Madrias

When you can land it safely with pieces missing.

Really? Really? This again? Misjudged my wingspan flying over the mountains. Vector 270 from KSC, flying toward the sun in a solar-driven glider (highly modified Lack Luster Labs SXT pack parts...) and I smack the bloody wing into a cliff because I was too busy admiring the view of the mountains at sunset. Not as pretty a landing as my other one, but let's see you do better when your main landing gear is sheared off, let alone flying on one wing. After all, any landing you can walk away from is a good one. And no, I don't try to knock the wings off of my planes, even my motor gliders. I hate night flights when I don't have landing lights... As for the spot of debris you can see in the first image, yes, that's the other bloody wing. Or maybe a landing gear. I'm not sure. It's part of the plane.

Could you link me to that, Gaalidas?

I dunno. The one for 0.24.2 seems to work, you just need to click away the incompatible mods thing. Everything appears to work just fine. It's not often I find myself having a modder's ear as a place to drop ideas. I've wanted to have an ability to fly a glider in KSP for a while, but I keep being hindered by cockpits that say "All you can see are your gauges. Have fun." I want to see the sky. I don't mind looking downward to see my gauges. That, and I've got the basic ideas for the parts in mind. Glider nose contains SAS and avionics, so you fly straight at all times. Cockpit, you've seen my basic design. Tail boom should be... don't know how long, but contains batteries. Big folding/retracting glider wing for storage in a cargo bay, perhaps containing built in solar panels. Simple control surfaces for the tail, although a pre-built assembly would be nice (containing rudder and elevator along with the horizontal and vertical stabilizers, so that it's one piece, attached by a node). Landing gear that tuck away into the body of the plane. As for an engine, something that sits up high, behind the wing, with a folding propeller on it, running off electricity. And stick the radio antenna in the tail boom. It's just the way I've thought of the glider. I've made a hack-job of a design that is about the size I want, but one, the colors really don't match up, and two, the cockpit doesn't have enough ground visibility to IVA fly with it. I see we both have that affliction. My only fatal flaw is I can't put it into action, so I have to go about dumping the ideas somewhere and hoping they get picked up on.

Crap! I put my drop tanks in the same action group I used to turn my landing lights on and off. Dropped a pair of Rockomax Jumbos loaded with nothing but liquid fuel about 10 minutes into my flight. Was turning on the landing spots while flying low so I wouldn't hit the ground. As for how big the plane was... I had a delta-wing jet fighter in the cargo bay. 5m fuselage.

No, the most Kerbal way to stop a speeding repulsorcraft is to strap an RT-10 to the nose and use it for braking thrust. Or perhaps breaking thrust... I've been (shamefully) flying around Kerbin, which means I'm unable to test many of your parts, Lo-Fi. Repulsors work great for landing, and a reconfig'd APU allowed me to have power without that horrible and heavy oxidizer, but other than that, I've been flying, which means tracks and repulsors and rover bodies don't get used as much. Sure, I've made a DSR fly. Impressive though that may be, it's not really a great airplane body. Reasonable visibility, sure, but there's no matching tail boom, no place to put a nice set of propellers. It does, however, carry a lot of very brave Kerbals on expeditions to the north pole of Kerbin. As for the truck version, I have a good bit of fun with that one, but I've found the best use for it in my space program is to strap the biggest nuclear reactor to it that I can, drive/fly it out somewhere, and leave it there to beam power into space for my thermal probes. Of course, that doesn't stop Jeb from strapping RT-10's and repulsors to one and firing it across the hillsides. Thankfully the DSR's are all very heavy duty. DSR2 doesn't get used as much (yes, I still have it, even though it's not as refined as DSR3) as DSR3 and 3C managed to be more versatile, but there may still be one or two of them hiding somewhere on Kerbin. Well, back to making a sport of gliding across Kerbin's skies. If you're up to one of my crazy requests, I wouldn't mind some glider parts, so I can avoid using these touchy little physics free parts, and stuff I've dragged up from 0.18. And things I've had to config bash. I mean, the Stock Expansion Pack from Lack Luster Labs is nice (contains a pleasant little probe-sized cockpit), but there's just not enough visibility from the pilot seat, and I'd like to be able to cruise in a glider that gives me the ability to have an awesome view, and also allows me to land without fear of "Where's the runway?" If you do take up the challenge, don't worry too much about propulsion. I generally use a rescaled Firespitter folding prop, or a config-edited engine designed to consume electricity. Solar panels are cheap, after all.

My method for slowing down with repulsors involves deploying air brakes to slow a little, then dropping my actual landing gear and shutting the repulsors down. No more destroyed gear on landing, no more whacking the wingtips into the dirt, and no more violent unplanned disassemblies. They aren't to be used as primary landing gear, they're meant to supplement the primary landing gear.

Would probably be hard to sleep, being there at the Kerbal Space Center. Heard rumors that Jeb tried to land a Mainsail powered rocket on the roof of the VAB this morning.

ACK! I just made a completely stupid move and I'm ashamed of myself. Built a wonderful Kerbin Explorer airplane (not designed to go to space at all, just to gather my missing science on Kerbin) and made the biggest mistake I've done yet. I remembered to have my parachutes onboard, and they were set properly to my abort stage. I had landing gear, and they were even on straight. Plus, they were the Firespitter amphi-plane floats, so I could land on water, too. Had all of my science equipment. Plenty of batteries, and a good amount of solar panels, too. Could EVA, and had the EVA seat behind the cockpit, so a second Kerbal could sit there and get my in-flight EVA reports. Had an antenna wiggling in the breeze. Plenty of fuel (electric charge for my electric propeller) and plenty of wings. And I even remembered to put struts on it. What'd I forget? The bloody engines. Yep, you read it here first, folks. Mad, the spaceplane pilot, just forgot to install an engine on an airplane. I felt so stupid after remembering all of my usual "what did I forget this time" checklist, got it out onto the runway and thought, "Gee, why do I have a bare spot right behind the rudder? Oh, well, we'll just hit x, then space, then throttle up... Why am I not going anywhere. Got plenty of power. What the heck!? I'm a bloody moron. Propellers, Mad, propellers. Plane don't fly without propulsion."

I forgot to put the landing gear down on my shuttle. All that hard work getting the empty ship back (probe core controlled at that point) and hoping to recover some funds from it... up in smoke as it cratered my runway and smashed the spaceplane hangar to pieces. It's maddening when the simple mistakes cause the most grief. Open solar panels, not enough batteries, forgotten comms device, crooked landing gear, landing legs retracted, and staging errors are all things I still make mistakes with. And yes, decoupling the SRB's and ripping the wings off of the shuttle because I staged too early... Not fun.

I, too, hate the complete eradication of my old control surfaces (and the old delta wings, too) because I designed a lot of craft where those surfaces were cosmetic. Also, while SP+ is an awesome mod, and makes awesome stock-a-like shuttles possible, the wings don't match anything else but SP+ craft. Sorry, thumbs down in my book. Stability went right down the crapper, too. I get more crashes in 0.25 x86 than I got in 0.24.2 x64. 0.25's x64 quickly turned into a joke. Even with the same mods, minus SP+, it somehow eats more RAM... The only good things about .25 in my mind are the destructable buildings (which are hilarious in Sandbox only.) and the editor thing with the hold key to disable surface attachment. Not all that excited about the 'Z' to max throttle. Had a mod (Floor It) that did that exact thing. All up, I tend to enjoy .24.2 more.

I've been to Eve many times before (and to avoid having to spend hours worth of mission time, I will admit to using HyperEdit to send my ship there, but to be fair, it was capable of getting there, and all I did was dump the stages into Eve's atmosphere.) and so I kinda expected the hill. Grin and bear it, use your brakes and keep the ground in your lights. And if you're curious about the yellow off-road lights, I'm partly colorblind, so vivid color contrast helps me pick out bad terrain before I run over it. And as for why I picked Eve to dump a ship on... I somewhat love the painful purple planet. Sure, I could've landed on Laythe, or Duna, or built a non-atmospheric lander for the poor thing and dumped it on the Mun, but Eve is a beautiful gravity well that I like landing things in. I just don't like taking off from there. Maybe I'll land something on the Mun and go crater-diving. As for hills like that, I've had lots of practice sliding vehicles down them. These wheels and tracks are perfect for it, compared to stock's "Go 3 degrees off of prograde and you flip."

I made it! Sorry for the dark images, but I got the Far Wanderer onto Eve! Then promptly slid down a hill for nearly 3000 meters, but nothing exploded! No, I have no plans to return them home. First colonists to the evil purple planet. And yes, I used a parachute sled to carry it down.

How in the name of the Kraken did that happen? I mean, I know the biplanes are a little tough to fly, but to lose the engine, upper wing support, and lower wings, that had to take some doing.

It's a good question, actually. Probe core, fuel tank, and docking ports make for good refueling cans out in space. I'm fairly sure most KSP players end up with at least one "gas station" in orbit due to the need of refueling SSTO's, long-range interplanetary ships, and a convenient place to dump rescued Kerbals.

Well, it did end well, but that's what I get for trying to scream through the tunnels at KSC. And yes, I did also post this on the day of the event in the "What did you do in KSP today?" thread, but I figure, why not, it fits the theme well enough. And yes, it was an unmanned flight, but I wanted to save the craft anyway. Too many piloted aircraft exploded much like that and so I've learned how to fly damaged aircraft back to a save landing spot. With a keyboard. That's perhaps the worst damage I've flown back, but not the most difficult to fly. Flying with a missing jet engine is harder.

Those would work! I was thinking wheels, not tracks, but yeah, that'd work for a lot of my ideas. As for those tracks, glad to see a good set of steerable tracks! Would like to see them be maybe one wheel longer, but yeah, those look wicked and fun.

I guess my power of description failed me there. Think either a repulsor wheel, or the Medium Wheel, except turn the steering until the wheel is inline with the suspension arm, so that when mounted to the front of a craft, it would roll forward.

I have an idea. (I know, I know. "Not again!" Trust me, I think this one might fit in as a useful idea.) We have wheels that mount in a traditional fashion and run the usual way. I was thinking of a wheel turned 90 degrees by default with a stack node on the mounting plate. Could make some nice three-wheeled (and two wheeled) rovers that way, with some of the best wheels I've ever driven on. Also loving the new DSR hull. So useful having a rolling science lab. Not used the extra long tracks yet, but that's only because I've been having too much fun trying to assemble a DSR unit into a space-worthy package and get it on the way to another world.

Jeb, Bill, and Bob are the ones in Polar Orbit HQ. Placed high out of the line of danger. As for Doodbin Kerman, he just got assigned to test the Rocket Seat. It's a cubic octagonal strut, four sepratrons, and a command chair. I dare say he won't be coming back.

I do tend to prefer sending badly named Kerbals on dangerous missions. Most dangerous mission tends to be "Rocket Test Launch" but some Kerbal's names just irk me and so I send them to the BRIG. The Bottle Rocket Ion Glider. Think miniature ion powered spaceplane stuck on the biggest pile of SRB's I've ever done. It usually makes it past orbit and into solar orbit before all of the SRB's have burned out. Then I just let them float up there. As for stupid kerbals, well, they don't know what exactly they signed in the contract. Lots of "Experimental Aircraft Test Pilots" and "Stunt Aircraft Daredevil Pilot" kerbals out there in my space program. Also "Safety Equipment Test Engineer" is a common position. I launch you up on the biggest pile of boom I think I can manage that day, with no struts, and it's their job to test that the single parachute on their capsule can bring 'em home alive. Of course, Kerbals with high stupidity and high courage get the glorious job of "Rocket Exhaust Inspection Technician- Mainsail Certification". I dare say I need not say more on that one.

You ask me, there's too much of this "stock-alike" stuff flying around. Where's the originality when we need it? Why does everything need to be painted white and look boring? It's impossible to make interesting vehicles with just stock parts without using hundreds of 'em.

Solar panels, basic aircraft parts, and fuel lines solidify Career for me. Solar Panels keep my interplanetary craft fully powered, as well as allow for the use of probes. This means cheap, easily renewable science, and opens the path to ion probes and rovers later on. Without power, one cannot expect to get anywhere. Airplane parts allow me to steal the sweet science from Kerbin, as well as opening the path for my atmospheric landers, meaning Eve and Laythe are now open for land, plant flag, and return missions. Yes, I have a spaceplane that can, with a bit of trickery, leave Eve. I just leave 90% of it behind as debris there after reaching a critical altitude. Fuel lines allow complex ships that can comfortably sail out of the atmosphere. This means no longer needing to worry about getting fuel out of my drop tanks, carrying spare engines, and multi-engine turbojet flameouts. Which means I can comfortably use spaceplanes to leave the air behind and travel through space. Sure, there's other parts that are essential to have, but those three main ones allow me to pretty much ignore the rest of Career mode as "unlock part, go do science, make rocket." and play it as an unlockable sandbox mode.

When you can land an asymmetric nightmare on the runway after a tragic accident. Knocked the right wing off my airplane and had the bright idea to try landing it.

Even with KSP's stock pea-soup atmosphere, I think this still deserves a medal. That was nervewracking. As for what tore the wing off in the first place... Tunnel dash gone horribly wrong on the one heading for the VAB. Clipped a wing on the inside of the tunnel, barely recovered enough to get the plane out of there, then decided, "Why the heck not? Let's see if I can put it down on the runway without ripping it apart or cratering the thing again." Most of my mission elapsed time was spent playing key-jockey with this thing, trying to line it up for a runway pass because I didn't want to risk uneven terrain ripping the landing gear off.