Claw

You'll likely run into problems building directly in the bay. If it's the ship I'm thinking it is, the space is so tight that the editor has a hard time understanding which node/surface you're trying to attach to. As Javster suggested, make it a sub-assembly. Start a "new craft" and build your probe. Whatever you choose for the first part will be what gets connected to the shuttle. After you've built your probe (and saved it), you can drag the whole thing into the sub-assembly tab (the right most of the parts tabs). You'll have to give it a sub-assembly name. Reload your shuttle and go to the sub-assembly tab. Select your probe sub-assembly and attach.

Yeah, I think I agree that it's a mixture of some of the "basic" staging concepts. By the way, that's a pretty nice looking rocket.

Just to be clear, FAR still doesn't effect orbital decay if the craft isn't in focus. Most people who like it say it's a lot more handy if you are into doing a lot of planes or atmospheric work. It also forces you to make rockets that are a bit more aerodynamic. So if you're unconcerned about those things, then you're probably right in that it won't add much for you. For me personally, if debris enters the atmosphere I just assume role-playing and delete it from the tracking station when I get around to it. I'm happy enough to consider that "deorbited" until they change the game mechanics.

Huh. I have always run the game with anti-aliasing off and I have never seen these white pixel artifacts. I sometimes get white dots showing on terrain seams, but not on spacecraft. I'm not saying that's what causes the problem, but it might be worth a try. I turned it off eons ago after reading a thread up here about tweaking graphics. Someone said the Unity anti-aliasing might conflict with most on-board graphics card anti-aliasing.

There's been several hotfixs released. I think Horman is looking to see if the current hotfix version is listed somewhere online.

Most recent download is 0.23.5.464. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where you can simply find this info without downloading it again.

I would also recommend building it a few km away from KSC. If it gets large enough, it could be killer later on when you try to launch a ship.

Haha, it's okay. There's been a flood of EVA, decoupler, claw, and asteroid questions. The others are getting washed away.

Depends on if you're driving, flying, or going orbital. And what you want to do along the way. If you want to straight shot up there with an orbital/suborbital rocket, seitch the Navball to "orbit" sooner. Because of planetary rotation, your rocket will actually be heading slightly east and requires some westerly heading correction. If you are driving or flying, heading toward the red North line will get you there. Actually, in either case heading toward the South line will too, for that matter. Just takes a little longer. Edit: darn ninjas...

Hahaha. Nice album. Did you make them radial mountable?

There is a five letter album identifier in the albums URL. There is usually a #0 or some other number at the end that you can delete. It just references the specific picture you want to start at. Put that five letter identifier inside an imgur tag with brackets, like you would with an img or url tag. But just use the five letters, and not the whole URL. [ imgur] lttrs [ /imgur]

Yes, it does grab other things. I haven't tried on smaller objects myself, but the posts I have seen about it lead me to believe you must approach very slowly and be very careful about attaching to smaller space junk. If the object is spinning, try to approach from the side and target the center of the craft (where it isn't really spinning anymore). The other thing you can try to do is put a support beam or something out in the way to slow down the spin before you hook up to it. I would imagine the best bet is to target the center of mass of what you're trying to grab and approach very slowly. It will be much less likely to go spinning off.

The Aero model (FAR or stock) is applicable to different things. In either case, the game doesn't simulate aerodynamics for things that aren't in physics range. (They are "on rails") So a satellite in 35km orbit will be stable as long as you don't visit it. So the game has the capability to decay orbits, but doesn't really simulate it unless you're looking. I prefer to deorbit low stuff and boost high stuff out of the way, although I might start labeling them as debris after they get there. (Seems most realistic.) I'm excited about the claw and nabbing stuff at random to sling back at Kerbin.

I think this happens a lot too if you are carrying over old save games. Like Otis said, I've seen most of this cleared up by going back into the R&D center and repurchasing the part at the node.

The percentage of transmittable science depends on what you are transmitting. The values can be found here at the wiki (listed as "Transmission Efficiency").

No. You can transmit and then return the same experiment (after running a second time) and you will not "lose out" on any science. Exactly how the science points stack up is a bit strange (as KerikBalm pointed out), but transmitting does not "lock out" any future science.

A very similar event happened in this thread. Did you have a claw on your craft? Can you provide a picture of the craft? Thanks

Yes, this is very true. One of the probes crashed when setting up for an aerobrake. The program was using km (because they learned from a previous mistake), but someone thought it was using miles. So, ironically, one of the numbers was converted from km to miles, effectively cutting the number nearly in half. The probe came in a bit steep for its aerobrake.

Ahh, sorry. I missed this comment. So it's probably not what I said. Sorry...

Seriously, as dumb as this sounds, check your keybindings. I launched a couple rockets that were "uncontrollable" before I remembered that my key preference for steering is not the same as the default in a clean install. Also, if you're launching large rockets, you'll need a lot more torque than before.

You can also tweak the amount of propellant if you want some TWR boost at launch but don't need all the extra dV. Or if you put some artificial weight limit on yourself.

I am even trying to switch over to Kerbin time to put myself in the game more.

I've only built one shuttle, but here is a youtube video that walks through all the concepts. I used this as a starter point, but like I said, I don't have a lot of shuttle experience.

Something that I think has become less clear since someone updated the wiki. - "In Space High" means your craft is inside the given Sphere of Influence and above the "Space Border" altitude listed in the Celestial Body Multiplier Matrix. - "In Space Low" means your craft is inside the "Space Border" altitude and in an orbital path. - Inside the atmosphere works the same way, except you need to be on an suborbital trajectory. So that means that even if you are inside the atmosphere but still orbital (such as during aerobraking), your science will not count as "Inside the atmosphere" For example, orbiting Kerbin above 250km altitude, your science is counted as "In Space High over Kerbin." If you enter the Mun's SOI, it immediately counts as "In Space High over Mun" until you get below 60km Mun altitude. Then it is "In Space Low over Mun."

TWR of 0.04. Nice! And nice shot over the crater.