Pecan

Have a look at the thirty-odd designs in the tutorial in my signature.

I stayed up late last night/this morning to design a low-tech Mun return lander that I could post today. Ninja'd like mad! Mine's almost exactly the same of yours, but had fewer T30 launch tanks and an additional 909 transfer stage.

Not necessary at all, especially with FAR.

Is that 600 tonnes of machinery? If so, it is indeed a heavy load. The best thing to do is go with the heaviest launch vehicle you're already comfortable with so you need only do as few launches and rendezvous as necessary. Work out what tonnage your space-tug can take to Mun and assemble the launched components into sections of that size in Kerbin orbit. Ferry them to Mun one at a time and complete assembly there.

WHAT?! You have a T30 engine (start technology). Presumably you have a decoupler (tech 1) and, hopefully, a radial decoupler (tech 2). Mun and Minmus are yours for the taking ;-0

Sorry, no - I haven't tried adding NRAP to 0.25 yet, I'm going through the vehicles in my tutorial to make sure they work in stock. The SSTO rockets I have at the moment launch with a TWR around 1.2 and maintain full-throttle all the way. The trick is that since they'd be tearing themselves apart with TWR >5 by the time they get to 75km I build some stacks to burn-out early, which is why the port & starboard stacks in that picture are shorter than the others. The biggest annoyance I find it having to tweak the remaining engines to 20% throttle in order to make a de-orbit burn with any accuracy and remember to put them back to 100% before landing! Doh!. The thing I really haven't spent much time on yet is vertical launch/landing jet SSTOs. As Stratzenblitz75 says, they're THE way to do it for easy cost-efficiency.

Well, yes and no. The big question is whether it's drag causing the thing to flip (which I mentioned in point 3) or the whole thing is so top/front heavy that it's being a lawn dart. In most rocket designs it's more likely to be the latter, I think, which is why I mention it first. In either case more control will help - which is why I mention control surfaces in point 2. Meanwhile, Zylark made the perenial essential point - without pictures we're guessing.

I'd recommend getting the zipped file from the KSP store as long as you know how to open it. It's just a lot easier to make multiple copies in whichever folders you want - just unzip it several times. For the same reason you don't need to remove the demo if you still think you'll get some use for it. The demo's still on my machine so I can check how things work in it if someone asks a question that specifically needs the demo. Then again, I also have both stock and modded installs of 0.24.2 and 0.25 (ie; five KSP installs on this one machine).

I love everything about your designs except the part-counts (but will still be voting for you in the http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93779-SSTO-Spaceplane-Airplane-Design-Contest-II-Akademy-Awards). This SSTOs a 100t payload with 52 parts.

That's all the reason you need :-) Just making sure everyone was aware that SSTO rockets are available, practical and easy. There's always someone who thinks "Single Stage To Orbit" means "spaceplane" or "a vehicle that goes to Mun". I'm particularly interested in this at the moment because Wanderfound and I are planning a "World of SSTO" tutorial/debate and I will be concentrating on rocket SSTOs because I don't enjoy all that tedious mucking around in atmosphere. Which is odd, because the last 7 vehicles I've built have all been spaceplanes.

1) Check the CoM in the VAB and make it lower. 2) Add SAS/RCS/Control-Surfaces to help steer the ship. 3) Make sure you haven't got too much thrust and aren't going or turning too fast, causing large amounts of drag. 4) Stop using FAR if that's a problem.

Sticky thread at the top of the page: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87518-21-Jul-KSP-First-Contract-%28v0-24%29-Frequently-Asked-Questions 1) Send up a ship with a spare seat inside for the Kerbal to get into. 2) Rendezvous with the Kerbal. 3) Use '[' and ']' to switch between vehicles so you can control the Kerbal. 4) Use the Kerbal's RCS-pack ® to manoeuvre to the ship, grab (F when prompted) and board it (F again, if needed). 5) Land the ship. Edit: Added the word 'inside' to point one so Alshain can complete the mission *grin*

I'm re-testing all the vehicles for the tutorial in my signature to ensure they work in 0.25. There are two things that I think I've noticed. 1) The spaceplane + control surfaces seem much more powerful, to the extent that the chapter 2 basic-jet trainer plane is just too twitchy to fly. The other spaceplanes are ok since they just go up and back down again. 2) All the launch vehicles (mainly rockets) seem to be using marginally more fuel to reach orbit. This could just be that I'm not flying them as well as before. Nothing has been outside the design safety-margins yet but I'm not too sure the Minmus lander will make it back to Kerbin properly. Apart from the one design being retired the effects are most too limited to be definite - anyone else seeing similar or am I just going mad?

Jets can be a problem, but if you're so happy with rockets why not simply SSTO with them? Much simpler builds over a wider range of payloads and easier to fly as well.

So much depends on your TWR and speed/drag at any particular altitude, it isn't anything like as simple as 'angle'. The best you can do is experiment I'm afraid, although 45-degrees is always a good place to start.

Jebretary is the mod you'd want. What I'd like to see is the ability to select different folders for ships.

Won't fix the wobble but: lose the huge, heavy, monopropellant tanks and replace the Mk 55 radials. As it is you have enough monopropellant for a couple of complete space programs and the worst engines in the game. If you're not confident of your docking you'll still have plenty with a couple of cylindrical tanks. Just about any cluster of engines will outperform the Mk 55s.

It's nice to know I'm not the only person who asks this question. While I occassionally like to play around with spaceplanes they always seem to be the hardest way to get to space. Wings are fine for plain old 'planes that don't need to reach orbit and, in KSP, they do at least work but taking them to other bodies (except Laythe) is just daft. It might be daft fun, which is fine, but there's no other reason. Having said that ... My next tutorial is intended to be "World of SSTO" written in collaboration with Wanderfound, who is a spaceplane enthusiast (and therefore uses FAR). We're still finalising the structure but are intending to have this very debate, presenting our alternative rocket, JATO and spaceplane solutions and critiquing each other. The hope is that from that people can take whichever designs they like (if any) with a fuller understanding of the pros and cons on both sides.

All the stock vehicles have 'issues', Squad said they didn't want to give people perfect vehicles and discourage them from making their own. Building rockets is easy. Flying stock ones is harder. When you've built a few of your own you can spot what's wrong with Squad's. Building 'shuttles' is HARD. All the ones I know rely on mods or config editing. Don't expect anything much of Squad's.

KSP 0.25 - I am re-testing the vehicles for KSP 0.25. So far the trainer aeroplane (chapter 2) appears unflyable - it's just too twitchy and getting more than 10 degrees or so from prograde makes it flip all over the place. Fun, if you like that sort of thing, since it has plenty of power to recover, but not exactly a good first 'plane. The other vehicles in chapters 2 - 4 appear ok, although the resizing of the inline reaction wheel can make them look a bit odd. Once I've tested chapters 5 - 8 I'll update the ships files and then correct the text. Trainer will obviously need to be completely replaced and it makes sense to update Crew Shuttle SP (chapter 7) with something prettier using the new "Spaceplane +" parts. Performance statistics, etc. are likely to need updating for all vehicles although the IRW and cupola changes are the only ones I see in the release notes. Ok to chapter 7. I'll try to get those last two done tomorrow but I'm being sidetracked by playing with spaceplanes. They take so long to test! As a general note everything seems to take a bit more fuel than before. Within the tolerance of the launch vehicles so far but I'm not sure about the lunar landers (chapter 5 - they're still on their round-trips so not completely tested yet but they seem ok).

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Sandbox - I want to design vehicles and missions.

Indeed, you are correct. Thank you for reminding me. I've only used candle a couple of times, it's interesting and pretty flexible. Using several slack-tank stages gives quite a bit of room to add the 'twist' and it's easy to tune the thrust when it's time to add new engines.

1. I haven't heard of that one, I'm afraid. 2. The forthcoming version 0.25 includes the ability to move Kerbals between different parts of a ship without EVA. It does not depend on using any particular parts as connectors or having any passable route. Crew Transfer and Crew Manifest are similar, as I understand it, in that they do not rely on a logical route through the ship in order to move crew. Ship Manifest, on the other hand, can use the additional mod Connected Living Spaces, which tells you which parts can be crossed by Kerbals - a fuel tank would not be acceptable, as it has fuel in it, a fuselage part is fine. 3. There are some old threads on the forum about KSC West (as it is generally known) but no official story about it. There are several-to-lots of "Easter Eggs" (fun hidden things) on Kerbin and, to a lesser extent, the other bodies. If you want to make use of KSC West and other bases on Kerbin check-out the mod Kerbinside. For other bodies use Extraplanetary Launchpads.

I think you'll find 2,229m/s is a bit more than mach 1.