Sequence

Some things that weren't immediately obvious to me: In the VAB you can see your TWR in the engineers report (button in the bottom right group). In the VAB you can see the delta-v required to visit other bodies in the mission planner (button in the bottom right group). In the VAB the clicking the middle mouse button will focus the camera on the part that's under the cursor. In flight you can see how much fuel is in each tank and move fuel between tanks in the resource manager (button in the bottom right with the grid of dots). In flight when burning a manoeuvre node, the burn bar isn't always accurate, do the burn in the map mode and watch the orbit lines to be sure. In the settings, if you change maximum debris to 0 you won't be able to EVA kerbals, so don't put it all the way to 0.

That was my initial impression too, but I had my mind changed. When you think about it batteries, solar panels and reactors are basically the same thing. Batteries are a timer and power generation is making them self sufficient. The engineering challenge is to meet your mission needs with the lowest amount of weight and awkwardly sized parts. With life support you might not even need kerbals to complete your mission and could use probes instead, assuming you have the infrastructure in place for keeping comms open. It depends how it would be implemented ultimately. But I'm coming around to the idea of life support being worthwhile, provided there isn't a significant performance impact that comes with it.

If they implement it, there would have to be options for self sustaining life support, else we'd never get kerbals to other star systems.

You make some fair points. I guess the real issue I was having was with too many mods and too little performance, so life support felt like an obvious thing to remove from my mod list. I hadn't thought about it in terms of the supply line features coming down the road.

I'm glad they're not adding life support into the base game. I've played with lots of different life support mods over the years. My experience is that either you have to run resupply missions which get tedious when you have stations all around the solar system, or you make a closed loop which is ultimately a part count tax. Sometimes I'm in the mood to go down that path, but I rarely include life support mods in my KSP1 runs anymore. I think it's best left to modders.

I knew the cargo bays were horrible for drag, but didn't know about the semi-workaround you discussed. Good to know. Also didn't realise the shockcones were so inefficient when using a small number of rapiers. I'm still stuck in KSP1 habits. Will have to mix things up a bit more. Good video, thanks for posting.

Lots of room for improvement, but something to get some scores on the board. I'm assuming staging is against the rules? Or can we use drop tanks and solid boosters?

Make sure persistent debris isn't set to 0 in the settings. Apparently Kerbals count as debris.

Yeah, I've not managed to stop things wobbling out of large fairings no matter how many struts I add. I've been putting the xs radial mount engines on my rovers and turning on infinite fuel as a work around for now. I really love the look of the TR-4's but they just have no power on a slope. Hopefully it'll get fixed in the next patch.

At the very least it would be nice if the brakes would stay on when EVAing from a rover/plane.

I've been able to fit largish rovers inside the biggest fairing. But you're right, making them foldable so they can fit in a cargo bay is much more fun. Really hope robotics are in the works.

There's a button near the bottom left of the UI in the VAB that toggles between horizontal and vertical orientation. Pressing spacebar with a part clicked will reset its orientation to whatever is selected on the UI.

Pre-patch I landed a rover on Duna, and it really struggled with slopes and was pretty slow (using RoveMax TR4 wheels). After the patch it can make much better top speeds and is climbing slopes without issues. Feels much more fun to drive around.

For me it was playable before the patch, and lots of things have improved with the patch. @Wheehaw KermanI'm also seeing bugs with the burn timers and delta-v readouts, but yeah, it's easy enough to eyeball it from the trajectory.

I've confirmed the Tylo and both Duna monuments are in the same place.