Lucius Sejanus

What's the situation with the intakes? All my favorite B9-based .20 SSTOs broke in .21, and B9 3.3 did not fix them. I'm baffled as to why, though, as it's the change in stock KSP that nerfed (fixed? broke?) the B9 intake behavior. Were my SSTOs flying due to buggy intakes, or are they now grounded due to a bug? I'm really curious as to what actually changed, since stock intakes are unaffected. Were the B9 ones buggy, and are now fixed?

Yup, it's the extendable landing legs blocking exhaust. I've had this exact thing happen to me landing Kethane mining gear on Minmus.

Amazing pack, I've already designed a massive interplanetary ship and a Laythe lander with it, which look amazing compared to my old stock Duna ship. One disappointing thing though, seems some S2 parts (cockpit, crewtank, wide-body bay, fueltanks) have those nifty thermal tiles painted, while some (widebody and engine adapters, from what I saw) do not. Did I install something wrong, or is that how the parts are? If it is, are there any plans to fix it? Would be much appreciated, I realize that it's a bit of work for a small nitpick.

Jeb, after his awesome booster ride:

I've recently mastered interplanetary navigation enough to able to do a manned Duna return. Having done that, I set my eye on a loftier goal, a manned Laythe return. Now, I like to meticulously plan everything in advance, but in this case, don't have all the info. And what better way to fix that than by starting a generic-named Howto thread, and dump a bunch of vaguely-related questions into it? First question concerns those delta-v maps I see floating around. As I read them, I need a vessel in LKO to have circa 4000 m/s delta-v for the return trip, assuming aerobraking on Jool capture with the resultant apoapsis around Laythe's orbit. But, I am unsure (How much to kick that periapsis out of Jool atmosphere? How costly is the Laythe capture?). What are the rough requirements, assuming liberal use of aerobraking? Secondly, my Duna mission vessel had abysmal TWR, which resulted in rather long burns. Not long enough to jeopardize the mission, but long enough to annoy me. How low do people commonly go, before low TWR becomes a serious problem? And lastly, it looks to me that the best way to go about designing a Laythe lander is to build a hybrid jet and rocket powered VTOL SSTO. Which raises a whole host of questions, since I can test my designs on Kerbin, not Laythe, and I don't want to overbuild the lander to make it Kerbin-ascent capable. My current design has around 1500 m/s delta-v as reported by MechJeb and Kerbal Engineer, which I think accounts only for the rocket-powered ascent phase. Is there a good way to find out the delta-v of the jet phase? I guess I could build a purely rocket-powered ship with 2800 m/s delta-v, and try and match its ascent profile with my hybrid lander, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate, since I imagine jets perform slightly differently on Laythe. Or do they? Anyway, thanks in advance for any insights, I'm sure as I keep designing I'll stumble into more questions.

Does anyone have any tips for working with UV maps in 3DS Max 9 (or older)? I\'ve modeled up a low-poly version of the Soyuz spacecraft, and am now trying to texture it. Problem is, the Soyuz has a roughly bell-shaped descent module, so every automatic tool gives me funny curved shapes that I am waaay too unartistic to be able deal with. I am also way too unartistic to be able to manually caress them into a simple rectangular shape that would just wrap around my model as if it was a cylinder. So is there maybe some magic button somewhere that unwraps a roughly cylindrical object into a simple flat map?