JoCRaM

what is special about parachutes that isn't about wings? they both have give craft the capability of landing unattended.

I'm sort of happy with the decision to not simulate multiple vessels at once, but I'm not happy with the choice to simply delete. I would rather they applied extra-special relativity, and qunatum ultra-uncertainty, and froze an object in place (relative to the surface of the SOI) until it became eligable for simulation. Unrealistic? certainly, but so is deleting my plane launch system - however it is a lot less agravating.

what iof it has lifting surfaces? it gets much much harder. BUT I think the decsion was made early on , when simulating the dropped stages seemed wasteful. as for difficult - no it's not, you have a list of objects that need simulating, you jump from one to the next. 5 objects take 5 times as much state information (memory) and slightly longer than five times as long to calculate. but don't speculate - test: https://github.com/m4v/DontUnload TT NeverUnload: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/48720-TT-NeverUnload-Vessel-Unloading-Preventer?p=632071&viewfull=1#post632071 and the Lazor system all manipulate the atmospheric unloading - but strictly speaking Krakenbane needs appyling as you switch beteween vessels, and that can only be done (I could be wrong) by Squad

looking at the new graphics for the runway, something appeares to be due to happen at the start and middle of the runway, but not at the end...

kOS9.0 is the first and only plugin in my game. I had a SPH (PRELAUNCH) plane on the grass by the runway, a VAB plane (LANDED) on the runway and a VAB rocket in space in a comfortable orbibt around kerbin, all three with space computers. I'd been playing with rotaions and vectors, and had finally worked out the formulae I wanted. I left it in the rocket console when I went to bed. I woke in the morning to find myself statring at a catastrophic failure for my rocket - despite being in orbit it had, apparently, collided with the launchpad. when I switched to the spaceplane on the runway, it blew up. the capsule was launched into the air, and then vapourised. I swithced to the remaining plance, it too blew apart. the capsule travelled ("skimmed") across the grass without any rotation or deceleration at ~19m/s. the revert to launch option allowed me to go back to this about to explode plane, and goging to the space center and switching to the plance also resulted in it exploding I put a launch towered rocket on the pad (which gave an almighty lean on physics start) and was then able to switch to the plane which behaved normally.

I can print velocity in 0.9, but how can I actually get at it in the program - I'm after my airspeed, so velocity:mag should be what I need... but I can't work out the magic... Also, could we have an "eval" call that is like run, but LOCKs remain after it ends? oh.. and in the true Kerbal spirit "MOAR History!"

Kerbin, I was over cautious so it took about 90 orbits to get down to from the Mun to an apoapsis of 70 before I burnt to bring my periapsis back up out of atmosphere. unfortunately I didn't have enough fuel to adjust my plane to dock with my Space station, so it was all in vain.

... but it would be nice to toggle he state of things like landing gear in the SPH/VAB

also the sheilded docking port should have it's drag factor tweaked - say .15 closed, .35 open - also the sheild should be ripped off if open while traveling at speeed in atmosphere? (leaving it at .25 drag like a normal port?)

If only we knew what a kerbal-whisker was in Nm/s....

Here you go, a test that demonstrates how much stability a nose cone gives you: http://www.scratchpad.eclipse.co.uk/ksp/clips/cone_stability.mp4 Cones increase your weight, increase and increase your drag, but they also increase your stability so they're a bit like tail-fins (but not as good - apart from not losing them when you drop the bottom stage). The test is, of course, artificial - however the prograde stability means that you are less likely to lose control when manouvering

yes, but he's using tails instead of cones (and tails don't improve stability yet, and if they did they would make stability worse if you stuck them on the front of a ship.

IRL they run tests in the parking orbit to make sure everything is OK after the stress of launch, and to recalculate orbits based on the actual figures (computeres weren't what they are now, and they couldn't just say the maths is to hard, lets just do patched conics instead)

They work by moving your center of drag down in relation to your center of mass (if you put them at the top of your rocket), which SRBs also do (assuming you put them at the bottom of your rocket) which is why the .22 drag of a stowed cone parachute is a bad thing.

An ablative heatsheald also removes heat in four additional ways - melting (latent heat of fusion), boiling (latent heat of fission) taking that heat away as the vapourised heatsheild then leaves your craft (ablating), and finally creating a cusion of thicker atmosphere to push the shockwave further away. A non-ablative heatshield (ceramic tile?) won't have these benefits, but will have very low thermal conductivity, and high temperature tolerance and high heat capacity. once you've sorted the detached shockwave, you then need to model the plasma being electorstatically attracted to points and sharp edges, and then FAR needs to model the exciting effects of plasma/frozen air (good luck with that)

I'm trying to draw a disinction between an optimal way to do sience, and science spamming

a fuel line from the outer tanks to the inner one, and then a line from the inner tank to the engines (or something uptree from the engines - but not the tanks) will probably do what you want. Alternately use the Fuel Balancer mod.

This is what I've been needing! my pegasus launchers have always been a desparate race to get the probe out of atmosphere and stabalised then switch back to the carrier before it hits the 25km roof

I think the liquid fuel tanks are radially attached, and so their fuel would not be available to the rocket. the "stack demand" fuel system sucks for space planes. The way I'd fix that in sandbox is to yellow piple the jet fuel to the rocket fuel, (or attach the fuel/engine pods via I-beams (no cross feed) to stop them stealing rocket fuel.

Select the craft in the SPH, and press Shift-W a couple of times, to see how the lift/CoM changes when you're in a nose depressed situation. As you get to higher alitidudes your ram air intakes will be grabbing less air - this means they will be lighter, which will move your CoM forward, leading to the drop you observe. My advice would be to move the scoops to the CoM (perhaps by swapping half of them with the goo pods), and give the rear winglets a 5 degree twist so the front is slightly lower than the back.

There are two different type of comment her, the mechanism, and the balancing. For the mechanism, I'd like to see "unknown unknowns" - it's only onve you've got out of thick atmosphere and found your winglets stop working that you should even be thinking about RCS/reaction wheels (>30km altitude and SAS at 100% deflection for more than 2 seconds?); it's only after you've made a landing crater (perhaps capsule subjected to over 80% of it's impact tolerance?) that you start to think about landing legs. For the balancing, I think the the first tech pack comes way too soon - I get about 50 research points out of the start pack, with "sensible" missions - no spamming research

You've never been an RA..... Or a test subject. Hmmm, now I wonder if there's a deifference.

this is what I use fuel ducts for - moving fuel toward he CoM - with 5 tanks pump 1 to 2, 2 and 4 to 3, and 5 to 4. (you have to pump boh ways, or you will become front heavy instead...)

how do you go about creaing your collider mesh? From what I read concavity isn't supported, and resuls in a defaul cube being used.

Uh... if you're just going to bend the rules don't bother with career mode, use the sandbox?