Allocthonous

Probably the Twin Boar for me. Career is my mode of choice, and it seems to be not that useful compared to the next tiers of engines, so I usually skip right past it without making use of it. The Puff, the Spider, the Dawn, and the Thud also don't get much love from me. Why is the Spider's ISP so much worse compared to the Ant anyway?

If you have advanced tweakables enabled (and maybe if you don't, I haven't checked) there should be an option when you right click on the part in the VAB to disable the shroud.

Huh, now that's an interesting bug. I'll have to remember that. Good catch.

Yeah, just tested that too. Control module (a Mk1 Capsule) with relay antenna and power, next to a probe core with relay antenna and power, out of range of Kerbin. Probe core remained in partial control mode (throttle min/max only). Adding an RGU to the control module in the same circumstances enabled full control of the probe core. I'm pretty sure that the 'Probe Control Point' stuff in the stats for the RGUs is what makes the determination.

KSP generally doesn't have very good documentation for some of the subtler features. There are the tutorial scenarios, and the description text, and that's about it. Even the wiki doesn't mention the remote guidance features, surprisingly. Really though, it confused me most that I had to have one of the RGUs and a piloted command module on the same craft to make it work. Made sense once I thought of it as being computers and transmission gear, but still. You sure about this? I just tested it in sandbox and it works just fine, at least on the launchpad. 'Store experiment' and 'Take experiment' both functioned as normal.

Yeah, I was excited about that too. It seems like the RGU really didn't get all the documentation it needed, between the experiment storage and the remote-control functions.

Maybe a Sub-brown dwarf is what you're looking for? No fusion going on, still big enough to snag a respectable amount of satellites. I don't know if those satellites would be moons or planets, because that sounds like it could get confusing really fast. As kerbiloid mentions, these could be considered a type of rogue planet.

Looks like it's under Fuel Tank -> mk3fuselage. Pretty sure the entry labeled 'crew' in that folder is what you're looking for.

Mostly, I just haven't felt the need. I'm still having fun with stock, and I certainly haven't exhausted the possibilities for new things to do yet. That, and I've been frustrated with other games where I've used mods (mainly minecraft) and had them be abandoned with a game update. Once KSP is definitely done being patched I may change my mind.

Relay antennas do work as normal antennas, but they don't combine with normal antennas for relay purposes. Your 88-88 antenna can get a signal to and from Kerbin, but it can't be used to relay signals from other craft. You're only relaying using the little RA-15, which just doesn't cut it. So your commnet visuals show the link from craft 2 to Kerbin with the 88-88, and they show the links between the local relays, but they aren't showing you that there's no relay connection from the local network to Kerbin.

I like the idea of ground stations. They fit in nicely with the whole infrastructure-building gameplay style. And I have to agree, giant rickety radio towers do seem terribly Kerbal.

I remember reading about these in old Poul Anderson novels. I seem to recall applications of the idea that any engine powerful enough to be interesting is also powerful enough to be a WMD. Apply this to your game of KSP how you will.

Poor Dres. All these people badmouthing it, when it's actually a pretty cool spheroid. I mean, where else are you gonna find asteroids so close together?

Ah, the rover-in-a-can approach. I like this one. It gets a bit tricky if you want the rover to be able to re-connect to the service bay with a docking port, but it does allow for some fun mission plans. Also useful because you can slap a big honkin' antenna on the can and not haul it everywhere with your rover.

Adding on to the previous posters, who all gave excellent advice, give yourself some lead time. Depending on the height of your orbit, if you plan your maneuver node when your orbit is perpendicular to kerbin, it may take so long to get around to the node that you're pointed significantly off from where you want to be when you make the burn. Before you reach a perpendicular orbit, plot a prograde maneuver node sufficient to eject you from munar orbit, then delay it by right clicking on the node and clicking the right hand button. If you look at the effect each delay (one orbit) has on your orbit around kerbin, you should be able to figure out exactly where the optimum ejection time is. Once you have that, you can go ahead and do the other adjustments to the node that are needed to reach minmus.

Construct a rocket propelled Christmas tree. Launch said Christmas tree from the back of a jet powered flying sleigh.

Stick a grapple node to a girder segment so that it can fit between the nukes and grab onto the rapier? Are you loading the plane in strictly by the tail door? If so, a pair of docking ports on the top and bottom of that rear fuel tank that connect to ports on girder arms sticking out of the front of the cargo bay might work. Having two opposed should counter the spring force, you'd just have to set them on an action group for decoupling/undocking. Be a bit tricky to dock with, but should still be doable.

Your system sounds about right for full coverage. One thing you might consider is that only the polar orbit relays around planets and the solar relays would need to be cable of interplanetary transmission. The circular orbit satellites could be relatively under-powered with no problems.

Most of my problems with docking come down to being in the wrong camera mode when I try it, these days. Nothing more frustrating than seeing that your ship needs to go left, applying left RCS, and having the ship on screen move right instead. For rendezvousing, place a maneuver node. Add enough delta v to the node to produce an intersect between your orbit and the target orbit, then drag the maneuver node forwards or backwards until your target position at intersect is fairly close (less than 10k for Kerbin SOI, certainly). You may need to increase or decrease the burn time on your maneuver node as you move it if one or both of the orbits involved is not circular. Depending on how close in size the orbits are, you may need to right-click on your maneuver node and move the node forwards by a few orbits (the right-hand button). Once you've made that burn, warp to about 1/8th of an orbit before the intersect point. Switch to target mode on your navball. Face anti-target. You should see the retrograde vector indicator somewhere in the vicinity of the anti-target indicator. Draw an imaginary line going from the anti-target indicator to the retrograde indicator, and point your spacecraft at a spot on the line past the retrograde indicator. Apply gentle thrust so that the retrograde indicator moves towards alignment with the anti-target indicator. While doing this, observe the target distance at intersect. It should be going down as you apply thrust. When it stops, cut thrust and wait for a while until the retrograde indicator moves out of alignment again, which it will naturally do as you move around the orbit. Repeat until you reach the desired target distance at intersect. It's entirely possible to have that distance be 0.0. (You can do this using RCS, as well, but I like using the main engines. It drops the relative speed at intersect some on the way to rendezvous, which simplifies that step a bit.) From there, wait until you've almost reach the intersect point, then apply thrust pointed at the retrograde marker until your relative velocity is 0. Again, you can make fine adjustments by pointing your ship so that the retrograde marker is between your thrust vector and the anti-target marker. I usually manage to drop in to rendezvous at less than 100m using this method. As you do this a few times, around different celestial bodies and at different orbital heights, you can start to get a feel for what kind of corrections will need to be made when. Larger orbits are easier.

I sent a 3-man mission to Dres and returned safely. I cut it awfully fine, too; about 500m/s of delta v left in the tanks when I ditched the engines for reentry. My transfer profile probably wasn't the most efficient, but I think the next rocket I send needs to have closer to 15000m/s left when I hit orbit, as opposed to the ~9k I used this time. I'd like to have plenty of wiggle room to mess around visiting dresteroids for samples.

Were your thermal control systems deployed in the shadow of your spacecraft? I have no idea if that actually affects heat transfer or not, but they do have tracking motors that make them turn edge-on to sunlight, so it may make a difference. Maybe try putting your heatshield inside a fairing or cargo bay? If it's still losing ablator in those cases, you should probably file a bug report.

You can use the move tool with angle snap turned on to move the part up and down in increments; one of those increments is generally at the vertical center of the part. It's not a very good method, but it's the only one I've found.

Autostrut still feels like either magic or cheating to me, and I only started in 1.1. Anytime a rocket actually ends up needing manual struts now seems really weird.

Same. Laythe rhymes with wraith for me. Vall rhymes with hall, and Pol's pronounced Paul. Granted, any of these pronunciations are subject to change if I'm not paying attention. I'd have to be regularly using them in speech for them to cement themselves.

I worked out the kinks in my technique for deploying relay sats at equal distances along an orbit. I put three little sats on a carrier rocket, then got it into an circular orbit of minmus at the correct height, deployed the first sat, and then raised the apoapsis until my orbital period was 7/6ths what it was before. Two orbits later, pop the next sat, circularized its orbit. Another two orbits for the last sat, and bam. Triangle. Really, really satisfying. Then I spent a few minutes with the sats' ant engines set at .5% thrust to get the orbits as close to identical as possible. This ended up being at 1,000,002 meters, for some reason. I expect there may be a little bit of drift anyways, because of invisible decimal points, but it should last for as long as I need it to. This method should be scalable for any number of sats I want to deploy in a given orbit. I wouldn't expect 3 to be enough for some solar-orbit missions, or around Jool, for example.