Need ideas for attaching 2 Mk II fuselages together & a few questions

[Turk_WLF]

I’m trying to make a Mothership & a Drone out of Mk II parts similar to the M-21 & the D-21 (the SR-71 with the Drone) but I’m having trouble attaching the 2 Fuselages together even with radial decouplers. I’m hoping someone has some ideas how to make it work.

1) What is the Fastest Engine (Air Breathing) for KSP?

2) I understand that Squad has limited 1 pilot per craft, but I just was wondering if anyone knows why they did it. Just to clarified I meant you can’t transfer a pilot for one craft to another craft (on orbit )& still fly the both crafts even if you have 2 pilots in the original crew.

Thanks,

Edited October 27, 2015 by Turk_WLF

[Taki117]

From my understanding there is no specific pilot requirement per craft, depending on your design there might only be one seat available for a Kerbal. As far as attaching something to another thing, you are going to have to build the two as a single craft. Radial attachment doesn't work well with subassemblies.

[Snark]

You didn't say what you mean by "next to", or include any pictures of what you want... but I'm guessing that what you're asking for is to have two Mk2 fuselages attached side-by-side (i.e. one on top of the other), rather than end-to-end at the connection nodes?

Yeah, that doesn't work well in KSP. That piece is non-surface-attachable, meaning that you can only attach it to other things at the connection nodes at its ends.

That said: If you're willing to do some gymnastics in the part editor, you can kind-of-sort-of get the game to do that-- here's an example:

...the trick is to build each separate component (mothership & drone) as separate ships, then use the re-rooting tool to make a ventral (or dorsal) docking port the root part and save as a subassembly, then you can attach it. Of course, you'll have to have something to attach it to, which is going to involve some unsightly ugliness (i.e. a radial docking port or BZ-52 sticking out the side of your mothership), but can probably be managed by someone who's determined enough. I've shown an example using docking ports as the attachment; could also be made to work using a stack separator.

The fastest air-breathing engine is the Rapier, followed by the Whiplash.

There's certainly no limit of 1 pilot per craft. You can fly anything you want, with any number of kerbals aboard, of any profession. The only caveats:

• If there are no kerbals on board a ship, you can't control it unless it has a probe core & electricity.
  
• The piloting skill of the ship is equal to the highest piloting skill "on board" (i.e. of the highest-level kerbal pilot or the highest-level probe core present, whichever is better). So for example, if you have a 2-kerbal ship with a pilot, engineer, and no probe core, and then you transfer the pilot to another ship, the engineer can still fly the craft... but it will be hard to control because you won't have any SAS.
  

Edited October 27, 2015 by Snark