ammonia_ocean

This. Build the rockets next to each other, attached with small girders/beams situated near the top (not for support, just so they stay as a single unit and you can build them off each other), then launch and decouple the attachments between them.

I have successfully landed one spaceplane SSTO. By "landed", I mean "the pilot walked away".

I alternate KSP and Dark Souls. They're both challenging and unique enough to keep me entertained, but they're basically polar opposites so I never get bored of seeing the same stuff.

Most of mine have been covered (floating-point errors, crew resetting in VAB, navball initially closed in map mode, the weird rotation of the 3-man command pod), but one thing that really gets to me is the burn-time calculation system. It's glitchy at best and arbitrary at worst, so much that I usually burn my engines on full throttle for a short time before each long maneuver just so that I get an accurate estimate of how long it will actually take. There's nothing I hate more than: Est. burn time: 3m 42s [begins burning 1m 36s before node] Est. burn time: 7m 3s [smashes keyboard]

I landed OK but ran out of fuel and had to walk the pilot 10+ kilometers to a rescue ship (I didn't trust my landing abilities enough to get closer without crashing/wasting even more fuel).

Play KSP...

I set off to Moho in an enormous multi-part ship with something like 12km/s of delta-V. Something like five years later, I finally got back into Kerbin's SOI, and decided to go for ~realism~ by detaching the lander from the transfer vehicle and landing it in the ocean, while the transfer vehicle aerobraked to circularize its orbit and then got refueled for a second use. The only issue was that the transfer vehicle was in an almost-perfect polar orbit (actually possibly one of the best polar orbits I've pulled off, certainly better than the ones I've launched into), and had 686m/s remaining. So I sent up my mightiest*, most capacious†fuel tanker: the Type 2. However, I ran into some difficulties when I discovered that the transfer vehicle's orbit was still moderately eccentric, and that I'd failed to launch the Type 2 exactly into its plane. Moreover, the Type 2 had the launch stage as its only maneuvering engine. While this layout (intended to keep the ship's size down) usually provided more than enough delta-V to perform minor maneuvering burns for equatorial rendezvous, it didn't have enough to match the transfer vehicle's orbit and plane. Consequently, I switched over to the transfer vehicle, changing planes and then circularizing my orbit. In the end, my fuel gauge was empty and Flight Engineer read -- for my remaining delta-V. I wasn't sure exactly how much I had left, probably about 8m/s, but I was definitely glad that I'd rendezvoused with a fuel tanker.

I used MechJeb for nearly everything up until 0.22 (been clean since then). I quicksave/quickload like pushing F9 gives me tangible pleasure. Rather than going to the trouble of rescuing Kerbals stranded beyond Kerbin's SOI, I usually just smash them into the ground and get them off my map view (and conscience). The island airfield is littered with wreckage from my many failed attempts at flying aircraft. I have an enormous space station loaded with something like 35 Kerbals just sitting in orbit, because I was sick of the same damn crew spawning every time I started a new flight. Speaking of which... You are a god.

I used to do this, but for some reason using multiple jets on a lifter started to give me massive lag. Has anyone else seen this?

Got it, thanks. It was the MissingCrewsRespawn field.

When I kill a Kerbal and go to Space Center instead of reverting and load a new rocket, if I killed Bill, Bob, or Jeb, they respawn immediately and I have them as the crew again. If it's one of the generic ones, they either do the same thing or respawn within a few launches. I kind of feel like my immersion gets broken when this happens, and I get tired of launching the same guys over and over and over. I can change it by selecting a different crew in the VAB, but since the game always autoselects the top Kerbal(s) on the crew list whenever I'm launching a rocket, I have to specifically choose a new crew every time I redo a launch. Is there a "permadeath" button I'm missing? If not, are there mods to create permadeath (at least for the generic Kerbals) or to randomize the crew each new launch instead of picking the same guys every single time? Thanks!

If you still can't get them out and you're using a mac, click outside the KSP window so that the gray bar on top becomes lighter gray, then click on the crew hatch.

You (or, at least, I) get better FPS during burns when the camera is located behind your ship.

Okay, I'll keep that in mind. I did do an Eeloo mission, but with nuclear engines only, so this is a total first for me. If I can't return I may as well use what science I get from the mission to research nuclear engines, then build a more logical rescue craft in true KSP tradition.

200t drive stage? Check. Okay, great, thanks. I'll just mess around with one of my minimalist lander designs and go from there.