Juicy

Jeb decided to get into the tourist business early. I wonder how far his accomplishments will go using only fleas.

Somewhere in the universe, some little Kerbals are playing a game called Human Space Program, and complaining on the forums about weak reaction wheels.

I put them on everything, including airplanes. They're awesome! We need more of em! Bigger ones too!

I'd consider career if rocketparts didn't cost any money. I like the unlocking parts of the space center bit, I like the leveling up my Kerbals bit, I like the science (that's why I generally play science mode) but I hate having to watch my money while doing testflights or random oddball constructions. I wouldn't mind having to build rockets within a certain budget for missions, like, "make a vessel capable of orbitting the Mun costing less than 100k" as a mission parameter, but if I want to make something bigger personal toy within that game, I don't want to feel limited by my budget.

The simpleton option, ofcourse, would be to stick two shuttles against eachother, one a dummy that you'd ditch after you left the atmosphere, when drag is no longer an issue and a gimballed engine can keep you flying in a somewhat straight line.

G-forces affect my ships, which is good enough for me. Try opening a single chute at high speed below 1000m with several full fueltanks strapped below your lander and see where the fuel tanks go with the radical deceleration. The Kerbals themselves? Well, they're tough little critters.

Non-mechjeb. Eyeballing and guessing just feels more Kerbal to me.

That Hyper Edit is pretty ideal for this kind of testing is logical, given the lack of other means to test. Though for low altitude testing, I find rocket pods on radial decouplers for lift off and gaining some initial speed work just as well.

The solution to this one might be *less* control surfaces, spinny wheels and gimballed engines. I went from an avarage of 16 moving control surfaces to only 4, replacing the rest with rigid fins, and my rockets became less wobbly as a result. I've read from people who had similar results by disabling the gimbals on their rockets, so it's something worth experimenting I guess. Control modules can apparently be too effective and eventually reduce control instead of adding to it!

Attach lifting body Mk2 tanks radially in a symmetric manner? Like, 4 of them with their top or bottom side facing towards the center of the rocket? Sure, they might cause a bit of drag, but it should still be stable?

So I wasn't totally wrong when my rover got stuck on the edge because I wanted to test whether the pool was a bio-me.

It used to be the landing gears that people used as joints. Things could be attached to the "leg" of landing gear, and would move a bit when lowering/raising landing gear. But I haven't managed to make such connections for a while.

Sadly, no. Which is why Infernal Robotics is quite popular, even if it has one small drawback (it may mess up badly on docked vessels). On the other hand, it's easier to use than expected, even from watching the introduction video. I think it used to be possible to use landing gears as joints for a while, pretty sure I once attached a light on one which moved with the wheel on opening/closing, but when I tried a few weeks back, that no longer worked.

The advantage of the drag increase (since 1.0.1) is an increase to lift. It's not just a matter of going faster, it's also a matter of going up. Planes can climb at a slightly lower throttle, provided they have the wings to take advantage of that. Yes, building SSTOs became a little harder again. You don't want to add an infinite amount (or size) of wings to get infinite lift (since it'd add too much drag), but you don't want to keep them too small to minimize drag either. The ideal band moved a little and was tightened up.

If you mean the "purple ball", it's the Center of Thrust, not Center of Pressure. It's more or less the place where the expanding gasses from the explosion of the fuel enter the exhaust. So it is exclusively the force generated by the thruster(s) and does not include any other forces applying to the vessel, like drag, gravity, etcetera. The builder only shows the static forces acting upon the ship: Center of Mass, Center of Lift and Center of (maximum) Thrust. Center of Pressure is a derivate of CoL and CoT, but would also require a Center of Drag, which varies depending on direction&heading, speed, and air pressure (altitude), and thus is not shown during building.