Clockwork_werewolf

I think you are confusing what is easy to know with what YOU already know. It is a very dangerous affect and I have never met someone who hasn't done it (myself included). He noticed that if he made a change (removing controllers) there was an affect (no lift or control). This is a logical conclusion. The fact that it doesn't show the whole set of underlying problems and affects is not a sign of stupidity just of lack of knowledge. There is now a lot to learn with KSP when it come to aircraft and a lot of it is not equatable to real life aircraft, which (to his cost) is what he is trying to do.

When not moving air intakes can fluctuate. If you have less than one intake per engine it could be that they are "stalling". This is only a theory though as I have never had it in practice. Planes are never truly balanced. Fuel is usually used from the front of a plane causing the COM to move backwards as fuel is used. If the plane is pointing anywhere but the direction marker (and it will need to be even to stay level) then this can make it try to turn. The auto pilot is also not perfect and can under adjust for problems (it was worse when it over adjusted as it could make planes wobble). Lastly if it is still doing this it could be that the visual COM and Lift are not quite where the REAL COM and lift are, things like landing gear have Mass in the design building but are mass-less when flown.

Your thrust should be in line with your center of mass, if it is off by even a little without control surfaces, RCS thrusters or control wheels the craft will spin. I may have been a little confusing on that point. A: You can turn down your thrust, 2 jet engines at 50% thrust use the air of one jet engine. Or... B: You can cut the side engines leaving only one central jet engine. This will be along the center of mass so not a problem. You can even shut down pairs of engines in an order so that air is spread between 7 then 5 then 3 engines till one is left. In high atmopshere there is less drag so one engine can still accellerate you when before you needed 7. C: You can switch to Rapier engines. These use air then switch to rocket fuel when air runs out. They will auto switch to rocket fuel when air runs low. This can be turned off and they still distribute air better than jets so spin craft less. D: Add more air intakes. Some people have been known to use 15 ram intakes PER Engine. You can get an apoapsis above 70k this way but you still need some rockets to get you periapsis above that.

1: For control in air you want your control surfaces as far from the Center of mass as possible like a lever they work better further out. 2: In space your craft will spin if you have almost any mass off of your thrust. For space your plane wants to have everything symmetrical as possible. 3: In space or high atmosphere (about 23-40k up) you will need to use RCS (which gets used up) or ASAS modules to stop spin and turn your craft. I see you have one on the new plane but two might be better. Their placement doesn't matter. 4: As you go up the atmosphere gets thinner. Control surfaces will have less affect but more importantly air for engines runs out. Jet engines do NOT equally distribute air to all engines when air runs low. Some engines will fire at 100% others at 0% this will SLAM your aircraft into a spin. 5: Use air rams instead of circular intakes for high atmosphere. They take in more air and work much better high up. 6: I see a lot of fuel tanks and structural tanks if you are not using all the fuel in the tanks it could be worth switching to engine nacelles. With the update they take in as much air as a circular intake and hole 40 fuel. This would be useless for a rocket but jet engines are much more efficient. 7: An aircraft should be able to fly at about 50-80 m/s if your's can't you may need more wings. Most aircraft are full of air, imagine an aircraft full of water and that it what a KSP craft full of rocket fuel is like. You may need more wings than it looks like you need.

Mun habitation is worth it now . Whats that you want a flag on the Mun? Macrim get out and plant another flag. Easy 30k. Gets back in base. I have a forest of flags named forest of flags 0001 to 0008.

Anything not landed that is more than 2.5k away from the object you are flying and below 23k into Kerbin atmosphere is deleted. All landed objects are treated as safe but you can only land them while in control of them. 2.5k is the physics bubble, anything outside this is "on rails" meaning it follows a simple orbit even if going though atmosphere. Objects you are not near can go though high atmosphere and never slow down. At 23k into the atmopshere the game desides there is no way an object would be able to get out again with the drag and deletes it as if it crashed in the planet. I care about it but there is nothing I can do to save it. I try to build with the discarded parts costing the least I can. You can build single stage to orbit craft to stop the loss of debris but they tend to have awful cargo to size/cost ratio's. You can also try a two stage launch. Go straight up with the first stage and when past 23k detach the second stage which then burns sideways to get orbit all before the first stage drops below 23k again. Once the second stage has a stable orbit and before the first drops below 23k you switch back to the first stage and land it back at KSC. This approach is hard but not impossible (managed 1 out of 3 tries) and only requires very basic technology unlike the SSTO's (did it with only basic rocketry).

I think the parts tests are there for people running low on funds. If you can't afford to go the the mun how can you get the money to go to the mun? The only impossible tests the things like the launch stabilizers being tested on the Mun. Getting a mainsail to be splashed down is a new type of building test and requires lateral thinking. Do you need to build a rocket or can you rover it to the sea and test it there? Engines and the such don't even need fuel to be tested. I will say I once get a test a S3 KS-25x4 Engine Cluster (9.75 tons unfueled) on Minmus. It was a bit ridiculous but would have got me 300k just for that. I might like to see a buy cost of new technologies as well as the science cost. You could unlock the part you wanted and leave the rest in the technology group till you have more money. It would also give people something to do with all their money. Now that there are deadlines for contracts I can see the point in having a "design" time for new technologies but it could still get annoying. Also if you have 5 year deadlines what is stopping you just accelerating time.

Having dyslexia and having friends with dyslexia I know that there is no such thing as one cause or one type of dyslexia. It is the same as labeling everyone that can't walk well as disambulatory whether they lost a leg, have cerebral palsy, are weak from celiac disease or any other leg problem. Some people have problems with the words "moving around on the page" this can be fixed with a coloured filter. This is obviously a visual problem and in some cases the filter can fix the problem. This backs up Idobox's post, but in my case the filters make no difference as nothing was "moving about" in the first place. I myself have a bad short term memory (but not long term) but I can remember routes and faces better than most people. This backs up Scotius's post for my type of dyslexia. It is also worth noting that when I was young I had problems telling b's and d's apart and telling which way round an R went. This was not because I didn't know the symbol but because I saw it as an object that could be turned over or around. My brain was working with objects not abstract symbols on a page. I still have above average 3D spacial awareness even if I sometimes loses where the sun is in Kerbal orbit. I would like to clarify that when I was diagnosed at 7 I had a reading age 1 year below average but an IQ of 138, I have no idea what it is now. I sue a spellchecker on EVERYTHING I write, it's a pain but people tend to assume literacy is always equatable with intelligence. Spelling is not the same as grammar. A computer can't help with that. I wish it could.

1: SRB's are your friend. Lots of SRB's. Once you have a apoapsis of 70k or over then is the only time to use liquid engines to efficiently get your periapsis up. 2: Liquid engines are expensive only use the minimum you need and in the top stages of your rocket. One Rockomax BACC Solid Fuel Booster costs 700, that gets you 850 fuel, 315 thrust but a bad ISP. One LV-T30 Liquid Fuel Engine costs 850, and gets you no fuel. It's bonus is it can be turned off and has a better ISP. 2: If you aren't flying it, it will not be recovered. This is a bit of an over simplification but assume this is true and you will not have any problems. Parachute do nothing, probe cores do nothing for recovery. Landed objects are fine but only if you landed them. 3: Watch the number of separators you use. One stack decoupler costs 400, one RT-10 Solid Fuel Booster costs 325. A one to one ration is wasting more than half your money. Use one separator, attach a booster below then as many boosters around that one booster as you need. Struts cost 42 each and you might need them anyway whether you use one decoupler or 4. for this reason avoid using more than 2 radial decouplers if you can help it. 4: Make the top part of your lander as light as you can. Need 3 landing legs but put on 6 for safety? Test it on Kerbin, if you only need 3 on Kerbin you defiantly only need 3 on the Mun (1/6 gravity and all that). Worried your parachute will not be good enough on return? Test them on Kerbin. Worried your engines will not land you on the Mun? Test them on Kerbin, if you lift off they have all the power you could need for the Mun. If they lift off fast on Kerbin you have to many so cut out one or two. 5: I attach wings and a jet engine to every returning lander. It lets me land them at KSP runway for the full 100% return value. It does add more cost though so it's swings and roundabouts. On a side note I'm now playing with everything set to 8 times the cost. Using module manager and @PART[*]:FINAL { @cost *= 8 } I've got into orbit with 170k and now need to get to the Mun. This is hard when a singe booster costs 5600 and a decoupler costs 3200. I even attached on decoupler upside down so I get to retrieve it on return.

It all depends on play style. If you are like me and would much rather send Kerbals than probes to do science then the size and part count of ships increases. If you can get parts back from dropping then people would have more stages and objects in the air. I use a lot of boosters and even now with the decoupler costs I still use 2 sides of boosters. This means even without changing my play style to have more than two to three stages I would have at least 3 bubbles at once. With 2 fast burn and 2 slow burn booster stages and three main stages I could easily have 7 bubbles in the air at once. In programming you can't just program as if people have powerful computers and resources parts sparingly for the stock game. It is fine to assume so for mods as they are optional but stock needs to work well for everyone. About half of the people that play KSP seem to use low part counts and half medium to high part counts, that's too many to program stock to use 2-100 bubble physics.

The big problem with the two or more physics bubbles are for when people are using large part number ships. If you are running just below the point where normal time slows (goes yellow or red) then adding a second or more bubble would cause things to slow a lot. If you are only using 50 to 100 part ships then you may very well be able to have three or four "bubbles" running at the same time without problems. I did think of one possible solution of a sorts. Have a booster that has a built in parachute. Being on part it would have a default landing speed and as such not need to calculate that, it would also have a default drag and landing pattern. All the game would need to do is recalculate the landing zone with given and predictable drag (lets assume it is built to not tumble) then "get" the angle of the land at that location and if below a certain angle then recover based on distance form KSC. One downside is there would be no mid air collisions but then they are rare for me and you could always have a chance of collision if more than one exits the normal physics bubble within a second of another. The other great downside is people would just keep using that one booster because it is recoverable. Really there is so much money about that recovering every part is just not an important project for the KSP team to work on. Modders are welcome to work on it (and already are) as we all have difference play styles.

I've ended up making every top part a kind of shuttle. Wings, control surfaces and at least one jet/turbo jet engine. If my reentry is off a bit the jet and wings let me fly it back to KSC and land for a full 100%. They are usually sent up on a cluster of boosters because they are the best trust to cost ratio. Also I only use one stack separator if I can 6 struts are still cheaper than one extra stack separator. I have tried SSTO's but without air hogging they tend to not be worth the trouble. My shuttles can get to the Mun land and back with all science and a Kerbal for only 20k this way. I got over 2 mil in the bank now and a space station with a full orange tank on it. I just added a RTG module to the station too for nighttime power. It has also made learn aircraft better and I'm using engine nacelle now. Really loving the update. Maybe after completing the tree I will try without using "recover to launch" but I'm not using quick saves at the mo anyway.

I'm not sure why you are getting no parts test but I have a few ideas. Firstly it usually gets you to test parts that are one level above the tech you have. This would mean a part from basic rocketry it you only have starting tech. It could be that you have too few tech tree options so that the other types of contracts are more likely. It will give you tests for parts already unlocked but they seem less common or very difficult. I've been asked but didn't accept to test the x4 giant rocket (9.25 tons) landed on Minmus. Test rules say I can't fire it before then. It could that the game give you more contracts of the type you like, so having never taken any part tests it thinks you don't like them and has got stuck in a loop that isn't your fault. It could be just a bug. For any part tests that aren't landed I always use an aircraft. Easy way to get adjustable speed and high and then land back with 100% recovery (apart from fuel) My worst part test to date was a decoupler at 7-9 k up and going 490 km/s. I had to strap on 5 jet engines, some ram jets and dive into the ground from 15k up at a 45 degree angle to keep the speed needed. I've also done a splashdown test then "boated" the aircraft back to shore and then the run way to get it's full refund. Not hard but a but funny to be bobbing along in an aircraft at 6 m/s.

Parachute recovery, as technicalfool said is not simple. Firstly what part is landing when it reaches ground? Is it a high impact part like landing legs or a very low impact part? How does the game know which part it is landing on without fully physics calculating it? Are the parts ripped apart by the parachute openings? Since recovery savings are relative to distance from KSP, where will the parts land? What angle landscape are the parts landing on? If they are landing on a 45 degree mountain then in reality they would tumble and possibly be destroyed. You could in fact set up some fudges to ignore some of these questions and simplify others. You could assume always flat surfaces. You could average all part impact tolerances and use that as impact tolerance. Ignore parachute opening force. You could do a simple trajectory calculation that ignores atmosphere to work out landing site. Lastly use all this to work out if it survives and from landing location cost saved. Automatically recover costs rather than landing the parts so that you don't need to simulate its landing. You could end up paying more for parachutes than you get back from recovery though at which point the whole mod is a bit useless. I'm having fun trying to get costs down or make things reusable. Good luck to those working on mods though, I know I have at least one friend trying these mods out.

With the new Tweakables, nose cones should also have fuel in them. I know they would be useless on solid fuel rockets (unless you fuel lined them to normal engines) but you could always tweak them down to 0 if you don't want fuel in them.

I'm not sure about the equation but I do know that the drag equation is a bit too simple. Drag for each part is based on its head on drag if it is flying head on or its angularDrag if going sideways (at least I think these are the .cfg numbers used). This is then multiplied by the parts mass (yea an empty fuel tank has less drag than a full one). It is also worth noting that 3 tanks in a row have as much drag as 3 tanks stacked on top of each other. This is why nose cones are considered useless and only for show and wide asparagus craft can be better than tall thin craft. Please correct me if I'm wrong but this was how I believe the stock system works. The FAR mod was made to fix this and other problems.

The intakes are the key not the engines. The intakes need to be much heavier AND have more intake. With heavy intakes, Rocket SSTO's start to have very low payloads if they want to get air above 12k. Planes can still stay light if they don't need to go above that. SSTO's with wings can have a low TWR but still have reasonable payloads. Nerf the engines and they have no purpose. The normal jet is already only useful at low to medium altitude. All the engines need to stay useful in low Atmo. I would love to see the atmosphere mechanics changed but that is a lot of work and not happening any time soon. So my earlier post stands. Make the normal intakes heavier and make the RAMs a LOT heavier and take in more air. No more rocket jets, no more 15 intakes to an engine, SSTO's still viable.

So I thought I would try out a two stage stock launch vehicle. It uses Basic Rocketry Tech which since the science can be got from sitting a capsule on the launch pad and doing just that science should be cheap enough. The whole thing is reusable and makes orbit, may try for the mun later. Two Stages, both parts have capsules and MUST be manned to retrieve both parts. Second part minus the top landed safely

Firstly Replace the Jet with a Turbo jet, it's much better at high altitude. Secondly MORE ram intakes. I can't even see any and you have at least 4 surfaces without them even if you want it to look right. You can even add circular intakes on the rear of 2 of the tanks (these still work). With a space-plane SSTO you want to be using air breathing mode to get you as high and as fast as you can before switching modes. You want to be flying sideways at about 10-15 degrees rather than 45. With enough intakes it is possible to have an AP outside of 70k and 23k of lateral velocity without using any rocket fuel. This does require air hogging though (12 air intakes per engine).

Turning north when you want to get into orbit (I still have that satellite up there it's own unique orbit). Taring your craft apart with parachutes all opening at once and hitting 30G. No power generators for your craft. Stranding craft in orbit because you ran out of fuel AND forgot/didn't know about docking ports. (The grabber changes things now but I have some craft up there for before it's time) To my knowledge Noob means someone who doesn't learn from their mistakes i.e someone who plays like a new player despite clocking up lots of hours. Newbie is just a new player.

Thanks for the input, will give this a go and see what's what.

Sketchup mostly because it is easy to use, free and I now know how to use it. Picture of the model in Blender without a texture I fused the faces on the last panel. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I do have a fix without needing to update the atmosphere equations (which I would still like to see but it's not a priority). Up the mass of the normal intakes from 0.01 to 0.1 without out any increase in intake air. This means to get enough air for an exit should add about 0.8 to 1.5 tons per jet engine making the extra drag much higher and exit very hard. Second up the mass of ram intakes from 0.01 to 0.5, increase their intake surface from 0.01 to 0.08 and decrease the airintake storage from 0.2 to 0.15. This means one or two rams per engine would work like 8 or 16 intakes BUT the mass means one would add 0.5 tons and 2 would be an extra ton PER engine and extra air friction. Lastly the reduced air storage means one ram might run one engine but it couldn't reliably run 2 engines. Normal intakes would be lightest and fine for low to medium atmosphere but useless in upper atmosphere. Rams would be heavier with no benefit for low atmo but much better for high atmo. You could still build SSTO's and in fact people wouldn't need to Air hog or build unrealistic looking craft like the primary picture. The extra weight would also mean those pictured craft would have a very low TWR but Vtols with normal intake would still be light enough.

So I'm new to modeling and I've got some problems with the lighting on my first part. I'm so new I'm not sure even what info is useful or not so aside from all parts and screenshots of every screen of blender and unity I don't know what to post. Here is the part and the lighting problems. Second and third pictures show weird lighting around the top of the vents and on the sideways pictures on all lighting seems off.

It could be residual wobble. On large crafts or ones with many joins between parts or weak joins like docking ports the whole craft can flex under force. The problem is the bend at each part is so small that it is hard to stop. Any ASAS systems or RCS systems can even make the problem worse as they try and force just one part to be back on target while powering either the part they are in or an opposite end of the cart to wobble more. Try rotating the craft along it's axis with SAS turned off. The effect should prevent too much wobble. If it calms down and you can stop the rotation without reactivation the wobble then this is a temporary fix. Apart from more struts, I've not found any other fix for this, if it is what you have.