Pecan

Same here (*grin* see 'spaceplanes aren't worth it' in my earlier post; there are many things apart from cost to consider) @spinomonkey - sorry if we've hijacked your thread a bit but this is 'worth' your consideration - do you really want to stick that much fuel in orbit?

2 x Mk1 command-pods. 1 x OSCAR-B and 48-7S. 4 parts = took off and landed several times for 'safe to fly' (you have to really try if you want it to spin!) and 'low budget' Bit short on range and speed though ...

No worries mate, do it if you think it's worth it. Separate, smaller, launches sounds like a much better idea to me too; how often is anyone going to need that much fuel in one go anyway! If you do do it I really don't think the Mk3s will be the way to go and you ought to keep it stock so the rest of us can compare. No doubt your findings will be interesting, the most I've built a spaceplane to deliver is 40t (generic/dockable) at a time.

Wow, you've reached stellar levels of ignorance already - that took me months! As the man said:

Does the fuel really cost that much? - ah well, I'll give you that then. It's never been significant in my games. (All those fuel tanks are fuel - the NRAP on top is the 100t payload) With 2% loss that thing would cost 15k per launch as well. That gives you a 63k per-launch premium for your spaceplane (630 funds/tonne) or, expecting 10 launches, a budget of 950,000 funds to build the thing in the first place. Should be do-able, although my machine probably couldn't run a flight if I wanted to do anything else during 2015 ^^. 52-parts solely because simplicity is one of the virtues of that rocket (probably its only one). Jet-tailsitters, like any well-designed SSTO, come down almost empty of fuel - therefore they mass much less than at launch and whatever rocket engine(s) you use for circularisation should be ample to power-land if drogue-assisted. Why would I want an engineer when the thing's unmanned? I'm recovering the vehicle, why would I repack chutes 'in the field'? In the unlikely event I miss KSC I'd just take the extra few % recovery-loss. Remember, I only said "spaceplanes aren't worth it". There are many factors apart from price that affect 'worth'. The OP asked for a "cheap(ish)" solution and I offered one which I think is the part-, simplicity- and time-optimal while still being reasonably cheap. Slashy had already given the cheapest solution, which is a tail-sitter. Between cost-optimal tail-sitter jet SSTO and almost-everything-else-optimal rocket SSTO, where is your proposed spaceplane SSTO?

Fun, isn't it! Yes, it really comes down to the only complicated thing is the natural logarithm 'ln()' function and no-one calculates logarithms by hand any more. Even pre-computer people would use slide-rules or simply look them up in published tables :-) (In spreadsheets like Excel and LibreOffice Calc the function is "LN()") Dry mass is easy to find in-game career-mode because the 'i'nformation button at the bottom of the VAB/SPH gives you the vehicle mass. Check it first to get the full mass then 'tweak' the fuel out of the tanks to get the empty mass. Edit for below: thanks for that - I read your earlier post already and still didn't think of it, doh! Mods are SO much easier.

1) Spaceplanes aren't worth it for a 100t+ payload because you need so many wings and things the extra mass doesn't pay for itself even if you get the 2% extra recovery for landing on the runway (I'm assumng people practice enough to land SSTOs 'at KSC' for 98% anyway). 2) A tail-sitter jet (vertical takeoff/vertical landing) "like Slashy's" has all the efficiency advantages of jets without the mass and awful part-count of a HTOL. I didn't say the rocket was cheaper - I offered it as 'easy'; and although it uses a LOT more fuel than a jet-launch it ain't exactly expensive either, since it's a recoverable SSTO. Still, you build me a <52 part spaceplane that lifts 100t to orbit and we'll start talking. 3) Now ... Mk3 parts? What are they for? Ohhhh, I seeee - you think somehow it makes it cheaper/easier/simpler if you ALSO carry a cargo bay to put the payload IN! Good luck with that then. I look forward to your cheap 100t+ payload spaceplane designs. Still with me. Stock. < 350k initial cost, anything extra better be paid for by your 2% extra recovery. <= 52 parts or explain how easy to build it is. Simple, fast, flight to orbit - because rockets do. Altogether now ... Hodo, Wanderfound and (no doubt) a few other spaceplane specialists might be able to. ... Everything aside, I'm not saying that rocket is a great design. I'd never launch 100t at a time anyway. If I were designing an economical launch-vehicle for that though I'd first ask how many missions it's expected to perform (how many can I spread the build-cost over) and then what the per-launch fuel costs and recovery-losses were. I have yet to see any spaceplanes beat an equivalent tail-sitter under several 10s of missions, because their (potential) extra 2% recovery doesn't cover their build-cost due to added complexity. (It gets as complicated as the discussions about whether the US Space Shuttle was 'economical' or not and comes down to 'depends what you mean'. If you want to use spaceplanes then do so. For me, it isn't worth it to the extent I'd often rather use a very simple, easy, fuel-hungry rocket for a few hundred extra funds per launch than even a very-efficient tail-sitter).

Ooh no missus, titter ye not. Worth a mention in the OP then, I'd think? A 6t launch-vehicle with nearly 50% payload ratio is a different thing to just 'a spaceplane' :-) (Or maybe I'm just being dense, sorry)

The asteroids in KSP are randomly generated for a short-ish period and do not have any 'grand' orbital life-cycle so this would not be possible. When you 'track' one in the tracking centre this makes it persist, otherwise it'd just disappear after a while and be replaced by a new, random, one. This is a consequence of when they were introduced to KSP - with the NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) update. The mechanics deliberately do not affect anything else in the game so, unless you track any asteroids, they have no effect whatsoever on the rest of the system. A mod(el) which simulated many asteroids, which may or may not be Kerbin-crossing, would have to do a lot more work tracking orbits than the existing computation-engine is designed for.

But not as cheap or simple as 'tail-sitter' jets (your preference). A thing which is 'economical' may be cheaper than the alternative but, nevertheless, needlessly more expensive than it could be - ie; 'better' but not 'best' because there was waste or under-utilisation. You ain't going to win - low-price isn't the same as lowest-price. When it comes to spending even 'lowest' has different meanings - I worked at one company that decided it was cheaper to re-wire the entire head-office building twice (at more than twice the cost) because they could write-off the expenditure in different tax years that way.

Happy New Year and lots of hugs, etc. Slashy but why's it so BIG? ETA: Sorry, I live near Brighton, England - this question is liable to misinterpretation. Especially as it's pantomime season (Oh no it isn't!)

Something like ? 740.925t, 52 parts, cost 320,866. Not as efficient as a jet launch like Slashy's (spaceplanes aren't worth it at this mass) but it's a SSTO, so reusable, and a whole lot simpler.

Ideally, yes, but there is a good reason for building 'up' and asking what it can lift - we have a limited choice of parts. For instance - if I want to launch a 3t payload I may well find optimal solutions at 2.5t and 3.7t. OK, so I take the 2.5t and add a bit of fuel or the 3.7t and tweak a bit out of a fuel tank. Close to optimal, but still sub-optimal. On the other hand, it's valid to ask "What can I lift with one Skipper engine?" (for instance). Since the dV requirement is constant, knowing the engine ISP and max thrust the rocket equation will tell us the max payload capacity. Now, of course, we have an optimal design which may be unsuitable for any payload, doh!

The two big figures ruling rockets are TWR and deltaV. Provided you have sufficient TWR to take-off in the first place, Slashy explains variations on the rocket equation (deltaV calculations) that explain max payload: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/102809-The-reverse-rocket-equation-explained

Inviting the Kraken, with bait! Don't use timewarp under acceleration, in atmosphere or 'exciting things' are very likely.

As UmbralRaptor and Slashy indicated it's just one of those 'gotcha' things - good you got it sorted :-)

"The only stupid question is the one you didn't bother to ask" 1. Drag the manoeuvre-node around your (Kerbin) orbit path to adjust when you start. You can also double-click Mun to see the expected orbit-path around it and - with a bit of fiddling-around - click the manoeuvre node to make small adjustments so it ends-up where you want. Otherwise, immediately after making your transfer burn, create a new manoeuvre-node to make any adjustments required. 2. To an extent it depends on which mod, but in general they are supplied as 'zip' files and you need to; i) if the mod is in a 'GameData' folder (eg; Chatterer), drag that to your KSP game-folder and 'merge' it, ii) otherwise (most mods, eg; MechJeb) drag the mod folder - MechJeb2 in that case - to KSP\GameData, iii) start the game and it should load. 3. Don't know, sorry. With luck, someone with a screenshot of their game install folders will be along soon to make mod-installation clearer.

Seconded - the potential dV saving isn't much and as I say in the tutorial, "For me, it's more trouble and time than it's worth as <ship name> has enough fuel to do it the easy but inefficient way." I only briefly mention the other ways to match plane since I'm concentrating on the vehicles, not flight. It's also a good point that rendezvous and docking is a good practice on a small scale, as is transfer between Mun and Minmus on an intermediate one. They both introduce the idea of a transfer window as the right time to do the transfer burn.

The orbits that appear are targets being offered as contracts. If you go to mission control they should show in the 'available' list - they show in the Tracking Centre and map view so you can see what all the numbers actually mean. Similarly when you are offered 'visual survey' overfly or EVA missions a tag appears on the body/location target. Welcome to the forums

Ooooh, that Google! Was it being, well, bitchy about your avatar?

Misfire much? Please see post 14. I 1) don't feel it's too easy, 2) nearly always play in sandbox, 3) used to use quite a few mods but my old machine can't cope with them any more *sob*, 4) and became a professional software developer in 1981, 3 years after learning to program, 5) am not crying - except possibly about the stupid tech-tree that starts manned.

CoT looks ok but the CoL is in front of the CoM, which will make the whole thing prone to doing a back-flip. This is accentuated by having the higher-drag parts like intakes ahead of the CoM; they should also be behind it, otherwise it all just wants to fly point backwards

For those wanting to get on with this in 0.90 I have posted a link to the new ships for Chapters 2 - 5 in the OP. There's a lot of stats and text changes to come but the existing instructions should make sense if you squint a bit and ignore the parts-lists ^^. There shouldn't be many significant changes to the heavier vehicles in the second half so I'll focus on updating these first chapters before re-building those ships. Please let me know if you encounter any specific problems.

You can't upload .craft (or any other files) to the forum directly. Put it on dropbox or similar and post a link to it. A photo of the 'plane showing the CoM, CoL and preferably the CoT would help us spot any problems but it doesn't seem to have many control-surfaces (eg; elevons). What would help you most would be building something much smaller to start with, just to practice :-) Mk1 parts ftw, even a satellite-delivery SSTO.

's the extrovert version of quantum tunneling*. Personally, I've always preferred reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Well, it works for .Anyway, I know what you meant ^^. [*alright, no it isn't]