Hodo

As Tetryds said. Or you could just slide your wing forward just a bit so that your flaps are in line with your CoM. This will help with the nose tilt issue. I rarely use more than one notch of flaps on take off, and 3 on landing.

Pressure or electrical detonation. The pressure has to be with in a specific range same with the electrical charge.

I think you forgot to link your imgur link in your post.

Thats kind of like my FB-1 attack craft.

Oh its not fast, but it will go a good distance. I built it in my RO install last year. Could go something like 800km on a single fuel load, and never climb about 7km on Earth.

Off world bases are pretty pointless stock, but if you have Kethane or Kerbonite with TAC Life support and KAS they become QUITE useful. If you are exploring the Jool system you may want to setup a base on Laythe for a refueling and resupply point for the rest of the system. I have even had a base on the Mun for a while there that was nothing more than a command station for Remote Tech 2 and a 3 satellite in sync around the mun for communications with anything outside of the Kerbin SOI.

There is the one I was looking for. And the previous one was actually modeled after a common passenger aircraft used by many companies for short flights.

Congrats, good looking craft there. And hey any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Any landing you can use the aircraft again later is a great one!

This unfortunately does not always work with real aircraft or in FAR. If you are looking for a long distance slow flying stable aircraft then you want a high wing design. Nothing overly fancy, basically a Cessna or Piper Cub.

This is my catch all planes with FAR, I set all the pitch roll and yaw kd to half of the original values. This usually kills the oscilation with the pitch issue with SAS on. Oh and if you are using the Pilot Assistant tool PID, then use stock SAS settings it will help with the tuning effort. Otherwise you have an otherwise amazingly stable aircraft, it should do fine for long flights around the globe.

Davy sounds like you have an issue with roll authority. Let me see if I am reading the problem correctly? The craft is rolling randomly or lacking of roll stability during flight? I have to ask what control surfaces do you have on the craft other than the canards I see in the pictures? Do you have any horizontal rudder control, ailerons or elevators other than the canards at the front of the craft? If you are relying on the canards for all of your roll and pitch controls you are asking them to do to much this will cause the craft to roll unexpectedly when attempting to climb or dive and make it unstable in roll situations. It is generally best to set canards to pitch control only and then set a set of ailerons out towards the edges of the wing trailing edge to act as your roll controls. This with an actual rudder not some horizontal stabilizers and no control surface on them you will have a pretty stable aircraft there.

With B9 you can actually get away with placing fuel alongside your cargo hold which is pretty nice for balance issues. This craft the cargo hold is actually pretty well centered in between the fuel tanks. This craft on the other hand had its fuel tanks fore and aft of the craft hold with TAC fuel balancer I am able to keep the CoM pretty much where I want it, which is nice. But it also has canards and a delta wing design. The trick is to use decent airbraking before landing or even getting down to the lower atmosphere. I highly suggest one mod you should get for your SSTO building needs is RCS Build Aid. It will show you your dry and wet CoM at the same time. You can even configure it for different fuel loads and to show your average CoM. It will even tell you your CoM movement distance which is nice also. RCS Build Aid

Anything under 40tons to me is light weight. 1-40t light 41-99t medium 100-200t heavy 201+ super heavy. And yes I have built them that big.

And airhogging doesn't work in FAR. To the OP, your engines are suffering from asymmetrical airflow starvation problems. One engine is getting more air then the other, this is causing the one that is lacking air to create less power. This is most noticeable when your required air drops below 90%. As a general rule of thumb for my flights I dont let it drop below 110% before I switch over to rocket power. EDIT- after looking at the picture closer, I also noticed you are going a bit slow for that altitude. Usually when I am up to 25km or higher I try to be going over mach 4.5 at that point. Because at 26km I am about to start my orbital burn which means I should be going at least Mach 5.

I have been building heavy SSTO space planes since well before the new MK3 parts came out. And it isn't much different with a 300+ ton SSTO that can haul 108tons to orbit then it is with a 30 ton SSTO that hauls itself to orbit. The thing is you have to keep your TWR at the right areas and you L/D ratio perfect for most of the flight. After you get to a certain speed and your rockets take over you are no longer concerned with your wings or your intakes and you are now just a heavy rocket with a considerable speed advantage. The hard part is finding the time to launch things like that now....

To quote one of my former instructors. "Just because it worked doesn't mean it is right." You can get a car to take off if you put enough power behind it. Don't believe me look up Top Gear and the Reliant Robin Shuttle. All you did was basically make a tail dragging aircraft like an old WWII plane. That is great when you have a prop at the front. But pretty bad when it comes to most modern designs. This is because you are actually handicapping your take off and landing speeds by not giving yourself proper rotation for take off or landing. Most of my designs can land at about 60-90m/s depending on the plane. All of them can stop with in half or less of the distance of the runway, some can even stop LONG before that without having to stand on the brakes. I even have one aircraft that doesnt even need to use the brakes to stop and doesn't use chutes to land like a autogyro. This aircraft can land in half of the distance of the island runway and come to a stop with its wheel brakes, or it can come to a complete stop without its wheel brakes in a little over 3/4ths of that distance without them using its thrust reversers on those turbines. It lands at 65m/s which is fast for something that size, but I have to tweak its flaps a bit. This is what a proper landing gear position looks like.

I can agree with the wheel wiggle issue. Sounds like your gear mounted on your wings is causing them to flex upwards throwing your landing gear out of alignment and thus sending you off in a random direction. Also looks like you are going a bit to fast on take off. Most aircraft should be off the ground around 70-80m/s. If you are going faster than that you should look at the amount of wing your craft has vs the the mass of your craft. Check the FAR diagnostic charts see what they kick back, what are the numbers in it. What do the graph lines look like when you sweep the AoA and the Mach numbers. It should be pretty stable and predictable, if it isn't you have a problem. If your numbers are in the red they you have a problem. Right now I would start by strengthening the landing gear, I would move them to the body of the craft. Doing as another person said and moving them to the tail of the craft is probably one of the most idiotic and wrong answers of the day.

I would but I am currently reworking the design after the .90 update. Just getting back into working things back. Now trying to get my tech level back to where it needs to be for my test program. I always build everything in my career mode to make sure all parts are compatible with the career installs. Hopefully by the end of the week I should have time to get the design redesigned and back into service. But in the mean time I will leave you with this picture of a current project undergoing flight trials.

Ok then you want to go simpler in your design. It isn't going to need 3 jet engines that is a bit of an overkill. The other issue is your rear/main gear are to far back. You want them ideally just behind your CoM. And your first design was far better then the last one. The one with the CoM and CoL closer together was the best of the two. The other would be TO nose heavy. This is a VERY old craft that was quite capable of going anywhere on Kerbin. And it was an SSTO. When you get more advanced in your tech level and in your skill you will start to design craft like this. Notice the landing gear on this one are almost directly under the CoM, they are about .5m behind to be exact. This is to give it the best point of rotation for take off and landing without having to worry to much about tail strikes.

DrDrunk is right about the tail strike your craft is hitting its tail on take-off. As for your CoL vs CoM. That is fine. Your craft would be a bit twitchy but not that bad, and actually would handle better at supersonic speeds due to the CoL shifting back on the wings. The only thing I have to say is a major issue that would cause some problems is the shear number of radial intakes you have on that aircraft. In FAR airhogging does not work. It is best to drop all those additional intakes all they do is create additional drag and more mass to the craft. The only other issue is those engines. Ideally you want to use turbojets for any SSTO operation or RAPIERs. On take off you dont want have more than 10-15deg nose up on most aircraft, as you would have a tail strike. I know on all of mine I rarely have more than 15deg nose up to achieve take off after I hit V1 speed which is about 70-80m/s or 150-170kts on most of my designs.

The DYJgatling gun is very dated, and very wrong as far as scale goes. It is listed as a .50cal or 12.7mm tribarrel. I had it for a while and converted to work with Infinitdices weapons for a good while and dropped it when this came about.

I have an aireal survey aircraft modeled after the Boeing 727. At around 0.9 mach to 1.05 mach it will have some serious flight issues, it gets a bit "wonky" and the controls start to stall out. But from .4-.8mach it is a dream to fly. And below mach .4 down to .3 mach or landing speed it is fine as long as the flaps are set 1 notch.

All I build are SSTO space planes, in this recent version I have disabled the revert button so I have been testing flights in stages. First step is take off and climb to 15km then turn around and land. I have had a test SSTO worth about 160k go up and have a wing failure, (pulled to many Gs on climb and the right wing snapped off) the craft went into a tumble and began to come apart from 10km. I had the crew begin evacuation of the craft, it didnt have an eject system in it because of the size of the craft. Only 1 of the 5 crew managed to bail out and deploy his chute. This career mode has been a blast without the revert button. The failures that have lead to mission aborts have been a challenge bringing the craft around for emergancy landings.

I built a working SSTO in RO that was a pure rocket design, it was powered by 6 linear aerospike engines and weighed in at over 300tons sitting on the runway. I am sure I could repeat the design in a stock Kerbin size with FAR. Honestly it isn't that hard to make an SSTO in stock KSP because of the small scale of the atmosphere. I have built quite a few SSTOs that dont use RAPIERs/SABREs. And they were quite cost affective. Total mission cost would be measured in the hundreds vs the cost of thousands to launch a satellite. I think my low cost SSTO challange the total cost to put a space station in orbit that weighed in over 200 tons when done was less than a few thousand. Not including the cost of the station itself. - - - Updated - - - I removed my revert button. Killed 4 kerbals so far... one catastrophic failure of a wing in a test flight. One crewman survived the bailout and deployed his chute to live 4 others did not make it.

It is possible just harder. I havent used a nuke in a long while for my SSTO program other than an orbital maneuver engine. I prefer aerospikes or RAPIER/SABER engines for the orbital insertion burn. I am just now getting to where my career program can start to build big SSTOs again. But I havent had a need for them yet. The trick for the orbital burn now to get out the atmosphere is a higher TWR then what you were using before. Now instead of a .1:1 you need at least a .3+:1 ratio. Anyway here is my newest visual survey craft that does not leave the atmosphere, but is capable of getting to a max ceiling of 20km. Is it fast, nope, but it will fly anywhere on Kerbin and perform any airborne visual survey mission and has a lab to help with the mission.