Capt. Hunt

RTGs have built in Radiator fins.

apparently, after a recent tsunami scare here (we only ended up getting a wave a couple of feet high), the local 911 got a rash of people reporting that they heard a tsunami warning on the local news, as well as people calling to ask what they should do. Also, that cat is seriously weirded out by that bread, do I need to call 911?

Tantares has a full selection.

You don't need the ascending/decending nodes unless you are actually trying to match planes with a target. The AN/DN are just the points where the two orbits cross. If you're in an equatorial orbit aren't actually trying to match a target orbit, then any point on the orbit will do. If you need a specific longitude of AN/DN for a contract orbit, just start your burn as you pass that longitude. If your orbit is inclined, then the points where your ship passes the equator are effectively the AN/DN. BTW, it costs an order of magnitude less Delta-v if you make the burn to your planned inclination just after you enter the mun's SOI, rather then waiting until after you decelerate to enter orbit.

You can access autostrutting from the right click menu for each part. It automatically places invisible struts that help hold a given part to either the Root part, the heaviest part on the rocket or a part further down the attachment tree. Animated decouplers is a script that enables specially equipped mod decouplers to play animations when they separate. You do need it for these decouplers to work, but it won't help hold anything together more then the decoupler normally would.

either turn autostruts on for the boosters, or add physical struts. Never trust just the radial decoupler.

I know, but matching the orbit is probably the easiest way to match the period of the orbit. Bottom line, the larger the difference between either the period or the radius, the more they will drift. Ike does like to gobble up unsuspecting spacecraft, one of the reasons I like the swarm approach. I use Scansat, so usually I have a few sats in polar orbits anyway, I sometimes also throw small relays on spent boosters and payload busses to help. Once I even released a cubesat (literally a QBE core with an RA-2 and a small solar panel) during a Trans-Duna injection burn, so it would settle into a Kerbiocentric orbit between Kerbin and Duna and act as an intermediate relay at least until the payload reached Duna.. In a pinch, the RA-2 will also work at Duna, as long as Kerbin and Duna are on the same side of Kerbol. If you time your mission right you can make it before the planet gets out of range. Fortunately, there is no penalty for having a weak signal, as long as it does connect. BTW, a side benefit of mechjeb is it does not require a signal to operate any of the auto-pilot functions, as long as you're comfortable with being hands off. Think of them as pre-programmed maneuvers.

There are slight differences between the probe cores, generally, the higher up the tree they are and the larger they are, the better, but for most applications it will probably come down to which style fits best with the rest of your probe's design. Some shapes work better in tight spaces, some offer more space to attach things, and some fit best with certain cross-sections. Unless you're planning on doing precision maneuvers, such as docking, you don't really need to use RCS. Most, but not all, of the probe cores do have some reaction wheel torque, and of course adding more wheels adds more torque. The reason the Ant didn't work is that not all engines have gimbaling nozzles, the spark could turn you under thrust because it does have one, although gimbals have a limited range of motion, so it's not going to be much help. That depends, if you want them to stay in the same place relative to one another, they should be as close to the same orbit as possible, I'm not talking Kilometers, the orbits should be within meters of each other, and as close to the same inclination as possible too. Their orbital periods should match as close as possible, or else they will drift out of alignment with each other. I know there are people who will disagree with me, but the easiest way to ensure precision like that is to use something like Mechjeb or KER. That said, for mission comm coverage, that's not as important as just making sure at least one relay has line of sight on your lander when you need it. There are different techniques to achieve this, using as few as a single relay or a whole constellation of them. On Mars for example, NASA routes all of their probes signals through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a single satellite, which is in a sun-synchronous polar orbit, the downside of course is that it is not overhead all the time, but that's not a problem for NASA, since the rovers are mostly autonomous, and any instructions can be sent during the comm window, the orbit was mostly chosen for MRO's own mission. One or two relays in Dunastationary orbit over your planned landing sight could also work, they will always stay in the sky over your landing site, and be high enough that line of sight to Kerbin is only an occasional problem when the planets are aligned just right. You could probably even cover a whole hemisphere with one relay. I usually use a swarm approach. Put enough relays in orbit and it won't matter where they are as long as something has line of sight more often then not.

You want something like Scatterer done to the stock visuals, yes I understand that. However, my point still stands. As cool as scatterer is, it doesn't really fit the cartoony visual style of the stock game, that's why the devs haven't done something like it, not because they're lazy, but because their vision of the game doesn't need it. I'll admit I use scatterer too, but it's not because I think the stock game looks outdated. And you're proving my other point by discounting most of the stuff they post in the news because its not what you want. Besides, there's been plenty of bugsmashing going on behind the scenes that doesn't make the news, just look at the patch notes. Just because your pet "bug" isn't fixed right now doesn't entitle you to anything. There are plenty of other people on this forum with "pet bugs," some are getting fixed, some don't need fixing, but none of them are as "game breaking" as they think. Get used to it. And guess what, those other games "where the developers actually give a crap," will be exactly the same. No dev team can please every single customer. Honestly, Squad has a history of being one of the more receptive and open dev teams in the industry. You want to take your wallet elsewhere because you're not getting what you want right now? Go right ahead. If supporting this company for doing good work labels me as a fanboi, so be it.

So, just because the devs aren't working on the feature you want, they don't give a crap? Get over it. They've been working on tons of stuff, just read the "KSP loading..." threads. As I said before, the Cartoony look isn't because it's "visually outdated," games have been doing "realistic visuals" for decades, it was a design choice.

the Mammoth is literally supposed to be a cluster of vectors (modeled after the cluster of 4 SSMEs on SLS). IIRC, Twin-boar is essentially a pair of vectors and an orange tank. The main advantage of both is they are slightly lighter then their equivalent parts. Rhino is an upper stage engine for super heavy rockets (modeled on the J2X)

they've said before that the cartoony look was a visual design choice, that's hardly lazy. There's no "industry standard" for how a game should look.

One does not simply "switch to Unreal engine." that would probably require years of work re-coding the entire game from scratch. But hey, don't take my word for it, if you think you're such a bad ass coder that an engine switch is easy, Squad is hiring, you can find out for yourself.

it had a reaction wheel, but the game just didn't seem to recognize that it was a controlled part, maybe it didn't see the built in antenna for some reason. I'll try it again to see if I can replicate the issue.

hmm, don't know what's going on there, I'm not using the HOTAS, but I do have their TRudder pedals working for me. Have you checked to see if it has problems in any other games? Are you using TM's calibration tool?