StevenRS11

There was a little pulling, yes. I had to trim it pretty hard, and I didn't really have any control over my inclination, either. I just pointed it up and only bothered controlling it once it was out of the atmosphere. It made for a nice gravity turn incidentally, if not awkwardly skewed against the planets rotation and almost polar. And yea, I noticed what you said about the kerbals lagging it really badly. Im ticking orange with a really low part count flyer, its only like 40 parts. Any more kerbals (more than 20) and it would be unplayable for me. I've used interstellar before, and I remember those reactors, but this computer (at home from college) cant quite deal with the parts. I had to edit lots of parts out of my reduced modpack to just run it on this computer. Its really old, with only 2 gb of ram. Surprisingly, it runs KSP pretty well other wise because its a overclocked dual core with a high clock rate to begin with. All the extra cores in newer CPUs dont help that much with KSP. If I really wanted to be nasty I would set up a microwave transmission network and have infinipower with barely any mass, heh. Though I know the new receiver has a different model, I wonder how heavy it is? I did actually use the middle prop as a pusher to slow myself down for landing, just because it was taking so dang long. This thing floats like nuts. The parts are from TV Aerospace, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-1-taverios-pizza-and-aerospace/ It has lots of cool stock themed aero parts, and some really cool ramjets.

Looked like a fun challenge, and I had never built a duna plane before, so I did! Its called 'Mupyiba', or 'massive nuclear powered flying wing with a bunch of lawnchairs strapped to it' Its powered by a single fission reactor from near future, which gives it unlimited flying time and 240 e/s to work with. That powers 6 small electric propellers plus one larger one, giving it decent thrust even on duna. The rest of the plane is just lifting surface. Getting this to duna, howerver, was interesting. I originally had all these ideas for assembling it in space, or making it fold up using infernal robotics. Instead, I just strapped a bunch of mainsails to it and blasted it into orbit. This worked surprisingly well, and ended up in orbit with quite a bit of fuel left in those tanks. Next launch was the crew transport vehicle, with an equally silly ring of boosters. TWR of like 4. The idea was that moving 20 kerbals is way easier in microgravity than, well, I actually dont know how else I would have done it. Now, I had planned for a third launch to send up a transfer stage with NERVAs to get it out to duna, but I ended up with enough fuel from these to launches that I just jettisoned two of the boosters, and used the fuel from the crew transporter to get it to duna. Luckily mainsails have enough thrust vectoring to deal with the offset mass. Other than that, it was a typical transfer to duna. Now, landing on duna wasnt so bad. I just skimmed over the atmosphere until I made a landing moving at about 120 meters/sec. It took a few tries before I found a flat enough location, but I did at 4000 meters elevation. Taking off again was a bit more difficult, and eventually I had to leave 6 kerbals behind. Those little guys weigh wayyy more than I realized. After a few uh, simulated takeoffs, I got it into the air with 10+1 kerbals, and once I get in the air, I can stay there indefinitely. Without any kerbals on board, I could fly at over 8000 meters, but with all 10, I could only maintain 7000. These guys are enjoying the view, and wondering what voodoo is keeping this thing in the air when the sensor reads 'VACUUM'. So, lemme try to add this up. 1 for using FAR, 1 for circumnavigation, 2 for 2000 over 5000, and +9 for my 11 kerbals. I think thats everything. I may go back and make a larger one with 2 nukes and 14 engines, and see how many kerbals I can fit on it. This one can hold 19, but taking off was almost impossible and I couldnt maintain anything over 5000 altitude. I agree that the fission reactors are very powerful, but they are also very heavy. That one reactor is more that half the mass of the entire structure. More importantly, I could get the same performance out of lots of solar panels mass per e/s wise, but the lag on them would kill me. You can see the rest of the pictures here- http://imgur.com/a/LVSoR A few shots of the orbital stuff, some explosions, and thats about it. This is the first challenge that I have tried to do so far, and it was great fun, thanks!

I thought signal delay was going to be annoying to deal with and I was just going to disable it, but now that its in, I love it! My only two wishes are than it accpted time delays in yy/dd/hh/ss format so I could schedule burns without a calculator, and if I could schedule burns by deltav instead of just time, but thats maybe a bit too autopiloty.

Hey ferram, two things. Is FAR feature complete to you, other than smallish refinements and fixes? It seems like it addresses just about every game relevant aerodynamic mechanic to me, except maybe boundary layer control for control surfaces. Or maybe it does, and I just dont build good enough planes where thats actually important. The other thing- have you had any contact with squad about making this, or something related to it, the actual aerodynamic model in game? Other than very slightly reducing the feasabilty of some insane aircraft, it seems to make just about everything make more sense. It does kind of necessitate fairings of some sort, but who doesnt love the look of fairings splitting off into space, revealing a payload nestled inside?

0.10 finally fixed the issues with heat-shields flipping things over, hurray!!!