ComradeGoat

Hurrah! Three cheers for cybutek!

Can't help noticing the scare quotes. Seems like you're trying to convince yourself here. Tempting, is the dark side. :-p

Stacking them - never. That's cheating. Multiple intakes per engine though is fine, IMO.

That always struck me as very much breaking with the spirit of things. If there wasn't surface area to mount something, then it can't really get access to the air. I don't do clipping.

I get this a lot on big ships and space stations; it crashes the Dv thread and means I have to quit the game and reload, and remember to turn off ER before looking at those vessels again. If I can be cheeky and suggest a feature upgrade, perhaps having some sort of timeout after which the thing gives up gracefully would be good? It wouldn't get you your delta V, but it also wouldn't do the "reduce to 2fps until you quit" thing.

Confirmed - it's not the RAPIER making my SSTOs work better - jet engine flameout is now much less aggressive. Running full throttle at 38K on 5 intakes was previously not even remotely a possibility. Was still providing thrust at 50K. I like it! Means the days of festooning the wings with ram intakes are over, and the things will look much less silly. Also really like the way pov changes to chase mode now hold the current position. Nice work, devs!

I'm a big fan of the turbojet+2 48-7S engines arrangement. Most of my SSTO shuttles use it. I'll have to re-fly some of them. Perhaps other changes have indeed made them much easier to use too. I guess the autoswitching does at least solve the asymmetric flameout issue if you have more than one, or have they fixed that for the other jet engines too?

Part of me really likes the RAPIER. Part of me mourns that the "I can build SSTO planes club" just got much less exclusive. That auto switching feature makes things *so* much easier than before.

Wow! An SSTO with 5 intakes that ran out of air at around 30K is now running full throttle on air at 38K, at fully orbital velocities. Designing SSTOs just got considerably easier.

Engineer redux does indeed appear to be broken. Switching to the VES tab crashes it. Protractor and Alarm Clock seem fine though. Just testing the RAPIER out on one of my SSTO designs now. Liking it!

Any word on common mods compatibility? I'm using Engineer Redux, Protractor and Alarm Clock. Thinking of holding off a few days until I know they're OK.

IDGI - why use RCS on boost stages? That's what vectoring is for.

I've used a couple of them under a seat on a Mün rover, to get the driver back to orbit when he's finished roving. Light and low profile. They're great!

Useful for ultra light landers (with the seat).

The radial version is great though.

And specifically, 48-7S engines.

The linear RCS port is really useful for spaceplanes.

If the exhaust from a sepratron hits your main rocket, it will damage it. I avoid this not by having them push the tanks outwards, but by placing one on the *inside* of a tank, at the bottom, so that it fires upwards on separation. As you separate the tank stops accelerating. If there is a small upward force on the inner edge, it will cause the tank to tip outwards, falling neatly away from the rocket. The sepratron exhausts hit nothing but the other spent stages, peeling away, keeping that nasty exhaust flame away from your main rocket.

I've started doing this. Just made sure I'm pointing prograde after circularisation and *whoosh* - off it goes back to Kerbin.

And 4m/s is a soft landing compared to the impact the KSP landing legs are designed to absorb!

The old launch tower! Remember what an utter pain that was by 0.18?

There's a good reason to keep landers small: they're dead weight you have to haul to your destination, which adds up to more fuel burned getting there. If your destination is, e.g., Moho or Dres, that matters, hence this chap: Over 3000 m/s delta V for under a tonne.

I'm warming to Moho. Loads of launch windows, short flight time, easy to land on. Might build a station there soon.

An overcomplicated resource system that made you *have* to micromanage life support for long missions would probably ruin the game. One that allowed you to, with some skill, pilot down to a body and mine fuel to sustain those missions - that would enhance the game tremendously, IMO.

I've been avoiding Kethane because I've wanted to build distant outposts using an "official" resource system, where I can build a network of bases in the Joolian system without having to ship all the fuel from Kerbin. That it's probably not coming is really disappointing. ISTM that the potential offered by gas planet systems is only fully unlock able by resource mining, otherwise it's too logistically tedious to establish much of a presence there. This will apply doubly so when a second gas planet is added. Resources gave the prospect of setting up deep space colonies semi-independently of Kerbin.