HvP

It's just the simple fact that it defies expectation. A hollow tube of that sort in real life would shield items inside from drag and to some extent from heat. When these parts were released I was hopeful that they would serve such a purpose. Now I know that they do not, which I think unfortunately limits their usefulness. I seldom have the need to add long empty sections of dead weight to my rocket unless I specifically want to pack it full of smaller parts like batteries, monoprop tanks, science experiments, fuel cells, RTGs, command chairs, etc. and the stock cargo bays in the 1.25 and 2.5 cross-section are either far too ugly, far too short or not available in the cross-section I need. Or, in the case of the Gemini/Apollo style 1.85 & 2.5 service bays, far too tall with a poorly optimized interior for what I need. So I just have to make do with making heavy interstage fairings with that ugly ugly mismatched base, or tweakscale other parts as best I can.

The procedural structural tubes don't seem to shield anything from drag, so it's like having a gap in the middle of your stack as far as aerodynamics are concerned. Also, they apparently don't protect anything inside of them from heat either. I tried making an escape pod out of one of them and not only do my Kerbals inside show aero drag lines, they also explode during reentry as if they are directly exposed to the heating.

@athalon020 Is it possible that when you placed the tanks into the service bay you actually surface attached them to the side of the TD-25 decoupler above it before sliding them into the service bay? Decouplers don't allow fuel to flow across them by default and if you stuck the tanks to the side of that decoupler the game might be reading them as being on the other side of the decoupler and blocking the fuel flow. Try removing the tanks and attach them to the sides of the lower part of the service bay instead and then use the slider tool to move them into position. Or even better, if you hold down the ALT key while placing the tanks it should make it a lot easier to stick them to the green node positions inside the service bay.

Right click on the tanks inside the service module and look for a little green triangle beside the fuel bars. If you see a red circle crossed through in that box then that means the tank has been locked and the fuel won't flow.

My suggestion would be to make sure you have a Negative Gravioli Detector on board. It has a high science output for each report and can generate biome specific reports from low in space and from high in space. Use it with an Experiment Storage Unit and assign the storage unit to collect all science with an action group and you can clean up a huge amount of science very quickly. Just make sure you have a lot of battery power on board because the gravioli detector generates a large amount of data that will drain small batteries very quickly when trying to transmit.

I may have one or two...

Excellent pictures @Nafiu Sean! I especially like this one of yours: To display the image in the post, you want to right click on the displayed image on the hosting site (not the link, the actual image shown) and choose "Copy Image Location" or the equivalent option for your browser/operating system, then simply paste that link directly into your forum post and it should show the image inline. You won't be able to post them directly from a folder on your computer, they have to be uploaded to a hosting site. @harits Most people here use Imgur, but it will work for Dropbox pictures also.

You're not alone; planes are harder than rockets. If I were to give any advice on landing it's that people (including myself in the past) usually approach too steeply, from too high, too close. Practice maintaining level flight close to the ground - about 200 to 300 meters high. Line up your approach as best you can from a far enough distance that you can barely see the angle of the runway and descend to about 150 meters and then try to keep it level while all the time reducing your thrust and keeping an eye on your prograde in the navball. You want your prograde marker to be almost on the horizon line but a hair below, usually keeping your nose very slightly above the horizon line. Check your vertical speed indicator often. It's the needle on that analog gauge next to your altimeter at the top of your screen. Ideally, You don't want to be dropping more than about 5 m/s during your final approach with an airspeed of no more than 80 m/s at touchdown. Make sure your brakes are toggled on, then pull up your nose a few degrees just at the moment of contact. Landing should be a slow, methodical, (hopefully) boring process. Another tip: Try putting flaps on your wings that deploy downwards from an action group (I assign them to the brakes group.) Flaps go near the center of mass along the inside portion of the main wings. When deployed they should slow you down quite a bit while adding lift. It's important that flaps are attached near the center of mass because then they won't dramatically change your pitch angle. As for VTOL's - I'm not brave enough to land those suckers yet, haha. @TheFlyingKerman Good catch on circling over the dropped probe. I'm always too paranoid about losing it but I know it works.

That's probably the most straightforward approach for an atmospheric deployment. But there's one catch. If you drop the rover from your plane and the two become separated by more than about 23 kilometers then the game will delete whichever one you aren't in control of that hasn't landed yet. This isn't a problem if you don't care about keeping the cargo plane. Just make sure that it is controlled from a probe core and is uncrewed, then tab over to your rover once it is deployed and stay with it until it lands. Other options include: - Put parachutes on your plane so that you don't have to make a proper touchdown (kinda cheaty.) - Make your rover capable of flying itself over there (potentially not very aerodynamic on an atmospheric world.) - Put your rover inside of a ballistic rocket to fly it over there (takes practice to hit a specific landing site on an atmospheric world.) - Practice landing heavy aircraft without a runway. Results will vary, but if you are OK with installing a mod to help then Atmosphere Autopilot makes flying planes much easier; more akin to arcade flight games.

That's certainly one of the most unique stations I've ever seen. I'm reminded of an episode of ST: The Next Generation where the crew designed an impossible geometric design that couldn't be analyzed by the Borg computers without destroying their system. At least that's what was starting to happen to my brain. Escher station perhaps? How did you get it up there?

The Zvezda module has many small maneuvering thrusters along with two hypergolic S5.80 thrusters which are the main engines for the ISS. It's located on the trailing end of the ISS so that it can be used for orbital corrections. There really isn't an engine or thruster in KSP that directly compares to the S5.80 used on the Zvezda, but the "Place Anywhere RCS Port" is the one that most closely matches the size and thrust capabilities of the real thing. It responds to RCS controls instead of thrust controls however, and won't show up in the delta-v calculations. You'll find that it won't move you very far very fast, which is also true of the ISS. If you want a more powerful orbital maneuvering system engine you could use the "Puff" monoprop engine, although it's significantly bigger and more powerful than the real thing, it will respond to thrust input and the game will calculate delta-v for its maneuvers. Edit to add: Thinking about it some more, the engine used doesn't have to be monoprop at all. Considering that the original is hypergolic we can imagine that the fuel used by the "Spider" or "Ant" in the game could be a hypergolic combo like the nitrogen tetroxide/UDMH of the S5.80 (instead of the RP1/oxidizer I'm used to assuming is KSP's basic fuel.) In that case the "Spider" or "Ant" would be excellent analogues to the ISS engines.

You will need to master rendezvous and docking to build complex space stations in KSP. There is a simple tutorial for this here. Although you can launch fully built stations in one piece, it's usually not practical to do so and often impossible for really large stations. It's best to design them to be docked together in modular sections which are launched separately and then connected by docking ports in orbit. Most people do this by having each segment of the station be moved into place by a detachable "tug" segment that has a probe core with enough monoprop and RCS to maneuver the module into place to dock with the central station. Once they are connected you can decouple or undock the "tug" section and either deorbit it or keep it to continue attaching new segments as you bring them into orbit.

Agreed. With no SAS control the "Stayputnik" has a very difficult time staying put.

As long as vacuum is only the default for the VAB. I feel like atmospheric should stay the default for the Space Plane Hangar.

I haven't tested Tweakable Everything on 1.6 yet so I don't know. The mod hooks into the right click menu to gain access to part actions, and since a lot of these menu options changed in the background with the introduction of part variants, I have a feeling that it will have some problems here and there.

I second this suggestion. I have found that it's best to never set autostruts to "heaviest part." When the craft stages the game will detach the autostruts from your lower tanks and grab a different part of the ship. This can cause all sorts of asymmetrical bending and breaking if the craft was flexing at the moment the struts switch over - which in your case it probably will be. Setting a few segments to grandparent part seems to be the most reliable for me. And don't get carried away with the autostruts either; one connecting each stage to the next, or connecting just two segments in long stacks usually does the trick. Although, for particularly large lifters like that you will need to experiment to find the best results.

Only attached antennas are capable of transmitting science. The ones built into command pods and probe cores can only receive control input and can't transmit anything.

There is good news, and bad news. The good news is that the mod "Tweakable Everything" does exactly what you are wanting. You can use it to attach nodes to shielded docking ports in the editor - along with lots of other adjustments that will become available. The bad news is that it hasn't been updated to be compatible with the 1.6 update yet, but give it time.

@JoaquinJAR Glad you got it fixed like you want it now. For future reference, it's a good idea to make a separate copy of the game from your Steam folder and put it in a duplicate location on your computer. KSP doesn't have any DRM and can be run directly without requiring Steam. So you can freely make multiple copies of the game on your own computer and add your mods to those copies that you play from, which keeps your Steam version clean. This has the added benefit of allowing Steam to update the game when a patch comes out and it won't break any mods in your older copies.

Also, it really helps to double-click on your spacecraft once you are out on EVA. That makes your craft a target and your navball will show you the prograde marker (the direction you are traveling relative to your target) and target marker (the direction towards your ship.) This will really help if you drift too far from the ship; just use your jetpack controls to keep lining the prograde marker on top of the target marker . Clicking the green numbers inset into the top of the navball will cycle the guidance display from orbit display, to surface display, to target display and back again. If you find it hard to master the WASD eva controls, I find it helpful to reassign them in the start menu settings to the numeric keypad.

A real spacecraft engineer wouldn't even begin to imagine going the speeds KSP rovers are capable of in low gravity environments. The lunar rover topped out at about 5 meters-per-second and the mars rovers are struggling along at less than 0.04 m/s. Remember that while gravitational attraction to the ground may be reduced, mass inertia in a straight line never changes.

Elegant use of screen real-estate. Between the new stock delta-v data, and using this mod for AP/PE I no longer I feel the need to have KER data all over my screen. Thank you so much for this mod!

That was basically what I was thinking. Anything to help a player track what science is left to be discovered, and what you already have, would be welcome. I'm assuming this isn't in the game because it would essentially be a biome map and the original developers wanted you to find biomes by trial-and-error instead of following a map to find them. But in my head I'm envisioning that heat map to gradually fill in as you physically fly over the terrain, dispelling the fog. Perhaps revealing a 100 or 1000 square km area as you go, depending on how sophisticated your science equipment is and with increasing detail the closer to the surface you are. This would be entirely parallel to the science points gathered, not a substitute for them.

Agreed. The gameplay mechanics of collecting science in the game seems like it could be greatly improved. Personally, I'm in favor a system by which scanning worlds with different instruments fills in a science based heat-map of the planet, similar to how the ore scanner reveals ore, but gradually as you physically traverse the planet. At the very least it could provide a helpful catalogue of where you still need to explore and provides a visible goal to encourage people to fully explore each planet. (In the game Civilization, I was the one who raced to get the technology to build caravels so that I could map out the oceans and continents as early as possible.) I'll leave it to smarter people than myself to devise how that data could be leveraged into the upgrade system.

Is there air?!?!?! You don't know!!! Sorry, but there's no way I of all people could resist the opportunity to post that.