Zourin

Revert to Launch, of course!

Yeah, if there's too much of a TWR difference between stages, you get some wild torque issues with air resistance becoming very dominant compared to the new stage's thrust.

SRB's are the 'springboard' for vertical launch before bigger, potentially reusable options become available. they're less expensive than chucking liquid fuel engines and tanks down the toilet, and TWR is the stat to look at in atmosphere. Speed isn't so much the main factor as distance off the pad. and on topic myself; I murdered Jeb and three passengers on a NK-style passenger sub-orbital ICBM propelled entirely by SRB's . Apparently, drogue chutes have their limits.

I often circularize to hit my LKO refuel depot before I travel on if I'm cutting it close (and I usually am to cut back on weight). I try to hit it on the way back to 'drop off' excess fuel that I don't need to return to Kerbin. The more fuel you can conserve in orbit, the less you have to burn to get more out there. Sometimes a good answer doesn't involve a lot of math ^.^

Munrise is the earliest point for a "direct intercept". Munset is 'last call' before you will likely need to spend the fuel for a full kerbin orbit, plus the fuel for the transfer burn. I'm pretty sure I don't have that backwards. Now I can't remember if Kerbin rotates faster than the Mun's orbit.

You know you're a noob when your cockpit falls off the front of the space plane on the runway. No staging, no engines. Just falls off. Or when you attach an engine to the bottom of an SRB. Or you forget to attach solar panels to a probe. Or you successfully land on the Mun without enough fuel/rcs to take off again. Or you use the last of your fuel/rcs to circularize your orbit, unable to de-orbit. Or attempt to dock a craft to refuel and realize you forgot to add the docking port Or building a spaceplane without air intakes and wondering why your engines aren't turning on. Or using Jumbo tank booster rockets to put a light orbiter into space.

I thought that's what a 'strut' is.

Kabbage Staging. Definitely Kabbage.

Both? My spaceplane designs always come equipped for an emergency decoupling so that manned portions of the craft can be separated and landed in atmosphere in the event something goes horribly wrong.

So, in short, a thermic detonation instead of a tectonic shockwave. Such fun choices! Although, this doesn't particularly take into consideration the rate at which particles enter the atmosphere, as a larger 'spread' in combination with planetary rotation and wind would help diffuse a lot of that energy. There's probably a sizeable difference between a shotgun cluster of gravel (which isn't much different than a solid impact) and a 'cloud'. I'm pretty sure the thermodynamics would play out a little better than a straight kinetics analysis would lead you to believe, as you're contending with early vaporization of portions of inbound gravel particles as the air heats up, windage, and atmospheric layers. I wouldn't say you could stand under it with SPF30 and some shades, however.

I've had a parachute rip off the command pod. Wasn't much to retrieve.

1. Structural rigidity. Massive amounts of energy is wasted to wobble and badly balanced designs. 2. TWR. How easily can the assembly reach Kerbin Orbit. Are you overburdening your launch sequence with too much fuel? 3. Payload size. How much total mass reaches Kerbin orbit? Do you have enough parts to complete the mission (eg, enough fuel capacity) 4. delta-V. How far can that payload go? Does it require refueling? 5. Mission Support and Mission Independence. Is there support infrastructure available to run multiple missions without having to land back on Kerbin? Can it interface with that infrastructure? Does it enable personnel to return without a 'retrieval' mission? If you go down this list and reach a point of failure, you need to redesign and go back to #1. You cannot discuss dV until you have addressed whether it is structurally sound, can get into orbit, and what you have to work with once you're in orbit. #5 is a point of failure if it hinges on Kerbonauts returning to Kerbin, but cannot do so because the design (or pilot) isn't capable of making the return trip, with or without orbital support.

I won't clip for meta purposes, such as RAM stacking (which I've always seen as an exploit), but I will clip for aesthetic or basic functional purposes, such as the technique for using aero-tails as radial mountings for intakes or engines, or mounting an engine assembly into a wing rather than hang off the end of it. I'll also often rotate-clip things that *should* be internal, such as some batteries and power generators, just for aesthetics.

I'm assuming you have AI cores on the probes themselves. Staging gets funny when dealing with breakaway probes. You should manually disconnect and control one probe at a time (there is no 'shotgun' solution worth its salt) and land it before taking control of the next. Cluster probes are useful for getting a number of light satellites or even landers along interplanetary trips, rather than sending out multiple missions for each moon/planet/etc. The purpose is sound, but for KSP, simultaneous deployment is messy and inadvisable. You may even need to manually activate the engine and chute if necessary. As mentioned, you *should* always have control to organize the staging of your current vessel. If there's a problem with it being weird about being undocked, your best solution for a simple probe is manual control.

Initially, keeping one or more 'tankers' in orbit with an AI core is enough for most orbital refuelling needs, and makes it more likely that you'll be able to quickly rendezvous with it, as opposed to guesstimating one-shot intercepts with a single station or waiting weeks for asynchronous orbits to line up. These can then be de-orbited easily when (nearly) empty in whatever way floats your boat. There's really no point to a single LKO station for purposes of refuelling, but in the same way as having multiple tankers, having multiple fuel stations in orbit wind up being much more useful. They only need to store enough fuel to handle the needs of a few missions, and should be serviced/serviceable by a single tanker so you're not running more fuel missions than science missions.

Mass is likely the main culprit. It's too far back. Before reentry, push fuel as far forward as possible so that you're more of a lawn dart with a weighted nose, and pre-open rear air intakes to help keep your initial alignment along your velocity until you hit thick atmo where your wings should be able to take over properly. The moment you take a weighted tail out of alignment with motion is when you start doing a 'bullet tumble', especially if you're 'falling' and not 'gliding' at that point.

The nonscientific rule of thumb is no more than two full-sized tanks per engine being used as a booster, or you're giving up a lot of bonus TWR that's supposed to be going towards getting the payload into orbit.

There isn't much you can do. part clipping is great for design on one hand, but cheating in the other depending on how you use them. Nacelles make me cry.. they're a great part to look at, but they're so numerically horrible I can't justify ever using it.

I suggest going into the flight hangar and building out a template of what you want to build in space. This will let you play around in advance with layouts, break it apart freely to determine docking links, etc.

Crossfeed behaves strangely. Just because two parts are attached doesn't mean they'll draw fuel, even if they are crossfeed capable. I've run into several instances of this in my SSTO designs, especially when dealing with wing sections where fuel does not pass freely.

I can't really tell well, but you shouldn't be trying for VTOL in high gravity, or horizontal landings in zero atmosphere. A set of rockomax 24-77's should be all the VTOL you need for low gravity (lander-style landing).

Ths is a bit more complicated than simple TWR. Generally speaking, you gain about 2:1 rocket ascent performance from any improvement to your atmospheric performance. Going higher and faster while still on turbojets saves you in both necessary thrust and fuel needed to complete the ascent into orbit. My general checklist for building an SSTO is as follows: 2 turbojets to 1 rocket 3 RAM intakes per Turbojet 1 point of Lift per ton of craft, not counting control surfaces 1 LV-T800 per rocket Must fly level with less than 15 degrees AoA (angle of attack) I tweak from there.