Ulzgoroth

Debris that is really close to a vehicle sometimes seems to disappear regardless of location. Possibly only when you recover the vehicle. I've seen it happen a lot with plane crashes.

After Electrics, I'd suggest getting the Control tech for RCS. Once you have that, you can pretty easily build a Mun or Minmus landing mission. (Probably an unmanned one until you get bigger rockets.)

You don't need to wait for them to expire. Just reject them and they'll be replaced.

Recovering them as debris is what you want to be doing. You get credit (and, I think, science from any experiments) when you recover debris just the same as when you recover a ship.

Strapped a couple to the sides of my first-stage thrust-limited BACC in order to give it a quick kick off the launch pad.

Since being introduced to the advantages of the LV-T45, I've considered my solid boosters justified for giving that critical first few km of height and allowing me to use a Swivel as my first liquid stage rather than a Reliant.

Looking at the picture, it appears that the parachute pod is still attached to the capsule and intact, so what you destroyed was the parachute, not the part that holds it. The parachute part looks like it's safely situated out of the airstream, but obviously the deployed parachute won't be! And since 1.0.1, parachutes don't survive being popped open at hypersonic speeds.

Is it possible to build a "hot dog" that small? I've got a similar design about to fly, and the purpose as I see it is that it's a small, not very high tech craft that can hit high-altitude objectives for missions.

Going much above 300 m/s at low altitudes isn't worthwhile. You don't want to hit the sound barrier while the air is dense enough to matter, because transsonic drag is a lot worse than subsonic drag. Gravity doesn't decrease significantly between sea level and Low Kerbin Orbit. When you're in orbit, look at your trajectory on the map, zoomed out far enough that you can see it all the way around the planet. It's only a tiny bit above the ground, relatively speaking. The thing that does drop off with altitude enough to matter is air resistance. But that drops off fast, by 30 km you are not going to experience very much decceleration due to drag. The 909 isn't good for thrust, but it is relatively light and has high ISP. Being relatively light helps make your top stage have a good fuel fraction. (For thinking with rockets, you should basically ignore how much fuel you have in absolute terms: what matters is what fraction of the initial mass of the rocket is fuel.) High ISP means that for a given fuel fraction, it can do more. The low thrust doesn't matter so much when used for an upper stage because first of all the stage doesn't mass much, and secondly the stage is mainly accelerating horizontally, not fighting against gravity. Using 909s for a first stage would be a bad idea. (It's an even worse idea than the low thrust alone indicates, because the 909 also has bad ISP and thrust in dense air. It only gets its good performance in near vacuum. Near vacuum includes Kerbin's atmosphere once you're a bit past 10 km up, though.)

Is there some reason the simulated zone has to be a sphere centered on your currently-controlled ship? In most cases, I'd think that replacing the 'automatically delete parts deep in atmosphere' with 'automatically simulate parts deep in atmosphere' would not be a serious processing problem. Where it might be a problem is when you want to use non-physical time acceleration because your main vessel is now in space, but you have a bunch of boosters gently drifting to the ground on their parachutes requiring that the game do active physics simulation.

You could try adjusting the opening conditions for the chutes. As I understand it, the min pressure parameter determines how much air is required before the chute will partially open. Setting that to a higher value should mean that, even though the parachutes have already been staged, they don't actually deploy until later in their fall. Set it to the right number and they should pop out after drag has slowed them enough to not destroy the parachute, though I couldn't tell you what the right number would be. You can also have multiple chutes with different settings for this so that they deploy sequentially. If you have problems with the parachutes burning off before they deploy, try to make sure that the 'chute pods are tucked out of the airstream on the falling booster. EDIT: This is theory, not something I've tested myself.

I think almost every rocket I've launched didn't really want to have the throttle at 100% when it ignites the first liquid stage. Having the throttle start at 50% isn't particularly helpful for that. I don't think there's any other level that would be reliably right either, though.

Your parachutes shouldn't be exposed to atmospheric heating if you fly your reentry right. Capsules are supposed to come down flat side first, not pointy side first. Top-mounted parachutes, or laterally-mounted chutes on the top of the capsule, will be occluded from the airstream by the pod. They could be burned off by heat conduction from the pod, if it gets hot enough, but I've never seen that happen. (In most cases if you de-orbit an rocket, rather than just a capsule, the aerodynamic forces will try to get it to flip point-down. That might be okay if you've got a top-mounted heat shield as you propose, but otherwise it's something to be avoided, because it puts the vulnerable top of the capsule and parachute pods in the airstream. Careful handling and careful SAS use are enough to keep some vehicles steady.) You can definitely reenter from orbit without needing a heat shield, if you keep your orientation right. I haven't tried a hard reentry from a lunar return transfer, that might be too much for an unshielded pod. You may also have more need for a heat shield if, for instance, you've got an instrument bay underneath your pod that you want to reach the ground uncooked.

Is there any reason to think those things are connected in the first place? The parachute changes are relevant to the other changes from a play perspective, since both are major factors in reentry, but they don't need to have a common cause.

Shutting off SAS to allow oscillations to damp out is something long rockets tend to need sometimes. At over 60 km up, being off prograde is probably not the problem. Not a lot of drag there.

Is there any chance that it is a 'run test' test mission rather than an 'activate part in staging sequence' test mission?

How long is it? My design for a Mun orbiter only runs about six FL400s, plus two BACCs on the sides. Though it does have the benefit of 909s. Definitely the research center. Probably also the astronaut facility, I've never gotten the research center without having the astronaut facility first.

You've got all the tech that I do and a bit more, and my Mun orbit mission has already made its return transfer and is ready for reentry when I get home today. Personally, I'd go for Electrics in a hurry, because I don't like having to run things on battery power. And do like probe cores. After that, probably the necessary stuff to start using larger rockets. EDIT: Actually, going after Advanced Flight Control might want to be a priority. RCS is very helpful for landers. And while the Mun can be a bit stressful Minmus is pretty easy to land on.

To counter wobble, if SAS isn't good enough, tail fins can work wonders. Unless it's structural wobble you're getting? For width, asparagus is definitely not required. Just sticking either solid or liquid fuel boosters on to the sides of your rocket is perfectly viable, if not as efficient. Preferably with a radial decoupler of course. A pair of radial BACC boosters makes a very useful first stage. For science, do you have the upgraded buildings for surface sampling? You can get a good chunk of science out of Kerbin surface samples (along with the obvious landed crew reports and landed+flying EVA reports). And of course the full orbital EVA collection is a big chunk of science.

I don't think we know what choices you've made so far, or what you are having problems with. Do you, for instance, have Advanced Rocketry? If you do, and you have the first launch pad upgrade, you most definitely can go to the mun. (And if you don't it's only 45 science, you can definitely scrape that up without having to go far.)

If you've spent all the science you can get in the space center and in Kerbin orbit and gotten airplane bits but not good enough rockets to orbit the moon (if you have 909s, you can do that pretty easily), you're probably going to need to go farm up some science by flying the airplanes around Kerbin with instrument packages. Which will take a while. I suspect you're overlooking some available sources of science, though. I have left a lot of orbital and even planetary science untapped and had both adequate rockets and thermometers for my moon orbit mission.

I haven't launched a mun lander yet in 1.0, but you can put up a mun orbiter fine without anything like asparagus. A couple laterally-mounted BACC boosters and simple stack (with 909s in upper stages) is more than adequate.

Where is it going wrong? If you're having trouble getting launch to space to work, a few 1.0 key notes: -Don't go too fast in the lower atmosphere. You will have stability and heating problems. And don't even try to turn more than the tiniest bit at those altitudes. -Once you get to 20-25km the air is thin enough that you can tip over to orbital prograde safely. -High atmosphere drag is very low. Flying at 60km for a while building up orbital speed won't hurt you much. Oh, and if your rocket doesn't look streamlined, there's a good chance it isn't, and that can make things worse in the low atmosphere. You should be getting science by doing science. A mun flyby gives you opportunities for temperature readings, crew reports, EVA reports, goo and material bay experiments... Lots of science, but you won't just get it handed to you.

Orbit is achievable with an early-career three-stage rocket that you can launch from the starter VAB and launchpad. Maybe even with something simpler, but that's my best. However, the technique to flying a successful orbital launch well is more involved in 1.0 than it was in the past. You may want to blast upward a bit further than the old 'tilt to 45 degrees at 10km', and you definitely want to drop your nose to orbital prograde at lower altitudes than before, since the upper atmosphere has so little drag. I'd recommend designing and flying so that you don't need tail fins rather than using them. They'll increase stability if they're in the right place, but SAS alone is more than sufficient to keep you pointing where you need to without the extra cost, weight, and drag.

I was able to launch a drone Mun flyby without upgrading the launch pad, and it had enough excess fuel and batteries that it could have easily been used to orbit and radio back temperature readings. For manned missions, you probably do need the upgraded launch pad.