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[Aseaheru]

So the techtree crashes it? That explains it...

[Girlinhat]

Having trouble landing (space) planes.  Getting to a low altitude and moving slowly enough that I don't slam into the ground seems tricky...

[Lightningfalcon]

My problem is balancing them so that the center of mass doesn't move too much.  Right now I am fine on takeoff and in orbit, but when I try to land, if I turn the engine on, the whole thing loses any semblence of control..

[Leonon]

So anybody know what mods are currently up to date for .24?

Particularly interested in Interstellar of course, but would be nice to try out B9 and such now that we don't have to worry about the 4 gig thing.

Near Future is reported to be working with 64bit as long as you don't use the custom tech tree. Here's your excuse to try it out instead of Interstellar.

Interstellar does have a working version for 0.24.2 made by WavefunctionP. The latest version is posted here.

[BigFatStupidHead]

Having trouble landing (space) planes.  Getting to a low altitude and moving slowly enough that I don't slam into the ground seems tricky...

The usual problem, if your spaceplane has spaced already, is the that your COM has shifted after burning all that fuel to get to orbit. Liberal use of SAS is recommended, and using parachutes is also perfectly acceptable. You can use stock radial intakes as a poor mans air brake (or should I say you could; things may have changed), or install Firespitter and use Snjo's really nice ones.

[Aseaheru]

Dragchutes.

[alway]

Yeah; if you have trouble landing spaceplanes, parachutes are a pretty viable method. I mean, sure, it's a bit less glory than landing on the runway and all that, but practical concerns are important too.

[nogoodnames]

That seems likely to make your plane disintegrate if you're using FAR.

RE: Balance issues, if you have any fuel left (you should if you want to leave orbit) you can shift it to fuel tanks closer to the front of the spaceplane to make it more stable for reentry. Or you could empty the fuel tanks while building the plane so you know where the CoM is going to be, then design the wings so the CoL is always behind it.

[Greiger]

I found that it's quite helpful for landing spaceplanes to not have your thrust at max pretty much any time after you have returned to atmosphere.  If your plane can get up to 20000 meters and a kilometer per second before you fire up the rockets it can probably cruise below 10000 meters at half or even a quarter power. 

It's pretty obvious to reduce or maybe even cut thrust during landing, but of the two other people I know who play KSP, both seem to think they have to have thrust at full at all times to keep their plane flying.  The more speed you have when you reach the landing site the more speed you have to kill while trying to land, so while cruising back to the space center cut back on the thrust a bit, if your plane is even remotely well made it shouldn't need to be flying at mach 1 just to stay in the air.

Another thing I personally do that may be useful is I place a flag at the beginning of the runway, far enough away from it that it doesn't ask to recover the flag every time you launch but close enough to be useful.  With that flag there whenever you need to get your bearings you can just target that flag and it will bring you straight to the runway.  Then just line up the target indicator on the navball to be straight east or west of you.  Do it right and you could theoretically even land blind by just aiming your direction of travel to be just a hair above the target indicator (if coming from the west) if you had to.   
If old microsoft flight simulator has any bearing in reality it seems that actual airports do something that basically amounts to that to allow planes to land in near 0 visibility using only instruments and radio.

[BFEL]

Scott Manley slows his planes down by "pancaking" i.e. making your underside face your direction of travel. The bigger surface area will slow you down surprisingly fast.

And thank you Leonon, will try that out.

[Lightningfalcon]

I just thought of something.  Would it be possible to deploy a drogue shoot while landing on the airstrip, or would doing so cause horrendous FUN to occur?

[nogoodnames]

I tried that once. I can't remember if it just didn't deploy or if it ripped my wings off. Either way, not very productive.

[Sean Mirrsen]

You have to attach it directly to the fuselage so that it doesn't cause damage when it suddenly deploys, and have to remember that stock chutes disengage automatically when you're in contact with the ground, regardless of the speed you're going at. So, good for slowing down before landing, but not actual landing.

If you're using RealChutes, however, you can easily do that, as neither of those issues apply any more.

[Rose]

Yeah, I found that out the hard way when I tried having a parachute brake on my jet car.

Other than that, the car worked great till the first hill.

[BFEL]

Having parachutes on a plane defeats the purpose of building a plane.