ZenithRising

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. When I feel mentally prepared to take on spaceplanes again I will have much more to work with.

THANK YOU! Spaceplanes are so frustrating, and I've had trouble finding decent info about them in the past. I feel much more prepared to give them another try.

I love this idea. I've been playing a lot with mini probes myself lately, as they are easy as heck to put pretty much anywhere I want. This is my current design I'm quite enamored with: The whole thing, including the engine, 1000+ Xenon, and 18.00/s worth of solar panels still only weighs 0.8 tons. That solar panel array at the top generates as much power as one of the big ones at half the mass, and as an added bonus, works at close to peak capacity (80-90%) no matter what way the ship is facing. It generates enough power to get (almost) full thrust out of the ion drive as far out as Jool. However, if the probe is seeing diminishing returns from the panels, they can be jettisoned along with the larger xenon tank to bring the mass down to 0.5 tons.

Can't you just use the Maneuver system baked into the game?

Just keep experimenting. EDIT: Deleted snarky post based on misremembering which engine the Poodle was. Whoops!

My brothers and I do a little let's play channel on YouTube called Bad Enough Dudes, and I just did Kerbal Space Program! Hooray! So, if you want to watch a video of me flying a probe through Laythe's atmosphere into Jool (plus some basic game description for the uninitiated), check it out! http://youtu.be/2tNmw9RtC0s

Hee. I've used ion drives in the final stages of very low mass probes (less than a ton). One flew by two Joolian moons and settled into a nice tight 300km Joolian orbit using only its ion drive (and some aerobraking). Granted, some of the burns were over an hour long (I did house work and set a timer), but the delta-v of an ion drive can't be beat if you're willing to wait for it. That said, I've since gotten better at both flying and rocket design, and haven't used up the fuel on my pre-ion nuclear stage since.

Fantastic video. This one on staging is great too: Does anyone know if struts add drag, or just mass? Can I add them more or less with impunity? Sometimes they seem to just make the situation worse.

Not enough specific impulse! Mainsails are going to burn through your fuel in a hurry, and you really don't need that kind of thrust once you are out of atmo, you need delta-v. What engine has the best delta-v? The ion drive. Of course, it would take you AGES to get that delta-v out of your ion drive, and you'll have crashed long before then, so you still need a certain amount of thrust, but a lot less then mainsails provide. Remember, mainsails are fuel-hungry beasts, and more fuel means more mass, and more mass means you need more delta-v. You are caught in a self-defeating cycle. Add more solid boosters in your initial stage, and use skipper(s) or even L30(s) for your final apoapsis burn. So long as there is enough thrust to keep from falling back into atmo, you have plenty. Go green! Get better fuel efficiency! P.S. As others have mentioned, jam a small grey tank in between the orange ones and the mainsails to prevent overheating. You can also add a winglet or two next to the engine, which will not only help control the craft while in atmo, but also act as a heat sink.

I really couldn't say until the game is done. As it is, the $23 price for an Alpha build of a game seems a little steep to me, on principle if nothing else (I really do love the game). If, down the road, KSP is a finished polished product, and they start putting out content packs, I would probably get them. I'd pay as much as $15 certainly.

So, on two separate occasions, I've tried my hand at building some spaceplanes, worked at it all day, and ended up quitting in anger with no working plane designs. Most recently I did a lot of googling too to try and find some answers, and while I found a lot of things to try, it didn't seem to help me get a plane off the ground. The big problem seems to be a fundamental instability that starts to affect my planes when they get up to a certain speed, causing them to roll and destroy their wings. I was able to get some minimalist planes (and the stock planes) into the air, but anything of any significant size I design is impossible to get off the ground. I know this is a pretty common experience, but plenty of people out there seem to be flying successful planes, so I'm just wondering if those of you who have managed it could give me some tips to making my plane designs easier to take off and fly. Where should I put my CoM, CoL and CoT? Should I tie everything together with struts? What is a good mass to lift ratio? Do I just need to wait until Squad improves the plane physics? Etc etc

Yes, I have since read about this behavior, which is fairly nifty, However, I have multiple stages of tanks (two groups of three to maintain symmetry), so the current system doesn't distinguish between those (unless perhaps if I daisy chained the fuel lines?). In any case, I want this functionality for xenon gas and rcs too, so the fuel lines won't help there.

You tried and failed to spell Decouple multiple times? How does that happen? In any case, programming languages are moving away from abbreviations and towards readability, even going so far as to do away with typing all together and using drag and drop lego-style systems. That's definitely the direction I would like to see anything in KSP go towards. How are you suppossed to know that the proper abbreviation is dcpl and not decoup or decpl? If anybody has used Apple's Automator, that's a pretty good example of drag-and-drop script building, and it works well. Something similar in KSP would be amazing (though obviously a huge undertaking). Something text based might be easier to implement (perhaps it could be based off of the game's existing engine?). Either way, I would love playing around with it.

Totally agree here. I'm sure UI refinement is a low-priority right now, but yeah, this should be a thing at some point.

Just posted this in my own thread the other day. So I second this notion. Also worth noting, the game doesn't currently remember whether or not you have toggled a fuel tank off after you leave the game. So you have to turn tanks off every time you load.

I really like this idea, but I would get rid of the time delay, or at least make it a toggleable option (that is off by default). It's realistic and interesting, but it would quikcly make the game a lot less fun too.

I'd love to see space planes that don't immediately go into a death roll on the runway as soon as I get them up to speed. Perhaps aerodynamics would fix that? Resources would be nice too. Though you'd have to be careful how you implemented it. Could get hokey and unrealistic pretty quickly.

I spent my first few hours of KSP just crashing hare-brained rockets into Kerbin over and over. At this point I have concluded that Jeb is in fact the Kerbin Highlander.

Add ladders. They should make your EVA a lot easier.

I just went through a similar episode myself. I was working with a moderately sized design (5 orange tanks, 4 mainsails, 12 solid boosters) that had been fine, and after some minor tweaks to the payload to try and reduce wobble on ascent, the whole thing started collapsing on the launch-pad. A few times it just split about halfway down, detaching my initial stages, without any visual change. It took me a long time to figure out why most of my engines weren't responding anymore . Unfortunately I don't think I have a lot of insight to add. After messing around with a lot of strut configurations, I eventually got it to stay in one piece all the way up again. In the many configurations I tried, very small changes in configuration seemed to sometimes result in huge differences in outcome. I think ultimately it just comes down to quirks in the alpha build.

I can't speak to landing on Duna, as I haven't attempted landing on anything yet. But I've sent orbital probes to Eve, Duna, and Jool, and I would say Eve was the hardest out of those. Something about where Eve's orbit was relative to Kerbin made it a huge pain, but with Duna and Jool, I just escaped Kerbin, and from an orbit around the Sun, found a maneuver that would put me in their sphere of influence. Once I was inside the SoI, it was simple enough to reduce my velocity and settle into whatever orbit I chose, Including flybys of the various moons (3 out of 5 for Jool). Now for Jool, I was down to just an ion drive, so I used aerobraking through both Jool and Eve for a lot of the delta-v I needed to make a tight orbit, but it was simple enough to build a low-mass, high delta-v probe that reached the others with plenty to spare. Now, getting landers and Kerbals there will definitely be more difficult, but as others have pointed out, the delta-V required for Duna is much smaller than the others.

As I was launching my first deep space probe on an escape trajectory from Kerbin, I was thinking how much fun it would be to attempt a rendezvous with a comet that is small, fast moving, and only in the neighborhood every so often. I'm sure you have plenty of plans for new bodies to add to the system, but I'd love to see a comet or two added to the list.

What OP suggested was a few animations and textures to help improve ambience. I think you must have misunderstood the post. What he suggested is rather easy to implement (assuming your graphics guy has some time) and doesn't involve the the physics engine.

100000x time warp would not be even close to enough to get to another star.

I like this idea. I think it may be too much work to do full cutscenes for now, but some sort of shift in music, or a celebration animation when your Kerbal first sets foot on Mun, or achievements. Whatever you could do easily and build on later, for a number of major milestones in the game. It would be a very nice touch, even in Sandbox mode.