Silverchain

Testing a Tylo lander - blasted off from the KSC launchpad, thought it would be a good idea to land on the VAB rooftop helipad. Flew over it, corrected, flew back over, corrected, slammed into the top of the building and lost one engine, one fuel tank and three lander legs, spiralled down in circles towards the ground with the remaining engine turning the craft madly, hit the ground, lost the remaining engine and fuel tank and watched in astonishment as the lander can bounced to a stop. Lucky Kerbal!

You can go much higher and faster. My heavy planes usually hit 28km at 1600ms-1 using twin turbojets and 2 ram / 8 radial scoops. A purpose built plane can fly at silly heights and speeds on jets. Be sure to fly at a very shallow angle to pick up speed - I start to level off around 15km, and have the plane moving at a very shallow climb above 20km. It may help to listen carefully to the engines - when you hear them start to stutter, throttle back a little, then again, then again, until they're practically off, at which point slam on the rockets and ramp the speed back up. You start to get a feeling for when they're gonna flameout.

For a fair lander payload with lots of room for error (Moho is about 2400ms‾¹ δv really; this is the sort of margin I allow for my incompetence): Vacuum landing and ascent. Checking fuel at 21:08:14 for planet Moho Plus. Completed at 21:08:14 Payload mass 2 tons. Desired TMR: 2.7 and desired δv: 3000 LV-909 with 7 tanks gives 7.77 TMR ( 288.0 %) and 3001 ms‾¹ δv ( 100.0 %); mass 6.438 tons. 48-7S with 8 tanks gives 4.55 TMR ( 168.0 %) and 3198 ms‾¹ δv ( 107.0 %); mass 6.6 tons. 48-7S, 48-7S with 8 tanks gives 8.96 TMR ( 332.0 %) and 3120 ms‾¹ δv ( 104.0 %); mass 6.7 tons. 48-7S, 48-7S, 48-7S with 8 tanks gives 13.24 TMR ( 490.0 %) and 3046 ms‾¹ δv ( 102.0 %); mass 6.8 tons. 48-7S, LV-909 with 8 tanks gives 11.27 TMR ( 417.0 %) and 3040 ms‾¹ δv ( 101.0 %); mass 7.1 tons. 48-7S, 48-7S, 48-7S, 48-7S with 9 tanks gives 16.08 TMR ( 596.0 %) and 3172 ms‾¹ δv ( 106.0 %); mass 7.463 tons. And for what it's worth, an LV-N design isn't a better option, especially given the extra difficulty of fitting the engine: LV-N with 5 tanks gives 8.5 TMR ( 315.0 %) and 3429 ms‾¹ δv ( 114.0 %); mass 7.062 tons.

You can't "go faster" around the same orbit. If you thrust prograde (i.e. fire rockets while pointing "forwards" in the direction you're going) you will raise the height of your orbit on the far side of the planet. Your ship which is in the lower orbit will go round quicker than the one in the higher orbit. With your ships in the position as shown, using the lower ship thrust prograde at periapsis until the apoapsis marker overlaps the higher orbit. You will see a red (and maybe an orange) marker showing where the point of closest approach is. Speed up time and watch as the point of closest approach gets nearer and further away. When it is close (say about 100km) try firing retrograde or prograde at periapsis and see what difference it makes; the closest approach will get larger or smaller. Find what makes it go smaller and get it down to about 5km. Speed up time again and wait for the ships to get close together. When they are near, the velocity marker on the navball will switch from "orbital" to "target". When you get close enough, thrust against your target velocity to bring your ships to a relative halt. At this point, you can start to move cautiously closer to the target ship. And then the real fun starts...

Most of them, but you're welcome to cheat.

No mods which make the game easier (most of them) or harder (most of the rest). No permanent one-way missions for Kerbals. When I crash something it stays crashed, except if it sprays lag-inducing debris all over the runway / launchpad area during takeoff. No airhogging, minimal clipping. I like the aesthetics of some craft which exploit clipping, but I won't do it. I usually try to make craft look presentable by rounding off flat tank ends, not leaving exposed wing ends and that sort of thing. I reserve the right to do what I like if it's sufficiently funny.

Skurj 23-Q Dunan Bananaslip, carrying some extra fuel in a front drop tank, breaking for Kerbin orbit. After an uneventful interplanetary transfer, the Bananaslip arrived at Moho. Just kidding. Duna. Well, blast... I'd found what looked like a lovely big flat area on the equator, and touched the wheels down okay... After maybe a kilometre of braking things started to go wrong. Bits of plane went everywhere and Charlie Kerman was lucky to survive. Unfortunately, half of the science instruments were lost and worse, the aerial was destroyed in the crash. Shortly afterwards Barbree Kerman in the Stochastic attempted another landing and was killed when the plane slammed into an unexpected hill at 200ms-1. Stochastic had been ferried over by the heavy spaceship Land of Sand, which is waiting in a high elliptical orbit carrying vast quantities of fuel. I suspect Duna will claim more Kerbals soon.

Thanks everyone.

Is there a simple (and stock) way to get rid of Liquid Fuel in space without relying on a drop tank? I have a plane I want to fly to Duna, where its turbojets will not work, and so I want to get rid of all the 'spare' liquid fuel, the fuel which I do not have enough oxidiser to react against, so as to improve the performance. I've tried running the turbojets but they flame out, and I've tried running the rocket with only liquid fuel available. I seem to remember that doing so would use to drain fuel, but that isn't happening now. Anyone? (The plane is in LKO, so it would be trivial to rendezvous with another ship and transfer off the fuel, but more generally I might want to do this at harder to reach locations.)

Cool, thanks for the information. You may imagine the light bulb going on over my head; I've been reading the descriptions backwards in the SPH, thinking the irrelevant stored amount was some strange multiplication factor for the intake area (which makes no sense at all) instead of just going off the intake area. I knew it didn't make any sense from the practical performance I understood well enough how they compared!

I don't find that to be the case - if I take one of my spaceplanes and strip the radial intakes off, it can't reach the same ceiling. There is a point at which adding radials doesn't produce a return, but I think it's higher than 18km. Might try some tests later. If there was an 18km boundary, perhaps something in the mechanics has changed since, or perhaps the extra storage capacity provided by the radial intakes helps somehow even if they aren't filling. It's tricky to mount large numbers of ram intakes without it being unsightly - I've never really found a satisfactory looking way to attach them.

My heavy (~16-17 tons on the runway) spaceplane/rovers have just enough in the tank to get to the Mun's surface and back with careful fuel management. They use a central LV-N and a pair of Turbojets (usually 2 ram and 8 radial intakes) and the flight profile is to climb to ~28km / 1600+ms-1 using jets (at which point they're really struggling) then switch on the nuke (which at that altitude is operating at full efficiency), point up to 30ish degrees, wait for the jets to cut out and fly the rest of the way on nuclear. The key thing I found was positioning the long and unwieldy nuclear engine in such a way that it didn't get trashed on landing. I've flown one to Duna but I used a fuel pod - haven't tried doing it using only the internal fuel, that's probably a one-way flight without some fancy gravity assists.

Project Cool Slurp F taking off (barely) from the runway. A rough attempt at a 20t payload cargo spaceplane. No exploits unless you count the mutated pentaplane wings. Project Cool Slurp F in orbit. Unfortunately I had to dip into the payload fuel, and the tank arrangement led to liquid fuel being drained to feed the turbojets and fed from the jet reserve into the rockets which was a pain to sort out. Ultimately an interesting proof-of-design for me, and I might revive it to use at Laythe, but it's much more convenient and many times faster flying to stick stuff onto a disposable rocket so I'll probably shelve this as it needs a total redesign to sort the problems out.

Sometimes I use a program (it seems to me that relying on other people's tools to do that sort of thing does people no good as a whole) that runs through every possible combination of fuel tanks and engines for given payload, velocity change and acceleration requirements and returns me a set of lowest mass options, then carefully build something to that specification. Sometimes if I see something I like and try to blatantly copy it. The rest of the time I come up with a silly idea and throw parts together and see what happens, then run it through a few launches. Usually it gets abandoned, but if it works really well I start making evolutionary changes. With my present save I've got rover parks and plane parks (er, and debris fields) outside physics range of the Launchpad for all the early models, and LKO is full of successive iterations of spaceplane that I haven't bothered to land...

Lifting a lander (overkill for the Mun, good for Moho). The Skurj doesn't have particularly good lifting capability because the only place things can be easily attached is the front docking port. It'll handle a few extra tons. Hello Duna, my old friend. First visit for this save... Skurj 23-O Wanda von Duna (with disposable fuel tank attached) aerobraking into orbit. Turns out the North Pole isn't a good place to land a heavy loaded, low-thrust spaceplane, what with being 3km above sea level and full of bumpy bits. Wanda von Duna breaks for orbit. Ike watches smugly.

All parts should approximate to the properties of whatever they're modelled from so far as the simulation allows. Balance and fairness are only game concepts.

Nice work!

A long way, because getting a rescue craft down to the surface of Tylo is hard enough, never mind landing on a precise spot!

Skurj 23-Jc Steamboat I'm continuing to refine the design of this rover spaceplane, and the current model is very promising. By shortening the central fuel tank and lengthening the wing tanks I've been able to move the LV-N to a safer position for landings and ground travel. The pictured spaceplane, Steamboat, launched uncrewed from Kerbin, flew to Minmus, rescued Nedlo Kerman from low orbit, returned to Kerbin, landed safely (despite encountering a problem with the turbojet and air intake on/off switch!) then made a short scenic drive to a nearby lake. (At which point the turbojets fell off when I bounced it over a hill at 50mph, oops.)

What you need for Gilly is to ferry over a whole bunch of Kerbals with shovels, get them to stand on the prograde face and start throwing dirt into the sky...

Mine don't have much in the way of personality, and because the adulation surrounding them annoys me I have deliberately kept Jeb and Bill locked up in a Science Lab orbiting the Mun for practically the whole duration of my current game while Bob has been sat on a space station in LKO. If I get a Kerbal with a name I like I make sure to keep giving them flights, but Kerbals with crap names tend to get left sat in a rover or stuffed into a hitchhiker module.

Worked on refining my SSTO rover design, trying different engines, fuel loads and so on. Found a much better flight profile for it than what I had been using before. Crashed a couple of conventionally powered versions (Aerospike, then LV-909) on Minmus - the first ran out of fuel trying to land and the pilot had to bail out and get to orbit with EVA thrusters, the second ran out of fuel above one of the flats while still moving forward quite fast - I tried to land it on its rover wheels but the craft broke apart and the crew capsule bounced along with bits flying off in all directions before it eventually braked to a halt on its one remaining wheel. Then I tried a nuclear version with far higher delta V (it's a heavy craft for a one-Kerbal spaceplane, but has over 3000 ms-1 left after reaching LKO which is easily enough for getting to Minmus, landing and return) - this went well, landed on the flats, drove up a hill and took some more samples for kicks, then boosted to orbit. Driving on Minmus with it is interesting, but the heavy spaceplane fared better than lighter rovers, though braking tended to fling it into the sky a few metres and the long LV-N was a constant worry. Made it back to Kerbin and indeed the LV-N broke off on landing in the desert. Gonna be a lot of work to move the mounting! Skurj 23-I Meerkovo landed on Minmus.

Craft file: Aeris 3H Training SSTO This heavily modified version of the stock Aeris 3a plane is turbojet powered and carries a pair of 48-7S engines for spaceplane operations. Like the Aeris 3a it is very easy (and forgiving! - plus it has an emergency chute) to fly and to land only much faster and more versatile.

Craft file: Aeris 3H Training SSTO This heavily modified version of the stock Aeris 3a plane is turbojet powered and carries a pair of 48-7S engines for spaceplane operations. Like the Aeris 3a it is very easy (and forgiving!) to fly and to land, only much faster and more versatile. Additionally, it has an emergency parachute. Aeris 3H First Rule of Flying in orbit above Kerbin. There's just enough fuel for a Munar flyby. By luck, the return took the First Rule of Flying almost directly over KSC. Safe and sound!

I took the stock Aeris 3a craft (which is a surprisingly good flyer) and souped it up. I've no idea if the competition is still on, but it seemed like a good idea. I replaced the cockpit with an inline model, changed the front control surfaces accordingly, put a ram intake on the front, replaced the jet with a turbojet and (after a test flight) added an extra pair of silly looking ram intakes on the wings. The Aeris 3f "Wicked Felina" at takeoff... ...and splashed down after reaching a maximum speed over land of 2311 ms‾¹, which I was very happy with. I ran it around Kerbin making attempts until it more or less ran out of fuel. I suppose I could have skimped on the parachute but I'm not sure the plane would've survived a glide landing into the sea. Also could ditch one fuel tank entirely but it'd mess up the shape - it's far from where it started but it's still recognisably an Aeris 3 at the moment.