ComradeGoat

I take them there on tugs, apart from the NERVA powered ones. My experiments with air breathing rocket landers on Laythe ... killes a lot of kerbals. Found planes considerably easier to use, and more flexible. YMMV.

Landing on Laythe, landing on Laythe and landing on Laythe. Especially if you want to a) land on solid ground, and get back to orbit again.

This. Seems to be little point in building shuttles, given we have viable spaceplanes. The advantage of a shuttle is that it can glide to a landing on a runway and be reusable. If you want to get crew up and down easily and quickly, it's much easier in KSP to use a capsule with a parachute. If you want reusability, why bother with the "jack of all trades, master of none" shuttle approach when you can do a spaceplane? So little practical use, but they look kinda cool.

I'm sure the devs know what they're doing, but currently the game is pretty well balanced, given the reduced size of the solar system and planets, for lifting and transfers with the current rockets. If there's suddenly a single tank and single engine that's equivalent to an entire asparagus staged heavy lifter, it seems it would be very easy to unbalance the game. Put one in orbit (because now you can build even heavier lifters, by aspargusing these new tanks and engines), and there's no need to build efficiently to get to Jool or Moho or wherever; you suddenly have an embarrassment of fuel and thrust.

I can't help but noticing the severe lack of a rudder... ETA: To elaborate, the two canards you've stuck vertically to try and control lateral stability are almost in line with the COL/COM, which means they have precious little leverage. You need a lateral stabiliser as far aft of the COL/COM as you can get it. Perhaps try a delta wing stuck vertically above your rearmost engine with one of the large control surfaces mounted on it, set to control yaw.

Seen this a lot. If you're gonna be close enough anyway, just drop out of time warp and the game will figure it out and put you in the right SOI.

Standard ascent profile for many of my spaceplanes: circular orbit at about 35K.

Another possibility: they're making contact with another part of your craft as they exit, and it's pushing them off the ladder. Make sure the exit is unobstructed.

Sandbox. Tried career, was fun for a bit, but rapidly found it grindy, so I went back to building my space empire.

Those are the lights from your landing gear, which I notice you have on backwards! ETA: Ninja'd!

I tested my Tylo lander on Kerbin, by doing a powered descent that was always well below terminal velocity. When I got to Tylo, I landed and took off again on the first attempt. Huge success! Mine end up living in a space station at Laythe. In theory, I could use a nuclear tug to drag the habitation module back to Kerbin with everyone on board, but in practice it's a one-way trip. Maybe one day I'll bring someone back, just to prove I can. Seems a waste to remove a perfectly good spaceship and a load of fuel from the Jool system though. It takes so long to get there.

Have you turned the graphics down? It runs pretty well on my Haswell Macbook Air. I've got 8 gigs of RAM though.

Yeah, burning direct from Minmus to, e.g. Jool actually uses more fuel than burning from LKO, unless you can do the periapsis dropping thing. The problem with doing that is that Minmus takes so long to orbit Kerbin, while you wait for the ejection angle, you'll miss your launch window. If you're mining fuel with Kethane, a station at Minmus may make overall sense, but be aware your ships will still need more delta V to go places than they will if starting from LKO.

Jool is fun because the three inner moons let you do all sorts of funky stuff with gravity assists. You can often get places cheaply just by letting encounters shift your orbit around Jool about. For bonus points, use a gravity assist from Tylo to get back to Kerbin almost for free. Good luck getting the angles right!

I've started doing Moho by a slightly longer route, but one which avoids the need for a plane change, and doesn't involve trying to match orbital inclinations at launch. On two days a year, as said above, Kerbin crosses the plane of Moho's orbit. Launch on one of these days and burn for escape velocity with an ejection angle for Moho. Lower your perihelion until it touches Moho's orbit, then wait. Once you reach perihelion, select Moho as your target and burn retrograde to lower your aphelion until you get an encounter. With this encounter, you'll find yourself in an inclined Moho orbit, but fix that by stopping your capture burn the moment you get an orbit. As long as your periapsis isn't too near the poles, you should be able to fix your inclination near apoapsis. If not, consider this a good time to go explore the Moholes!

I use it on my heavy Duna lander. It's heavier than an LV909, but that's largely mitigated by the extra TWR and lower profile, so it's a good engine for that scenario.

Not so. That danger from flameout is pretty much eliminated in 0.23 because of the throttle reducing behaviour. However, twin engined designs still reduce asymmetrically, so you get an induced yaw, just not as much as with a flameout. Now if your design is well built, it'll hold its course on the rudder and you can see SAS applying yaw and know to throttle back. If it isn't, it'll go into a flatspin. This will happen regardless of whether you're using RAPIERs or turbojets.

Make it light, use a turbojet for its TWR and a pair of 48-7S engines because they weigh nothing. Two turbojets and a NERVA!

We probably are, but some of us got here by necessity, after avoiding the place because the start of the learning curve was daunting. I had spent ages (and many Kerbal lives) trying to design a working air breathing Laythe lander in the VAB, and in the end concluded the solution to all my problems was learning how to make spaceplanes. It takes quite a bit of perseverance to get past the "why won't it take off" and through the "why does it spin out of control" and the "how do I land this without it exploding" stages though.

I'm finding exactly this too. It's probably because the intakes generate more speed the faster you go, and turbojets have a higher TWR. In every test I've done, the turbojets go higher and faster before I need rocket power, and that's even with the RAPIER's signature user-friendly autoswitching feature disabled.

It's also worth noting that my own tests in the other thread deliberately used the Aerospike for precisely this reason - if the RAPIER was going to beat anything, it would be an aerospike. The aerospike still won.

That's a very nice looking aircraft!

The honour of Team Turbojet demands a riposte! One turbojet, 4 radial intakes, full throttle, 35K, 2230 m/s (surface), orbital velocity, while still air breathing. .craft file here (stock - I removed the KER part for upload). When I replaced the engine array with a RAPIER, and let it autoswitch, this craft didn't reach orbit.

I clearly stated that I didn't - go reread my original post. I arrived in orbit at night and time warped until it was daylight in order to take the pictures. My test was a comparison of RAIPERs and other engine types ON THE SAME CRAFT, and the other engines won every test. A race to orbit is an entirely different test. I'm interested in getting there with a plane that weighs not much for what it does (hence is cheaper to haul to Laythe), doesn't use much fuel (hence I don't have to ship as much fuel to Laythe) and, for some designs, can carry 3000-5000 m/s delta V in space. That's not actually true in the general case either. There's a tradeoff between running the jets for as long as possible, maximising the Oberth Effect, and minimising atmospheric friction. If you want to get to space as quickly as possible, build a device that has a TWR of 2, stand it on its tail, and follow the ascent profile of a rocket. Then burn to circularise at apoapsis. That'll get you there very quickly indeed, but it won't get you there effficiently. If you want to get there efficiently, build a craft that can still breathe air at 3-35K, get up there as quickly as your wings will let you, and accelerate until you are actually in orbit while still in the atmosphere. Point your nose down to remain at periapsis and burn until your apoapsis is about 200km or more. Coast to space using slight bursts of the engine to recover speed lost due to atmospheric friction (which won't be much once you pass 40K). At apoapsis, circularise, which will require so little effort you can do it with RCS if you want. That's the efficient way to reach orbit with a spaceplane, but it is also slower. Most designs we build pick a compromise between being a rocket with wings and an airhoggy super cruising stratoglider and fall somewhere in the middle. RAPIERs suck at either extreme for two very simple reasons: the turbojet has a better TWR; the turbojet is lighter.

That's actually how I do my Laythe missions - I ferry planes there by nuclear tug, or if they're designed to be able to visit outer moons, under their own power. If you use the RAPIER, your plane will be bigger, heavier, take more fuel from your nuclear tug to drag to Laythe, and waste more precious fuel every time you go visit the surface in your heavy, slow, RAPIER plane. Small and nimble still works if you're building modular. The advantages don't change. A plane that can get to LKO is lighter and smaller if it uses a jet and 2 48-7S engines than if it uses a RAPIER. It's easier to haul to Jool and gets to and from the Laythe surface much more cheaply. But, you know, enjoy hauling that fuel to Jool for your airborne SUV. ;-)