New game (for DLC), so let's learn to fly?

[bewing]

OK, so let's start with suggestions, and if that's not good enough for you then we can begin with decent-but-not-ultra airplanes.

First suggestion: once you have the panther engine, you can fly high altitude missions without needing any other engine. If you buy the wheesley engine, then you will often get a gift panther engine after a little while for a part test contract, and you can use that to do your high altitude survey contracts.

Alternate suggestions for if you want to use a low-tech, "juno+rocket"-based solution to nail those survey contracts:

Your mass doesn't have to go up all that much. But you will need to add a tank full of LFO. You need to carefully minimize drag through good engineering.

The plane's mass will indeed increase some. To fly at a decent speed at a moderate altitude, you will need 3 junos -- on nacelles, with 3-way symmetry is a good start. A terrier is a really good low-tech rocket engine to power the "hops" from your cruising altitude up to your target altitude. If you can only do one "hop" to a high altitude per flight, that makes it really annoying, because you will almost certainly have 3 or 4 high-altitude waypoints to hit. So it's best if you can engineer your plane well enough to do at least 3 hops to high altitude per flight.

At this early point in your career, you will probably not be able to transfer fuel around your fuel tanks. So you will need to figure out how to keep your plane's CoL balanced by locking particular fuel tanks during flight. You will also not be able to use the throttle to control your rocket engine. You will need to use either the fuel tanks, or engine enable/disable on your rocket.

 

[MPDerksen]

On 7/2/2019 at 9:14 AM, bewing said:

OK, so let's start with suggestions, and if that's not good enough for you then we can begin with decent-but-not-ultra airplanes.

First suggestion: once you have the panther engine, you can fly high altitude missions without needing any other engine. If you buy the wheesley engine, then you will often get a gift panther engine after a little while for a part test contract, and you can use that to do your high altitude survey contracts.

Alternate suggestions for if you want to use a low-tech, "juno+rocket"-based solution to nail those survey contracts:

Your mass doesn't have to go up all that much. But you will need to add a tank full of LFO. You need to carefully minimize drag through good engineering.

The plane's mass will indeed increase some. To fly at a decent speed at a moderate altitude, you will need 3 junos -- on nacelles, with 3-way symmetry is a good start. A terrier is a really good low-tech rocket engine to power the "hops" from your cruising altitude up to your target altitude. If you can only do one "hop" to a high altitude per flight, that makes it really annoying, because you will almost certainly have 3 or 4 high-altitude waypoints to hit. So it's best if you can engineer your plane well enough to do at least 3 hops to high altitude per flight.

At this early point in your career, you will probably not be able to transfer fuel around your fuel tanks. So you will need to figure out how to keep your plane's CoL balanced by locking particular fuel tanks during flight. You will also not be able to use the throttle to control your rocket engine. You will need to use either the fuel tanks, or engine enable/disable on your rocket.

 

This is exactly the level of detail I wanted.  Happy to experiment, not just copy.  I built a little juno-powered rover/plane with a science kit, and collected enough points around the KSC to unlock the Weasley.  Then I got sidetracked, and did a Mun Orbit Science collection mission since I needed some money.  

you bring up a very interesting problem that I hadn't even considered:  When I have both jets and rockets on a craft, how do I throttle them?  Seems particularly important once I graduate to orbiting spaceplanes.

Michael

[bewing]

3 hours ago, MPDerksen said:

When I have both jets and rockets on a craft, how do I throttle them?

You will find through experimentation that the answer is that you don't/can't. You fly along at full throttle all the time, and toggle the rocket on/off using some other method.