Pecan

Use Kerbal Engineer Redux (KER) or MechJeb so you can see your TWR and total deltaV in the VAB. 1. Build your payload. 2. Put any fuel tank and your favourite engine under it. 3. Replace the fuel tank with a larger or smaller one until the TWR for this, final, stage is 1.4 or so - by the time it's used you won't need the 'usual' ratio of 2ish. 4. Add an asparagus stage. 5. Replace the two fuel tanks on this until the TWR is 1.6+ (should reach over 2 by the time it's jettisoned). 6. Repeat 4 and 5 until the total deltaV is sufficient to reach and circularise orbit (or whatever you're intending to do). 7. Launch. 8. Add struts if it falls over instead of flying. 9. More struts (and possibly control surfaces, but I've never needed or wanted them).

People just don't read the OP, do they? Everyone trying to help but ignoring the 'unlikely' requirement. If it becomes too difficult to avoid success feel free to call on my spaceplane piloting skills - I have a 100% failure rate so far.

Kerbal Engineer Redux and MechJeb will both tell you the fuel and other stats for each stage. AFAIK neither will allow you to separate stages from the map view but if you use MechJeb you can set it to 'autostage' so it automatically changes to the next stage when the current one is out of fuel.

I am new(ish) to KSP and lazy, so I let MechJeb do my rendezvous for me. That dictates what separation phasing orbits will be established at and, therefore, whether they will be needed at all. At Kerbin, for instance, it wants to create a phasing orbit 100km above/below my space-station. Placing the station at 250km means there is sufficient room below it that MechJab can go directly from 100km launch-orbit to rendezvous, including a margin for deformed orbits and to keep the numbers round ^^. By extension, any required outer phasing/rendevous orbit would be at 400km and my 'traffic control' rules make 550km for parking orbits. At the Mun MechJeb wants a 30km separation and launch-orbit would be 10km so traffic control says: inner phasing/rendezvous 10km, station 45km, outer phasing/rendezvous 80km, parking 115km. Incidentally; I tend to design landers to go only from low-orbit (10km for mun) to the surface and back. Changing and circularising orbit at that height, plane-changing and recovery (rendezvous, docking and returning) are all left to a general-purpose spacestation tender which gets all the fun jobs.

I've just started using .23 as I've only just found settings low enough to make it usable :-( First of all, I should say that my machine doesn't meet the system requirements so Squad is covered. Specifically my graphics card is only an nVidia 8300 with 256Mb RAM. That said, the .18 demo version (that I tried to see if KSP would work at all) and the proper .22 (when I found it did) work much more smoothly than .23. In this latest update, for instance, with graphics set low, eg; quarter-res, launching a simple 4-part rocket it takes 5 seconds leaning on the shift key to throttle-up to 100%! Even then the met tells me KSP is taking 3 seconds to calculate every single second. You can imagine what it's like with a more complex vehicle ^^. Don't use science, haven't used tweakables, mostly use .22 for performance. Not a lot of reason to use .23 at all, and I'm disappointed - but buying a new graphics card soon, I hope.

I find it a pain with small ships and ports as well - from 100m it's not easy to click on a small port. My solution comes from switching to the target ship to turn it so the port faces the incoming one ... 1) get incoming ship within docking distance, 2) 'control from here' on its port, 3) switch to target ship and turn it's port so it's facing AWAY from the incoming ship, 4) switch back to the incoming ship, zoom view out and rotate to see target ship, port will be right in front of you and easy to 'set as target', 5) switch to target ship again and turn the port towards the incoming ship to make docking easier, 6) incoming ship one more time and carry out the docking.

Toal laziness - I'm still new and letting MechJeb handle most of the flying for my Munar landings ... Time to bring a lander back up and re-dock for return to Kerbin, ascent put it in orbit going East from the surface. Command module was going West and had all the RCS fuel (to save weight on the lander) so I told it to rendevous with the orbiting lander. MechJeb's "solution" to matching planes was to come to a complete stop, burning all the fuel and losing so much altitude that the module simply drove straight into the Mun's surface. ^^ (That and on the next mission, delivering rovers, I attached them directly instead of with decouplers, separators or docking ports. All the way there before realising I had no way to detach them)

Probably a totally dumb newb question but then a) I am, and the only really stupid question is the one you don't ask. I have seen people talking about the display of flags and see the toggle for them in the tracking station but I don't see any 'flag' parts in the VAB/SPH and can't find any information about using/planting them. How do you access flags?

Thanks all - 'no' saves hours of pointless trying. I'd better get practicising EVA then :-)

Things are going well so far. I have made a light orbiter vehicle, LKO space-station and a drone tanker to look after it. What I can't do though is transger crew between ships without using EVA. Some VIPs are waiting to visit the station and I can't ask them to do anything that dangerous! So the question is - can you transfer crew between docked ships in version 22 without using EVA and, if so, how?