Hovis

I love this mod. Such a smart idea and it makes shipbuilding much, much easier. Something like this, if not just this itself, ought to be in the stock parts down the line. Many thanks!

I like Mechjeb for creating repeatable launches and such like. If I blow up a ship on a manual launch, or don't reach orbit, I don't know for sure if the ship is bad, because maybe I screwed up. With Mechjeb it might not be as efficient as a perfect manual flight (which I might managed 1/100 times) but I know it's going to give me pretty much the same result every time. So if my ship fails, it's the ship. Which is good to know.

Question with this, is there a way to replenish CO2 using the biomass modules?

Must confess I have not found a whole bunch of uses for this thing, but I love it anyway. Kerbal survival is always a big concern and this thing is very good for that. Also it's a really high grade set of components, which is always great to see.

OP is not cheaty. If it's in the game, it's in the game. I think it's a very clever idea and something I might well pinch for my own plans. My lifters are usually bodged together with all sorts of rockets, boosters and voodoo. Anything that can get a heavy payload into atmo has my attention.

Works out like this, space planes are harder to build, engineer and fly than rockets. However they are in some ways better. Why are they better? Well because they are vastly more efficient in terms of fuel, and the fact that you are not dumping off great big valuable chunks of space rocket on your way up into orbit. But of course because nothing costs anything in KSP this advantage is lost. So in effect they are much harder to use with little real in game benefit. I could be wrong, but my take on it is that the SSTO space plane, capable of flying between planets, even landing on them or on moons, and coming home, is pretty much the greatest design challenge in the game. It may not even be possible. I'm not great at the game, not even close to great, but I've seen some amazing things built on here, and on vids and so on, and the most impressive things almost without exception are the space planes. That stuff is hard. Harder than rocket science hard. There's nothing wrong with it being hard to do, it just is what it is.

I was saved by limiting acceleration to 20 m/s on the control thingy. Not sure on the exact science of how this made the critical difference, but it did. My understanding is that Ferram favours longer more controlled lift offs, rather than the Massive Power Blitz style that would traditionally work fine. Once I made that change Mechjeb was fine.

When it comes to landing, on Kerbin at least, FAR or no FAR, I've found the secret is ALL THE PARACHUTES. It's getting back into the atmo that proves challenging at the moment. As a further query, has anybody had any success with emergency procedures for planes? I often find with planes, whether I'm using FAR or not, that landing is impossible, or just unlikely, and I should probably bail. Having a pod that can pop off the top of a rocket is one thing, but escaping from a plane as in its death throes seems a lot harder. Was experimenting with decoupling the front of the plane, but there is often too much momentum in the same direction to get clear, and a lot of the cockpit setups don't have the strength of a capsule and things can get ugly. In some cases I've just loaded up small aircraft with enough parachutes that if things go bad I just gain altitude, cut the engines, pop the chutes and float down, but this is seldom practical for larger aircraft.

FAR has been a bit evil for making me relearn how to into space, but seems very good overall. Due to it's uneasy relationship with Mechjeb (which I've now largely sorted) I did at least get to test a large number of in-atmo-rocket-goes-crazy escape scenarios. Only fatalities so far, out of about ten attempts, was when a capsule failed to get far enough clear of some debris and a chunk of wreckage took out the chutes. My bad on that one though. Am installing separatrons now as standard to get capsules well clear. I was a bit worried some of these mods might not have been updated yet, but I'll give them a look. Is B9 clear to work with FAR?

Fine Tune was the thing I was always forgetting. That's the key right there, the difference between hitting the target and fifty years of mindless hula hooping round the solar system.

First thing I would say is that an SSTO plane is pretty much one of the hardest things to build. It is something to bear in mind when you're building the thing, it's not like getting a rocket into orbit, you're really going to have to know what you're about to get a working space plane. If you actually manage it, you're a hero and they'll build statues of you in Kerbaltown. Maybe. Anyway, as bsalis said, sounds like you're making the standard early attempt at SSTO mistakes. However many intakes, lifting surfaces and control surfaces you thought you needed when you started this thing, you'll almost certainly need more. It is also worth bearing in mind that even if you design the perfect SSTO there is still a lot to do when flying it. But I'm a rubbish SSTO pilot, so I'll say no more about it. Suffice to say, there's more to it than just flying up in a straight line, which is how I used to do it when I first tried it. Good luck though.

So the End Flight mission has gone, and for me this has changed the game a lot. Gone are the days I could end a mission and kid myself that it wasn't a horrible death for all involved. I'm just not going to be happy if I can't count my Kerbals into space and count them all back home again. It is time for a revolution, for me at least, in design, building ships that can be recovered easily, ships that can land, and ships that can, in emergencies, be used to dock with an rescue Kerbals from other ships. No more Kerbal orphans. No more letters to Kerbal moms. The body count stops here. So I was wondering if anybody had any tips or designs they might be willing to share? I'm specifically working at the moment on some fairly basic concepts, and I'd appreciate any input people might have on them. 1. An easy to use escape pod, either a sort of standard capsule build to use for all craft that can be relied upon to detach and fly home from a reasonable range and come down from orbit, or some kind of pod I can have the Kerbals run to when things get hairy. My previous experiments with this have tended to leave me with an escape pod that is too big though, and it becomes more work to get into orbit than it should be, and gets in the way of actually doing anything in space itself. 2. A crew transfer vehicle. Am thinking of using an SSTO for this, but am thinking it might be simpler to use some sort of basic shuttle type design that launches vertically off a rocket but has enough lift on re-entry to actually land softly. Essentially this would be a flying bus that could return the passengers safely. Was thinking something like this will be required to bring folks home from stations or from any rescue missions. 3. A rescue ship. A proper Thunderbirds are go cleanup vessel. Something with loads of useful equipment and other gizmos (possibly from mods) to either collect the crew of a damaged/stricken/immobilised vessel, or refuel that vessel, or dock up and tug things away. Am thinking such a vehicle would be entirely spacebound once launched, have it deliver rescued crew to a transfer vehicle to drop them home, so it could be bigger and capable of longer range. Maybe docked onto a station. Anybody got any thoughts? I've seen rescue missions as a recurring theme in the game but that was when it was just a part of the fun, now it's serious business to get everybody home.

An alternative plan might be to have a second craft remain in orbit around Eve and have that either dock with the lander to bring it home, or have it collect the Kerbals.

Maybe so. But something better takes longer. I was shooting for something quick a struggling player could get into orbit with. Does it do that? Yeah. So what's not to like? Why do you hate orbit?

You can just turn the throttle down a little bit. You just run it at about 80%.

Would love to post a picture of this, but it happened too quick. Basically I thought it'd be fun to fly one of the stock aircraft with the basic engine removed, two radial jet engines from the B9 pack on the top, and a solid fuel booster where the engine used to go. The theory was this might be able to create a plane that could get into orbit easier, maybe getting some sort of gravity boost off the sun or something I dunno. First couple of times the aircraft would flip out of control like a mad beast, looping around and spinning end over end until the fuel ran out and it crashed. Then I hit upon the idea of instead of wrestling to stop the made somersaults, just try something new, so what I did instead was just spin the aircraft, like a bullet from a rifle, and sure enough it was stable (albeit spinning like a drill). When the fuel in the booster ran out I managed to land the plane again using the engines. I didn't want to use the aircraft again, my guess is that it's carrying about a ton of Kerbal puke in the cockpit now. Going to want to have it hosed out.

If it works, it's beautiful.

I shall take a whack at these problems cos I feel lucky. 1. Gun to my head, I honestly don't really know what the precise system to get into space is either (I can do it, but it's messy and random). I use Mechjeb. To be honest, until I got Mechjeb and just saw with my own eyes what a proper ascent looked like, I had no clue what I was doing. I mean I was literally just firing rockets straight up, as far as I could, thinking if I got one high enough it'd magically start to orbit. These are the things we must learn. Mechjeb can get you into a 100k orbit if you've got about 4700 DV, and it'll tell you how much DV you have, which you won't know without it, or some similar mod. 2. That's an odd one. I must confess I've never knowingly used the F key to toggle ASAS. I just fly my rockets, I didn't know it was even a button. So not sure what to make of that. Maybe leave it alone completely? 3. Is it possible that you've not got the engines of your next stage connected to a fuel supply? Some parts do not have what is called Fuel Crossfeed, so if they are between an engine and some fuel, it won't get that fuel. Alternatively, it's possible that you might have accidentally hooked an earlier stage to a later stage via a fuel crossfeed, this would mean your earlier stage is noshing on your fuel for later on. 4. If you jam Mainsails together they will get much hotter. If you're anything like I was when I started out you might be at the panicky "NEED BIGGER ROCKET!" phase (if you're running multiple Mainsails it sounds like you are). What I would suggest is to dial it down. If your first goal is orbit then start real simple. If you put together a really simple orbiter/return home capsule, maybe a three man capsule with a parachute and ASAS attached to a decoupler, then attach that to a Jumbo fuel can with a Skipper engine, a decoupler below that, then another Jumbo with a Mainsail on the bottom, you should be able to make orbit with that. In fact, I just built one, looks like this. 4800DV, gets to orbit easily enough. Use the last of the fuel to de-orbit to come home, pop the capsule on the way down and hit the chute to avoid dead Kerbals.

Ahaa, thanks for that. I'd had some success, inadvertently, by having a raised front wheel (by accident) and it wasn't something I'd considered too much before. I typically stick the wheels quite far back to avoid knocking my engines off when I try to lift.

Thanks for the advice, I suspected that to an extent I was flying planes wrong for this. How much air intake do I need for engines though? I'm not sure what the correct amount is, or what the effect of less air is on the plane (up until the flameout moment at least, I'm very familiar with flameouts). Also how do you know how much wing is enough? I've had a few planes just struggle on the runway, eventually only getting airborne when the land drops away beneath them. I was hoping just raw power would lift most of them but it seems not to be the case. I did manage to get this plane up to about 60,000m and back down again though (despite a fuel miscalculation killing one of the engines). (Random action shot of aircraft, it's not a plane, the craft is long gone, but it looked nice while it lasted).

Hey folks, more newb questions (though to be fair, am probably not a newb at this point, just a bit crappy). I'm trying to build some space planes. Ideally what I want is a space plane that can get into the air, then into space, then fly around space like a mad eejit, then refuel, maybe come home, all that good stuff. In essence the quintessential spaceship, like you see in the movies. However, I have problems in my efforts, many problems, literally from the ground up. 1. Are there any tricks to getting landing gear positioned properly? I seem to have all sorts of problems getting this right. 2. My planes tend to go crazy about 10000m up. This seems to be when they run out of air, and by the usual run of things I switch to rockets at this point, however control remains an issue. 3. How much DV do I need to be aiming for to get a plane from the jet engine flight ceiling to orbit? I'm using the B9 pack (among others) so I have Saber jets, but they have a habit of running out before I can complete the circularisation burn. 4. Are there any really good Space Plane construction tutorials out there? I've nosed around a fair bit, but a lot seem to be for earlier versions of the game and I don't know if they're still accurate. 5. Other than B9 are there any other really handy Space Plane mods? Any help much appreciated.

Hmm. B9 does look like a good shout for transporting ships like that. This does mean that I'm going to need to learn about cargo bays. If ships are attached via docking clamps, will they remain attached during a burn? Do I have to keep speeds low?

So I have a theory and I was wondering what you folks thought to it. The theory is that for reasons of balance it might be best to launch multiple small ships off a big rocket, rather than trying to launch one off the back of a smaller rocket. I know, in practice, the best solution is a single ship being launched off the nose of an appropriately sized rocket, but the whole point of a space program is trying out new stuff, so here we are. Something I had close to success with was an attempt to launch two shuttles from opposite sides of a very large rocket. As a prototype this kind of worked okay, although truth be told the shuttles themselves were of pretty poor design and were very heavy. The principle failure was that I couldn't get the entire launch vehicle and the shuttles into orbit, the shuttles had to make the final push for the a stable orbit themselves, which meant they would need bigger engines and more fuel and really for them to be fit for purpose they need to be equipped with nuclear engines, which means they need to be deployed in orbit. In the test they had nuclear engines and lacked the power to get into orbit. But that could be addressed. But anywho, as a proof on concept it was a success I think. You could, I think, launch twin shuttles from a single extremely powerful rocket. So now I'm wondering how else multiple vehicles might be deployed? I'm working on a Mun City. Well I say City, I just want to land a whole bunch of stuff in one place on the Mun. Because it's there. Get some bigger habitation buildings. Some rovers. All things that are good. Now to do this something I am wanting to build is a sort of a drop ship. A vessel that will carry pods to Mun orbit, and these pods will then drop and land under their own power. The hope is that by doing this the pods won't need to carry as much fuel. The problem here is what is the best way to get a number of these pods into orbit and docked with the mothership? I was thinking maybe using mods for cargo holds, but these seem quite hard to use. Alternatively I was considering making the drop pods stackable end to end, so I could have maybe three of them on the front of the launch craft and release them into orbit like a pancake stack, to separate before docking with the Mother. Has anybody had any success with this type of approach though? Are there any balanced mods that might help?

Damn you, I was reading along this thread thinking the same thing and you beat me to the reply. And extremely powerful core rocket, two shuttles, one on each side. Might just be crazy enough to work.

Ahaa, I typically aim for a 200k orbit. If it'd be easier to stabilise at 100k then step it up then that would be a big saving. Getting a TWR around two sounds like good sense too, thanks. I used to go for that, or even higher, but then realised I was tending to damage my aircraft with the acceleration. Since then it's been around 1.60 usually, maybe bumped up with solid fuel boosters to get the early burst of speed. Aiming for two seems like a good compromise.