Pecan

Faster! 2km/s at 30km :-) Yep, ok 1km/s at 20km, but then level-out to climb comparatively slowly. As your engines are thrusting mostly horizontally most of your acceleration will also be horizontal and as you get higher (air thinner, Terminal Velocity higher, drag lower) you should aim for something like another 100m/s horizontal velocity per 1km altitude; 1,100m/s at 21km, 1,200m/s at 22km, etc. to 2,000m/s at 30km - roughly. If your horizontal speed isn't keeping up with your vertical speed then you're climbing too fast and not getting the most from your jets - which means needing to use more rocket-power, which is less efficient. If you can accelerate faster than that horizontally then you can afford to ascend faster as well, but the idea is to try to get to/above orbital velocity (~2,200m/s) before you get so high you have to throttle-back the jets so much that they're not really helping any more. Spamming intakes the way I do helps with this because you don't have to throttle-back so much or so early but if you fly a jet-powered vehicle properly (I must practice more!) you can get away with way less than the 8 I suggested; it all comes down to regulating your vertical speed to get the best horizontal acceleration.

So how much more do you get for these 5 hard missions than a single 45-minute to-orbit one?

Easy answer first - air is treated like monopropellant and is automatically taken from anywhere so you don't need 'air lines' in the same way as fuel flows. The altitude you can run your engines on depends on the speed and angle of attack, so how much air each intake is getting. Do it right and you can run the engines all the way to space (69km). Personally, I find that spamming 8 RAM-intakes per engine makes that the easy way to do things but whether it's worth doing is a different matter. Have a look at this thread to decide which intake(s) to use: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/106114-Stock-KSP-90-intake-comparo-for-SSTO-turbojets However you do it the benefit of jets is fuel-efficiency, so you want to get as fast as possible using them. That, in turn, means getting as high as possible to reduce atmospheric drag. You won't be able to accelerate much above 30km but by then you should be at, or near, orbital velocity so the rest of 'up' comes automatically. The important thing is speed - if you get that physics will take you up. If you aim for altitude first you'll never get fast enough. ETA: Also note that it is very important to throttle-back jets to keep them working. Whenever they (are due to) flame-out throttle-back a little bit and they will need less air to keep going. 70% thrust is way better than 100% deadweight. As you get higher and the air gets thinner you will need to go faster to keep them supplied but, at the same time, the drag gets lower so you can go faster. It's the balancing-act that makes jet-launched vehicles 'tricky' to fly (but it all comes together with practice, like most things).

If it's a polar orbit the easiest way to tell is by looking at which way around the dots are going on it in the Tracking Centre. When KSC* passes under the orbit launch and turn N or S as required to follow the dots. Note that Kerbin is spinning anyway so you have some Easterly velocity already - launching due N or S will result in an orbit slightly to the East, but you'll probably need to make some adjustments once in space anyway. (*KSP = Kerbal Space Program = the game. I suspect you mean KSC = Kerbal Space Centre ^^)

More than a few mod-makers are not supporting Win-64 KSP because of the bugs they get unfairly blamed for. Last year StupidChris got fed-up with the many whiners around and withdrew RealChutes. The MJ thread has recently been plauged by a PERSON who was convinced it WAS BROKEN and HAD to be fixed because HE couldn't play KSP without it. Sarbian has now left Module Manager - which many other mods depend upon. Time to give some New Year love! Remember: Mods are free It takes a lot of work to make a useful mod and keep it up to date Mod-makers still need to eat - so they're giving-up their time voluntarily Apart from their wish to make things better for everyone there is no guarantee of quality, functionality or past/future compatibility Mods, and the makers of mods, owe us exactly nothing If you are new - ****ing off the maker of popular mod, that many people use, is not going to make you many friends ^^ Hug a mod-maker while you've still got a chance!

How much = 2(piece of string) + surreal fish. Unfortunately, most of this depends on so many system-specific things that there is no definitive answer. I get worse performance and memory-use with OpenGL rather than any improvement. The best you can do is suck it and see, then start again when there's a new (engine) release. There certainly seem to be cumulative memory-leaks on scene changes but nothing that mods can do anything about. If they are Unity errors there's not even anything KSP\Squad can do about them. I do know that, while my machine will happily do an interplanetary return-trip with all the manoeuvres if I stay focussed on a single ship, if I change ships or go to the space-centre I have to save, exit and re-start the game every three or four times (max 7 or crash and burn).

(Sidenote: as originally stated, they don't just become a bit worse/lower thrust, they will 'suddenly' flame-out. True, they also become worse on their way towards that, but that isn't the essential point). - - - Updated - - - Is that a new-ish finding? I've never tried much of anything with basic jets but is 1.5t/engine consistent? Your research really is great :-)

In defence of surgeons: they often have little idea of who/what is being wheeled-in next, despite what the schedule says, because of all the 'things' happening outside the theatre. It is also worth noting that several KSP players pretend to work at NASA - for a given value of 'pretend to work' :-) (Hehe, there was a thread a while ago where first person said "you don't know what NASA does" (or words to that effect), second person said "Nor do you" and the first person posted a picture of their NASA id-card. It's even possible - although unlikely - that I know what I'm talking about sometimes ^^).

Yes mate, easy - Career mode, tech-0: command pod, parachute on top, 10 fuel tanks and a T30 engine underneath. It's a Single Stage To Orbit. Sandbox mode: QBE, FL-T100, 48-7S. SSTO. Big bunch: core, several jumbo stacks, KR-2Ls. SSTO. NOW we've got over "it's hard" part - what is it that you want to DO with a SSTO? Re-usability? Design for >4,900m/s launch deltaV and 2-4 drogue chutes for assisted powered landing within 1 or 2 km. Precision landing? Use MJ. Horizontal landing? Add wings and landing gear. Add power and fuel for carrying them around all the rest of the time. Jets? Well - USE them by staying in the atmosphere for as long as possible but, yes, using jets properly is more complicated. That doesn't mean SSTOs are hard though, it means the way you maximise jet efficiency is hard. - - - Updated - - - 8 intakes per engine is plenty, even spamming (it's what I do too ^^). THE trick to using jets is that as they run out of air they don't just become a bit worse/lower thrust they will 'suddenly' flame-out. Flame-out at full-throttle, that is, but still work at 70%, 50%, 20%, almost no, throttle... When (preferably just before) the jets flame-out reduce the throttle a little and they will need a little less air. Although they're giving a little less thrust they are still working for you. Repeat as required. In a lot of cases you'll find jet-powered launch vehicles ascending from 30 - 60km with the jets eventually just 'ticking over' at practically no throttle and 0.1KN thrust for a lot of the way. Base speed (~30km) will get you an Ap outside the atmosphere, thrust after that can bring your Pe to the edge of it (best I've managed is 58km Pe).

Erm, I'm going to assume some sort of reality - you don't need to SSTO, then decouple/undock. As long as one stage goes sub-orbital long enough for the other(s) to circularise before it gets auto-deleted you'll be able to come back to it, land and recover it and then go back to the one waiting in orbit.

SSTOs are easy - although LethalDose may be along to make it harder. The T30 and Mk1 command pod, given 10-12 fuel tanks (tech-0) will be able to SSTO and land back at KSC. Going to the moon there's really no point in taking all that stuff with you so, yes, you want to stage. Do it IN ORBIT, rather than dropping things back through the atmosphere on the way up. So i) A vehicle that can go LKO <-> MuKO, ii) A simple SSTO rocket. The amounts of money aren't really worth the time, but if you want to do SSTO then leaving the launch-vehicle in LKO is the only effficient way to proceed.

WD LD - you nailed the gear issue :-) @ locustgate - dropbox is as good a repository for sharing files as anywhere else.

The biggest grind, PITA, is not calculating TWR and deltaV, it's simply doing all the book-keeping to total thrust, wet and dry mass. To a pretty big extent Squad have given us one of those, now the launch-pad/runway have mass limits and we get the wet mass displayed in the VAB/SPH. Tweaking the fuel out of tanks is a fairly easy way to find the dry mass, although a little grindy if you have lots of tanks in a stage. The next simplest thing we could be told is the total thrust of a stage. To be honest, unless you have a lot of engines of different types that's not too hard anyway. --- Now you have enough for TWR calculations 'by hand' (which is, of course, a really simple equation). After that give us the Isp of a stage. Again, unless you have heterogeneous engines, that's pretty simple to see from the parts' descriptions anyway. --- And that gives you everything for deltaV calculations. Apart from being aware of what a 'logarithm' is that's pretty easy too, especially if you're just putting the above figures into a spreadsheet. So then Squad can just cut the **** and tell us what we need to know! --- Let the games begin. I can't help thinking the real reason we've never got this in stock is because Squad can't work it all out, taking the fuel-flow rules into account. Apart from that I suspect they would get a lot of complaints unless it were 'perfect' in all situations, even though KER and MJ both have trouble with 'odd' staging, engines with different orientations, etc.

Looks like you're sorted so this doesn't really matter but ... That 5.5gb would be your total system usage, not KSP - 32-bit KSP, being 32-bit, can't even theoretically use more than 4gb.

Post the craft file and I'll give it a go, otherwise as I said before uneven thrust caused by too little air is my best guess. NMI.

Just because making a hard version of something is hard doesn't mean making a basic version of that thing is hard. It's a good reason NOT to start complicated ^^. Stating "they're easy" reminds someone that they're trying to over-think or over-design things. Start small and simple and SSTOs are easy. EVEN you agree that SSTO doesn't mean spaceplane so, no we aren't getting into definitions again, especially as you're the only one that uses your definition and insists on complicating things, making it hard.

Stock or FAR? The balance looks ok and you should have enough thrust but there doesn't look to be enough wing on there, or possibly rudder. Almost certainly not enough air-intakes for much performance though - 4-8 per engine will let you go much higher and therefore faster. Air intakes don't act like engines OR monopropellant fuel tanks - they act like air intakes. Those I see on there are also Liquid Fuel tanks. If there really are only two intakes on that plane my best guess for your main issue is that you're getting uneven thrust from the two jets - possibly one of them is flaming-out even on the runway.

In 0.90 there is a root selection tool at the top-left of the screen, to the right of the offset and rotate buttons. Click that, then (for some unknown reason) a part of your vehicle then, finally, the part by which you want it to attach. Now save it as a sub-assembly.

The first rocket in the tutorial linked in my signature is a SSTO. Almost any engine can be used to build a SSTO. Put a command-pod or probe core, a fuel tank and an engine together and launch. That's the 'spaceship' side taken care of. For the spaceplane side, I'd wait until the next update or concentrate on FAR guides because we know stock aerodynamics are going to be changed in 0.91.

There's nothing special about a space-station except, possibly, that it doesn't need heavy engines so it's easier than other things you put into orbit. What it does need, to be at all useful, is docking ports - plenty of them. Chapters 7 and 8 of the tutorial in my signature, but you may well want to read the rest as well.

SSTOs are easy - a pod/core, a fuel tank and an engine is all you need. 48-7S engine for tiny ones, T30 (start tech in career/science mode) for manned, almost any engine with high enough thrust to launch after that. As long as you aren't trying to SSTO with an ant, nuclear or ion engine you should have no trouble.

Got to love navigation :-)

Hehe, I knew there was something I wanted to add to the introduction. Since "You will need to redesign your craft and re-learn how to fly them in atmospheres with these installed." attached to the FAR/DRE mod does not seem sufficient the next version includes a specific warning that these designs won't work with them! Procedural Farings is fine though, I use it most of the time. Make sure you put the throttle to full before launch as well, rather than leaving it at the default 50% (apparently Squad believe that's better than newbies not knowing why their engines don't fire).

Excellent stuff as usual. Somehow I missed the pre-Christmas launch. Time ... time ... time ... if I get any I could wrap the vehicle designs from my tutorial into a VAB/SPH guide. Would that be useful?

Ahhh, the smell of necromancy. Stock doesn't HAVE any fairings so you're not going to save much there, but I suppose you could delete the nosecones. All the stock stuff is in <Your KSP folder>\GameData\Squad ... \Parts and/or \SPP. ...\GameData\Squad\Parts\Aero\aerodynamicNoseCone, for instance. I have no idea what happens if you delete the contents or even the whole folder. Make a backup and try :-)