Madrias

I tend to experiment and use weird combinations of engines for boosters. I've done jet boosters, I've done RAPIER boosters once, solids, liquids. On one craft I built with the Firespitter pack, I had a lower stage built with Propeller boosters. Modified Ion engines and used as boosters for small Xenon driven probes. Got to Orbit once with a purely solid booster craft. For me, KSP is a way to say "Screw the rules, I'm building this and I'm going to MAKE it fly." After all, what good is it if you build a plane out of structural panels and can't fly it? I follow a simple rule: "If it's not flying, you need a bigger engine."

I've found the Kermol sections to be a nice change of pace from the usual Rockets and Explosions that go with a space story. Nothing wrong with either sides of the story, but the Kermol sections tell a story that can't be experienced with KSP as a game. That, and I'm interested in seeing how much trouble happens...

Looks like they'd make a nice addition to a few of the planes I routinely build and fly. And of course, in my Insane Planes Division, I'd have to see if I could repurpose some into a propulsion device... Would only be slightly more insane than my entirely sepratron-propelled airliner...

Had to re-read that chapter a few times, but if it means what I think it means, somebody is in trouble. My mind might not be as sharp as I'd like, but I couldn't help but try to piece together the situation.

Building a spaceplane, only to find I'd used Structural Fuselages instead of Jet Fuel Tanks. Forgetting antennas on one-shot space probes. Forgetting the Xenon for my Ion Engine once. Putting a space station core up with no docking ports. Sending ships up to dock with a space station, only to realize I forgot RCS. (twice. First time I had nothing, then I put RCS nozzles on and forgot to throw on an RCS tank. I felt so stupid...) Explosive decoupling of a running stage with sepratrons. Explosive decoupling of an aircraft's tail surfaces with sepratrons. Knocking the tail off the plane. Knocking jets off of the plane. Hitting right roll instead of right rudder and flying straight into the control tower. Twenty smashed crafts on Minmus. No casualties, so far no planned rescue missions until I manage to learn how to land on Minmus with my spaceplanes. Attaching wings to decouplers, forgetting Stage Lock, and decoupling my main flight wings by accident. Was trying to go into IVA view and suddenly lost my wings. Accidentally firing the SAFE Cockpit. (Simple And Fast Ejection) Nothing like an aggressive launch by 8 Sepratrons to clear you from the remainder of your plane. Six push you forward, two push the nose up a little. Just press 2 to eject chutes. Panic button was set to 1 instead of 3 like it should have been. Taking out my own wings on a space shuttle by decoupling the solids while they were still active. "Everything is air-droppable at least once!" with a rover. Accidentally dropped it while dropping my spare fuel tanks. Five times. Because I didn't realize my action group for dropping tanks also had the rover in it. Because I'd set up staging to eject tanks, then rover, but felt I'd use an action group. EVA on re-entry and get blown away from the cockpit. I just wanted some science! And last, but certainly not least. Mere minutes from establishing Laythe orbit, my fuel runs out on the staged spaceplane, I eject the stage and proceed to fire the landing stage, and put my elbow right into the power button for my computer. Not so much laughing, but cursing a blue streak, which caused Dad to laugh.

Looks good to me! Anything that adds a little more to the sounds and ease of landing (like knowing you've landed... Built a few planes in my time where I couldn't tell I'd already landed cause it was dark), as well as happens to be cool is good in my book.

Am I the only one who wants the 0.21 SAS back? It did a great job of keeping a plane flying straight.

Knew both, but they're good to know. I tend to keep Sepratrons around as emergency decouplers, exhaust nozzles aimed at decouplers I feel might be tricky. If the nozzle fails to decouple, move some stages around, put the 2 sepratrons in a new stage and fire.

To be honest, I'm just glad that InfiniteDice made flying multi-engine planes with an engine out possible. Go ahead, try it with Vanilla KSP. You'll get your death spiral into the ground. At any throttle. Instantly. At least with this, when an engine fails for any reason, whether it's a clogged air filter, fuel loss, oil leak causing seizing, or pilot error, it's possible to recover. Whether it's restarting the engine, performing an emergency landing, reducing throttle on opposing engines, or just plain shutting off opposing engines, you have time to react. It's not the "Instant death spin, pieces coming off, just shut off engine 2 but my wings broke so we're going splat!" that you get with any other engine. Also, InfiniteDice, if you're considering making engines and wheels and transmissions for Version 2, could you make some car parts? Would be nice to build a 'kit car' from several different pieces designed to fit together, rather than trying to build 'em from structural panels, girders, and struts.

Minmus. Out of 27 missions sent to it, only one was in a shape capable of making a return. Yes, I know it's a moon, not a planet, but I've lost more to Minmus than anything else.

So, any interesting monstrosities created in 0.23, Whackjob?

Stock part would have to be either the Turbofan Engine or the LV-T45. Close second place is the LV-N. Mod part would have to be the Firespitter Biplane cockpit.

I may have been unfairly biased against FAR. I figured, seeing as the last time I'd used it was back in .20, I'd give it another try. And it's not too bad. I can make it off the runway and I can cruise around. That's good enough for me at this point, and I can still build somewhat Kerbal aircraft designs. If it ends up being the standard for aerodynamics, I can certainly adjust, though it'd take a bit of effort.

My opinion on the RAPIER engines is kinda so-so. They're fun from a "Shoot this into LKO" standpoint, but they take a lot of the fun out of the attempt to make good spaceplanes. Not SSTO's. Spaceplanes. SSTO's are fun, but once you build two or three of 'em, there's no need to really keep doing it. One of the things I hate about the RAPIER, and I'll say it now, is that there's no power generation. At all. Now I know what you're thinking. "Mad, that's not a problem, use RTG's and Solar Panels." Here's the thing: I only need that electrical generation when I'm under active engine power. After that point, I'm in orbit, where it's now safe to deploy my folded panels, rather than covering my plane in those obnoxious little panels. So as I'm ascending to orbit, I'm bleeding power the whole way up because where my Jet Engine or Turbojet might be providing some charge, the RAPIER is saying NOPE! to that. I took care of the low thrust on the runway issue with a simple Sepratron Assisted Take Off. They don't weigh much when empty and have just enough kick to send you screaming off the runway faster than Jeb can eat the snacks in the cockpit. I can handle the fuel-hungry nature. Most of my designs use the LV-T45 engine to get into orbit, so I have fuel to spare. Autoswitching makes my life easier with not having to waste two action groups, one to switch jet, and one to switch rocket, as well as not having to time the transition from jet, to hybrid, to rocket only, and back again. So in the end, I kinda like the RAPIER, but I might go config-bashing and throw a generator on the bloody thing, because it's rubbish that both the Jet and the Rocket side of the engine produce nothing useful. A jet makes electricity, and my tried and true LV-T engines produce electricity. So where's the juice?

I believe that better aerodynamics should be somewhere between Vanilla and FAR. Or if you refuse to compromise, give me a toggle switch between what we have now and what we get. Why? Vanilla allows for construction of planes that are decidedly Kerbal. Things that would never dare to be built, let alone flown in the real world. FAR has so far stumped me something fierce and I've found it nearly bloody impossible to get anything off the runway that isn't just a simple inline-jet-with-delta-wings configuration. And even that blows up more frequently than I would like, to where I'm putting LAUNCH CLAMPS! on my bloody runway cause it flies okay, it just can't take off for crap. And don't give me any of that childish "Lurn to air!" garbage. I gave FAR a fair try. I don't actually like it. Yes, I know I have to adapt to things being different. I tried. When all that works is the most basic of designs, with no lifting capacity, no capability of making space, and it still has to be thrown into the air, I give up. I'm more than capable of making things fly, heck, making things glide and fly well in vanilla KSP that FAR needlessly complicates things for me.

Well, I had the ForceFire series of spaceplanes, where I was trying to basically build a sideways expanding, runway launched rocket. With wings. And SRB's in the wings that detached. There was the Flying Ant Ejectable Safety Cockpit prototype. It's an atmospheric glider with two ant engines and 2 sepratrons for deorbiting. It's used on just about everything because it was built in the highly likely event of everything going explodey. Then there's the deceptively named "Flying Motorbike" which uses a pair of Oscar B fueltanks, those red Rockomax Radial engines (the ones that kinda look like a pepper), and Cubic Octagonal Struts to allow Jeb to fly around the space center. It's deceptive because it contains exactly zero wheels. Then there's the Bottle Rocket Ion Glider. It's a small space-probe with an Ion Engine launched out of LKO with nothing but SRB's. It also has a MK1 Cockpit for punishing Greysuits. ("send him to the BRIG.") It's a glider because it's capable of surviving and landing on planets with an atmosphere. And was how I explored a lot of worlds in Sandbox mode.

These are fun! Flying around Kerbin in style, and being a little crazy at the same time.

Bugfixes! Would love to see them start crushing a lot of the little bugs, and some annoying ones that keep popping up.

I noticed as well. Science Spam wasn't my strategy, but it was always my policy that if I popped open the science canister, I would send the data, regardless of worth. Usually I was either burning an engine or had managed solar panels, so I had energy to do it. Now I'm having to adapt everything to have that bloody science lab, that big bloody can, strapped to it just in case I don't make it back to Kerbin before I use all my experiment cans. And now I can't even logically do multi-biome ships. I used to carry a goo-can, material lab, one Communotron 16, and whatever other sensor sciency equipment I had on hand on a plane around Kerbin to get some extra science from the biomes as I flew over. Now that strategy's gone. The science lab's too bleedin' heavy to lift without the extra weight making it worthless. Would it have killed you to have to jump out on EVA and manually reset the labs? That would've made sense for people like me. Set my plane down, jump out, reset cans, jump back in, and take off. Nope. Gotta have the science module. Gotta divert power from my reaction wheels keeping my plane flying straight to power the bloody lab. Trying to get the bloody lab on anything useful so that I can just connect to it. As someone who had suggested having difficulty settings in Career mode so I could've made it easier in the past, I didn't mean to make everything harder first! So here I am, wasting time on the forum while waiting to see a color change in the background that tells me my plane's flying over another biome so I can get my 40% science, reset, and keep going, cause it's not worth stopping. And why, by the Holy Name of Jeb, do I not get 100% for transmitting my thermometer!? It's bloody numbers. Do we really need to have the pilots say "Oh, the ice caps are really cold, see the thermometer, it said -10 on it." rather than ">Begin Transmission: "TEMP= -10" >End Transmission" or are we just assuming the Kerbals are that stupid?

I had wings fold on one of my high-speed jets. Pulled up to do a loop, wings folded, then came off. No, I'm not using FAR, either.

I'm thinking Jeb must have put happy juice in the company watercooler again...

Murph, I love that idea. No monopropellant, but you've installed goo cans? Play a farting noise and cover the rocket in bright purple or orange goo.

I liked it, and I liked seeing all the waiting posts in one spot instead of filling General Discussion with "Where's the update?" threads.

Noticed mild performance increases. Windows, Intel build, nVidia cards. I won't mention system stats, other than that there's more CPU behind this thing than needed for almost any game out there.

I'm loving the new German engine. Just enough grunt to do the job, and it's got the same lovely fiddling in flight as the British engine you made.