Autochton

Okay, then it wasn't you who did. But that's where that whole line of conversation started - with someone saying their ship did not perform right. Well, the answer to that obviously is to redesign until it does. Bac9's opinions are his own. He may work for Squad, and may have good reasons for them (IMO he does, and I agree a lot with him), but neither he nor Squad as a whole are the final arbiters of what anyone gets to enjoy about the game. If you like to build things by throwing random parts together and pressing launch, who's to gainsay you? As long as you don't expect it to actually work (for a suitable definition thereof).

If you're having fun, you're doing it right - but then, if flying badly designed craft is what you want to do, why complain at their bad performance?

Ferram, have I mentioned that you are like unto a god? Between you and NathanKell, KSP will be such a wonder to behold. This is added to my "Can't live without" mod list.

This sounds like a very good idea, actually. A lot of the stock engines in game are, shall we say, not a match for early rocketry. It could make for interesting tech tree choices wrt. things like liquid engines vs. SRBs, and so forth, too. This would play well with some of the other realism mods in play, like Deadly Reentry, Earth Size Kerbin, Modular Fuels and FAR, so consider taking a swing by the realism discussion thread here.

As long as you don't do it in my solar system, go ahead, mate... A.G. Streng already did, and it wasn't pretty.

OK, not exactly the spot for it here, but: *SQUEEE*

Of course we then also run into having the sound barrier at ~110m/s, planes taking off at ~25-35m/s, etc. Eesh. This is something of a can of worms.

The exception to this would be SABRE style intake precoolers, which give non-scramjet engines air up to Mach=5 or so. The B9 version (the common SABRE-analogue in KSP at the moment) models this by giving the intakes the precooled level of air, since there isn't a ready way to adjust intake air according to whether a precooler is present. As a result, the precooler part is just a bit of structure, not an actually functional part. I honestly wish it could be brought to work like in real life, though.

Re. the population levels of the area around KSC, it might be instructive to look at a few major launch sites: Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and Centre Spatial Guyanais at Kourou, French Guiana. To start with the latter, Kourou was a small town when the CSG was founded near it, and has grown rapidly. French Guiana is not exactly a population density capital of the world, but Kourou is actually one of the denser areas in the country. So while there are places around it that have higher populations (the cities of neighboring countries will likely overshadow its night time light output). CSG is located at ~5â°N, so is very close to the Equator. French Guiana is mostly jungle further south, so operating a space center further south, away from the coast, is complicated beyond the normal level by logistics, as well as by needing to overfly other countries to achieve eastern-bound orbit. Kerbin Space Center matches the location of this space facility best, being smack on the equator. Baikonur Cosmodrome is literally located in the middle of nowhere. The nearest built-up area of any kind is a non-descript railhead called Tyuratam, and the city of Baikonur is some 200 km away. Otherwise, you pretty much get black on a night map - bare Kazakh steppe. Being located at ~45â°N is not fantastic for equatorial launches, but is about as far south as is practical within the bounds of the former Soviet Union. Kennedy Space Center is further south than Baikonur, at ~28â°N. It is at the southern end of Florida, near some major urban areas (Miami, Jacksonville). It is different from the two others in being very close to such major urban developments (Kourou is only populous by Guinanan standards, and Tyuratam is all but deserted). This gives it excellent logistics, and given the launch direction, it's pretty much all water downrange. In many ways, Kerbin Space Center seems to match this positioning best - an eastern coast, major sea downrange for eastward orbit trajectory. Whether you look to CSG or Cape Canaveral for an example, I think the result will be good. Baikonur is a bad fit for the standard space center, but matches KSC2 well (out in the back of beyond, continental).

Share, man!

I second that. If you look at Earth, you see population where there's sea, rivers, or lakes, mainly. That's where most of the big cities will be, and most coastline will be populated to some degree (excepting Antarctica and the Arctic coastlines, naturally). Wrt. procedurally generated cityscape, it would be excellent if there was a matchup - so the same map that generates the lights is used to generate cityscape. Certainly the location of Kerbin City ought to be picked out with a nice, big blob of light.

Ozligia, you want the center of lift to be behind the center of mass. Otherwise, it won't fly right, it will try to turn itself around to get the center of mass in front. Try moving the wings backwards, or putting heavy things further forward in the plane.

You don't. B9 has integrated FAR configurations in the part files, so all you need to do is load it up and go. :-)

Toxic fans cost us a sequel to the 2008 Prince of Persia, in my eyes one of the best games ever made. My wife and I still occasionally play it through, and it was one of the games we got with our PS3, in early 2009. I am myself a game designer and sometime developer, and I have no time for those fans who would try and tell me how to make a game. If you enjoy what I do, then great. If you do not, then give me a bad review and be done. I will not change my design for your desires. Nor should I have to.

I'd just like to say, I'm an atheist, and I don't feel lost or sad by looking at this perspective. I feel empowered. In all our solar system, there is one rock that supports life - we may not find any its like in many solar systems around us. That life is, among others, us. We are the only sapient, technic species we know of - a way, as Carl Sagan said, for the universe to know itself. We're inextricably part of this universe, part of this world, and it is part of us. In that way, we are, ourselves, part of the divine. Part of this wondrous thing we see around us. We are all of us made of the matter from long-dead stars, an enormously unlikely and enormously significant accident that had a probability of 100% from our point of view. We are at once enormously insignificant and enormously important. It all depends upon perspective.

For my own part, I can't abide the look of stock atmospheric vehicles as it stands now. Planes invariably become wide, squat, ugly monstrosities with absurd amounts of intakes in weird spots (backwards, sideways, control surfaces clipped into them, whatnot). Rockets become these wide, stubby ungainly things that look vaguely like oil drums welded together, not something that flies to space. I'll take my nice, sleek, fast-looking, aerodynamically sensemaking FAR designs, thanks.

This page is useful for the terms used to name planetary features: http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/DescriptorTerms

Well, FAR has you flying in air, not chicken soup, so 600m/s at 10km is fine, in fact that's usually what my ascent profile tends to hit, or close to it (I usually do my initial climb-out to 12km, then level off and pour on the power. Typically I hit mach 5 (1500-1600 m/s) between 25 and 35 km, whereupon I pitch up for atmosphere transition and engage rockets). But as I mentioned above, I doubt this is a profile problem, or a stability problem. This is a problem of control authority. Incidentally, one I've had myself, and solved by the approach given in my post above.

Okay, a few points: A) FAR is just fine for newbies, provided they're ready to learn some actual aerodynamics rather than the utterly nutty setup of stock KSP. In fact, my wife requested FAR so she would not learn bad habits, as she put it. But hey, if you like monstrous planes with eight wings clipped into each other, fifteen air intakes per engine and three times the amount of engines it ought to need to even fly, then stock KSP planes are for you. If the aerodynamic center (or aerocenter - it's not the center of lift) is in front of the center of mass, the plane will straight up flip out and kill everyone involved. So that's not what's happening here, and is anyway counter-indicated by the fact that as you go supersonic, your aerocenter shifts backwards. C) Fuel drain can and will shift the CoM as well - but for me that only becomes a problem when going to rockets for the atmosphere transition burn. Usually, that happens well above where the atmosphere is a major factor, typically 35-40 km up. So probably not that. And as mentioned before, it looks very different. D) As your supersonic velocity increases, depending on the structure of your plane, your control authority may decrease selectively - particularly I always have trouble getting enough pitch-up. Bigger control surfaces farther from the center of mass and aerocenter are typically called for. Also, ensure that control surfaces are specialized - otherwise they may work against each other, giving you less, not more, control authority. My guess would be that that is the problem you are encountering. To test it, you can fly your aircraft at lower speed and see how high up you can maintain pitch-up, or you can try lengthening the fuselage, adding bigger canards, and making sure they're the only surface controlling pitch - that should see some effect too. B9 delivers some nice big stabilators that should serve you.

Fuel tanks are, inexplicably, found in the Structural tab for this mod, so make sure you've checked that they aren't present in there. Apart from that, the fuel tanks generally share geometry with the structural fuselage pieces, which may or may not cause issues. Go into your GameData dir, find the B9 folder, seek out one of the structural pieces that have fuel tanks (S2 2m fuselage does, it should have both LF and LFO variants), and ensure that there are configs present for the fuel tanks. Apart from that, I honestly have no clue what might cause it.

That might just be due to having the extra part in there. Part count means a lot more to heat dissipation than any particular part's values or size, in the current heat model. Hence why people add small fuel tanks below jumbo tanks to dissipate heat from Mainsails. But don't take my word for it, look at the source code for the part - it does not invoke any modules that might have heat dampening effect or tweak thrust/intake values.

The real-world SABRE's precoolers chill the intake air ridiculously fast, which basically has the net effect raising thrust at high velocities. The SABRE combustion chambers get colder air in, which will thus expand more and faster when combusted. Most jet engines run out of juice at high velocities because compression heating at the intakes mean that combustion does not give as much thermal expansion, which is what provides the thrust - so you're basically burning fuel just to break even. The SABRE doesn't have that problem until far, far higher speeds, and is thus rated to go Mach 5+, higher than any other air-breathing engine capable of subsonic operation. IIRC, this effect is handled in the B9 pack by having the SABRE intakes be more generous about the IntakeAir they provide at 700+m/s than other intakes, and having SABRE engines provide more thrust at higher velocities as well. The in-game precoolers have no real effect, and are simply hull sections that fit the style.

Go here, mate: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/35872-Tweak-BlendedPasta-Stock-TV-and-FAR-Will-it-blend-Reqs-Modulemanager This set of instructions and the modman config included will set you up with Taverio's parts mod, modified to work with module manager, and with tweaks added to make it silky smooth with FAR.

One thing that might be worth trying, which has at least at one point worked for me (although this was in KSP 0.20.2), is to pick up a non-symmetric part close to the root (the S2->S2W adapter right behind the cockpit seems a good candidate, if the cockpit is your root), and then reattaching it. This has some times cleared up symmetry bugs for me. Please note: You need to do this any time you change anything symmetric. Also, stay away from 'Recalculate CoL'. Those will bring the problem back.

Ferram Aerospace Research, or some equivalent thereto. I want to fly aircraft, not strange pseudo-submarines with magic wings.