Spaceplane tips and tricks?

[MaddPhish]

Played 250 hours and it's all been rockets so far. They're fun stacks of explosives that are simply great for brute forcing huge chunks of metal into the sky. Decided to finally toy with spaceplanes and the aerodynamic parts are causing me fits when trying to get them to fit together into a decent wing. Once it gets on the tarmac aircraft tend to be very floppy. Struts are unsightly and I can't get wing panels to 'bond' to two different nacelles to the plane's working parts sandwiched between two layers of wing like I've seen on so many SSTO's in the space craft exchange. Can any other rocketeers offer plane construction tips or tricks?

[psistorm]

What I found works for the nacelle issue is to build the wing first, then assemble a nacelle. Once you have that complete, turn on mirror mode, and place the nacelle on the wing, before rotating it into the wing body with the WASDQE keys and possibly shift. As for space planes in general, it seems to be a lot of trial and error, my designs are awfully flat-spin prone, or tend to just flip over backward once in the air and stop responding to any inputs.

[SinPistones]

Allow part clipping in editors is your friend.

Anyway, take a look at the examples included with the game, those will give you an idea where to start.

[ThePsuedoMonkey]

Start small (<10T with a single turbojet) and use a pair of struts from the forward landing gear to the rearward ones (this gives plenty of stability for small spaceplanes and prevents wobble issues on the runway). Assign your engines to different action groups, so you don't have to throttle back when you want to burn your rockets and still get some boost from the turbojet. Keep the CoL near the CoM, since their relative position determines maneuverability.