Darkeldar

Not a great achievement, but I was able to land a capsule just over a degree away from the north pole. So I placed a flag at Peary Point at 88 degrees 55' 31" North.

Sure my avatar is my flag...Here it is in all its glory. I don't have the PS skills though to Kerbalize it.

Simply I just called it Crash.

So I thought I thought I'd do another launch pad science mission, and I EVA'd and ended up walking due east to the shore line. Stepped into the ocean and grabbed a sample and hiked back. Boarded the pod and recovered to get my SCIENCE! Takes a less than a couple hours (game time) and is within 2km of the launch pad. I had 4x time going for most of the hike, and other than having to hold down the direction button, I'm going to try it again to grab some beach sand.

Well I never enabled clipping, so where do I look to check.

It's happened several times to me that I'm not sure if it's a bug or not. I had to revert several times as I've had stages, or portions of, stick to the current stage. Whether it's a failure of the decoupler or something not working right about the solid rocket boosters. I've had instances where I had the large boosters, that I though were attached to a central one by decouplers, stay attached while the decouplers go flying off by themselves. I've had to stack decouplers in the VAB, just to fight off the affinity these booster have just to stick to each other. I've had launches ruined when one or two of the three small boosters stay attached. It seems to be a problem with both the side mounted decouplers.

Does a large blue button show up on the lower-right of the screen when you click on a new tree item?

With some configurations, you won't (?) be able to climb back into the pod, until you research a ladder or more rungs. But it's worth knowing that's how it works, and the tracking station still shows a "flight" is still in progress so you can still recover your data.

I don't know if it is because I'm doing EVAs on Kerbal, but after I click the green recovery button at the top of the screen, I still have to perform a recovery through the Tracking Station. And I had fun working out how to fly a polar exploration flight. Just don't know how close I got. But I did plant my flag.

You can look at 3.5 here http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/53011-Spike-3-5 where I shorten her takeoff run by adding a pylon to the nose gear. Got her up to 1189 m/s, and comfortably over 22K with adding the radial air intakes. But yes she's a big fuel tank, and when I build Spike 4 she'll be carrying more oxidizer. So far (and it may be that I haven't been in rocket mode that long) I haven't had any electrical issues. I currently don't have any plans for making her SSTO but I'll see about removing some fuel as I know she has endurance, as I've only used less than a tenth of her fuel for my test flights.

I just seen the "Blackbird" thread, but here is my interpretation using B9 parts. Since getting the full KSP, last week the Spike series is my first aerospace craft. I have pictures of Spike 3 here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/threads/52828-How-to-do-this-with-Action-Groups?p=699547 Here's Spike 3.5 I made a few modifications to help me get her off the ground by adding a pylon to the nose gear to raise the nose. Now I don't use the entire runway. I also added some radial air intakes to give me more air to delay the engines flaming out. And since you all like blazing aircraft: Next step is to make Spike 4 a real spaceplane, I'll try for an SSTO, but I need to see what the next build does.

Posted pictures of Spike 3 in this thread http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52828-How-to-do-this-with-Action-Groups?p=699547#post699547 I built her for aesthetics, more than performance, but I have had her up to 2.25 Mach in my last flight. She uses up the entire runway to take off, so I'm going to raise the nose with a pylon attached to the nose gear, and adding radial air intakes to the engines on version 3.5. Se if I can get her above 25k with the extra air.

Well here we go....Spike 3, my kerbalized SR-71 or A-12 I did get rid of one pair of fuel lines as all the liquid fuel tanks are contiguous.

I'm using B9 currently. So air-breathing mode will not draw oxidizer from a LFO tank, and no I don't want "drop tanks", though it sounds like I could drop 1 pair of fuel lines as the engines would draw liquid fuel from all the contiguous LF tanks. So all I need to do is to put the mode change into a custom AG, and the spaceplane will handle the change-over. If this works, I'm going to rebuild the Spike with a larger LFO tank. And I had a chance to try it at lunch, so I took Spike 3 up to 19k, did the mode change AG and transitioned back before I ran out of oxidizer. I stopped the flight there as I wanted to verify that I only needed one set of fuel lines. Thanks!

I already have a separate fuel line from the LFO tank, so getting oxidizer to the engine isn't a problem, but turning it on when I change engine mode is what I'm trying to accomplish. What do you mean action groups can't be done? Are you saying that I can't have the engines in two AGs, Stage and a Custom?

I've been flying my spaceplane with Sabre S engines, and I trying to come up with how to make action groups to do what I need to do. Before takeoff I shut down the Oxidizer flow on the LFO tank, but action groups does not give me this option, and I have to manually turn the flow back on in flight. When I reach 20km altitude, I want to switch the engines from air-breathing to rocket mode, will this process take more than one group? Do I have to shut down the engines during conversion? I assume I just create another group for the return to air-breathing? At least I found out why I was having engine problems at takeoff.

Another lifting body fan here, that would like to see something like them in KSP.

Thanks all

What is going on with the brakes? I'm trying to take off full throttle, but if I set the brakes before the run-up, it doesn't matter if I push B or click the brakes icon my airplane just stays in place on the runway and I have to revert. Also how do I see the flight statistics, like the demo shows when you end a flight.

So I had my first "successful" flight today of the my latest Spike series aerospace plane (a kerbalized SR-71, sorry I don't have picture posting rights yet). With the help from the newbie thread I was able to group the two Sabre S engines together, and I found the oxidizer component I needed, to at least try the rocket mode. I'm still having a few issues about when it is most efficient to switch from air-breathing to rocket mode, as I wasted the first attempt as my one of the engines had already flamed out and the remaining started me in a flat spin. I was able to recover 3 times from a flame-out and bring the craft back under control. I discovered that I don't want too much higher than 20,000 m in air breathing mode. I was able to get Spike going over 660m/s in a shallow dive, but I need over 1000m/s to reach Mach 3. I had managed to land her on a beach, but far from the base, I just didn't have the time or inclination for a return flight. So I'll do some more flight testing before I re-build her with more oxidizer capacity. Maybe I get hypersonic, one of these days.

Is it just a simple drag and drop between folders to move something from the HAB to VAB, and back? I'm having issues putting wing tips on a aerospace payload built in the VAB (one pointing up, the other down), that I believe I have to build the payload in the HAB, bring it to the VAB, translate it to a vertical orientation and then build the launch vehicle underneath it. Can KSP do something like NB-52 and X-Plane flights? Is it just a matter of changing the flight focus? I assume it would be possible to "autopilot" the mothership during the X flight, providing it is at a safe altitude and in stable flight.

Thanks for the welcome...I rebuilt the aerospace-plane with Sabre S engines and while it still takes most of the runway to take off, I have no problem getting it over 10K and over Mach 1. But I'm having a couple issues...supplying oxidizer with the Mk2 body-style and the procedure to change the engine mode while in flight. I have found the buttons per the right-click, but I've only been able to activate one engine...with the expected disastrous outcome.

Growing up as a child of the Space Age, I knew well the names Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. I was 10 in July of '69 and I grew up in a small SE Ohio town. Our High School mascot was the Golden Rockets. I used my newspaper route money to buy materials from Centauri and Estes, and I tried to garner interest in forming a model rocketry club at the same High School. But the hobby had fallen away as I went to college and found wargaming was easier to sustain and maintain. Though even now I will stop and took at the Estes stuff in the hobby stores (Though Centauri had the best looking rocket kits). So a lot of years have gone by, and I'm still a gamer, both tabletop and computer, and it took a visit to FARK to show me that KSP existed. I downloaded the demo and played around with it and finally purchased it yesterday. I headed straight off to the HAB and built my own version of the SR-71 and while finding out that the aerospike engines wouldn't work, I was able to get the plane to fly with an engine change. Which brings up my first question...How do you end a flight? I was able to land it, but I'm far from the airfield. Next question...is there a pointer available (toggle able) to point back to the launch site? I'm looking to build and fly aerospace craft like the Dyna-Soar project and the Lifting-Bodies like the HL-10 and X-24. I just started to explore the B3 Aerospace Pack, but even then I don't see the components I'm looking for. So I'm going to play around some more, build my own weird stuff, but I'm sure I'll have more questions later.