Pecan

A SSTO should be performing exactly ONE manoeuvre once in orbit - a de-orbit burn. All the structure of a plane is deadweight in space. Most of the structure of a plane (eg; wings) is deadweight even during launch from Kerbin, wings are only really useful for landing accurately. Detach the useful bits once in orbit and re-dock with the landy bits again when the mission is complete. And for the record - I use 8 RAMs per engine and don't have any problem arranging them aesthetically: Crew Shuttle MK2 In SPH But then I'm not trying to make something that looks exactly like everyone else's, nor replicate something that didn't/wouldn't even work on Earth anyway. With 8 RAMs I do the 'speed burn' around 28-30km, with the engines throttling-back above 33km. Apoapsis goes to space around there and I keep my ascent flatish to bring the periapsis to around 50km by the time the jets fameout and I'm in space. That leaves <50m/s deltaV for circularisation at 75km, which is so easy 48-7Ss are usually all the rocket-power I have. Detach payload and send it off on its mission. If it has to land again later re-dock to the lander and bring it all down (but mostly what goes into space gets reused in space, so my SSTOs are almost purely launch-vehicles).

We should all remember the point is that staging is efficient if your objective is JUST to launch something into orbit. So a SSTO design would simply be more expensive, although its construction is simpler. Once you want to REUSE parts/costs then the situation is reversed - you want to avoid staging/discarding anything. Ultimately that means for a disposable vehicle you stage as much as possible to optimise factors other than cost (like payload ratio). For a shuttle, where only the lander is reusable, you stage the launch vehicle as much as possible to minimise the cost of disposed parts while also optimising for other factors. For maximum reusability you don't want to stage at all, hence SSTO. SSTO rockets are simple to make and fly but use a relatively large amount of fuel and are hard to land accurately. VTVL SSTO jets are fairly easy to make and fly, are more fuel efficient but are still hard to land accurately. SSTO Spaceplanes are intermediate-efficiency launch-vehicles but are harder to make and fly; their benefit is that they can land accurately. [...this post is unfinished, but I have to go to work ...]

Superb! THIS is exactly how I keep saying it should be done :-) Like a lot of things it's not such a big thing within Kerbin's SOI but the further you go and the more you do where the 'plane part can't fly the more practical it is to leave them in orbit and redock later to land.

The rockets are a SSTO but, not from the look of them, a resusable SSTO.

Can you define the upper-limit of the payloads a bit more than 'heavy'? I don't want to spend ages designing launch-vehicles for multi-hundreds of tonnes if they aren't going to be used.

SSTO rockets don't climb slowly!? TSTO rockets are pretty normal, as are three- and four- stage vehicles. Unless someone's chasing ultimate asparagus or just special effects I don't think anyone goes further than that though.

Stipes? Stripes? Planet Ribbons? Is "How to get them" meant to be a question or an instruction? Your title says it all except what you're talking about and what you want to say about it!

To use MJ without parts, so vessels remains 'stock': 1. Remove the MJ part(s) from all ships but leave the mod installed (you may delete the 'parts' folder within MJ if you wish). 2. Install the Module Manager (MM) mod in KSP\Gamedata. 3. Save this text as a MM configuration file, with a ".cfg" extension, in KSP\Gamedata (Mine's called AddMJ.cfg): @PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCommand],!MODULE[MechJebCore]]:Final { MODULE { name = MechJebCore } MODULE } Module Manager runs during KSP loading and the above cfg will add the MJ functionality to all command pods and probe cores without having to attach a part.

The best place to find tutorials is The Drawing Board, and the rest of the tutorials section of the forum, including mine (link in signature) which is all about mission and ship design from orbital satellites to an interplanetary spacestation infrastructure.

Don't know about aerospace but the marine industry has a term for this: "Draft" is the depth to which a vessel extends below the water-line (surface). "Air Draft" is the height above the surface to which it extends. A typical small sailing yacht might be 14m "tall", of which 2m could be "draft" (hull and keel sitting below the waterline) and 12m "air draft" (hull, superstruture, mast, radio antennae above it). (Draft is important so you don't run aground, air draft so you know when you can safely fit under bridges, etc.)

Is there a patch to 0.25 that I missed?

KISS 1, 2 crew, stock aerodynamics, vertical-launch straight up at full throttle. 56,246m Achievements: The wind in your hair, Gnat (once its 2-man cockpit is detached prior to liftoff), Budget Cuts, "Budget Cuts" (in can possibly land, but has hardly any fuel left and no 'chutes, so I doubt it), (Stickler? I have no idea what the intake area of a shock cone is, I forgot to look!), (maching fly? It's doing vertical speeds > 600m/s not long before Ap) Edit: DOH! I didn't read "to level flight"! Self-disqualification :-(

"Kerpollo", Chapter 6 of the tutorial in my signature (Chapter 5 for lighter, easier lunar vehicles). If you want lightweight, my entry in Mun Challenge (4.673t, including launch-vehicle) and the others there.

F1 for a screenshot F2 to toggle GUI (altimeter, etc.) on/off Screenshots are placed in the KSP\Screenshots folder on your computer In imgur.com, once you signed-in to an account (free up to 265 (IIRC) images), you can drag pictures from the folder above to an album or just 'loose' in your browser. Change to the browser and select 'images' in imgur, click the picture you want here and there are options to give you the BB code you need to paste a link here. I find the best is a linked large-thumbnail size. That's big enough to be seen here without hogging bandwidth. If someone wants a better look they can click the picture here to see it full-size in imgur.

Yeah, so I have a tractor launched on a SSTO. After undocking the SSTO landed and was recovered. So far the tractor has been everywhere except Eeloo and Eve (and back to Kerbin orbit), because I haven't got a transfer window for them yet. It's refuelled lots of times - with reusable fuel modules that have also since been recovered. It has never landed anywhere, it's just used to shuttle other stuff around. THAT's efficient, but how would it fit?

Can you clarify how you'll handle other bodies such as these. My approach would be to put a lab + fuel in orbit around Mun/Minmus and drop-(hop-)re-orbit-refuel-repeat with a science lander. Not quite sure how that fits. Edit: Yes, the explanation below is the clarification I was hoping for :-)

Good ho! Indulge yourself in the 100-odd pages of mine, too (link in signature).

Good point, I shall pester sal_vager to make it challenge of the month ETA: He's making a list, he's checking it twice. He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Sal_vager is watching the thread! (so be good for goodness sake).

It is simple to check the mass of a ship at any time, without mods. Go to map mode and press the 'i'nformation button at the right of the screen. ETA: Oh, and for light Apollo-style missions, see Mun Challenge (~4t for LOR return trips)

Newb! You missed all the fun of Visicalc, 1-2-3, Supercalc, et al. {Started on the lecture circuit 1980 explaining the possibilities of spreadsheets and even, *gasp*, word processing}

You'll find the figures on the deltaV map here much more accurate, and you can use it for going between any planets/moons, not just a trip from Kerbin. There are several others available, the composite deltaV map by mhoram (IIRC) is particularly nice. Have you checked The Drawing Board for all the hundreds of pages and thousands of hours of tutorials that are already available for KSP?

Like a wiki, in fact? Don't forget, if there's something you want on there YOU can create it! (And not just you, but everyone else, so get working Tux and rdwulfe ^^).

Nothing to add on what deltaV is. Plenty on why you should use KER/MJ/VOID or at least a spreadsheet to calculate it. Rephrase your other question as "Will knowing nothing about my car's endurance make me a better driver?" and the answer is ... it won't make any difference at all to your driving but might make all the difference in the world (pun) to where you drive. Assume it's got a full tank, without refuelling would you drive a) to the nearest shops?, across the continent (whichever one you're on)?, c) somewhere in-between that you haven't been to before? In other words you NEED to know the ship's deltaV if you want to know where it can go (without refuelling). It is also not true that "the stock game has no way of calculating it whatsoever", it just doesn't do that calculation for you, despite more than 80% of us asking for just that in a forum poll a few months ago. All the information you need is provided by the game so if you refuse to use a mod use a spreadsheet. Of course, you'll have to retype all the parts' stats every time KSP changes and you'll have to recalculate everything every time you make any change to the ship's mass, fuel and/or engines, but that's the cost of being 'pure'. Real rocket scientists use computers, you know, and used sliderules before that; it's not cheating to work out the figures you need! Which brings us to your final point, about design and construction rather than flight. The answer here is even simpler: if you aren't calculating dV and TWR for each stage of your ship you just aren't engineering, you're hoping. The information mods are there because they make vital information a lot easier to get than doing it by hand/spreadsheet. We nearly all wish the figures were available in stock but Squad think "the only option is to go there and fail a dozen times" is more 'fun' so we aren't going to get them :-(

Ciao, your English is perfect*, well done. You inspired me to play The Planets Suite, I look forward to hearing yours :-) I don't know if we've have a thread on what titles each KSP planet should have, perhaps: Moho - The sun-baked Eve - The eater of ships (in case you don't know yet, it's very hard to re-orbit from) Duna - The friendly neighbour Dres - The forgotten Jool - The paternal Eeloo - The distant [*except "I have loved" instead of "I love"]

There is always the parts-list in the wiki ;-0 I wouldn't buy a print version while KSP still isn't even in beta - we know Mk2 parts are incomplete, Mk3 parts are being replaced, etc. etc. (And they are individual parts so what schematics would you want anyway?)