Pecan

That's WHY we didn't say it - you're the master of it!

Please ignore all previous posts, rocket science is magic. In order to achieve magic-user status you must learn the wisdom of Manley and know the true name of Tsiolkovsky. Yeah, ok, or you can just read the blurb. Huh! It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works*. "Up" is a good start, beyond that all sorts of funny stuff starts becoming important as you'll have gathered from the previous comments. As you'll have also seen, we nearly all started-out the same way too. [* Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men]

Lots of numbers and teasers - please show me your 15t 1-turbojet spaceplane and tell me: a) Where the rocket-power comes from What orbit you're circularising at c) How much fuel (LFO and oxidiser) you use d) If you're not talking about spaceplanes so the above don't apply; what are you talking about?

I was away from home and trying to find a link for yours but couldn't. Glad you posted it :-) The drawing board is always a good place to look though.

I thought later that that is actually the time they are worth their mass. StrandedOnEarth just proves my point otherwise - IF you've got a bad design and IF you've restricted yourself to uncontrollable SRBs you MIGHT have to add otherwise useless, massy winglets. Apart from that, in stock, if anyone wants to show me a design with winglets I'll show them a more mass-efficient one without; generally just by taking the winglets off.

I posted a 40t payload spaceplane a while ago. Version change meant its balance was a bit off but anyone who knew spaceplanes can easily adjust it. 40t ain't "heavy" so a spaceplane can do it easily enough. There isn't much point in launching more than that it one go though.

I ran out of fingers and KER doesn't help

Look in the tutorials section for manoeuvres and orbiting. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28352-The-Drawing-Board-A-library-of-tutorials-and-other-useful-information Read mine for vehicles to do it with.

What I want controllable in the first stage is thrust and gimbal. Oh yeah, SRBs can't do those so can't steer, maybe that's why you need to add wasteful mass with reaction wheels and winglets. Reaction wheels have been discussed quite a few times but the results have been inconclusive as to whether placement matters at all. The essential thing is though that there are pivot points, NOT levers. RCS, say, applies a translation force so is more effective for rotation the further it is from the CoM, exactly as you say. SAS applies a rotational so is most effective AT CoM, otherwise you're trying to turn the mass of the ship around an end-point. Push-pull goes at the ends, twist goes in the middle ^^. Sorry you felt 2 minutes was too long to spend learning something. For anyone who's spent the time and thought a bit, knowing that winglets on a vertical design are NEVER a good solution in stock KSP will be helpful.

As well as Laie's excellent links it sounds like you need a deltaV map as well. I am away from home and don't have my usual links handy - just google it, or look on the wiki.

Jets for launch are THE way to do things if you want cost-efficiency. That doesn't have to mean spaceplane but, obviously, you'll want to fly high/fast as long as possible to get the most from them. Not worrying (much) about aerodynamic flight and landing makes a VTVL 'tail-sitter' jet vehicle a lot simpler than a spaceplane although they are still a bit harder than a pure rocket.

Yes I can make a shuttle but no I don't make them because there are so many better ways of doing anything in KSP.

I disagree with all these construction tips. SRBs are 'ok', just, but liquid-fuel is much more controllable. SAS placement doesn't really matter but it may as well be central as anywhere else. You only need to add its mass if the craft is otherwise awkward to handle. Depending on the command-pod or probe-core you have you may already have sufficient torque. Winglets are just wasted mass and completely useless out of atmosphere. Reaction wheels help you turn, winglets just hide a bad design. Since there's no reason to spin anyway, there's no reason to rotate the rocket. Head East using yaw (press D) like in all the videos and tutorials.

I keep parts as they are in stock because my primary aim is building craft other people can use. As the OP says though, it's a single-player game; if you want to change things and don't mind the fact that makes your craft unsharable then go ahead. Rebalance will come.

The only time I've seen this it was, yet another, symptom of low memory. Closing KSP and re-starting it cured it.

Page 1, 1st reply, step 1: "Make sure you know which way around you're meant to go (follow the dots). A LOT of people don't."

No, I think any real space agency has way more accurate and realistic simulators already - or will get them pretty quickly. What they may use KSP for, as we've seen with NASA is a quick way to make a mock-up video to present the idea to the press/public. KSP's parts, physics and solar-system are just too different to be useful for real applications. Graphics purists might sniff at the limitations of KSP's images but real applications don't need to know much about what a vehicle will look like - what they need are all the numbers; mass, deltaV, temperatures and everything else that tells you if/how it will perform.

Ahh, I misunderstood because "Once you've grown accustomed to what jet power can do, the payload fraction of an ordinary rocket SSTO appears abysmal. Recently, I've been exploring the approach of a recoverable first stage..." in your earlier post. From that I'd assumed you were using a recoverable jet first-stage but just hitting 'up' as hard as you could insted of milking it. To be clear - what payload mass are we talking about here, I'll try to play-around with different approaches? (Away for the weekend though)

That IS a good, even the best, option for Kerbin orbits. Whatever you may have read, it's not possible to set the current reference body as target in stock KSP. It's not even possible to find out what your inclination is, let alone where the AN/DN are. Where there is something orbiting the same body on an equatorial plane already, such as Mun does around Kerbin, using that is simple and gives all the information you need. Since Gilly is on an inclined orbit around Eve it's not as useful, but still the most useful thing the game itself provides.

Construction point: it might just be the pictures but I don't see any monopropellant tanks on that probe. Tonnes of Xenon, but no monopropellant.

Now that's the sort of stuff I'm talking about, although more complex than I'd do it. Yes, it's scalable; a KR-2L can SSTO 26t, so three of them 78t, with enough fuel for de-orbit and 'chute-assisted powered landing. I'd suggest trying drogues more than 'chutes, letting them bring the descent-rate to 20-50m/s, which leaves hardly anything for the engines to do to touchdown safely. As I posted elsewhere, here's SSTO 40 parking at the office. It uses mainsails (SSTO 11t each) and delivers a 40t+ payload, e.g.; orange tube + accessories, to orbit. 10 orange tubes to launch one is very fuel-hungry even by rocket standards, let alone jets but it's only 42 parts including batteries, etc. and flies a normal ascent and landing. 98% recovery 'at KSC' is good enough for me. You are almost certainly right, if I weren't too busy already I would be trying it :-) At the moment I'm still thinking it would be worth dragging the jets the rest of the way to orbit rather than mess about with recovering two stages but I can't comment since I have no data. 'Worth' is pretty time/effort subjective anyway in this case so it's just a preference call. NB: I'm not saying SSTO rockets are more efficient, they definitely use a lot more fuel, I'm just saying that I use them at the moment because they're easy and low part-count.

Area 5.1 notice: Dres has been interdicted. Attempt no landing there. Honest, there's nothing to see there, these aren't the drones you're looking for, move along.

This is the truest thing ever in KSP :-) Jets are incredibly OP for efficiency. Might as well make the whole launch vehicle SSTO, switching jet to rocket when required, detach the payload in orbit and recover the launch vehicle 'at KSC' for 98%, even if you can't get the extra 2% for runway-landing a spaceplane gives you. A VTVL, 'tail-sitter' jet-launched rocket is almost as easy to build and fly as a pure rocket, almost as easy to land as a spaceplane, best of both worlds if you do it right. Having said that, I'm still messing-around with pure rocket SSTO launch vehicles because they are so easy.

OP, "Alt:89200m to 93500m". That means you have to have an orbit (periapsis in space) AND your altitude when you do the test has to be between 89.2km and 93.5km. 70km periapsis alone isn't gong to cut it.

Safety first, so it works. Efficiency second, third, fourth and fifth so it works better. MJ sixth, because it's boring now.