Grumman

The most interesting use, I think, would be for probe retrieval on Eve and similar planets. Make an ultralight probe with a parachute on one side and a collapsed balloon on the other, drop it on Eve with the parachute, then inflate the balloon and send a shuttle over to retrieve it from the upper atmosphere.

For those who like building reusable space planes, how about this idea: A structure near the runway with a docking port on the side. It would be treated as a vehicle with an arbitrarily large inertia (and is thus immovable) that contains an infinite supply of liquid fuel, oxidiser, RCS fuel, electricity and xenon. A vehicle could drive up to this structure and connect with its docking port to resupply. The purpose of this structure is to make not just space planes but refuelling trucks reusable. Since the current method of refuelling requires spawning new refuelling trucks (which causes problems when you already have a plane on the runway), this would allow a more convenient and more immersive method, by using a tanker truck to shuttle fuel to the spaceplane from the fuel depot. Thoughts?

More or less. I usually get my apogee a bit higher, both to allow for air resistance and so that I have a bit more time to get up to orbital speed.

Here is my first successful spaceplane. My advice would be to perform a test flight and work out what the maximum sustainable height is for your plane - the highest you can go before it becomes unstable or suffers from flame-outs. For example, for mine that's approximately 23,000 meters. Once you know what that height is, you should perform another flight, and use up as much of your jet fuel as you can flying at that height. The higher you are the faster you can go, so building up horizontal velocity is a lot cheaper at that height than above (using inefficient rocket engines) or below (too much air resistance). Once you're almost out of jet fuel, you tip your nose up to about 40 degrees, switch to the rocket engine, and perform a burn to get you above the atmosphere - say to 80,000 meters. Then you just coast until you're out of the atmosphere and perform your circularising burn.

Congratulations, you're now a Captain Planet villain.

If you do another manned mission and don't want this to happen again, it might be easier if you EVA and collect all the science, so you can put it in the crew capsule.

I invented my first SSTO space plane - complete with docking port. Hopefully it has enough delta-V to reach Goliath Station to refuel. If it does, I'll pick up a passenger and return to Kerbin.

I broke the rocket engine on my rover, so now I have to send a rescue mission to go pick Jeb up. On the plus side, he'll bring a whole lot of Science back with him.

Capillary action.

Asteroids are very tempting for this purpose. I could imagine it turning into some sort of Ork Rok - a ramshackle spaceship which you then fling in the general direction of a planet you want to invade explore.

I sent Jeb over to Minmus on a rover/lander to collect more science for my planned capital ship, Leviathan. The nice thing about a rover that is also a lander is that you can use the rocket engines to increase your acceleration while driving.

You can't perform an Apollo mission without docking ports. That's a pretty clear indication that you're wrong.

Establishing geostationary orbit is actually quite simple. What you want is a circular orbit (apoapsis = periapsis) that has zero inclination from the equator, at a height where your orbital speed makes you orbit 360 degrees in one day. For Kerbin, this means that you want your apoapsis and periapsis to be 2,868.75 km. For Laythe, you want an apoapsis and periapsis of 4,686.32 km. Once you've established this orbit, you should create a maneuver node and use the two blue buttons to push it forwards and backwards one orbit. If you're in the right place, doing so will change the time to the node by exactly one day.

Another option you may want to consider is launching the top section of the ship upside-down. In other words, on the launchpad you'd have the main engines pointing down, and the space engines pointing up, with the usual decoupling mechanisms in between.

I'm going to bump this because it's a kludge that ruined one of my recent vehicles. I built an aeroplane designed to parachute probes down across Kerbin - a stylish way to grab all the different sorts of Science available. Or it would be, if the game didn't delete all my probes before they could land.

I have found one good use for these, and that's for my escape module module. 1.5 thrust is sufficient when all you need to do is put a Kerbal in a decaying orbit.

You're fighting a strawman. Nobody wants a single parachute to have infinite carrying capacity. Even if the X*parachutes > mass calculation was just to decide whether to bother simulating the landing or not, it is important as a way to distinguish between the bits which might land safely and which are inherently incapable and will do nothing other than eat up valuable processing power.

Just a rough estimate would be enough. If the mass of the rocket is less than X*number of deployed parachutes, it lands safely. Otherwise, it is destroyed.

I don't think we'd need a full N-body implementation anyway. Just increasing the number of gravitational sources from one to two would be sufficient to give us Lagrange points, and that's the main thing we're really likely to notice, right?

Having just done some calculations, this might work better if the cost of blocked LOS is higher. I'm using the example of a rover on the exact opposite side of Kerbin, with distances measured in millions of meters. The radius of Kerbin is 600,000 metres, so the rover is 1.2 megametres from the KSC. This gives a multiplier of 1.2^2, or 1.44, multiplied by whatever effect the blocked LOS has. But if you have a trio of communications satellites in synchronous orbit you could instead send the packet to the nearest, which then bounces it to the one nearest the KSC, which then sends it down. Since the radius of a synchronous orbit is 2.868 megametres, this gives the following: Surface-to-relay: (-1.2,0) to (-2.484, 1.434): (2.484-1.2)^2 + 1.434^2 = 3.704 Relay-to-relay: (-2.484, 1.434) to (2.484, 1.434): 4.968^2 = 24.681 Relay-to-surface: (2.484, 1.434) to (+1.2,0): (2.484-1.2)^2 + 1.434^2 = 3.704 Total: 3.704 *2 + 24.681 = 32.089 At the very least, we'd want the surface-to-relay cost to be lower than the cost of transmitting straight through Kerbin - the relay-to-relay cost isn't such an issue since it could be mitigated by building your comms satellites with big, bulky antenna and big, bulky power supplies that you don't want to stick on every single ship.

If this was implemented, it would be a good idea to add a dedicated transponder component. This would make it significantly simpler to calculate a correct path back to Kerbin, as you'd only need to consider ships with an active transponder part as nodes and not every ship in the solar system. Perhaps instead of changing the penalty, it would be better to change the power consumption? Make each packet cost (distance)^2 / (efficiency), with the cost doubled if you don't have a clear line of sight.

Perhaps when a fuel-carrying part is destroyed, subject all adjacent parts to an impact of 1 m/s for every ten units of liquid fuel and oxidiser. Fuel tanks have an impact tolerance of 6 m/s, so anything with more than 60 units of liquid fuel and 60 units of oxidiser could cause a chain reaction. Small tanks, empty tanks and non-tank components could not.

Pointless micromanagement is pointless. Unless there's a situation in which you wouldn't want to close the pod, it should happen automatically if it is necessary.

I would like to see a part added to the game that converts air and liquid fuel into electricity. It doesn't need to be light, or efficient, but this and some wheels added to the start of the tech tree would give us the ability to build a basic automobile.

As well as splitting pools into (transmission or recovery) and (recovery only) Science I would also suggest changing what percentage of the remaining science different devices recover. Some devices like thermometers would then encourage repeated samples by giving you 5% of the remaining Science each time you transmit, while recovering a rocket that reached orbit might just give you a 100% lump sum the first time you do it.