cantab

There's no net torque if you pump fuel from two or more side boosters into the core, assuming you don't do something silly like run fuel pipes obliquely into stuff.

Armageddon, pffft. Try The Core.

Was it the new XL one? There are known bugs with that due to it having PhysicsSignificance = 1 set in the part.cfg, which makes it massless and dragless. Remove that line and the bugs will go away though I was warned the rockets may wobble more.

I killed a Kerbal in my current permadeath-on save, and I don't know how.

Was that crazy trajectory permanent? I routinely have weird orbits show up on SOI transitions. I just give it a couple of minutes (at 1x) and it settles back down to what I was expecting.

To narrow down the problem a bit, have you tried: Ctrl+Alt+F1? Give it a few minutes if need be, that should switch you to a text console. If it does, the problem is likely KSP hogging RAM or CPU. Hold Alt+SysRq/Print Screen, hit R, E, I, S, U, B giving a few seconds between each key. That will reboot your computer in a somewhat more orderly fashion than hitting the power switch. If nothing else it'll help when you're troubleshooting this issue. If this doesn't work I believe the problem is probably down to your graphics drivers, consider changing them to a different version. Alternatively the Alt+SysRQ combinations may have been disabled, I don't recall Ubuntu doing that but it's worth checking. (The commands are take Raw keyboard control, terminate all processes nicely, kill all processes without prejudice, sync the disk caches to the disks so you don't get filesystem corruption, unmount the disks, and reboot the computer.)

This is completely wrong. The current situation is akin to knowing that your journey is 64 miles, and that your car has half a tank of fuel left.And yes, many modern cars will estimate your range. But they often get it badly wrong because they can't predict what you the driver will do, and it's the same in KSP for certain mission types such as Apollo-style landings. I guarantee I can build and fly a ship and get significantly different delta-V to what any calculator, stock or modded, tells me. Not to mention running out of fuel in real life (in any vehicle) is a bigger problem than running out of fuel in a video game.

Once you're controlling from the active docking port and targeting the passive one, I know two easy ways to get the ports parallel. The first is to rotate the docking ship to line them up by eye, rotating the camera to help. On the navball the heading indicator will move away from the prograde (yellow/green) and target prograde (purple) markers, but you need to keep the prograde and target prograde markers on top of each other. This approach will usually give you an oblique docking, but that's usually no problem. The other is to get heading, prograde, and target prograde lined up on the active ship, then switch to the passive ship, set the relevant docking ports as control from and target, and line heading, prograde, and target prograde up on the passive ship, before switching back to the active ship. This approach will give you a straight-on docking.

And they have. I don't know the mod name but the star is called Serious. It's done orbiting the Kerbol like a planet, for which the patched conic approximation is accurate enough if it's sufficiently low mass and far away from the planets orbiting Kerbol. I don't know how or even if the lighting was done, but that's mainly eye candy anyway that doesn't really matter for playing the game (though the messed-up day/night cycle could annoy).Edit: Also, biomes just make the game more boring by encouraging repeating the same mission rather than going to new places. Actual diverse terrain, beyond the current anomalies that are nigh-impossible to find without mods or looking them up, is what's needed to make things more interesting. But that's a tall order considering even KSP's baby planets are the size of large countries. In terms of explorable land area KSP isn't as big as Minecraft, but it dwarfs the likes of Daggerfall or LOTR online. It's a challenge to make that much space interesting and not samey. (Heck, you can argue the actual solar system has failed in that respect!)

Unless KER is lying to me (very possible) the monoprop in the command modules still has mass. It's the bottomless supply of EVA fuel that doesn't.

The Falcon Heavy could be great, but it's not in the same league as the SLS. Maybe it rivals the low end of SLS Block I, but the higher figures mooted for Block I or the Block II payloads are up around twice, nearly three times what Falcon Heavy will do.

Attempting to reach Kerbin orbit - using nothing but separators. (I never succeeded).

Indeed. I never had that much trouble with docking, but:I'd already learnt how to rendezvous thanks to a decent tutorial (the Basic Manouevres page on the Wiki). That DID give me trouble the first time. I'd already learnt how to EVA, by trial and error. And remembering what James May said when crossing the Channel in a pick-up truck: If something is on a constant bearing, ie it doesn't appear to move, then you're going to hit it. That taught me the fine control skills needed. Again, the first time I tried I went flying off and had no hope of getting back to the ship. I did my first docking with two parts of a ship that I'd just UNdocked, so they were nicely lined up for me, before trying a docking of two different ships. Even then I still managed to nearly clobber my station docking the crew bus to it one time, was coming in at quite a speed and overestimated the stopping power of the RCS. Managed to swerve sideways at the last minute. I still wouldn't say I'm quick. I don't want to rush things and risk a muck-up, not after the mentioned near miss. And I still miss the target port and bump the ship sometimes, but hey, that'll buff out. I did this for my Moho ship. Two pods on the orbiter giving I think 20 units, and I emptied the lander can on the lander altogether to save the weight. The TDE and the post-landing rendezvous went fine on the shakedown Mun landing, though I'll have less main fuel spare on the actual Moho mission.

The multipliers are correct when you remember that LOWER scores are better in this challenge. The maths is indeed wrong though.

New bodies could create new challenges. Scott Manley's video on one of the planetfactory mods demonstrated that, with things like Inaccessible, that spins so fast its equator is travelling above orbital velocity.

Well as I see it delta-V is a fundamental parameter of the manouevre node. The manouevre is defined by the amount of delta-V and the direction it's applied in. The game has to have the node delta-V to work, even if it hid it from the user. By contrast the delta-V of a rocket, though hugely important, is a derived parameter from the engine specific impulse and ship mass ratio, and the game doesn't have to calculate the ship delta-V. That's why it's not unreasonable to have the current situation where you have manouevre node delta-V's but not ship delta-V's. Not that it means the game should stay that way, but it accounts for the behaviour. "Don't use them" was not generally accepted as a counter-argument against the claim the ARM engines are overpowered. Why should it be accepted as a counter-argument against the claim that a delta-V readout doesn't belong in the stock game?

It's more that if you get close enough to the Sun you might suddenly enter the Mun's SOI, even though the Sun's gravity ought to be far stronger, and thus have weird things happen to your orbit. How does the game handle SOIs - is it dynamically calculated from the masses and orbits, defined in the config files and so easy to change), or hardcoded and so difficult to change?

You can turn off automatic updates in the game properties. You can also install the previous version from there, it's under the Betas tab. Of course, this is small consolation after you've had an update mess things up. According to the KSP website, the only transfer possible is for those who bought KSP before the Steam release to switch from the KSP store to the Steam version. Not the other way round, and not either way for those who bought KSP after it came out on Steam regardless of where we bought it.

If you do send an adapter, I advise either: Have the transport place it on the target ship, then back off and let the docking ship in. (Or place it on the docking ship first, but that may affect RCS balance for the docking ship) Or: Have the adapter be fully autonomous with its own probe core, RCS fuel and thrusters, and solar panels. What you want to avoid is attempting to dock with something that's floating in space uncontrolled. That's possible but a major pain in the backside, especially if the thing you're trying to dock to is tumbling and you consider using timewarp to stop rotation as cheating. I learnt it the hard way when I brought some drop tanks to attach to a ship, and the tanks were just a fuel tank and a single docking port.

Sure. Build one or more ships that have crew modules (hitchiker containers for maximum capacity) and any other gubbins you want your colony to have. Ensure each ship has at least one claw. Optionally dock them together into one big ship for the journey. Send them over to the asteroid and claw each part on. Hey presto, one asteroid colony! Asteroids don't have gravity (the game doesn't implement it and even if it did the gravity would be negligble) so EVAing around will be like in space. E classes can at least be big enough to get the feeling that your base is on the asteroid not just attached to it. Monopropellant, xenon, and electricity will automatically flow through the asteroid (because it's just treated like any other ship part) and liquid fuel and oxidiser can be manually transferred through it, so you can do something like have your main solar array separate from your battery banks.

If you're having controllability issues, then yes manning the miner will solve that, presumably allowing you to stop the drills when you're out of power.

Is the Centre of Mass behind the Centre of Lift, either initially or perhaps once some fuel has burnt?

What I'm thinking of working on is a patch to the stock parts, to change some annoying part attachment limitations.

Hopefully this isn't too dumb a question. Where should Module Manager configs/patches/whatever be circulated? In the regular Add-On Development or Add-On Releases forum as appropriate, or is there somewhere particular for them?

They're cool to have and can be useful, but I wonder if using a fuel depot in LKO will ever be more useful than not using one. Let's say you launch your fuel depot with a big load of fuel. It can refuel lots of small craft, but said small craft don't really need in-orbit refuelling, you can just launch them full to begin with, and around Kerbin there's no penalty to tossing the old craft and launching a fresh one. On the other hand if you've got a big craft, big enough that you have to launch it empty, it's probably also big enough to take much of the fuel from your depot, if indeed it doesn't need more fuel than you have there. In that case it's easier to send up the ship then fill it from one or more single-use fuel tankers. Once money's introduced, though, reusing small and medium sized ships may become more worthwhile.