Pecan

Which is to repeat what Tex_NL pointed-out in post #5 on page 1, which explains everything.

From what Owen says of his experience, I'm sure he's learnt that SSTO stands for Single Stage To Orbit, which is a long way short of Eeloo ^^. If you meant a single-stage transfer vehicle, then this is designed to deliver a set of SCANSat satellites to any planet or moon in the system: If you meant a single-stage all the way from launch I'm not sure why you think anyone 'should' do such a pointlessly inefficient thing. If you meant 'spaceplane' then why didn't you say so, and explain what use it would be on Eeloo? Welcome out of the lurker-closet Owen :-)

There are two figures you need to work-out for your rockets in order to know how they'll perform. TWR - Thrust to Weight Ratio = How much thrust your engines can provide 'up' versus how much gravity is pulling you 'down'. Less than 1 and gravity wins, you aren't going to space today. Exactly 1 and a vehicle can hover or maintain its current vertical speed but not accelerate upwards (if the current vertical speed is 0, on the pad, you aren't going to space today). A launch TWR of 1.2 - 1.6 is generally considered best. More engines (thrust) or less vehicle (mass) increases TWR so keep your vehicles light. Not so important once in orbit, but a low TWR means your vehicle can't accelerate as quickly (isn't as agile). DeltaV - potential change in velocity vector = To change direction or speed in space you need to fire your engines in the opposite direction. How much a vehicle can change its speed or directon (the velocity vector) depends on i) the engines' Isp (shown in the VAB), ii) how much fuel the engines have, iii) how much the vehicle masses. Use more efficient engines (higher Isp), add extra fuel or reduce the mass of the vehicle (eg; by staging to jettison empty tanks and other used components) to increase the deltaV. The tricky bit for launch-vehicles is that getting a high TWR usually means big, heavy and inefficient engines ... which then can't lift the amount of fuel they need to get to orbit. Using more efficient engines often means they don't have enough thrust to get off the pad in the first place. It's rocket science. (See 'Exploring The System' linked below).

In general only use the larger parts to reduce part-count. 2.5m is useful for large vehicles assembled in orbit, by docking, because the large 'senior' docking port causes less wobble than the smaller ones. Otherwise the trick, as Taki117 said, is 'only as large as it needs to be'. Design small and, especially, light. Less is more and all that stuff. Work backwards from the end of the mission as in Long Tom - Section 3, Chapter 5 of the 'Exploring' tutorial in my signature.

Eve is HARD! The gravity is so high and the atmosphere so thick that launching from Eve is i) really demanding (~12km/s dV from sea-level), ii) impossible with a reusable (SSTO) vehicle, iii) takes a BIG, efficient, vehicle that itself hard to launch from Kerbin and get to Eve in the first place.

If you fly a spaceplane properly the efficiency of turbojets more than pays for their mass as you only need a couple (for balance) of 48-7Ss for a tiny circularisation burn.

SSTOs don't need intakes, or jets. Probe-core, fuel tank, 48-7S = SSTO. Probe-core, big fuel tanks, 2x drogue parachutes, KR-2L = 25t-payload reusable SSTO. Yes, they're overpowered. No, you can't do it in real life - or wouldn't want to because other ways are cheaper/easier. Yes, there is a big rebalance intended for 1.0. No, we have no idea if that will nerf SSTOs of any, or every, type.

Good point on the keybindings, but I don't want to do that much work duplicate the wiki page. That does need highlighting outside of the Annex though. I will think about 'protips'. I'm not sure what would be useful but still within the understanding of a complete beginner. I am currently thinking chapter 6 should just be a walkthrough of the building tools in practice and then launch/flight to examine the flight & map modes in the same way the previous screens are shown; pointing out what all the instruments are. Hence, it will only have one ship and one flight (I think; it could change by the time I feel like typing again) - a tech-0 straight-to-orbit flight seems best as it will a) work in any game mode, go further and demonstrate more than the flight basics tutorial, c) provide the 'standard' (10km then turn right) newbie instructions for orbit, d) really DO something, without doing too much. Even with such a restricted definition it might need to be split into two chapters but, no, I'm not going to be building planes or doing more than mentioning dV and TWR, since those aren't displayed in-game and jets/wings are well along in the tech tree. The whole thing is definitely intended to be 'book 1', just so people can find their way around the programme interface without being completely confused. Yes, I am intending to do other guides on orbital manoeuvres, docking, the maths etc., but I'm not in a hurry because I think they're all covered pretty comprehensively by other guides already. When 1.0 comes out (and once I've updated everything again) I'm still intending 'World Of SSTO' with Wanderfound, but I've also offered to update the MJ manual before that. Perhaps I should put this in context better. I am planning (in reading order): Complete-Beginners - Induction To Construction (this, obviously). A guide to the programme itself, the interface and how to get around it. Beginner/Intermediate - In Pursuit Of Science. Maths, manoeuvres and the tech-tree. Science in Kerbin's SOI. Beginner/Intermediate - Exploring The System (simpler than now, with less flight detail). Sandbox ship design. Intermediate - A Career In Space. Contracts, money, reputation, strategies, building-upgrades, etc. etc. etc. How to survive Career mode. Expert (so much humility!) - World Of SSTO, with Wanderfound. Recoverable Single Stage To Orbit (which means To Orbit, not Eeloo!) rockets and spaceplanes. Expert - Shoestring Spaceflight. Low part-count and cost reusable everywhere.

You took the contract at the same time, but it probably has a deadline a long time in the future (most have) so there's no need to DO it at the same time. Shelve it for now, until you have wings.

Owwww! Sprained wrist! Going to slow down the typing a lot. There's always a silver lining though; it might slow me down enough to stop so many typos. :-) The manual KSP doesn't have was the target. I thought we've got lots of tutorials about ship-design, getting to orbit, interplanetary-transfers and 'the maths' but we didn't have anything that explained, from the start, just what the hell you were looking at and what all the buttons did. Plus, of course, I'm angling for 'Hey Squad, can I write the official manual and get paid?'. "Introduction to Construction" wouldn't work - sounds too much like it is An introduction to Constructing things, if you see the shift in meaning. Probably the simplest thing is to change the line order (and it needs a hyphen now I think about it); "A Complete-Beginner's Guide - Induction To Construction"? Thanks for the close reading. I have an unfortunate habit of not finishing the words I'm typing. New posts please.

For rocket science itself, in an easy form, why not try NASA's Beginner's Guide To Rockets. For a more wide-ranging, borders-of-possibility, look at space; Preliminary Notes on Atomic Rockets

My guess is you would use the hardest possible style, since you seem determined ^^. Seriously - these trucks though cool are hard, spaceplanes are hard, heavy-lift spaceplanes are harder, VTOL is hard, rapiers are, well easy actually, but low-efficiency so make all the way to Mun is harder. Have fun any way you want, but rocket was and is my recommendation.

Just (full mass - empty mass) / fuel units. Yes, it's a small difference and probably just rounding, but it's another reason apart from part-count not to use the small tanks if you can avoid them.

Just as a stock example - LightMun F Ion-powered Apollo-style (separate lander and command module) return Mun ship, <5t including launch-vehicle.

Since you ask then ... The difference between an empty and full tank must be the cost and mass of the fuel, since that's all that changes. In nearly all cases the fuel masses 0.005t/unit. The cost per unit varies a small amount between different tanks - perhaps some are harder to fill than others?! In an Oscar B, however, each unit of fuel masses 0.00503t, in an FL-T100 0.00501t and in an X200-32 only 0.00497t. Hard to justify that, unless there's some handwavium-leakage or something.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/111513-3D-Printed-KSP-Crafts-are-Possible%21 may be of interest

Thanks for the heads-up - and thanks to Dasoccerguy for the mod, of course. If it's easy/easier to get models into Blender, does that make http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/111317-Showing-us-all-the-new-things-in-a-cooler-way only one step (export to SketchFab)?

Excellent! - and well done.

Welcome to the forums. A 'station' is anything you want it to be, just another vehicle, so first consider what it's for. Chapter 7 of 'Exploring The System' explains the station and some of the supporting vehicles I use, if you want somewhere to start. Link in the signature.

Welcome to KSP and the forums. See "Exploring The System" if you want to learn about vehicle design, otherwise check The Drawing Board for tutorials on all things Kerbal. Links in signature :-) ETA: As a new player I'd also welcome your comments on "Induction To Construction", which I'm still writing - signature again for the link.

I'm more or less in the same situation and think it is NOT worth the switch, simply because you'll have to re-learn things in FAR and then almost certainly do it all again for the new stock aerodynamics. I'm just going to wait and learn the new model. - - - Updated - - - Did you tell MJ you'd changed all the rules by installing the MJ FAR-compatibility mod as well, or just blame it when its calculations based on stock conditions weren't accurate?

You and MANY other people. It's a point I make in my (not yet finished) Beginner's Guide, "Target orbits are also shown there for satellite missions – check which way around the 'blips' on these orbits travel; an awful lot of people get the heights and positions right only to find they're going in exactly the wrong direction!" Too late to help you, but at least you know you aren't alone.

You're limited in part-count as well as mass for launch in Career mode so these are prohibitively complicated for most people. Apart from cost, what are you considering as your measure of 'efficiency'? If it's payload-ratio (the percentage of launch-mass that is the final payload) you don't seem to list it. If you're just interested in cost then you should consider recover value - those SRBs don't have any. Regarding: Terminal Velocity - your 'drag' problem - values are listed on the Kerbin page of the wiki. TWR for each stage determines how fast the vehicle will accelerate and faster is not always better. In particular a launch TWR of 1.6 or so is usually best in stock, as low as 1.2 using FAR. In general, the average TWR over the life of a stage should be just over 2 to reach and maintain terminal velocity. Using liquid-fuelled engines at less than 100% thrust means you're carrying more engine mass than you need so, yes, use at 100% or replace with lighter ones. SRBs, on the other hand, can't be throttled and should be tweaked in the VAB to adjust the TWR for their stage. In any case SRBs are heavy for their total thrust and should only ever be used in a first stage, if at all. After dropping a stage the mass is reduced but you're also reducing the thrust available so you should expect to accelerate slower if the overal TWR decreases. On no account should you actually be slowing down, as that means the stage is completely underpowered. Throwing things at the sky is fine if you like that sort of thing, but to quote Apocalypse Now (which is likely to happen with these 'designs'), "I don't see any method at all, sir". I suggest you read a little about deltaV, TWR, terminal velocity and staging strategies, as well as something about rocket design - you might like my 'Exploring' tutorial, which starts with payloads under 1t.

Very bad form to necro-post in a thread that's nearly two years old just to advertise your new one, but you could at least provide a link rather than just the title!

Try the (space)planes in my 'Exploring' tutorial (link in signature). The first one, in Chapter 2, is specifically designed to be stable and easy to fly. Also note that KSP 1.0 is going to completely change the way aerodynamics work so expect any planes you build in stock now not to work in the next version.