Traches

I always have better luck with I-beams angled down and out a little. They're astoundingly strong; your ship will break before they do. No shock absorption though.

Nice! Is that minmus?

I'm not saying you should use MJ, but your "magically works out of the box with no effort" argument is just as valid for literally every stock part in the game. We don't plan fuel mixtures, tune engines for payload/atmospheric pressure, design communications/electronic systems, design structural wing spars in our spaceplanes, or deal with any of the other engineering hurdles that real air/spacecraft designers have to deal with.

I do the opposite-- leave as much debris around as possible. Space is more interesting with more stuff in it

At this point, I wouldn't mess with ISA mapsat. It's barely functional in the current version of the game. There's a new mod that's very similar called SCANsat, you should look into it!

That's what my lander looked like; managed to land it with completely full tanks at a good altitude. And that's the last stage that I was talking about.

A manned eve return mission is one of the hardest things to do in the game. You need about 12,000 m/s delta V to get to orbit from sea level, but only around 7,500 to make it from the tallest mountain. (For comparison, you need about 4,500 to get into orbit from kerbin.) Basically, asparagus it all to hell, use aerospikes, and keep the payload as light as possible. One trick that many people use is instead of sending down a whole command pod, just send down a single kerbal on a chair, sitting on top of the smallest probe core. For my eve lander, the final stage was just the second smallest 1.25m tank and a rockomax 48-7s, with some batteries, a probe core, couple solar panels, and a kerbal. It was god for about 4,000 m/s.

You could talk me into a longer runway-- it's on the short side of real world runways, and the ones the shuttle used were the longest in the world. That said, all of Kerbin is scaled down from real life and our jet engines have way too much thrust for their weight anyway, so I can see a few reasons why it's balanced as-is. Honestly, I think the problem here is stock landing gear, not the landing lights. I really hate when people come to my favorite games, complain that they're too hard, assert that they're doing everything right, and expect the game to change to accommodate them. There may be reasons to change the landing lights, but "they make it too hard" is a terrible one. They're just one of the many (and more literal) obstacles between your spaceplane and space.

Yes I get that, no they're not, no it's not, and no I wouldn't be. The launch tower impeded perfectly good rockets; the landing lights only impede aircraft that are flawed to begin with because THEY CAN'T TAKE OFF, THEY CAN ONLY STAY IN THE AIR LONG ENOUGH TO LET THE GROUND FALL AWAY FROM THEM. If that's how your aircraft takes off, then you have problems with your quite possibly otherwise perfect design. It's impractical, unrealistic, and most importantly not the game's fault. Strongly. If you build a rocket that can only barely lift off, it might hit the flagpole. If you build an airplane that can only barely lift off, it might hit the landing lights. What you really need are better stock landing gear. The available ones are way too tiny for many purposes.

"They are annoying" is not an uncounterable argument.

My entire point is that the plane is the problem, not the game. The attitude of "I'm doing it right, it fails because the simulation is wrong" is itself almost always wrong. If you're arguing that it's not realistic, you're right, but in the wrong direction-- there aren't nearly enough lights, and friendly cliffs are very rarely found at the ends of runways. If it looked like this: Would that airplane still fly?

Real world airplanes never intentionally use the entire length of the runway, and there absolutely can be approach lights off the departure end that are a few feet high. A good design that doesn't work isn't. If it weren't for that little drop-off at the end of the runway you probably couldn't make it into the air at all. You either need more wing area, more AOA on rotation, more thrust, or some combination of 3. If you're willing to use mods, the B9 pack has some nice big landing gear that may solve all your problems.

You may have a case against the lights being poorly placed and too big, but I have to disagree with you here. If you're using the last brick of the runway to take off, you probably have your landing gear set too far back, which is making it impossible to rotate and generate any lift. Your plane isn't taking off, the ground is falling away from it. Solutions: Move the gear further forward and be careful not to tail-strike, or mount the nose gear lower, which will make the plane sit nose-high on the runway.

The ant engines work great as a sooper light maneuvering engine for itty bitty space probes. Ion engines are a pain to deal with, and require a bunch of batteries, a bunch of solar panels, and all of a sudden your bitty space probe isn't so itty. The 24-77 has a whole lot of thrust, which can make setting up perfect geosync orbits or fine tuned intercepts tough. That said, RCS often serves the same purpose just as well...

A different way to get to moho is to eliminate the plane change altogether-- Instead of going for a half-orbit transfer, ignore the transfer window and just aim for either the ascending or descending node between kerbin and Moho. Once you get to periapse, play with your orbital period to get an intercept in the next couple of orbits (preferably by decreasing it rather than increasing it.)

I hadn't thought of putting relays in kerbol polar orbits! How did you get there-- slingshot or the hard way?

If this is the case, you probably brought way too much monopropellant in the first place. 100 units or so is plenty for several docking operations for any reasonable sized ship.

Obviously, but an unrealistic, simplistic drag model is a dumb way to increase difficulty.

He's got that set up right; unless he's got a weird ship design I really can't see why it's not working.

Symmetry matters - if your engines don't push straight through your center of mass, your ship will want to turn whenever you use them! And the skipper will work fine, it's just not ideal.

You didn't look at the pic that close then-- they're angled.

Single launch manned mission to Eeloo and back, with KIDS on the FAR->Real life setting. Basically, the ISP of all my engines was multiplied by .45; it'll make a guy hate the rocket equation pretty bad.

Lots of questions here, I'll take 'em one by one. Wherever you want, really. I usually put mine at a round 100km, cause it's easy to remember. No lower than 75, obviously. Wherever it's convenient to launch to. When you make it one. Right click on that cupola command pod and pick "rename" - then click the icon you want. Moving a station with stuff on it is hard, because you usually lose all your symmetry. Why do you need to move it? It'll certainly have enough thrust, but it's a poor engine for orbital operations because it's very inefficient. I'd use one of the smaller engines with a higher ISP. But again, why do you need to move it? For that, I would search for "KSP rendezvous tutorial" on youtube. I could attempt to explain it here, but a video will do a better job. Basically, you'll set up either a faster or a slower orbit to bring your two ships together sooner!

I think that FAR would make it work. Can't say it would work well, but it would probably work.

Made a remotetech tutorial vid for the new flight computer. Czech it out!