LeFudge

Well even the LEM had a descent stage and a separate ascent stage leaving the base behind lol SSTOs are easily one of the most difficult things to do in KSP

Theres a mod for more realistic aero, FAR (ferram aerospace research) Works good, makes it harder to control rockets though, when you start to tip the nose over sometimes the pressure is too much and it just flips your rocket. Anyway hope you enjoy the game as much as the rest of us do! :3

14 Hours!! Now that's dedication. Probably felt like 14 hours at least lol.

Well if your science is all on/above your command pod you could just eject everything below and parachute to safety pretty well, I think. Even if you don't have the right size decoupler, I've found myself using the smaller one in a pinch. Also just FYI the ISP on the LVNs only drops to about 500 on the surface of Duna so they're actually a pretty good lander engine for Duna I found.

Shift Left click should work, if it doesn't then somethings wrong. I think Alt+Left click is supposed to "navigate to this part in the menu" as well but that one doesn't seem to work for me

Make sure you have fuel lines running out from the center tank to the ones above the nukes or they'll run out of juice. And that poodle's going to ruin your efficiency (isp only 390, plus you'll just be towing around 2.5tons of dead weight), might as well get rid of it :3

I make the occasional LVN powered lander, this thing tows some extra fuel behind it allowing it to make the trip to Duna and back with no CSM/transfer vessel

I like to keep them higher up too, my laptop is a little weak as well. Basically just number of parts, my last station froze up(cant even load it any more) at around 350 parts, which is weird because I've launched more complex rockets than that. Something else I like to do is use the ClampOTron Sr ports to keep it more rigid, and then I disable the reaction wheels in everything. Also I use larger parts whenever possible (z4k batteries instead of a bunch of z400's, or an orange Jumbo instead of a series of smaller tanks for example)

It's the extreme inclination... and it's proximity to Kerbol... and the lack of atmosphere... And yeah MechJeb isnt the greatest, i used it for a bit just to see what it could teach me. The auto docking and rendezvous functions, yeah how about no, often they just put me on a suborbital/some other ridiculous trajectory. Maneuver nodes and a little bit of knowledge about orbital mechanics is the best way.

Probe stranded on Eve cause of accidental staging? Were you planning on recovering it? You do know Eve requires like 10 or 12 thousand dV to reach orbit right? If youve been interplanetary then you've got the skills to go anywhere! I recommend trying the Kerbal Flight Engineer mod, it just lets you see a lot more of your ships stats, so you actually know whether or not you've got enough fuel without busting out the rocket equation and doing math(s).

I dont think it really matters if you put fuel tanks inside each other, no different than putting them side by side, also it causes fuel flow problems sometimes so it can be a bigger pain than help if you dont know what youre doing

I only used kethane a little bit but I found that some of the drills or converter/refinery(?) pieces are pretty heavy and they made my ships a little awkward. Are the three sides exactly symmetrical?

You can do that??

B9 has some vtol jet engines, cant remember exactly what theyre called, extremely OP, B9 definitely makes SSTOs much easier.

front end of the wind screen needs to be elongated a bit so that the base of the nose is narrower. Also the nose needs to be pointier. Looks good though. I wouldn't have even noticed the "unnatural" look to the front end if you hadn't pointed it out