Anquietas314

pWings would only be to keep the part count down - my computer's 9 years old dude, she can't take the strain of a 400 part behemoth that's mostly wings and intakes

It always did As was already said above, you need solar panels or an RTG.

Well okay, I did miss that, but from the context it seemed like they thought that was the only alternative to landing a second ship to collect the crew

Right now, I don't have a tier 3 R&D in my career save; I'm not about to spend an hour or two in sandbox designing a plane that may or may not be viable to settle an internet argument, but if you want to we can follow this up in a few days time (I'm nearly at 6 million funds! nearly! ). In any case, OP wanted a refueler rather than a generic payload lifter. No cargo bay required, plus you can easily do it in a few launches if you can't quite get a spaceplane to lift 100 tonnes of fuel in one shot (and it'll probably still cost less). I probably will be using Mk3 parts (mental note to install pWing first) to launch/assemble a usable space station though; should be fun

Don't use the in-game (stock) mass readout. OP even had an issue with it!

The 2% extra recovery isn't the only factor here: rockets consume much more fuel than spaceplanes. If it's a huge rocket like that one, that can start to become significant. The fuel in an orange tank costs just shy of 3k funds. You have 16 orange tanks on that rocket; obviously at least one of those is payload (I'll assume 3 - it's difficult to tell from the screenshot). That leaves 13 to launch, which costs ~38k in fuel. Never mind the rocket and 2% loss from landing at KSC but not the launchpad/runway, assuming you managed to do that. Okay, why the 52 part restriction? Obviously planes require wings, intakes, engines, etc. That means high part count in stock, although I imagine with pWings and pParts (does it have intakes?) you could get that way down. Secondly, jet-powered tailsitters are a real pain in the backside to land unless you use parachutes - and if you do, you'll need an engineer to repack them in case you miss your landing site.

You're welcome. Something that occurs to me based on your numbers: be sure to include the empty mass of the tanks in your "dry mass" calculation. Tanks are not massless when you've drained them (it's a bit more work to determine the dry mass ingame without mods because of how the information is displayed). Also, the equation me and slashy gave you is Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation.

Wow. I never used the SP+ mod before it was added to stock, but I have to say I prefer the old style too. Uniform bay doors ftw!

Oh boy... this'll be fun. Yup. You're using the wrong formula. What you should be using: deltaV = 9.82 * ISP * ln(start mass / end mass); ln is "natural log", or "log to the base e". Most calculator utilities you find in operating systems have a button for that. Also note that the equation is per stage. If you have multiple stages, use the start mass and end mass (treat future stages as full here) of each stage.

There's literally a sticky at the top of the forum that tells you exactly how to do that. Glad to hear adding intakes worked though

In my experience, tail sitters are way more trouble than they're worth; it's easier to just pull up to 90 degrees (or as close to it as you can) as soon as you come off the runway. Plus you need more thrust to make a tail-sitter viable. As for economical, maybe it really was cheaper for the company because of the tax stuff? In any case, one company misusing a word doesn't change the meaning of that word; that only happens if the majority of people who use the word use it to mean something different.

It's worth mentioning that stock parts at some point will stop changing significantly, so this would probably be more useful around release. With 0.25 I had a spaceplane design that worked really well so I backed it up for 0.90, but with the new editor I think I can probably rebuild it better anyway (can't yet - need R&D/SPH tier 3 ), so I see your point.

In my experience, the main bug that causes this also breaks target selection (clicking on Mun and such does nothing). Highly elliptical or hyperbolic orbits sometimes make it hard to place a maneuver node but I think that's a separate problem.

Interesting. I've just checked the bug tracker and there's no entry for stuff in the KSC biome being deleted. Are you sure there's no funds recovered? if you recover debris from tracking station it doesn't always display a message but does always recover the funds (check if the number changed). The parts came to a complete stop while you were watching them, right?

Are you sure the debris didn't just explode?

An EVA report on a ladder counts as "in flight over ___" generally, or "in space low over ___". If you stand on the plane/ship/... rather than the ladder, it will count as being on the surface.

It's hard to tell from your description, but it sounds like you're just experiencing the issue where parts that get beyond 2.5km from you while low enough in the atmosphere (below ~23km on Kerbin) get deleted. You can use the StageRecovery mod to overcome that if you've got parachutes (or fuel and an engine) on the debris. I don't speak Spanish but hopefully this is reasonably accurate (blame google if not): Es difícil saber a partir de su descripción, pero suena como si sólo está experimentando el problema por el que se eliminan las piezas que llegan más allá de 2,5 kilometros de usted mientras baja lo suficiente en el ambiente (por debajo de ~ 23 kilometros en Kerbin ) . Puede utilizar el mod StageRecovery superar que si tienes paracaídas (o combustible y un motor ) en los escombros.

That's a minor but incredibly annoying bug I've encountered as well. It's been there pretty much since maneuver nodes were added so it's a safe bet Squad know about it. Switching ships or going back to the space center then back to the ship fixes it, but I don't know how you would overcome it in the tutorials.

If you mouse over the staging list then it locks automatically until you move the mouse cursor away. The idea I think is to prevent you from accidentally staging while you're in the middle of changing the stages.

Open .xlsx in e.g. LibreOffice, save as your preferred format. TADA!

Who said anything about transferring fuel? Pick up the lander with the claw, fly it home! As for whether that's safe... if you pick it up gently you should be okay If you have enough deltaV to get to orbit, but not to get back to Kerbin, then it would be easier to do that first, then rendezvous in orbit.

Most open-source spreadsheet tools can open excel files

I believe you're talking about this, and that's a very special case that really doesn't come up that often unless you're doing something related to Gaussians

Sure, but there'll be some way to express it as an integral or differential equation or whatever.

No problem