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[Sean Mirrsen]

I've found a somewhat unusual way to bring spaceplanes into orbit.  Raise to ~20km and hold to gain speed, then aim downwards JUST a little and slowly drift down to 10-15km, then aim nearly straight up.  When you exist atmosphere, stage over to rockets.

The idea here is to gain as much horizontal speed while near 20km, then lower to enter more atmosphere (lose some speed but that's fine) and rise up again, so you have your existing horizontal speed, plus the vertical speed you'll be gaining with airbreathers.  If you can get your apoapsis above 70km then you can usually use your rockets to pick up a stable orbit.

That sounds really familiar from something I've seen/read. I remember it was fiction and thinking "no way that would work like that. The thick atmosphere would kill all the speed." Maybe it's closer to possible than I thought. Seems like it would be pretty stressful craft/crew wise.

It doesn't really work in KSP. The thick atmosphere kills most of the gain you could have had from using the atmosphere for lift. What actually happens, as I've found, is that you're repeating your ascent, but have much lower mass due to having lost all that fuel, and thus can attain a higher velocity and maintain a greater angle of ascent, plus have less mass to push with your rocket stage. Generally, if you can do that, in KSP you'd be better off just keeping up the acceleration.

It's a whole other kind of ball game if you use FAR, or Real Life^tm. The atmosphere doesn't kill your velocity nearly as well if you're aerodynamic, and you actually gain a whole lot of upwards momentum from taking a dive into the atmosphere.

I can attest though, that even if for a different reason, the trick does work in KSP Stock. One of my more elaborate SSTO designs once suffered an uneven flameout, and tumbled out of its ascent trajectory, necessitating a dip way down to the low 10's of kilometers. The ascent from there was massively efficient, and I made orbit with way more fuel than normally. I wrote it off as a bug back then, as I haven't been able to really replicate it later, but I might try again, harder this time. ^_^

[PTTG??]

Man I want to re-do the tech tree. It should work out to be 1-2 missions for each tech, with lots and lots of techs available. That way you're getting a trickle of parts instead of an explosion.

[Rakonas]

...Why are you using the nuclear engine for a lander? I always have:

1. Launch stage. 6 skippers, 1 mainsail. Skipper all fed by rockomax 32, which all feed into Mainsail's 64.
2. Mainsail stage for good chunk of gravity burn and circularization. Fed by a rockomax 64 and 8 (so no overheat)
3. NERVA stage. Fed by five T-400, two on top of each other and 3 radial.
4. Lander. It's a pod, a science jr. (covered entirely with batteries, science implements and two large solar panels) and a T-400 feeding into an LV-909. After detaching the lander, it can be reattached by a docking node.

This is how people manage to land on other bodies and get back, btw; they have an intermediate stage with way more isp than the lander.

Bah! Apollo 11 can kiss my kass, I want to do a direct ascent lunar landing because I absolutely hate docking. It works for me except for the problem I described, which generally causes uncontrollable spinning and death.

[LoSboccacc]

Man I want to re-do the tech tree. It should work out to be 1-2 missions for each tech, with lots and lots of techs available. That way you're getting a trickle of parts instead of an explosion.

why all trees begin without even basic wings so you can get some report in an unsafe but satisfying manner instead of just suicide missions for fun? 

[10ebbor10]

Nothing is a suicide mission as long as you have a parachute.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Nothing is a suicide mission as long as you have a parachute.

And aren't landing on something that isn't Kerbin, Eve, Duna, or Laythe.

[miauw62]

Man I want to re-do the tech tree. It should work out to be 1-2 missions for each tech, with lots and lots of techs available. That way you're getting a trickle of parts instead of an explosion.

About that example tree given there there's one thing that irks me. I haven't played carreer mode yet, but apparently solar panels come even later than in the stock carreer mode (which was apperantly already pretty late?). They're pretty essential, tbh.

[Leonon]

Man I want to re-do the tech tree. It should work out to be 1-2 missions for each tech, with lots and lots of techs available. That way you're getting a trickle of parts instead of an explosion.

That mod installs tech trees as a plain text .cfg file in your save folder. If you want to you can mod it however you want.

[Greiger]

Pfft, I got more than enough science for landing on the mun by the time I figured it would be the next logical step.  And I didn't even explore all the kerbin biomes.  And if you can land on the Mun you can land on minmus with a few more boosters. 

While I haven't tried it yet, landing on duna seems like it would be even easier than landing on the mun, You land just like you did with Mun, except you deploy your kerbin return parachute on the way down for added drag and stability.  Just have to remember to pack it back up again before you try to return to kerbin.

I can't really think of any body except Jool that you can't feasibly land on with nothing but lander legs, parachutes, and liquid engines.  Might need maybe docking additional if you wanna return from someplace outside of the kerbin system, but once you get basic solar panels you don't even need to return the science.  Just transmit til it's dry.

[Canisaur]

Man I want to re-do the tech tree. It should work out to be 1-2 missions for each tech, with lots and lots of techs available. That way you're getting a trickle of parts instead of an explosion.

About that example tree given there there's one thing that irks me. I haven't played carreer mode yet, but apparently solar panels come even later than in the stock carreer mode (which was apperantly already pretty late?). They're pretty essential, tbh.

Well, the idea was to make you do a few landings before you have the option to go transmissions-only.  While I like the option of transmitting, I think there should be a cap on how much you can get for transmitting for some experiments.  Otherwise it's just a choice between the tedium of retransmitting or the challenge of returning.

The biggest changes you’ll notice early on are the requirement use SRB’s at first for heavier lifting, and that all early science must be returned to Kerbin.

[andrea]

if you can land on the Mun you can land on minmus with a few more boosters. 

actually, landing on minmus requires less fuel. if you can land on the mun and get back, you can probably land on minmus ( and come back) Without a couple of boosters

[sluissa]

I personally feel like the stock tech tree is just fine. Maybe a few changes might be warranted here or there, but it fits well with the Kerbals way of doing things and makes some amount of sense if you think about it. Even the progression isn't terrible. You might get a huge jump at the beginning if you're good, but the other end of the tree takes a while to get through.

[LordSlowpoke]

i have reminded myself how to use the jet engines to get stuff into orbit

i now have a 77 ton launch vehicle which highly inefficiently delivers a 20 ton payload into 100km orbit. payload has an estimated 700 meters per second fuel left, so plenty to deorbit or do mass relay stuff or i don't know

Spoiler: huzzah (click to show/hide)

now to bring back my fabled super-heavy stufflifter and haul ass to jool

[Sean Mirrsen]

Good luck assembling a mission to land on Tylo with just landing legs, parachutes, and liquid engines.

In other news, the transfer from Moho to Eeloo is a 20-minute burn at .5g. 5Km/s dV.

[IronTomato]

I sent a probe to orbit around Eve, then to send data, go down to the surface and send even more.

The probe landed on its side, but I flipped it upright by opening the radar dish, pushing it off the ground.