Galane

Depends on how your plane is built. Once you get wheels off the runway, Ascent Guidance will quickly tip the plane straight up, which tends to bang the tail on the runway and knock pieces off. Manual takeoffs and getting some air underneath are generally good things. The faster you can gain altitude, the less fuel the plane will use. I modified a couple of the stock planes to go to space and tried altering the stock MJ ascent profile with a really low turn start and a flat curve. Figured perhaps a slower climb on jets might save oxidizer later. Ran out of fuel. Following the default curve it worked. One plane is the one with four of the regular jet engines. I swapped the outer pair with the more powerful jets and the inner pair with rapiers. Some oxidizer tanks made with the Stretchy SRB mod plus some of the pill shaped oxy tanks (IIRC from KSPX?) mounted underneath gave the rapiers enough to work with to get to low orbit, then deorbit.

Tell the politicians you want to blow stuff up. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1522#comic

KAS Orion Hybrid. A courageous (or really stupid) Kerbal sits above the pusher plate, which has various KAS components affixed to it. Periodically he attempts to remove one of the parts and BLAMMO! The ship is pushed ahead a bit. Could have some fun with it before it gets fixed. Build a vehicle in SPH with some KAS parts on the back, grab them off and see how far the explosions will push the vehicle down the runway.

Why would it? It works with manual staging, one after the other up the stack, in the order the icons are arranged. MechJeb just has to 'climb the stack' in exactly the same way using the spacebar works.

If it was a lead (led) instead of lead (leed) envelope... Mythbusters made a helium balloon out of lead and IIRC someone back in the 1970's also did it. Very fragile and completely impractical, but it works if made large enough so the volume of the gas can overcome the weight of the metal. Which makes me think of another crazy technology I'd love to see in this mod. Vacuum airship parts. What weighs less than hydrogen, the lightest element? Nothing, that is a vacuum, consisting of nothing at all, weighs less than hydrogen. A balloon "full" of vacuum would have quite a bit more lifting power than one of the same volume full of hydrogen or helium, 14% more than helium. The problem is creating a vessel strong enough to keep the atmospheric pressure from crushing it AND light enough that the non-contents can float the container in the atmosphere. Not even a container made of homogenous diamond can withstand the pressure AND be light enough. Perhaps a "honeycomb" or other porous material, with impermeable inner and outer skins, pressurized with hydrogen between the skins, could be strong enough to contain a vacuum while being light enough for the vacuum to lift and outperform a conventional envelope of equal displacement filled with hydrogen. An airship envelope of a given size always has the same theoretical lifting power, no matter what it's filled with. To get the usable lifting capacity, calculate the volume of air displaced (thus how much maximum weight can be lifted) and subtract the weight of the filling (and the envelope). That pretty much leaves four choices, in order of decreasing weight. Hot air, helium, hydrogen, vacuum. There are others that have been used but have less lift capacity and/or are flammable and/or toxic. I wonder if anyone has tried hot helium or hot hydrogen? In "The Clouds of Saturn" by Michael McCollum, he had floating cities on Saturn using double layer dome envelopes. The inner layer held a heliox atmosphere (like what deep ocean divers breathe) because the 70% of normal air that is nitrogen is *heavy* and between it and the outer layer was heated hydrogen. If the city builders hadn't wanted an "outdoor" space they could have just used a smaller amount of heated hydrogen to carry the same load. And yes, everyone talks in a high pitched voice. People have been trying to do vacuum airships, with zero success, since the 1600's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship But in a computer simulation it's easy to have fictional materials with the right properties to make it work. This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_gas says vacuum is 7% lighter than hydrogen and %16 lighter than helium. Yet again conflicting data on two Wiki articles on the same subject.

I wish it would "learn" to recognize stages without a decoupler in the stage as stages instead of additional delta V it can grab for the stage below. Three workarounds. Run the staging completely manually. Set auto staging to stop below the stage without a decoupler then trigger the decoupler-less stage manually at the appropriate time, then change the stop at number for auto staging so it can continue automatic staging. Add a 'throwaway' radial decoupler on the rocket and put its icon in with the stage that does not need a decoupler. The decoupler has to stay with the rocket. If put on a lower stage that drops, MechJeb will fire the engines in the no-decoupler stage as soon as the lower stage gets out of physics range - when its icon goes away. How hard can it be to make MechJeb follow the staging process the way manually hitting the spacebar works? I often do some quite complex staging, I like to stack drop tanks on top of asparagus stacks and kick them off as they drain. That drops weight without dropping engines, keeping more thrust available longer. I also like to put probe cores on upper stages that end up in orbit, and forward facing separatrons to deorbit them. But due to this one limitation with auto staging I have to use one of the workarounds to keep ascent guidance from firing the separatrons at the same time as the engine(s) in the stage below them. Another configuration incompatible with auto staging is radially attached fuel tanks and engines on a stage, that you do not want burning until after the core they're stuck onto is empty. Manually it works, automatic will light it all up together. To make it work with automatic there has to be something extra stuck on to pop off just so auto staging can see the radially attached parts that are in a different stage in the icon stack actually are in a different stage.

One addition the bin contents window could use is a Close button. If you're running lower resolutions the window covers the whole screen then it has to be dragged off to the side or down to get at the button on the rightclick popup.

Squad says they've fixed it in .24.1 You'll still want to check the Size 3 decoupler cfg in the NASA Mission parts to see if it has the Physics Significance = 1 line. It was there in .23.5 and .24. If you use that decoupler in any way other than right side up in a single center stack or in asparagus stacks attached with a radial decoupler, some unexpected events can happen. Delete that line or change the 1 to a 0 and it behaves just like all the other inline decouplers, which don't have that line.

Here's what inspired my Eve lander. Got it off the Spaceport. My engineers got out the cutting torches and went to work on it like those guys in "Armageddon" to chop off weight and useless parts wherever possible. http://pastebin.com/Y1fbvAHP

Weight is the enemy when launching from Eve. Put anything not required after liftoff on decouplers so it can be dumped. Top of the stack staging like on my lander lets it drop weight as tanks empty, while using the same engines as long as possible. Rebuilding around a Rockomax size core (which should make it much easier to push out to Eve) and adding a second asparagus ring plus another layer or two of tanks on top... it just takes so much fuel and if you're not going to refuel on the surface that means even more fuel. So a two stage lander looks to be a better solution. Get a rocket built that can lift to orbit from Eve surface, then graft on a descent stage. Might try in orbit docking of the ascender to the descent stage. That's what I was looking at doing before I decided to try the lighter than air thing. The lander I used for inspiration was spread out a lot more and included two rovers and quite a bit of other stuff, but could put one Kerbal back to Eve orbit, in a chair, but had to start above a certain altitude. I'd have to load it and have a look to see but I think it only used the same 7 engines and might not have much, if any, difference in fuel load.

The problem has fortunately gone away with newer builds of MechJeb. I found a solution to an Eve lander capable of returning more* than one Kerbal in a chair to orbit to be Hooligan Labs airship parts and six aerospike engines plus one LV 45. *Two Kerbals in a 2-man can. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67575-Take-a-Chance-on-Eve-A-lander-that-gets-you-down-and-back-up! On-Eve by g_alan_e, on Flickr

The cfg for the KD25 SRB needs some adjusting. At the largest scale it can't lift its own weight off the pad and at one step down is barely capable of lifting itself. 'Course at the largest size it's nearly as tall as the inside of the VAB.

Can it scale just diameter without scaling length? I'd like to see what Tweak Scale says the capacity and mass increase should be on the ThunderMaximus tanks scaled up just in diameter from the ThunderMax tanks. Some of the ReStock parts could be replaced using Tweak Scale, but several are combined of two or more stock parts, usually rescaled and squished, and node positions adjusted.

Could someone recompile the final version of Stretchy SRB for .24? I've tested it in .24 x32 and it works, but KSP tosses up an "incompatible" warning.

I did a test in .24 x32 with several KAS parts, never got an explosion nor was I unable to attach anything, and I have lots of mods installed.

Decided to bring this home, didn't take any shots but somehow managed to get an Ike encounter leaving Duna AND a Mun encounter arriving at Kerbin, both of which royally screwed things up, requiring much fuel to be used to avoid hitting both of them. Good thing I built the ship with lots of fuel capacity! Despite switching Target to Mun it circularized retrograde around Kerbin between the orbits of Mun and Minmus. I figured capturing into Mun orbit then transitioning from there to LKO would work. I had to build a special tanker (hooray for Size 3 tanks!) to fly out there to get enough fuel in the ship to get it down to a lower orbit. Then I had to send out a Deorbitizer to bring the tanker down. The Duna Runa 2 lander landed safely (as it always does) so Mission Accomplished. Now I have to decide if I want to leave the ship core in orbit for re-use (is going to be a PITA to shift around to a prograde orbit) or crash it. Still to do, build a Kethane miner lander for Duna that doesn't burn up almost all the fuel it makes or Kethane it extracts getting back to orbit. I might try a variant of my (still waiting to go to) Eve trio of a mining rover, converting rover and a land/return vehicle - designed for SSTO-ing a significant amount of fuel to orbit. I'm thinking airship parts like the Eve lander.

Didn't replace it, just set the launch silo into a divot in the landscape near KSC, but it requires the KerbTown mod and running at highest terrain detail so the divot will exist. Otherwise the ground clips through the silo and whatever rocket you put in it.

Looks very nice! One more thing that would be nice is if it could snap parts precisely aligned with the VAB or SPH, primarily to ensure wheels are aligned dead nuts straight with the axis of the vehicle - and hopefully make aircraft track straight down the runway. Something I've been wanting since .21 which is the first version (aside from the current demo) that I used. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52288-Rover-wheel-alignment Also nice to see that .24 finally fixes rotating the rockets 90 degrees from VAB to launchpad.

Of course it should be possible to override perfectly straight alignment, simply by rotating the part. It should also have a way to snap parts back to perfect alignment. A plugin with UI additions to set precision angles would be most welcome.

An issue with assembling ground vehicles in VAB and SPH is wheels tend to not get attached perfectly aligned. Even the slightest bit off and your rover will need constant steering correction or your aircraft will not track straight down the runway. What KSP needs is a way to attach wheels perfectly aligned to any of the orthogonal axes, and possibly a direct text entry box for degrees if for some reason you want your wheels toed in 3 degrees. This can be edited in the craft file, even in the persistent and quicksave file, but it'd be much better if KSP would just attach the wheels perfectly straight. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52288-Rover-wheel-alignment The same would also be useful for attaching other parts. Many times I've built things that would not fly straight, but if I took parts off and reattached them the craft would work, apparently because something worked just a bit differently and the part attached just right.

I did it, but not without having to alter the empennage. Dunno why, but soon as it'd go vertical under MechJeb control it'd yaw left or right and wouldn't pull out of it. After changing the tailfins it works. Extra odd is with rockets above and below the wings, it wouldn't yaw, but the thrust would run out too soon. Soooo, turbojets, which combined with the Rapiers use up all the fuel in the wing tanks by the time orbit is reached, leaving just a bit more than enough oxidizer in them to deorbit. Since I don't have it setup for fuel to flow *to* the wing tanks I dumped them and their engines after the flight path was on target back to KSP - but they could be kept for a fully reusable SSTO spaceplane. Still wishing for a spaceplane ascent guidance module for MechJeb so it won't try to fly them like rockets. I might try it again with this configuration and the original tail by setting the gravity turn height really low. Big spaceplane by g_alan_e, on Flickr

Looks like the LRO has found the lunar equivalent of cenote. http://www.gizmag.com/moon-pits-lunar-shelter/33037/ Features like that in KSP would be fun to explore.

Nice program. Just the old version of Infernal Robotics, and they are all experimental and testing crafts I can delete.

Some of my old rockets won't load due to "locked or invalid" parts. I'm missing a mod, but which one? It would be nice if KSP would have a popup on those ships listing which parts it cannot find. Looks like a job for a plugin to audit craft files for missing parts.

It already has a thing to establish an elliptical resonant orbit so you can put the apoapsis at stationary orbit altitude and release your satellites there and have them stay put. Time warp to get to each spot you want to release a satellite.