Fraktal

The stock game already shows your eccentricity relative to the ecliptic in the orbital information in the lower left; you need to switch to the second tab (above the ORBIT text). You can also see your eccentricity relative to a celestial body by opening the map view, setting the body as target and mousing over the ascending/descending nodes (the Mun is on the ecliptic, so doing this with the Mun will show your absolute eccentricity). For eccentricity after a maneuver, KER can display that - and it always displays the eccentricity you'll have in the same SoI as the maneuver, meaning that you can create a maneuver node to see what your eccentricity will be after an SoI change before you actually get there. This is a good thing because even a 3° inclination around Kerbin can get you into an 81° around the Mun to give you a much wider choice of biomes to land in without having to spend dV manually changing your inclination at the Mun (though you'll do need to expend dV to lower your Ap to an altitude from where you can start a not-excessively-vertical landing approach).

Huh. A space telescope in Hawaii located an object approaching Earth at an unusually slow speed from a nearly circular heliocentric orbit. Said object might be the Centaur upper stage of a lunar probe launched in 1966. Trajectory predictions say it's going to get captured by Earth's gravity for four months before drifting off again.

They do for me too, but so very briefly it usually doesn't even start raising the G-LOC meter of wimpier kerbals.

That's why I set my chutes to start opening at 0.1 pressure and fully open at 1000 meters. Causes only moderate g-forces on full opening while still having a several hundred meter ground altitude safety margin even in highlands. Continued harvesting the Mun in my current save. Only have five biomes left, which will complete tier 5 science and allow me to start building what will eventually be a geostationary spacedock about 120° ahead of the KSC. I also still need to finalize my advanced munar lander designs; the stock one is more or less complete and tested, the Making History one still needs some engineering to compensate for the KV-3's weight. I'm also thinking of possibly retooling the stock advanced lander into a manned rover, but putting it together is going to require some serious engineering and possibly orbital assembly.

Right. It's just that I've heard contradictory statements over the years about whether open nodes cause drag or not.

On default 100% aero heating, the KV pods' built-in heatshield is more than enough to survive a munar return. It's not nearly as effective as standard heatshields because for some reason the ablator cooks off very slowly (reentry from a munar trajectory uses barely more than 1 ablator at most) and thus it doesn't cool nearly as well, but it still makes a difference. I'll try a Minmus return soon. Might even experiment with 120% aero heating to see if the pods can still take it.

Will that affect the Stayputnik's drag?

Did more experimentation and I think I was knocking on the wrong door all along. These pods can be launched into orbit fairly easily on a properly engineered booster and a proper flight profile. Pack a bit more fuel than necessary as per the delta-V map. You're going to lose more to drag during takeoff. If you're bringing a service bay, mount it above the pod and add a nosecone. It'll help a lot and the pod will self-stabilize during reentry. Begin gravity turn upon reaching 100m/s. If you're still experiencing flipping, start the gravity turn later. The higher up you are when you start turning, the less stability problems you're going to have. Once the prograde marker catches up with your heading, lock SAS to prograde (use the Mk1 pod to get Jeb into orbit once to train him up to one-star experience) and do not steer. Leave the AoA at zero. Throttle down to keep time-to-apoapse in the vicinity of 45s and let SAS complete the gravity turn for you. Again, do not touch the steering controls until about 60 km altitude. Whatever stage you have your fins on, do not drop it until you're AT LEAST 50 km high. Those fins are what's keeping your AoA low enough for the Swivel's gimbaling to keep drag torque under control. The second you lose those fins while still in the atmosphere, you'll flip instantly regardless of AoA. Adding a second set of fins to your upper stage will NOT work because the CoL is not far enough away from the pod to keep it stable, even if you're using six or eight fins. Using this, I successfully sent the KV-2 to the Mun and back to Kerbin several times in a row, without a fairing. Even the Onion can be launched onto a suborbital trajectory with one Swivel and enough fuel to reach the Kerman line, you just won't have any roll control. Once you have steerable fins, you have a bit more wiggle room AoA-wise during takeoff and once you start using 1.875m fuel tanks for your boosters, you're pretty much in the clear because their drag at high AoA is higher than the KV pods' so the rocket will actively self-stabilize.

Well, the white dwarf is part of a trinary...

Thinking about this project again, I'm probably going to have to make multiple mods consisting of progressively more widespread changes to reconcile disagreements over the wishes of various users. Of course, to make that happen, I first have to figure out the name of the module/property that controls which tech node a part is on before I can actually write the MM patch to shuffle the parts around in the tech tree... it would help if I had access to the stock part definitions, but I don't know where to even look/extract from. I barely even managed to locate the name of ONE part. After having started a new game and spent a while experimenting with low-tech parts, I had some new ideas. As @Jacke suggested, I considered moving the Stayputnik forward to the Start node but without batteries and reaction wheels, so that its use is restricted to uncontrolled sounding rockets and short-ranged Swivel rockets, similar to the KV-1. However, doing that would also require the radial-mount parachutes unless I can figure out how to add a 0.625m attachment node to the top of the Stayputnik via MM so that it can use the standard inline parachute (since without batteries, it can't transmit science and without parachutes, it can't bring the science down either). The thing with an unmanned start is that while some people want it, some people don't. I'm fine with making the Stayputnik available earlier, but doing it at the cost of forcing crewed missions back on the tech tree is going to liquid off people who want a crewed start. Not to mention that if we drop the game's science multiplier to very low levels (as I usually play), making EVA/crew reports and surface samples unavailable for the first few tech levels can risk softlocking the tech tree by making it so that you run out of science to collect within your reach before you can develop parts to let you get further and thus reach more science. Even with the stock tech tree, I only barely made it to the Mun before running out of easily reachable science by using KEI to not have to spend hours in real time grinding the KSC for science and flying short-range aircraft to gather everything from every biome within 15 minutes' worth of subsonic flight from the KSC. If I were playing a career game that disallows surface samples and offworld EVA, I wouldn't have even gotten that far. The KV-1 is not as much of an uncontrollable draggy mess as I thought it is. A single-stage Swivel rocket with a KV-1 at the front and fins at the back is very much flyable on a suborbital trajectory, the key is in keeping AoA low and not staging off most of the rocket's mass and fins because if you do, welcome to the centrifuge. You still won't have roll control so your inclination will be all over the place, but it will get you above the Kármán line and safely back down. I might leave it where it is, actually. Moving the Kodiak to the same node as the Terrier should work, as sending a KV-2 pod to the Mun on a 1.875m rocket is the point I found where the Reliant starts getting underpowered for the task and needs to be supplemented with Thuds to get the rocket off the launch pad with any appreciable TWR. For a KV-3, three Reliants and three Thuds are anemic for lifting the fuel needed for the pod's return to Kerbin without excessive gravity losses from running in the vicinity of 1.2 TWR during takeoff. I'm considering sending the Delta Deluxe Winglet over to the aircraft line, rather than the stability line. Compared to the Tail Fin, the Delta Deluxe Winglet has slightly more lifting surface (0.65 versus 0.61) and is lighter (78 kg versus 100 kg) at the same cost, while the Tail Fin has way too much torque to be fully utilized by the small planes you're building at this point. Rockets, which do have high torque requirements to begin the gravity turn in a timely manner and maintain non-zero AoA with draggy payloads, already have the AV-R8 Winglet for their maneuvering needs, so the Delta-Deluxe simply works better as a small plane tail than as a rocket fin while the Tail Fin can stick around as tails and canards for bigger planes.

Now this is interesting. NASA announced the discovery of a Hot Jupiter exoplanet with a 34 hour orbital period... around a white dwarf. Astronomers have NO idea how the hell it got there. There aren't any other Jupiter-mass planets in the system for the required gravity assists and it couldn't have formed there either because the star's collapse would've blasted it to space dust. In either case... in your face, After Kerbin.

Did a few more Mun landings today, including one unmanned land-and-return probe. An improved probe has been designed but not tested yet, capable of returning to Kerbin within barely more than a single ton (probe is 400 kg, fuel is 610 kg, propulsion is two Ants). Currently can't decide whether I should attempt using the tiny heatshield or strap on the small one and have the landing legs retract behind it to survive reentry. I'm not keeping the engines or the tanks, but I don't have tiny decouplers/separators yet so I'm forced to drop them with radial decouplers, which sharply decrease available delta-V. I'm also trying to give it another shot to build a Mun lander using the KV-3 pod (I initially wanted the Mk2 pod, but decided to keep that one back for a Duna trip instead), but the sucker is really heavy and none of my current boosters can put enough delta-V under it.

Don't quite remember the exact details, but my first launch was a crude spaceplane strapped to the end of about five or so Mammoths. The sheer torque was enough to make the whole thing bend like a noodle.

The one I posted doesn't tailstrike. Now if I were to put the rear wheel halfway up the fuselage to be close to the CoM, on the other hand...

It slightly miffs me that everyone keeps saying that while forgetting that it's a no-go if your center of mass is in the front half of the plane because you're going to tailstrike if you put the rear wheels too far forward. Not everybody builds Concorde-style rear-wing planes. For that scenario, put the rear wheel on a Tail Connector part and use the offset tool to nudge the wheel until it's higher up than the front wheels, causing the plane to slightly nose up while standing on the runway. Like this:

Did my first munar landing in my new Marathon (90% less science from every experiment) session. Took a rather unusual design choice this time in the form of using three small fuel tanks clipped into each other instead of radially mounting two of them. Was concerned it would cause a lot of drag but I didn't see any difference. Minor hitch happened when it turned out that my four landing legs were a big too high up and the lander clonked down on its engine bell, but luckily I was already descending too slow to cause any damage. A bigger hitch happened when I tried to transmit surface sample data and the lander's batteries completely ran out before the transmission completed, revealing that I also forgot to set the command pod's internal battery as reserve power. With no power to run the reaction wheels, I decided to chance the trip home using engine gimbal thrust only and not only pulled it off on first try, I actually landed in Kerbin's badlands completely by accident, which is out of range for my current science planes and thus provided me with a couple extra points of science. Currently got 63 science. First unlock will be the OKTO core, second unlock will be the small docking port, the two of which I'm intent on using to set up a permanent geostationary relay station over the KSC which I can expand/upgrade with additional and bigger antennas over time (I'm playing with DSN off and CommNet Constellations loaded). I might also put up a shorter-range secondary relay 120° prograde from the KSC to cover the far side of the planet, which should only leave a small blind spot close to the surface retrograde from the KSC, which is acceptable (as the secondary relay's position is so that unmanned craft finalizing LKO don't lose connection from going beyond the horizon). Second landing targeted the canyon on the far side and nailed it so well I had just enough fuel to visit a second nearby biome and walk away with 72 science in one flight and about 27 m/s left after executing the return burn to Kerbin. Ended up coming in a bit hotter than I planned to, burning off all 40 ablator on the heatshield way before I got past the heat. That's why you shouldn't try landing on the runway. The grass around the KSC is perfectly level and wide open, land there and taxi onto the runway instead. If you find you're rolling to the side on the runway itself after touching down, place your landing wheels further away from the plane's fuselage. Kerbin is rotating eastward, which is giving all rockets a slight nudge that way. Add a few degrees westward into your trajectory to compensate.

Probably not that. I have a save I've been running since at least 1.7 and never once did KSP complain about it after an update.

Why not spice that up? I remember once seeing a mod where Gilly (or some other body, I don't remember) not only replaces Ike as the moon of Duna, but does so at such a low orbit that its SOI is constantly caressing the upper edge of the atmosphere, making it highly challenging to get a stable low orbit or even to aerobrake without accidental GIlly gravity assists messing up your trajectory. With Dres, do the same thing but with over half a dozen small moons on wildly different high-inclination and possibly high-eccentricity orbits to create a chaotic mess where you literally have to weave through the moons' SOIs to land on the planet. I'm thinking all of the moons are asteroids Dres recently captured that either haven't had time to settle down on the ecliptic yet or are in the process of being ejected from Dres orbit due to the constant chaotic gravitational tug-of-war. We could even emphasize that by having two of the small moons on orbits that are not only extremely close to each other but actually intersect each other, not colliding yet due to orbital resonance but being on track for a collision in a couple centuries.

@katateochi Newly created game sessions where you haven't saved any subassemblies yet have no KSP\saves\[session name]\Subassemblies folder until you save the first subassembly. When I try to use Craft Manager to import another session's subassemblies into a newly created session, Craft Manager throws up a generic error message about part of either save's Subassemblies folder path not being found. I have to either save a subassembly in the new session first or go into the new session's save folder and manually create a Subassemblies folder before Craft Manager will copy over anything. Is CM not automatically creating the missing folder expected behavior, or an oversight? The saves folder wasn't write-protected so it should've been able to create the subfolder if it tried. I also noticed that craft catching is a bit iffy with subassemblies. I accidentally transferred one of my subassemblies to the VAB craft list, which caused it to disappear from the subassembly list and appear in the VAB list after a manual cache wipe. Then I transferred the same subassembly in the opposite direction and this time, it disappeared from the VAB list but didn't appear in the subassembly list, even after a cache wipe.

I don't normally do IVA, but this time I figured to take a peek while Jeb is on his way to the Mun for the first time in my new save. Nice vistas to be had.

Or you can just use Kerbin Environmental Institute. Depends on what science multiplier you play with. A few days ago I started a new game with 10% and found that if out of the tier 4 techs you pick the Science Jr. first and plane parts second, you can get just enough science from the biomes near the KSC to unlock the Terrier as third whereas if you unlock the Terrier as second, you can't get enough data from low orbit alone to unlock planes for third without going to high orbit too. Au contraire, mon capitan. This craft is built entirely out of parts on the starting and first two unlocked nodes, weighs a little more than 13 tons, has exactly 30 parts, yet it's very much capable of reaching low orbit with enough spare delta-V to compensate for the gravity loss from the underpowered bottom stage. The next two rocketry nodes drop the part count, switching to a Terrier once you unlock it can trim down half a ton of fuel from this and still be able to reach high orbit. The level 2 launch pad is for going to the Mun. Level 2 VAB is for building a munar lander. You don't need either for the initial LKO flights.

Few questions: Does adding or removing even one tag on one craft absolutely require the entire craft list to be rebuilt and reloaded? It's simply ridiculous that I can't add ONE tag without KSP completely freezing for over a minute if my save has 30+ crafts. The more crafts I have saved, the longer the freeze, but tagging more than one craft at a time doesn't extend the freeze time, so it's caused by something done once per save. I already asked this in January 2019 but never got an answer. Is it expected behavior from the mod to remove subassemblies from whatever category I saved them into if I use the mod to tag or edit the description of the subassembly? You're probably going to say that I'm supposed to use tags instead, but the above freezing issue means stock KSP's subassembly categories are orders of magnitude faster than this mod.

Nice mod, yes, it just has a few problems. Chief of which is that while it can also manage subassemblies, not just crafts, it does not play together with stock subassembly categories. That is, every time you rename, edit the description or even just tag a subassembly, the mod removes the subassembly from whatever category you put it into during saving and dumps it into the "no category" group, forcing you to re-save it by hand if you want to categorize it. Really annoying when you have literally dozens of subassemblies saved. Also, whenever you add or remove a tag on any of your crafts, it re-saves and re-parses every single craft in the savegame, resulting in minute-plus freezes per change.

I want to do everything. The furthest I'd ever gone was unmanned landings on Ike and Gilly. I want crewed missions, but those damn transfer windows...

I don't think I've ever seen negative g in the game in the several years I've been playing. Is it even a thing?