Hodo

If you airhog you can almost run a jet engine in space and you can if you time it right and close the intakes at the right time and have enough of them, you can create "canned air" for your jet engine. This challenge would be better suited to have a few more regulations. Like 1 intake per jet engine, max altitude, no oxydizer, xenon, or RCS fuel.

Good to know, wont affect any of my designs as I don't go crazy with airbrakes anyway. And I already adjusted my air brake settings to 1/3rd lol. Got tired of them stopping an aircraft in flight.

You can land on the Mun with RT2 and an unmanned probe. I have never done it but I have landed an unmanned probe on Eve, with RT2 + 7min signal delay because of distance, and a 15min window to send the signals in. It is possible but depends greatly on your satellite network coverage. Ideally you want at least 4 satellites in a geosync orbit around Kerbin, and at least 3 more satellites in a north south orbit. For the Mun you may one a couple of relay satellites there to give you a larger coverage area when attempting the landing. Expecially if it is a dark side landing. You wont have to worry much about signal delay at that distance it will at most be a few seconds. Tips for RT2 -Set your commsats with at least 3 antenna, 2 omni directionals, and 1 dish with a good arc. -Set your commsats like this, all antennas active, dish set to target active vessel, and that is it. This way no matter what you have one dish pointed at the active vessel which should give you a link back to KSC. Don't give up on it, it will take lots of trial and error but if you get it right it will be one of the most satisfying things you do in KSP. I know when I landed the probe on Eve, using the flight computer in RT2 that was my greatest moment in KSP. As for re-entry without RCS, it can be done, but you need either a lot of reaction wheels or a very light craft to do it. I use FAR+DRE, and I have had to do it a few times when I have miscalculated the amount of RCS fuel I needed in the design. Most of the time I have succeded, a few times I have not. Two major things are needed if you don't have RCS. 1- Electrical power, you will need lots of it or a fast recharge. 2- SAS Reaction Wheels. Without either of those two things your craft is at the mercy of physics, and that is never a good thing.

I never set any flap settings to my tail section. And no longer use them on any true delta wing designs I have been making lately. The ideal flap placement should be near your CoM. So if your CoL is where it should be, right behind your CoM you should have no problem placing your flaps on the trailing edge of the wings. I also have my flaps set to 9 and 0 and it works fine. I use one notch of flaps for take off on many of my craft, and 2 for landing and 3 once on the ground to increase drag. Kind of like a Boeing 747 on landing. I use TAC Fuel Balancer for my fuel shifting issues. But I also use it for moving the CoM on some of my more unstable aircraft, that go hypersonic to get out of the atmosphere. One of my designs, the CoM can be shifted almost 2m from front to back with the fuel. This helps because when it is flying subsonic its CoM is a hair in front of the CoL. When supersonic the CoL moves way back making the nose extremely heavy, so I shift the fuel back towards the tail and it puts everything back inline. It is amazing what you can learn by watching Youtube...... As for spoilers, I really don't use the ones in the FAR settings. I use the B9 air brakes most of the time, just easier to set the to brakes and not worry about the additional settings. But that is just pure laziness on my part. I do highly suggest you set your control surfaces to match that of most real aircraft. There is a reason why they are setup the way they are. If unable to find a real aircraft to look at either on a video, or in a flight sim (a good one), find a window and watch a bird fly, hawks, eagles, vultures, seaguls and crows are some of the best to watch as they have large wings and often are just gliding on the wind and fine tuning their flight with their flight feathers.

+1. And to add to his point. It is better to learn good habbits then learn bad ones and have to unlearn them later. I can tell you now it is easier to teach someone who has no experience in the subject, then it is to teach someone who has learned all the wrong things.

I downloaded your craft last night but was busy fine tuning one of my current projects and didn't get a chance to test it out. I will look at it tonight if I get a chance.

Now that my new heavy lifter is operational I am able to begin exploring the planets again. 200 tons in to 100km x 100km orbit. And the ship that is going to do the exploring.

The key thing is FAR puts actual aerodynamic forces on the craft which can and do affect it.

That's not a real video of actual M61 20mm rounds hitting. Those are special affects for the IMAX movie "Fighter Pilot".

It can't? Hmm.. didn't know that. /sarcasm Sorry but I have a full RO install that has Jupiter with all of its many moons and I don't see a problem. Actually it is a bit more stable then most other mods.

I don't think it would be fare for me to download it and try it out. As I run FAR and I am not sure how that aircraft would do with realistic aerodynamic forces on it.

He has pictures... but he didn't imbed the imgur album correctly. I think I got it imbeded correctly.

They are intakes not aerospikes.

Who is Nicole? And is she/he hot?

Use Imgur, it is a great picture sharing site and lets you setup an album and post several pictures without any extra space in the forum post required. Like this.

No offense but they are not that hard to build and far more gratifying when you build them yourself. The basic tail sitter (or Buck Rogers) SSTO is a simple design. If I were home I would throw one together for you in 5 minutes and upload it.

I back up my saves, and the current version of the game, so I can play uninterrupted till the plugins I use are updated or I can get around to updating them myself.

Which is JUST enough to supply the correct air amount for the SABRE M engine. It all depends on the application. Not saying that, that SSTO is not an airhog design.

That helps me. I often get them confused. I only worry about my surface speed and my orbital speed nothing else matters.

It depends on what you are doing. If you are going for orbital velocities then you should concern yourself with your orbital speed, but if you are just going for flight speed records then surface speed. And yes it does factor your altitude. It isn't a huge difference in KSP because of the very short atmosphere height, but if you were to use Realism Overhaul and the Real Earth atmosphere scaling where space is 180km not 69.1km, you would find that it makes a bigger difference the higher you are.

Pictures perhaps?

No worries, by then .24 will have come out and broke everything you have done anyway. J/K But as NK said, RL first. EDIT- Congrats NK on your Modder-ator status.

It is just like real life. Air speed over land is different then your actual airspeed. This is because of math... plain and simple. I wish I could give you a more exact answer but I am not on my home computer. Real aircraft have to factor two speeds when flying, indicated air speed (IAS) which is the speed the plane is moving through the air. And true Air Speed (TAS) which is the adjusted air speed based on altitude above Sea Level.

The black 2.5m fuel tanks on the SP-406 are from Stretchy Fuel tanks later Procedural Fuel tanks. It was a way to cut down on parts count. The craft file for the 406 is still out there but I am not sure how well it works now due to updates to procedural wings. Last time I loaded it, it gave me paper thin wings that I couldn't remove or adjust the size on. I have been tempted to recreate it because it was my best heavy lifter. But thats why the SP-409 came about, I haven't released its craft file yet, I am still tweaking and fine tuning it. I have big plans for it, and it is going to do most of my lifting duties in my current career mode and in .24. But the SP-406 is my original 100+ ton lifter, I used it for quite a few things previously. Everything from moving 3 orange tanks to my space station for station refueling, to launching one of my interplanetary ships, and building a space station in orbit for a challenge. ((Which I did quite well at and could have taken the top spot if I had been so inclined to keep sending it up with fuel tanks. Something I could have done indefinately. But I achieved my goal of topping out over a certain person.)) The SP-409 is my current 100+ ton lifter, and it is going through its trial run right now, I am slowly tweaking, and fine tuning the design. It is currently experiencing a serrious case of "Mach Tuck" at mach 1. I have mostly fixed the problem, but I am still working on it. I also added some new features to the SP-409 which has become standard on all my vessels, and that is a crew escape system, to save the crew of the vessel incase of emergancy. But feel free to ask me any questions, and I am highly honored that one of my designs inspired you to build this wonderful craft.

SP-409 SP-406 I use the nukes as manuevering rockets in space to cut down on the fuel needed. As for your take off issues, you don't need to add more canards or angle them, the problem is your landing gear is keeping your nose from coming up. When you are pulling up to get the nose up it is pushing the rear landing gear down and keeping them from rotating propperly. I found that if you place your furthest back landing gear just before your CoL and just behind the CoM, the craft will rotate pretty well.