ComradeGoat

Thanks for doing this. Will wait for a version without the toolbar spamming, as that's somewhat of a show stopper (have to restart the game after a few launches), but this has always been one of my favourite mods, and I'm just getting back into KSP after something of a hiatus.

I often clip stuff into empty spaces, so the Rocomax to Kerbodyne adapter is basically a big empty cone, which can be used to hide stuff like RCS tanks, etc. Have also been known to clip things like RTGs and probe cores into nosecones as well.

My current spaceplane is limited in its ascent profile by the ram intakes overheating. Any tips for helping to cool them?

Quite. That's called a "Laythe lander", and they're rather useful.

The plane I got into 100k orbit in 1.0.0 with 800 m/s remaining, with a new flight profile and a bit of oxidiser level tweaking now gets there with 550m/s left. Now hopefully this won't happen all over again for 1.0.3

Cracked it. Keeping a high TWR was key for me. Two RAPIER engines, lots of fuel, but light enough to punch through the sound barrier in a sustained climb. Designed so that fragile things are shielded from the airflow as much as possible. Climb away from the runway at Mach 1 (300ish m/s), at 10,000m drop to a 20º climb and go to full power. The plane gets VERY hot during this next bit, but it's over quickly and control surfaces are safely tucked behind rigid lifting surfaces (NO CANARDS!) The plane is doing about 1,200 m/s as it hits 23,000m, and will accelerate to around 1,300m/s by the time it starts to lose speed/air at 25,000m. The key here is to power through this part, keeping your apoapsis climbing. The old tactic of getting as high as possible and levelling off to gain speed doesn't seem to work; you just burn up. Once I'm at 30,000m and the flames are gone, level off, reduce thrust to a trickle to keep pushing the apoapsis slowly out to 100,000m, while bringing the periapsis up towards zero (or maybe a bit above). At 50-60 K, once apoapsis is where I want it, kill power and glide to apoapsis. Circularise. Reentry is easy and no airbrakes are needed. Burn retrograde to get the orbit line to intersect the ground roughly where I want to land, warp until below 70k, put the plane in a nose up attitude at 20º and leave it there. At somewhere between 35 and 40k, before the flames start, the wings will create enough lift to slow the descent while scrubbing off speed. Hold the nose up attitude all the way down to about Mach 2 at 25k ish, and land at your leisure. 100K orbit, 600m/s delta V left, docking port, RCS. Now just got to get a couple refuelled and shipped off to Laythe!

I managed to get a single seat RAPIER craft into orbit. Coming down was the easy bit. You need to kill as much speed as possible while still above about 40K. To do this, set up an entry angle that intersects the surface, and as you come in pitch up to about 20º. This will trade speed for altitude. Keep your nose up and you should be able to drop to 1.5km/s or so while still above 40K. Descend slowly, nose-up, washing off speed as you go, and if you do it right you will never even see reentry flames.

Manned landing on Tylo and returning to orbit on my first attempt with no casualties.

After reading all of this, it sounds like ARM is basically unbalanced. I haven't downloaded it yet. Perhaps I'll stick with 0.23 for a while.

Not up there with some of the other creations in this thread, but this is my Endurance Explorer. I built it for direct ascent missions to Moho. It has 17km/s dV on the pad. With some care, the last booster stage can be retained to orbit and refuelled there to propel it beyond escape velocity at >1g acceleration.

I'm very daunted by this prospect, so I'm looking for almost anything else to do to put it off. I can land on Tylo and return to orbit without difficulty, but Eve just intimidates me.

I remember those, but as I had a VIC-20 with its Atari compatible port, I never owned one. Friends did though. Fun times!

Check your tanks at the bottom. I built a lander where one of the radial tanks simply would not drain, even though nothing was obstructing the fuel line. No idea why. Something similar may be happening here: fuel from the centre not getting to one of the engines. Check all those radial tanks to make sure they have the same amount of fuel in them.

Fine tune your approach so that you absolutely *nail* Jool's orbital inclination, and get your periapsis down to zero. When you enter Jool's SOI, burn at 90º to give you the preferred direction of orbit.

You really have to nail the plane correction for Jool. If you have something like Engineer Redux, it will help, otherwise you'll end up with an inclined orbit. If you aerobrake at about 114k, you should end up with an apoapsis somewhere near Laythe's orbit. You can then fine tune your orbit round Jool to get an encounter, and then aerocapture at Laythe, with an altitude of 23-25k. Don't try and go straight to Laythe from a Kerbin transfer. Even if you get an intercept, your encounter velocity will be absurdly high and you will be unlikely to successfully aerocapture.