Pecan

Why bother going orbital? Sub-orbital or purely atmospheric is all you need - just get high enough to be out of the low-atmosphere drag and 'circularise' only to the extent that your orbit line passes over where you want to land.

Put some pieces together. Put it in the water. If it floats, it's a boat, otherwise it's a submarine. NB: This is not a tutorial ^^.

This is a very old thread with a very simple conclusion: good staging improves payload ratio and asparagus is the optimal staging strategy. On the other hand it is fiddly, uses a lot of parts and, since funds became significant, it also tends to be expensive in all the engines you're throwing away. If using an aerodynamic mod like FAR it is important to note that drag increases with the width of the rocket, so no pancakes - more than one 'layer' around the core is more trouble than it's worth in any case. One of the main things to remember when discussing asparagus staging on these forums, however, is to remember how many people can't tell the difference between asparagus and any other radial-staging strategy. Personally, I've finished with asparagus since the engines were rebalanced and it's so easy to SSTO any payload I'm interested in (<= 100t, hardly ever over 40t) with simple, low-part, builds and full recovery of parts so launches only cost fuel. Without FAR's nerfing of jets it's even fairly simple and low-part to SSTO 40t with a spaceplane so you don't even use much fuel in the first place.

Module Manager goes in KSP\GameData - you only need one copy of MM for the whole of KSP and it should be the latest version you can get. (Menu? What menu?)

And how many units of oxidiser did you use?

There is no way of doing that - but you may should be able to edit the .craft file and type in the amount of any resource there.

What stock cabin seats 4?

As you are using the development version of SCANSat it's probably best to ask about it in the development thread

Not fast enough, if you're having problems. Try 1km/s at 20km altitude and 100m/s more for every additional km up - so 1,500m/s by the time you get to 25km. The higher you go the thinner the air so the faster you can go but the higher you go the thinner the air so the faster you have to go to get enough air for your engines. If that doesn't work - spam the intakes! The other thing I'd say is; are you sure about "tail gives down force not lift"? KSP wings are symmetric so lift depends primarily on angle of attack.

Every mission can be broken down into three sections: launch, transfer and mission. Design backwards. Whatever your mission is dictates your payload. The only engine worth considering for transfering significant payloads is the LV-N, tiny ones can use ions. Launching that can use a plane or a rocket - resusable or otherwise. If you insist on keeping your launch-section attached to your transfer section for the duration of the mission it just becomes extra, useless, mass. For efficient and cost-effective reusability it is best to use a SSTO (plane or rocket) to launch things. Your transfer/mission sections then decouple from that in orbit. At the destination the transfer section places the mission payload and returns, docking with the launch section for landing and recovery.

So much depends not just on the mass of your payloads but their balance as well. Personally, I'd tend to go with a vertical-landing rocket but, again, it depends how important recoverability is for you. For plane designs you might like to look at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/93779-SSTO-Spaceplane-Airplane-Design-Contest-II-Akademy-Awards, which includes my entry for carrying a detachable 40t load: (.craft files for all the planes are included in that thread)

Turn it up to 11

1. If you're worried about the amount of fuel it takes to move from a 150km orbit to 600km then, no, you don't have enough fuel to go to Eeloo. Such a small orbital adjustment should be inconsequential compared to interplanetary escape (from Kerbin) and injection (at destination). Same for the amount of time the burn takes. 2. Not really. One thing to remember is that with a long burn-time starting from a low orbit you may well push the ship back into the atmosphere, or even crash, while making the burn (pointing down ahead of the node when you start). Starting from 600km should solve that problem as well as allowing faster timewarp. As has been pointed out KAC is great, you can use maximum timewarp just in the spacecentre screen, without focusing on any ship.

Yep. Stop making it even harder on your poor daughter than it needs to be - play sandbox ;-)

A reusable SSTO rocket is entirely possible with the T30 tech-0 engine. Drogue parachutes make SSTO rockets a lot easier because they reduce the descent-rate to 40m/s or less before you need to fire the engine for final landing. Just aim for ~4,800m/s deltaV instead of a standard-launch 4,500m/s, so that you have fuel left for de-orbit and landing. A T30 can't SSTO much of a payload (roughly 1.1t) with the approach above. Better are the Skipper (5t), Mainsail (11t), KR-1x2 (14t), KR-2L (25t) and KS-25x4 (27t). That's not their cost-effectiveness order though ^^.

If the exhaust of the front engines is hitting the ship its only effect is to 'stretch' the ship - front pushing against back - so there is no net thrust. The physics is rather different but think about a car; tyres push road = good, tyres push another part of the car = bad.

Yep - that's the trick. It's easy if you tweak all the fuel out so the **** thing is as light as possible and doesn't do crazy things to your ship when you 'activate' it by staging.

And to explain that in KSP specifically - look at the "Isp" figures for the jet and rocket engines in the VAB/SPH. The jets' figures are much higher, meaning they use much less fuel for a given amount of thrust.

Two things - 1) Pulling engines, ahead of the CoM need to have gimballing disabled or they tend to adjust the wrong way and make steering discrepancies and wobble worse. 2) You have more engines at the front than rear and it looks like the exhaust from 'some' will hit the rear ones. Not only could that make things blow up but it also blocks the affected engines, resulting in uneven thrust turning the rocket.

The navball doesn't have a 'rocket' and a 'plane' mode, it works in exactly the same way in both cases and the same as a real-life artifical horizon works too. Consider when you're flying a plane horizontally then pull back on the stick (S) - the plane's nose rises, pointing into the sky ... and so does the nose indicator on the navball. If you were flying North and pitch up to 90-degrees (without stalling ^^) the heading indicator follows the 0-degree (North) heading line. Similarly, pitching down from 90-degrees to horizontal again has to follow that line 'down' the sky.

There were quite a few minor changes in 0.24 that re-balanced things, especially costs, with the new contracts in mind. Mainsails were improved and other components adjusted but only one of the 35-odd vehicles in my tutorial needed any change at all (a bit more fuel). What problems are you having exactly and, most importantly, what mods are you using?

This has been discussed many times. THE benefit of planes comes solely from jets, not wings. THE requirement for (stock) jets is oxygen in the atmosphere. No oxygen => no jets => no benefit from planes. Since you need to use rocket-power (or ion) and the thick atmosphere just gets in the way you want to get UP and out of the thick atmosphere as quickly as possible. For that it is best to follow a normal rocket-ascent profile and for that it's a waste of mass to carry wings.

IBTL It takes as long as a piece of string and it's against the rules to ask on the forums, especially outside of all the other 0.25 discussion threads that already exist. Start a new game, keep playing it in 0.24.2 if you have a problem with mods when it does come out. You can have several installs of KSP at the same time.

Looks like you've booked your spot on Modding Monday (lunchtime edition)

Yes - build a ship that connects 15 tanks into one piece, for instance with decouplers. When you 'stage' at start all those decouplers would release the tanks and you have 15 separate vehicles. As long as they are landed or within 2.5km of each other (as magnemoe said) they will continue to function, but you can only control one at a time. The Burn Together mod may help with that.