arq

What the above said. If struts disappear it means that the parts they were joining are no longer part of the same ship, that you've had something break somewhere. F3 will let you know what happened.

No (stock) version of this game will keep you from rockets at the very beginning and force you to build and fly planes around at first. This is Kerbal *Space* Program, not Kerbal Flight Simulator. Planes are something of an afterthought (though they are certainly very fun and interesting to mess around with). Nothing says that Kerbals developed science in the same timeline that we did. If you really want a justification, consider that jet engines are a 20th century innovation, while rockets have been around since at least the 13th century. The design principles of rockets are much simpler, so I have no issue allowing them to be earlier in Kerbal science.

Since we haven't heard much mention of money yet with regard to contracts, I would expect it to be only primitively included in 0.24, if at all. Besides, as it stands parts are horribly imbalanced when it comes to cost (and some in other aspects *cough* 48-7S and aviation fuel tanks *cough*). For example, the mainsail, skipper, and T30 have same cost (and all are cheaper than T45). The X200-32 fuel tank is cheaper than the FL-T400 tank that holds 1/8 the fuel. Meanwhile, the Jumbo-64 tank costs over 20x what the -32 does, even though it holds only 2x the fuel. Also, the -16 holds 1/2 the fuel of the -32 but costs over 3x more. Current costs are placeholders and a rebalance, though not necessarily difficult, is something that I don't expect to see in 0.24. Without one, any money system would be annoying or exploitable, depending on your perspective, but certainly not fun.

I've been toying with the idea of a sending a probe to low Kerbol orbit via repeated Moho assists. You can repeatedly swing around Moho until your periapsis is as low as you want and your apoapsis is at Moho, and this can be done almost for free. Of course, getting your apo down to circularize will still take fuel.

It's difficult. I've tried something like 20 times with varying techniques. The bouncing is what kills you. I eventually gave up and now do the standard 'kill horizontal just above the ground, then do a vertical approach.' I flip back horizontal onto the main gear at the last moment, falling the last few meters unpowered. This does mean that I do a horizontal takeoff, though.

FAR adds these to control surfaces. Flaps are (by default) bound to actiongroups 9 and 0 (IIRC) while spoilers fire with the brakes, b. Flaps increase lift, and are used to allow flying at lower speeds than otherwise might be possible. This is useful for takeoff/landing, because lower groundspeeds are much safer. Spoilers are not strictly intended to stop the plane, but that is a useful side-effect. They are used to reduce lift and increase drag. They are used to bleed energy from the plane while it is in the air. When deployed, they 'spoil' the lifting characteristics of the wing, making it less effective. This can be used to increase a descent rate without entering a dive (which would increase airspeed, a bad thing near the ground), which is important for final approach to landing. On the ground, they do help to slow the plane but are much less effective than the wheelbrakes. The major reason they are deployed on touchdown is to keep the plane from taking off again, which can be exceedingly dangerous because you aren't planning on it.

I started working on some more advanced orbital simulations a few weeks ago. It's nothing quite so ambitious or well-organized as this project and I don't work on it often, so I'm excited to see where this goes. Best of luck to you, eggrobin! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

You can easily cruise above 30km with airhogging. I made a plane that could cruise above 40km. The wings were actually quite small, but I had pitched them up about 20deg from horizontal, so that I could face forward to max air intake while still producing upward lift. It had 5 intakes and 1 turbojet. Above 40km, air is so thin (lo drag) and speed is so high (low gravity losses) that you can circumnavigate Kerbin on fumes. The 'plane' I had could fly around Kerbin close to 3 times with the relatively small reserves it had. It actually took more fuel to get to 40km than to circle the planet. But this was mostly an experiment to screw around with airhogging. I avoid it most of the time. What I wanted to get at was you don't need massive wings, necessarily.

Wings do *not* increase dV. If you get a dV-tracker and watch dV into orbit, it can easily reach 6000m/s or much more. What they *do* do is make fighting gravity more efficient, essentially reducing gravity losses in exchange for increased drag loss. But drag loss is small at high altitude, so that's a good trade. The reason SSTOs are so efficient is the massive ISP of airbreathing engines. Oxidizer is heavy, so using jets as long as possible is advantageous. They are MASS-efficient, not DELTA-V-efficient.

Is there a way to control what orbit is drawn in Map Mode? Some way that I could provide a set of times/coordinates and draw based on that, instead of the ellipses worked out by the orbital parameters? It seems like I want to override the DrawOrbit() method. What about for following such an orbit on rails? How do I modify that? Would Interstellar Quest be a place to look, specifically the warp drive? Or does it do something different (I haven't used it)? Maybe I'll try taking a look there...

You can 'airhog' SSTOs by adding intakes to making getting to orbit almost arbitrarily easy and efficient. But I personally don't like to do this. The biggest thing is to reduce your oxidizer until you finish with basically no extra (so that you burn out of oxidizer and liquid fuel at the same time, after switching to rockets). Lose the second LV-N. Having more than 1 on a ship this small is a waste because they're so heavy. You only need 1 to get you from LKO to Mun and back, possibly with some 48-7S engines for extra thrust for getting into LKO and for takeoff/landing on Mun.

The 4 engines are 'worse' than 1 because they are heavier and for no other reason. So run them at full. If your ship is heavy (IE hours of burntime) then chances are that your extra engines only slightly reducing your dV. Also, there is a point where you have so little thrust that you cannot efficiently use your dV. If people are obsessed with maximizing efficiency, they should use ion engines exclusively. At some point it just isn't worth it. Remember: if your burn time is 3hrs, you will need to sit there at your computer for 3hrs waiting for it to burn. I would never rely on a single LV-N to move a 200t ship. I could add an extra engine, reducing dV by a tiny amount (<100m/s) but halving burntimes.

Awhile back, Squad said that eventually Career Mode would involve 3 currencies: Science, Money, and Reputation. They said there would be some ways of converting one into another, and that each would have its own uses. This seems like the second pillar, after we got Science in 0.22/0.23. Because there has been no mention yet I don't expect to see money in 0.24, but perhaps the foundations of the reputation system will be put in place.

Just because this fuel tank is bigger does not mean getting anywhere in the Kerbol system will be trivial. It may simply require fewer parts (and hence allow better performance). It is currently possible to SSTO into a Munar encounter or impact (not capture, though) using only mainsails. Using the OP 48-7s engine you could probably manage a capture. What really matters is that fuel fraction be maintained for fuel tanks (which it likely will, at 8/9) and that the engine not be too insanely powerful in terms of TWR and ISP compared to other engines (and the -7s is already very OP, so it is easy to fit a new engine's specs within that profile). As long as these parts are balanced in those aspects, interplanetary travel will only be easier in that it will require fewer parts (read: less lag) to get into LKO. Remember: in space bigger is not strictly better. Everything comes down to fuel fractions, ISP, and (only to a small extent, mostly for landings/takeoffs) TWR.

I love making real-world inspired planes. The best SSTO I ever made was roughly based on a P-38. Also, FAR helps a bit in dealing with off-center thrust, but adds a bunch of other stuff to contend with.

Yup, as others have said, Fine Control Mode will balance RCS translation.

It comes up much closer to the vac ISP in most cases. Usually I find 4500m/s of vac delta-V is sufficient with proper TWR management. You could use something like protractor or any other utility that has a dV counter to see how much you've expended, then compare that to a calculated value.

When they say asteroids will not be 'on rails', I can only imagine they mean to say that they will not be like Mun or Duna or another celestial body. I expect they will behave exactly like ships or debris. With Keplerian physics, there's no point in simulating these in real-time, since the orbital predictions are exact (up to error accumulation from finite precision arithmetic). They will load in to physics at 2.5km and otherwise use patched conics, exactly like vessels. Even the active vessel uses 'rails' during timewarp.

Do a burn to intersect Kerbin's orbit (Kerbin doesn't necessarily need to be there when you arrive). When you cross Kerbin's orbit, burn pro- or retrograde to get a Kerbin encounter after one orbit (or a few orbits later, if you need to wait to bring it around). This maneuver can be done at any time and is only more expensive than a direct transfer by the adjustment you need to do to get intercept, which can be very little if you have the patience to wait several orbits. Because Jool's orbital period is so long compared to Kerbin's (about 12x longer), you should be able to get the intercept in just one or two orbits with only a small adjustment. But a gravity assist could get you lined up to return at an actual transfer window and that will be faster in most cases. If you can do that, I would recommend it.

Haha Whackjob maybe you should just learn to build by editing .craft files manually. At your scale that almost sounds easier.

Do NOT taunt the magic boulder!

FAR has not caused overheating issues with overheating for me, especially as severe as you're reporting. I'm guessing something else is messing with that. Interstellar Mod does play with that, IIRC. Still, without a pic it is hard for us to see the problem. The FAR VAB/SPH GUI is very helpful for building stable craft. In the simulation window, set mach number to 0.2 and pitch to 1 and do an angle-of-attack sweep. The 'Cm' curve should stay positive (at least out to 20deg) both with and without fuel. Change pitch to -1 and repeat, this time making sure that Cm stays negative. Now change the mach number to 3 and repeat the entire process. If your craft works in all these regimes, chances are good that it will stay pitch-stable. As for flat spins, these are usually the result of unequal thrust or not having a sufficiently large vertical stabilizer that is set far enough behind the CoM. Try making it bigger or moving it back to improve this.

Does this still support text-based icons as alternatives to images? I've been trying to set myIButton = ToolbarManager.Instance.add("myButton", "myButton"); myIButton.Text = "myString"; which seems to be valid, according to the API, but nothing shows up in the toolbar. It works fine if I set TexturePath instead.

I have done this. The Procedural Wings mod works miracles with making large spaceplanes. And a SSTO can get payload fractions over 30%, so on the runway I would expect it to be in the 120-150t range. Don't be afraid to use large engines like the Mainsail or T30 clusters for the rocket stage.

If you use fine control (default key: CAPS LOCK), it will autobalance your RCS by modulating thrust. Even the most carefully constructed and balanced craft will not stay that way when you begin burning off fuel, so this (or a mod) is the best way to do it.