Friznit

Not at all, I'm delighted that someone is taking inspiration from my inspiration! Kit bashing in KSP is fun.

The satellite bus used for Galaxy 1 and TacSat in those kitbashes is parts from BDB Pioneer 6 smooshed together. General kitbashing woes I discovered on the way: we have lots of round satellite busses / control modules in various mods and yet many real life satellites are blocky. there aren't so many square-ish ones and those that exist have some lovely textures and greebling, which unfortunately gets in the way. You have to get creative! Ref. KH-11. Remember birds aren't real, folks.

Jarvis

That's a relief. We need more magnetometers.

It can calculate multiple trajectories, so you can figure out the optimum earth departure date for a Venus flyby and return. Porkchop plots are one way, so you'd need to do a lot of trial and error to get to the same result. But I find KSPTOT impenetrable and I've never worked out how to use it properly, so I resort to winging it, usually with spectacularly awful failures and a lot of Kerbals ...uuuh, "enjoying life long orbital observation of Venus"

Yep, works just fine in the VAB.

[x]Science has a feature to 'show experiments available on this vessel'. It's very useful for figuring out which parts do what experiment (and finding out that you have 15 redundant magnetometers).

Science progression is notoriously hard to balance given the way the tech tree game mechanic is built. You zoom through the early nodes in a few launches then it slows to a long grind for the late game stuff. I typically play with 50% science returns then ramp it up to 80% for the later game (basically once you get beyond your first Jool flyby). Bureaucracy basically adds a funding cap, which in the early game does encourage lots of cheaper launches (Thors and whatnot) to maximise your returns within available time & budget. KCT on the other hand essentially adds a time restriction, so you can't simply launch multiple cheap rockets in one day. Combine the two and the game can get quite challenging, at least until you reach a certain threshold. I recommend playing with the History of Spaceflight contract pack (pocket edition is sufficient), as it chimes well with SSS & BDB.

I guess!

Now do it with Life Support

Reminder to self: add to wiki Let me know if you think there's any other specific bits missing from the guides.

GATV port is designed for Gemini, not Mercury. That might be your issue?

Squeeeeee

Amazeballs! Can you do an entirely pink one?

Share my trade secrets? Never! But yes, its just a bunch of KVV images and judicious use of the offset tool. KVV works fine in the latest version of KSP, although it doesn't like module depth mask so the images sometimes need a little touching up in paint.net to fill in resulting blank spots.

https://github.com/friznit/Unofficial-BDB-Wiki/issues/70 Feedback welcome!

Not yet. Craft files and build guides will follow Soon™. There's a video a page or two back in the meantime that helps.

Prime suspect is Outer Wilds Program, given it's another planet pack running alongside KSRSS I'd imagine that might cause a conflict.

I love lamp

Possibly Proc Fairings for Everything, which includes Blackhearts texture pack

@Zarbon44too busy making Star Trek ships to send me a craft file. I'm pretty clueless so without his help I can't write it up on the wiki. (Same detail on the ISS Nauka module, though that looks a bit more straight forward. To be fair I'm well overdue another Tantares career playthrough ).

Cerebral Lander?

I like the concept. Science labs tend to be a bit of a catch all currently whereas I agree they would benefit from more niche roles. The Projects lab could have limited slots but support many different experiments that could perhaps only be switched by delivering "new science kit" to the lab. The kits could be a single part (e.g. science storage capsule with "stuff" in it) or require specific parts attached to the station/base before they become available (e.g. "black hole observatory" experiment needs a telescope fitted) - allthough that might create a painful network of interdependencies to maintain. It would be nice to have more progression in the various labs available in BDB (and stock). For example, early Mercury lab can only do a couple of projects, but not General Studies whilst GMSS labs are more versatile but commensurately more expensive.

If you can do it with stock hinges instead of SOCK so it's just BDB and stock parts I'll happily recreate for a build guide on the wiki. Is that feasible?

BD OGO already has a config for it, you could copy that.