Goddamnit- Clown

Personal fave so far is FMRS: http://addons.cursecdn.com/files/2210/210/FMRS_v0_1_04.zip It juggles ships and save files to let you control the stages all the way to the ground then jump back to the upper stage and carry on. It's more work than just bolting a hundred parachutes onto every stage and getting them for free. On the other hand (and why I like it) because you get full control over each stage you can have hybrid and composite ships - heavylift plane to take a rocket up to altitude for example. Fly the plane up, separate, fly the plane down and land, skip back to your rocket at the moment of separation, do your mission and recover both ships.

oooo, yes you might. Thanks!

There are some key mods to bring in some more of the core challenges of actual space flight (while remaining in hand-controlled hard-mode). Remotetech and a good life support mod to bring some more meaningful differences between manned and unmanned missions while adding some more goals for the ship design and for new missions. Maybe someone can recommend a good life support mod? Secondly, FAR and deadly reentry are both fantastic and again, take more of the training wheels off. Though you'll need to use fairing factory, or fairings from another pack like KW or novapunch to get anything off the ground. As for part packs to give you more options, I sympathise with the pain of people recommending 14 different mods totalling 250 new parts "to get you started" but I would say that to keep it simple: KSPX is a good and not too bloated pack of balanced parts which fit in nicely with the stock stuff, filling in gaps and expanding on a few things but keeping the same appearance and stat balance. Damned Robotics and KAS together add an enormous amount of power to what you can make - hinges, servos, hydraulics, winches, etc. And if you're looking at aircraft, Firespitter has (a vast and endless sea of) aeroplane parts, many of which are pretty redundant but a few are pure genius and PWing is the tiniest but magnificent-est addition to making planes in KSP giving you one completely customisable wing with procedurally generated stats instead of trying to glue 20 or so other wings together like a castaway lashing driftwood into a raft But in short remotetech and life support gives you space flight, FAR and deadly reentry puts it in a real(ish) atmosphere. Other than that, my only advice is to add mods a few at a time and remember you don't need to keep every part, most mods come with far too many!

http://imgur.com/a/uMMSI#3 I was messing about with Ferram Aerospace Research having just installed it when I remembered this thread, so this ended up being a manned FAR run that hit 2,208 m/s before a totally preventable flameout which i wasn't paying enough attention to prevent sent me into a spin. Mods used only pWing (much love for pWing) and the landing gear from TT wheels. Oh, and if the plane needs a name, I christen it The Yellow Dart

Hi Romf, can I call you Romf? Sounds good. Hats off for the exhaustive work you've put into the mod so far, it's really impressive. I'm wondering if it would be possible to borrow the intercept logic from the missiles and expose it as an option in the red subsystem? To elaborate: I've had a lot of fun trying to improvise a hit to kill anti missile system from the flight control subsystem but with either very limited success or very limited automation, relying mostly on settling in behind the target and catching up to it without overshooting which is a time (fuel) consuming intercept path with very high required specs wrt the target or alternatively loitering somewhere in the target's trajectory heading toward it as best as I can then using a very powerful RCS "kill relative velocity" maneuver at the last moment and crossing my fingers which requires a lot of hand holding and doesn't often work, although there is some real world precedent for the idea. I'm hoping that an intercept heading rather than a combination of "face" "parallel" and "relative velocity" headings will open a fe new doors for that kind of project. I can see that with an unknown vessel rather than the pre-baked stats of the missiles, that maybe this isn't possible, depending on how you've implemented it. The vanilla game has a current heading and a target heading already, so an autopilot keeping those aligned rather than the craft's own axis might be another option. Though, again, not knowing how a given craft will react might make it impossible. I dream of a future with small VAB designed vessels being launched as missiles with no user control at other uncontrolled ships, incoming missiles and asteroids For now though, thanks again for all the fine works.

About to start an attempt on this, just want to clear something up about the detection rules. So a large ship (bigger than a jumbo tank) triggers the 30s timeout at 70km but smaller things only trigger it at 2km. That makes sense to me, but there seems to be a rule stating outright that: So can we take big things inside 70km so long as we're ok with the 30s limit being started? I'm assuming we can, but it's just that 30s isn't much time to do anything useful with something that big at that distance. Will make a start now, presumably, also, the electricity generated by a crewed module is kosher so long as it's not used?