts to fulfill - one to catch a small tater, and contracts to explore Duna and Ike. Been a while since I've been to the red planet, so planning is now underway.

That's fairly normal, actually. 1300 is about where you want to be at that altitude. Well, you can start by attaching things to either wall. A docking port is a good start. You do have to add your payload at launch or pick it up in orbit. Myself, I use cargo bays to hide un-aerodynamic bits (totally unnecessary, as I don't use NEAR or FAR). Stuff like batteries, control stabilizers, RCS tanks, etc. all nicely fit inside one. I will say that you should probably strut down anything you stick in the bay. DocMoriarty's got pointers on that. Basically, you can set yourself out a primitive ILS with flags, probes or anything else you can align with the runway. NavUtilities is a mod that will give you a runway ILS if you prefer to go that route. I use both methods my own self. Probably the best way to avoid the spammy look of too many Ram Intakes is to use Structural Intakes - but yeah, if you want your plane to make orbit, you've got to have a lotta air. Keeps the jets running at higher altitudes, see.

I generally point spaceplane newbs to two places - Keptin's Basic Aircraft Design Explained - Simply with Pictures post (a great place to begin) and to DocMoriarty's KSP Space Plane Construction and Operation Guide (a great place for specifics and ideas on what exactly you can do with planes). DocMoriarty's guide focuses on use of the RAPIER engine. It's slightly out of date (by slightly I mean it was designed for 0.24.2 and he hasn't yet updated it for the changes in 0.25), but so far the only thing I've seen that's major is that the new Wing Connectors are functionally equivalent to Delta Wings. In answer to your specific questions... 1) You want to get up above 10,000 as quickly as possible. Assuming you've got what it takes to do that (in my experience, most spaceplanes fail either because they veer off course and crash during take-off - which keptin explains - or they haven't got sufficient lift/thrust and wind up going in the drink), start off by getting your prograde marker to at least 45 degrees above the horizon as quickly as you can after takeoff. Depending on your AoA, this may mean getting the nose up to 55-60 degrees or more; so be it. You can start leveling off after 10,000; at that point you don't want to be ascending greater than 100 m/s. Shoot for this velocity profile: 350 m/s at 11k, 450 at 14k, 650 at 16k, 850 at 19k and 1300 at 23 km. If your speed is increasing rapidly, you are going up too fast; if it's barely budging, you're going up too slowly. You want to try to get most of your orbital velocity before your engines start running out of air (or, if you use RAPIERS like DocMoriarty, before they kick over) - but, you want to keep the turbojets running for as long as you can. If they start flaming out, throttle back. Eventually, you'll stop accelerating on turbojets alone - that's when you kick on the rockets. If you're above 30k when that happens, you're probably okay to shut off your jets, close your intakes and angle up to 45 degrees - at that point your plane is a rocket and you want to get it out of the atmosphere as quickly as you can. 2) There are so many things to look for when you're building a spaceplane it's not funny. Refer to the guides I linked for specifics. As a rule - you want your CoL slightly behind and slightly above the CoM for maximum control, and preferably you want to design your plane so the CoM doesn't shift around too much - you definitely don't want it to where it shifts behind the CoL (if it does, you're more likely to lithobrake than land). You want your CoT aligned with the CoM, again for control. You want sufficient lift and sufficient thrust - sufficient thrust being 1 Basic Jet engine per ten tonnes of craft, 1 RAPIER engine per thirteen tonnes of craft, or 1 Turbojet engine per 15 tonnes of craft; sufficient lift is generally 1 lift unit per tonne (or roughly 2.3 tonnes per Delta Wing, like DocMoriarty says). You want good steering authority on all three axes, and if necessary you want sufficient SAS to hold your craft's attitude. And you want to be able to takeoff and land safely. 3) As others have suggested, I'd use Turbojets or RAPIERs for a proper spaceplane - Basic Jets excel for low-level aircraft (like you would want for parts testing) and for VTOL capabilities. You're short on thrust and short on intakes - thrust can be remedied by swapping out the engines for your design. You want no less than three Ram Air Intakes or the equivalent per turbojet - that's your craft's big weakness at the moment if you want to make space (you have the equivalent of three at the moment; you want at least twice that amount). You're awesome on the lift department. That CoM might shift a bit too far aft...I'd have to run your craft through the RCS Build Aid mod to know for sure, though. EDIT: These would be the OP's original questions, not the second set. Going to address those next...

I generally point spaceplane newbs to two places - Keptin's Basic Aircraft Design Explained - Simply with Pictures post (a great place to begin) and to DocMoriarty's KSP Space Plane Construction and Operation Guide (a great place for specifics and ideas on what exactly you can do with planes). DocMoriarty's guide focuses on use of the RAPIER engine. It's slightly out of date (by slightly I mean it was designed for 0.24.2 and he hasn't yet updated it for the changes in 0.25), but so far the only thing I've seen that's major is that the new Wing Connectors are functionally equivalent to Delta Wings. Only bit of general advice I'll give when you're designing a spaceplane is to assume your payload fraction will be 25%; use that figure to guesstimate the final mass of your craft, and start designing from there.

Decided to stop fiddling around with the Waste of Time 7 after adding VTOL capabilities to the craft - it inexplicably started spinning around faster and faster when the VTOLs were set to full throttle until structural failure occurred. I'm assuming either insufficient SAS or that the CoT was too low or imbalanced. Either way, without VTOL the craft will not be capable of doing its mission - and at the point I gave up I was on the verge of rage... So I decided to pick my regular "pays money" game back up. Launched a Moneymaker to Munar orbit; arrived going the wrong direction for the required FinePrint contract, so I got to a flip around at Apoapsis - good thing the probe's designed with a serious excess of fuel. That went well. Moar money. Landed Jeb on Minmus and finished the "Explore Minmus" contract. Moar money. Got a space station in orbit of Minmus for a FinePrint contract. Moar money. Landed a lab-habitat base on Minmus for a FinePrint contract. I haven't been awarded money for that one yet - which makes me wonder what part of the design didn't meet the contract's specifications. A supply mission might be in order. Finally, I returned the Aux-IVx2 and Bob from his extended repair mission of the original Moneymaker 7 mission. Aerobraking to orbit went well and the deorbit overshot the KSC runway by only about 100 kilometers - came in with 90 units of oxidizer remaining but enough LF that I could've flown around for another hour if necessary. Had a few hairy moments getting turned around again (one of my RAPIERs flamed out on me unexpectedly - which is what I get for closing the intakes at low altitude - and sent it tumbling, but I was able to recover). Landing went smoothly right up until the end...I either didn't land with my wings level or the stance of the rear gear was too narrow; either way the plane tipped over and I sheared off the outboard starboard wings. I was able to correct and get the plane stopped - which was good, since I had forgotten how to activate the ejection sequence - so the whole rescue mission cost me the price of three Swept Wings, an Elevon 3, a Communotron 16 (the real "payload" of the whole mission) and the fuel. Aside from the glitch at the end, a rousing success.

So...where are we at? Are we still on the "switch docking ports" one?