Jarin

Other simple tweaks can be found in @Alshain's Community Database of MM Patches.

Did they ever find a fix the "all planets' axis must be parallel" thing? Or is that too deeply-rooted in the game engine?

Try putting a heat-shield inline between your nose and the cockpit.Feel free to remove all the ablator in the SPH; it's just there as a buffer for the internal heat transmitting backwards.

People play in different ways. You've aptly communicated that a smaller craft would be easier to handle here, and posted a useful example pic. However, some people LIKE building big, and will still come here for advice specific to those designs. @Biggen what's your opinion on some light modding? A simple module manager file makes the heat shield able to inflate/deflate repeatedly.

For the purposes of RAPIER science (SCIENCE!) what's your cruising altitude and top speed?

This is always my go-to advice for planes that can't break the sound barrier. Especially Mk2 planes. Pick your acceleration range (I just burn hard at sea level for maximum rapier thrust), then tune your wings so that the fuselage is as close to perfectly level in horizontal flight at Mach 1 as possible. This is typically 1-3 degrees of incidence, depending on weight and wing size. Two rapiers can get some surprisingly large craft to orbit if you minimize drag. Assuming you can break mach 1 at low altitudes, I'd recommend running to 600m/s or so then just aiming at 10 degrees pitch and flying straight to orbit.

That... looks like a notable bug, to me. Need to see if it reproduces in stock first, though.

"in normal view", Trajectories is wonderfully useful for re-entry on Kerbin, but doesn't help aiming landings elsewhere and only works in map view, so no local precision. @Lunar Sea, I go the other way. Rather than showing my descent to a particular point, I use Throttle Controlled Avionics' landing calculator to set where I want to land, and it handles the braking and landing. It's a bit complicated to learn though, so might not be your best choice.

Except in that setup, B2 is showing both front and rear occluded. It's B1 that has its rear open. The middle of 3 bays is working fine. And I just tested, but it looks like there's nothing special about two bays, it still shows the same behavior. I guess I did get the "plane randomly works right" bug when I test-few the big 2-bay plane before.

When you build a "non-draggy" plane, is it consistent? Or does it vary from flight to flight? If consistent, share the .craft?

Oh hey, that's useful. Good to know.

One zip file download worth of mods then. Nitpicker.

I think I'm gonna wait for @Nertea to take a look at this. Maybe there's something obvious here to someone with knowledge of the internal workings. We may be approaching the "clean install, one mod only" testing point though, which is always a pain.

That last plane showed no drag variation, too, which is something I haven't been able to get. Inconsistency is the bane of debugging... there's got to be a common thread in here somewhere. =/

Okay, just to eliminate wings as an issue, I pulled off the tweakscaled OPT wings I'd used out of laziness and tested out this crime against nature and aerodynamics: Only stock Big-S wings, 3 bays, front-and-back drag like before.

So it looks like 4 bays is the magic number here. 3 or less and it flies fine?

Long-bay test shows the same thing for me. Front-and-back drag. Like the end-piece bays' inward-facing nodes aren't occluded.

Yup, working on it. Just having brain issues with borked wings. I don't usually build this big. XD

The front-and-back thing makes sense, if the front bay has its rear node un-occluded and the rear bay has its front un-occluded (i.e. brickwall in the airstream). No clue why @sh1pman is seeing drag in the middle and not the ends though. Doesn't help that we're now testing different models. That longer one has 4x240 bays, rather than the 120s in the shared ship.

Dangit, didn't check the middle bays on that one. (also didn't see the new page, so thought you hadn't posted; whups). So it's something about multiple contiguous cargo bays, I guess? The two larger ones back-to-back didn't have any trouble. Edit: Huh, that's weird. Now I'm seeing the huge drag on the front and back bays. Mostly the back. I wonder if the fact that I autostrutted the craft changed something... (possibly a red herring, I'm just guessing wildly at this point)

I think that did it! Got both of @sh1pman's planes to orbit, if not as efficiently as the first one did before (sorry, tail's gonna have some drag). As for my minimal-drag testbed: Those are some beautiful numbers right there. Thanks @Nertea so much for sticking with this and tracking down the issue. (though I do find it funny that the service bay has basically no drag no matter what I do to it, but that's hardly game-breaking) Edit: Oh, and the shoulder intake drag looks great too. Did you make any adjustments to the Advanced Shock Intake (the 2.5m one) like you did for the shoulder?

Plenty of independent game devs have public roadmaps and regularly give details on development without alienating their community. But that would require actually having a development structure, and I think Squad is still rebuilding that (and best of luck to them there). But still, this is hardly a no-win situation. You're defining "one person complains" as "our communication failed" which is... weird.

Huh, I somehow missed that. That just makes my findings with the thrust curves even weirder. The engines were cutting out at slower speeds as you drop below 20k, but I couldn't manage to reach the cutoff below 19.

While interesting, I've yet to see a craft that can actually reach rapier top-speed below 20km altitude. I'd love to see a functioning example, though. ... ow

Yeah, the log only seems to note when there's a sharp increase in heating from engine exhaust, such as might cause damage if left alone.