Laughing Man

That is one fine looking plane. Would you care to do a Tornado GR4 replica?

I tried it with a nuke before, but it just wasn't worth the weight especially when you can fly the turbo up to 40km . 180 ton SSTO lifter? Damn son, damn. I like the tri-coupled plane you got there, she's a beauty. EDIT: I should mention I'm only using that wee thing as a ferry up to my space station. Getting an ssto out of Kerbin SOI is beyond me at the moment. ***** the bed! What's the part count on that beast?

Quite an interesting design there, I got hung up trying to make an SSTO using the 3 Kerbal capsule and saw this. Ended up designing this wee guy, my first working spaceplane! -

That thing looks awesome! How many frames do you get with that? My humble entry:- all stock, pieced together in 7 launches, 2 senior docks, 4 clamps and 4 juniors. Science lab for science, fuel for fuel etc. Holds up to 19 kerbals, more for rule of cool than for any real purpose. I got tired of trying to think of profound/awesome sounding names so I just called her Anchorage.

XD Yeah I got it! Thanks for the help.

Ok, I think I understand you correctly here. I moved the outer fuel lines from the liquid fuel tanks to the SRBs. To my utter bewilderment and disbelief the outer tanks drained exactly as they should, one after another just as the asparagus staging was designed for it to do. Unfortunately the old problem cropped up again and the top 2 tanks of the last 2 asparagus stages started draining slowly. Again I want to itterate that the "double aspargus" works as intended at this point, but this problem still persists. This is the second thing I did. The outer liquid fuel tanks are connected to the radial decouplers with the SRBs mounted underneath and the fuel lines connected from SRB to SRB. I'm still kind of dumbfounded, but it completely solved the problem. The outer tanks drain one after another and the inner asparagus staging also works perfectly, with all tanks staying full until it is their turn to be drained. I launched the rocket twice just to double check and right-clicked the tanks over and over just to be sure. Here's some more pics for clarity:- I never actually expected liquid fuel to move through solid rockets let alone have your solution solve my problem completely! What weird things you discover in this game. Thankyou sooo much! All of this kind of begs the question though - why are decouplers crossfeed capable?!

I did read it. The boosters are solid-fuel and the tanks on top are liquid fuel, the idea is to transfer fuel from those booster-mounted tanks to the inner set of tanks if you get me. Also, I'm pretty sure decouplers don't auto-crossfeed if the wiki is anything to go by. If I understand you correctly, you want me to change from this:- To this:- I did this and it made no difference whatsoever. The asparagus staging still works as intended, but the top tanks of the last two asparagus stages still drain when they aren't supposed to, at a very slow rate. Your answer got me thinking however and I've sort of managed to come up with a solution. I kept the inner tanks asparagus-staged and simply connected the SRB drop tanks to the bottoms of each inner booster and voila it worked. The droptanks all drain at once while the inner boosters stay full until the asparagus staging kicks in. Here's some screens for clarity- This still leaves me without the ability to double asparagus however, should I ever need it. Anyhoo...thanks for the replies! One more question - how do I change image size? I don't want to fill the screen with those shots... EDIT: Nvm, the post preview made it look like the images were filling the screen. :/

Impressive stuff! It'd be great to have robotics in stock ksp so we can make stuff like this, I refuse to mod.

I'll make a video later if anyone is still interested, thanks for all the helpful replies!

I already ditched this lifter and designed a new one, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this so I made a test vehicle. Just as you said, connecting via bottomost seemed to work. Pics to demonstrate:- I connected tank 3 to the bottommost of tank 4 and also connected 4, 5 and 6 by their bottoms and by god somehow it worked! The outer tanks get drained quick as hell, then 4, 5 and 6 like they should however the top tanks of 5 and 6 start to drain when they shouldn't albeit at a very slow rate, speeding up when it's their "turn" in the asparagus. I still have the top tank of 6 connected to the main tank instead of the bottomost tank so I might try connecting it via bottommost as well and see if that fully eliminates the problem. EDIT: Connected the bottom of the last asparagus to the central tank. The tops of 5 and 6 are still draining at a slow rate when it isn't their turn. I had a look at this topic and tried installing the fuel lines from outwards-in to see if that would solve the problem, but no dice. I just did another test and they actually drain from the very start only very very slowly until it's their turn in the asparagus. The bottom tanks drain perfectly however. Very odd.

Thanks for the tips, I did as you suggested and it flies even better now. I was able to land comfortably at the island so thanks!

Would it work if I used Toroidals or Oscar-Bs then?

Okay so I have a rocket with a jumbo tank in the middle with a mainsail and six radial tanks with an LV-T30 each. The six radials are asparagus staged and work perfectly fine, I tested them and the fuel flows correctly. Now here is where things go wrong; I added six SRBs on the outside of the radials and on top of those I added fuel tanks, the idea being to feed fuel from these into the radials before the SRBs putter out. I tried asapargus-ing the fuel from the SRB-mounted tanks, but when I do this it mucks up the fuel flow completely with tanks from the inner radials draining when they shouldn't. Apologies for the crude drawing, but you can see where I'm going with this. Basically, I want the tanks to empty by number order. I've checked and rechecked the fuel lines, they are all running the correct way and I added them one at a time without symmetry. I don't really know why this isn't working.

Howdy folks! Just got back from 11 days of 12 hour nightshifts and made a beeline straight for KSP. I love the designs on this thread and have always wanted to make a proper vtol so after some forum-searching and CoL-CoM-CoT fiddling I came up with this little thing. I dubbed her Hummingbird for obvious reasons. She's pretty well balanced for a 2-engine design imho, but lacking a little in pitch authority. I had to make do with swept-wings until I make my way through the tech tree.

This is definitely going on my to-fly list! +1internetz to you good sir

You can always just adjust the trim as I recently learned. :-) edit: wrong quote

Man I want to fly that thing, being stuck on a work trip sucks so hard. :-(

Sound advice. I removed the canards, pushed the wings up, moved the landing gear forward, turned off pitch control for the aerilons and did a little tweaking with the CoL (without landing gear). The pitching problem is gone and it's much more stable now, however the CoL is still slightly in front of the CoM once the front tank is empty, but I can live with that. Next time I'll design something wider.

Thanks for the tips I'll try that out. I'm going to keep desining away to work my way up to getting an ssto since I've never built one before. Also while I'm at it; I understand the sas modules have the same torque, does the advanced module have any advantages over the normal sas whatsoever? I mean it weighs 0.2 mass units more so I'm not sure what the justification for having one is... EDIT: It's a shame the forums got wiped cos I had a topic showing off a rendezvous before the advent of manuevre nodes

That thing is adorable!

Wow, this helped soooo much! After some fiddling I realised that shifting the CoL back a fraction had a huge effect on how much runway my plane needed to take-off and so I needed more lift. So I added another couple of deltas at the back and shifted the wings forward. It takes off just fine now with the CoL slightly behind CoM with full tanks. It'll climb fine, but now it has a slight tendecy to pitch down which is a little unfortunate. However with the front tank drained the CoL goes forward, which is great cos I liked the plane having a tendecy to climb. So now the longer it flies the better it climbs! Thanks for the top notch help gents!

http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag385/Callum_Booker/2014-03-30_00009_zpsc0bbc040.jpg http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag385/Callum_Booker/2014-03-30_00010_zps5499b6ec.jpg http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag385/Callum_Booker/2014-03-31_00002_zps24c0ddcc.jpg I was able to make it to the North in the end, but the plane kept doing loops at random intervals after the first tank went then again after the middle went. The weird thing is, after I was able to regain control it went back to being ok again so long as the sas was on. EDIT: CoM and CoL - http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag385/Callum_Booker/2014-03-31_00003_zpsa59762e4.jpg EDIT2: Isn't there a way to transfer fuel between tanks with CTRL and +? I tried this but it wouldn't work.

Sure, just need to finish this flight. I should mention I'm trying to fly from ksc to the north pole, the plane is fairly stable so I just leave the sas on and go into steam browser, coming out every so often to adjust pitch.

Ok I'm sure there's an answer to this somewhere but I can't seem to find it so I'll just go ahead and ask:- I've got a neat little plane 3 fuel tanks long. After a long-ish flight and the front tank is empty it starts to pull up like there's no tomorrow. I've got the CoL just a tiny tiny tiny tad in front of the CoM to help with take-off so I can't really push the wings any farther back. I've toyed with the idea of putting a fuel line between the front tank and the rear so the rear one goes first, but now that I know fuel consumption negatively affects the performance of the plane I'm reluctant to do this. The only change I've made to the design so far is to swap out the normal sas for the more advanced one and I'm flying the thing atm to see if it's made a difference. Other than that I can't really think of a solution to this particular problem. Has anyone found something that can help?

No love for the tiny radial? That thing is awesome for shifting things about with low mass or in low gravity, plus it's damn cute. EDIT: Mixed up the large and small votes, eep