Pecan

You'll be missed Max; you did communication better than most and took KSP to more awards and presidential palaces than most games ever reach.

Nice to see this one back from it's two-year death. Still useful and relevant I'd say so no vote to lock, or even re-bury, it here.

Applause. Once you hear the news and it clicks into place everything suddenly looks easy again doesn't it? :-) (Right up until whatever the next personal challenge is, that's the fun of KSP - "we choose to do these things ... not because they are easy but because they are hard")

The official manual is about all there is. Someone said they were going to re-write and update it but then ragequit the forums for a while. Oh yeah, that was me ... (not likely to happen this year, but I'll get myself in gear once the tutorials on KSP itself are written).

Other uses ... I am seeing a launch-silo opening to the sky.

Correct, should have read Launch TWR. For a SSTO that'll increase quite a lot, however, if you have a two-stage design the second should generally have an initial TWR of less than 1.1. From launch you should, I suggest, be starting your gravity turn by the 1km altitude and/or 100m/s velocity - which should be around the same sort of time with that launch TWR. 5 degrees is not a hard limit either, you can turn further from prograde while you are relatively slow because i) there simply isn't the atmospheric drag to make you flip yet, ii) prograde will move towards your current heading quickly because there isn't much existing 'prograde' to adjust. The important thing is not to be turning too sharply once you've built-up serious velocity. Hence a slow (5-degree limit) turn through the main part of the ascent. Since you're turning slowly you have to start early just to get pitched (or yawed) over far enough before your apoapsis has fully developed. For what it's worth the old '10km altitude then pitch to 45-degrees, then pitch to 20-degrees when Ap reaches 50km' advice still provides good milestones, it's just that you want to be doing the whole thing as one smooth turn instead of in two sharp jerks. So, maybe kick your gravity-turn off with a 10 or 15 degree turn while you're low and slow if need be, then continue to turn slowly within the 5-degree limit so you're passing 45-degrees around 10km altitude. A continuation of the same thing should, more or less, have you at a very shallow pitch by the time your Ap reaches orbital altitude, leaving you with only a short circularisation burn. If you still have a big circularisation burn with the 5-degree limit then you've simply got too much thrust, getting you too high before the turn gets far enough. I've never used MJs acceleration limiter, just adjusted engines as required. Incidentally, the TWR limit is only there so the 5-degree limit has time to turn you and that's only there so the vehicle doesn't flip. If it's happier (aerodynamically stable) with a sharper turn then by all means use one - what works is good. As has been mentioned in other threads though, optimising for launch-to-orbit dV is generally not useful compared to cost or payload ratio.

KSP and MJ Versions?

You're right, of course, but since SSTO has never even become a reality in the real world, there's no reason for its current mis-use on the forum either. *Grin* Unpleasant infections need not arise, since the only 'D's would need to be SSTDu or SSTDr anyway (similarly SSTMu/SSTMi), to avoid ambiguity. More interestingly - but perhaps not interestingly enough to warrant a derail, so apologies if that's how it seems - seems to me the idea of undocking rather than 'staging' per se. AFAIK there's no term for that sort of design but it's accepted that a 'Jool 5' or some-such will undock a lander or two but still count as a single vehicle. Can't see the problem with that myself, but some people seem very sniffy about "Single" even while they ignore "Stage To Orbit". Ah well ... again, no RL exemplar.

Would that be radiating heat from your just-returned-from-space-cold vehicle to the look-at-the-pretty-plasma-hot atmosphere?

Awesome changelog! No wonder you thought it was worth releasing now, without the other changes scheduled for 1.1 As well as the usual 'more stuff for flight simulator' there's a huge amount of things in there. Particularly loving the docking and navball enhancements. Thanks.

The Travelling Salesman Problem doesn't sound even nearly as hard as rocket science. It's still NP-Hard though. So what you've got to ask yourself is, is it worth making KSP run twice as slow, just so your predicted interplanetary orbit in a couple of years is a few mm more accurate than when using patched conics? Can you perform burns that accurately - both by thrust and time? Would you find it interesting/challenging to keep re-positioning your Kerbin commsats every few months because Eeloo has degraded their orbits (it's undeniably realistic)? Note particularly that of the 'variety of cheats that could be done', KSP uses patched conics because it works well and efficiently. Yes there is a mod for that, if you answers yes to the questions above.

And my summary of the above ... Darts are made heavy at the front with fins at the back for the same reason as rockets - so they point the right way. Tall and thin is good, but short and fat still works if you follow the important rules. Mass at the front (top) Drag at the back (bottom) Start gravity turn early (1km or lower) Turn slowly (heading within 5-degrees of prograde) all the way up Which means a TWR no higher than about 1.3 If you don't have the mass and drag correct the ship will probably flip. If you turn too sharply it'll probably flip. If you turn too late but keep it gentle you're left with a huge circularisation burn. If you turn too far too early nothing else matters much because you'll just run out of fuel from all that draggy low-atmosphere stuff.

Just like a rocket, in fact. Air-breathers will always beat comparable LFO though, simply because they use less fuel.

Except, you know, how much benefit do you get from those wings compared to pulling their mass and drag? Given the thrust on that engine you just blast a rocket ascent. Wings are only useful for air-breathers, where you spend a significant amount of time in (comparatively) horizontal flight at a (comparatively) low level. Notwithstanding; wings (and landing-gear) are very useful for horizontal landing, if you can't target KSC with a vertical descent.

If the CoM is behind the rear landing-gear then the plane won't stand on the runway, it'll tip back onto its tail (the rear gear being the fulcrum).

Had to give those up because of 'clamps in space bug' but they look and work great, especially with LaunchCountdown-Extended to animate them. Now 1.0.5 has fixed that bug ... Well they work, except the 'umbilical' clamp. That doesn't seem to attach to the rest of the vehicle properly, can't be right-clicked and doesn't "stage" as expected (no swing-out, remains in stage list) so it's useless. It does, at least, remain on the ground. (Launch clamps 5.34 with KSP 1.0.5 and no other mods)

Single Stage To Orbit - after that any 'SSTO' rules are over. Someone who wants Single Stage To 'somewhere else' should say so. If those rules really seem important though ... undock instead of staging/jettisoning, you can always re-dock when you come back ready to land. Hehe, then you can look at your space-vehicle and start slashing away at the extra mass you now see is not needed with all the extra-efficiency tricks you've learnt :-)

Which is why one would have expected that inside a closed cargo bay, away from the sides, behind a fuel tank, behind a cockpit that they'd be just a little bit protected from the heat. That they don't do any better than being bolted to the outside is what I mean by not having any luck with cargo bays.

As TOTALLY meaningless as Chatterer? What 'profile' is this of which you speak, and how was your installation 'destroyed'? Since I don't use a joystick I'm not sure what you mean, and have never had this glaringly obvious problem become glaringly obvious but you probably have a better reason than my own ragequit. 'Bye then.

KAS and KIS will certainly let you connect fuel-transfer lines, if you rendezvous the vehicles closely enough (pretend you're docking). For "TAC" I take it you mean, TAC Life Support (there being others) and for that, IIRC, you should be able to ferry-over a food/whatever container with a Kerbal on EVA then attach it to the other ship (courtesy of KIS/KAS)

Lots of bad luck with cargo/service bays of all sizes and shapes here, to the extent that I'll often use fairings instead. FWIW, node-attached battery gets very hot (and might explode) inside a closed spaceplane pod on the way up :-( Still haven't worked out if these things do anything but Kraken-call and add mass.

You're doing well! If you can get to orbit (at all!) and land on the moons then you've really conquered the learning-curve; you just haven't discovered the extra information you need yet. When you look at it you'll find it's easy compared to the things you've already done. My Exploring The System was specifically written to explain going everywhere by starting small. It's mostly out of date now (update still waiting on KSP versions to settle down a bit) but the design basics depend on maths and physics, which don't change (outside atmosphere) so there's a lot of good information there anyway. Whatever changes happen in any version rely on this: mass is critical, keep it low, choose engines based on Isp rather than thrust, unless you just need thrust for launching/landing. Design and build for the required deltaV, and use a deltaV map to make sure you know what it is your vehicle requires. For your specific questions: deltaV, Isp, as above Anything floating in orbit is a 'space station' if that's what you call it. Good idea to have docking ports, the rest is up to you Planets have to be aligned for an efficient transfer between them; that's the concept of a 'transfer window', but is just like going between Mun and Minmus if you want to practice. Use a transfer window planner. Is the same thing, no? New aerodynamics mostly mean doing a more realistic gravity turn - design for launch TWR of 1.1 - 1.3, yaw right at 100m/s velocity or 1km altitude to 5-10 degrees then lock SAS to prograde once your heading comes into line. Look at the hundreds of threads about designing a rocket and/or spaceplane with aerodynamics in mind. Bear in mind that someone said "You've got to flip a rocket or two" before you get used to the way drag affects launches. Put some Kerbals on a moon, call it a colony (like space-stations, they're whatever you want them to be) Practice Remember - if it was easy it wouldn't be fun. If it was easy there wouldn't be so many threads about all the same things. If we didn't practice we'd all be stuck in the same place (probably KSC). There are no rules about what you 'should' do. ETA: Snark has pointed you at 'the drawing board' (as my signature does). READ stuff and try it - make sure things are for a compatible version though as 1.0, particularly, did change a lot of stats as well as introducing the new aerodynamics.

Decouplers are not very tall for their width and it's possible to push them too far up so they attach to the upper stage by their bottom node instead of the top one. That sort of thing can cause all sorts of problems. The TR-38 in particular used to (0.24?) have problems but has had some pretty intense love and attention because of that, if I remember correctly. In any case I'm using it without problems at the moment.

1.0.5 +; the answer to most of our dreams :-) The simple walk-through though is and will remain; almost any other design is easier, more cost-effective and reliable. If you want to challenge yourself to build something that looks like the North American shuttle then ... well, it's a challenge.

Not in stock. Various mods, such as AGX (Action Groups Extended) will let you follow or ignore symmetry but generally, if you placed something with symmetry it'll stick with symmetric operation. If you don't want to use a mod then place the parts individually.