QuantumFlux

If you use the Orbital Rendezvous and Docking Assist (ORDA) you can actually do that (running a line from one ship to another while they are docked)

It is not exactly original

Unless it is limited by the engine or the GUI somehow, you should be able to get to either 256 (8bit, char), 65536 (16bit, short), or 4294967296 (32bit, int) flights (I don't think they would use a 64bit integer for this...). However, long before you hit the 16bit border, you will see the game being rendered completely unplayable by the large amount of floating point operatons being done to update the positions of all the stuff...

Wow. This can probably move the moon down to Kerbin

Looks awesome, trying this out now It's also a good think that I was angrily searching for the GIANT download button

It's okay though, it's not that big of a deal. If they implement thermic and wind, I would like to see it gone though, as at the moment it is somewhat making up for the fact that you can't gain height by gliding legitimally.

Have you tried it? I think it handles great, especially regarding it's wonky look...

Okay, I initially built this ship as a fun idea, but apparently it works really well. It is capable of keeping it's altitude with only 5° horizontal orientation at speeds as low as 20 m/s. It is also very maneuverable and can go up to a speed of about 160 m/s by engine power alone. Only problem is landing, as it tends to easily flip over, making braking hard. I recommend to land it at a speed of 20 m/s and then tap the B button to brake. You can fly it upside down, also sideways!! Have fun everyone, critique is always welcome.

attaching the fuel tank you want it to fit on somewhere else and putting the aerospike on before putting it back, attaching the aerospike on the upside of the tank then rotating it, putting tank and aerospike back to the left and getting new ones all seem to work sometimes for me...

As long as your initial burn point is not aligned with the ascending/descending node you will most likely need at least two burns, yea.

Yea, I know. But sending a second craft to rescue the kerbonaut afterwards is essentially the same as putting a few fuel tanks into orbit, so I'm okay with that. EDIT: Success (so far): Deploying the parachutes at about 90 m/s seems to work flawlessly. There was a staging error in the original .craft File, which I now corrected. Enjoy

Evolution - Eval Exploration Vehicle It unfortunately can't take off Eve so far, so don't waste your time trying to accomplish that Many a kerbal have dreamt of seeing the violet mountains and quicksilver sea of Eve, but so far, no one has had the ways to bring a kerbal there and back alive to report of Her beauty. Thus, I present you Evolution, a vehicle specifically engineered to cope with the hardships of landing on and returning from Eve. Unfortunately though, our engineers, lacking mathematical and pilotical ability, have not yet managed to fully verify it's functionality. So let's make this work The Rocket is composed of a basic heavy lifter stage that is also capable of setting up a full orbit. Once that is used up, it switches to two nuclear-thermal engines that have enough fuel to make it to Eve. Having arrived there, it is designed to perform an aerobraking maneuver and deploy it's parachutes to land softly, however the one time I did actually manage to get that far, the drag ripped them clean off, so maybe I deployed them to early. It has a set of two aerospikes to bring it back up to a low orbit, however now that I realize how crazy the atmosphere and gravity of Eve actually is, I doubt that that would work properly. The aerospikes can be dropped once depleted which leaves the capsule with one RCS tank and thrusters to perform a rendezvous with a rescue mission. I have tried for days now to construct an Eval lander that is able to at least bring my kerbal back out the atmosphere to make a rescue feasible, but I seem to be totally unable. This is my best result so far, so I thought someone else who is struggling as much as I am might find this helpful.

If you meant me, I was talking about it actually using the physics engine to add a joint instead of just setting the positions of the vehicle

Actually, he did say that he uses a physical joint while the game is in physics mode. It only sets the position of the other ship when warping, because then theres no physics around to help you with that sort of stuff.

Well you could just add a rightclick-option to the docking part to decouple the shuttle, then use the vessel-quickswitch keys to gain control of it. I don't know that much about KSP-modding, but there might even be a rightclick-and-gain-control option possible...