cantab

Well known. Not scheduled to be resolved until KSP 1.2 as I understand it. Legs and wheels use some of the same bugged code.

Nobody does. That's why it's so aggravating. We haven't even really got to the bottom of why KSP 1.1.2 crashes lots for some people and not for others, so there's barely a glimmer of a hope of a solution. My own suspicion is that there are race conditions in the multithreaded code. Which makes it pretty much a lottery, seemingly inconsequential variation in hardware or software could make the difference between stable and crash.

BFR is not quite a paper project, but it's not much better. It doesn't even have an engine yet. It's at the same kind of point in its development as Skylon, though SpaceX have more money than Reaction Engines to make their thing fly. Falcon Heavy warrants comparison with SLS, 50 tons to LEO is impressive and does open up possibilities, but it's not 70 tons and it sure isn't a hundred. And sure, NASA funding could get FH and BFR developed and built sooner, but then it's not "private enterprise" as such any more. Indeed Falcon 9 was already partly government funded, and that is not at all a bad thing. It's the idea that I sometimes see expressed or implied that governments can do no right and corporations can do no wrong that aggravates me.

Yeah, I think it could have a niche. To me most obvious would be one based on the MR-510 that acts as an RCS thruster and runs on monopropellant - double the efficiency of regular RCS, but you need to keep it powered. A comparison with existing engines is also warranted now RCS thrusters have a "respond to throttle" option; compared to the Dawn ion engine the arcjet would require significantly less power, maybe one or two RTGs would suffice, and be a lot lighter and more compact. It's not such an obvious technology for a larger engine, though I suppose it could be done, if only for completeness.

If SLS isn't pushing the envelope then what the heck is? No "private enterprise" rocket in service or well in development will lift as much as even SLS Block 1.

Kerbal Forklift Program!

Hurrah for Github search! You have one in Advanced Mining Technologies. But that's an old mod and not fully compatible with KSP 1.1.2.

Doesn't appear to. It has a few parts with the Grapple Node module but they're all 1.25m and about the same size as the stock claw. Also quickly checked his Exploration Pack and Karibou rover, nothing there. Paging @RoverDude do any of your mods have what I'm after?

But as far as I know I need a Kerbal around to hook them up, and like I said I want something that works by itself. Unless there's a feature of KIS I'm overlooking? I looked at that, it's a cool mod and might work, I could co-opt the "helper drone" part for my purposes. I still wonder if there's something a bit more suited though, a "simple" claw part rather than that drone which does a dozen different things. @sebi.zzr MM patch sounds like a plan.

I know there was a jump beacon mod at one point. For that you had to take beacons to their destinations manually, but once there you could instantly jump a suitable-equipped ship to them. No idea if it's up-to-date for KSP 1.1.

In 0.90 and earlier engines always made the same thrust, and just used more fuel flow rate in atmosphere. Since 1.0 they have instead always consume fuel at the same rate, and produce less thrust in atmosphere. So a Nerv-powered Kerbin landing probably won't be possible any more.

Granted. The next thing we know, we're slamming into an anonymous planet in an anonymous galaxy on the other side of the universe. Thanks a bunch, Einstein! I wish Newtonian Mechanics was more correct than Special Relativity.

This is a really great way of looking at it, cutting out a lot of the complexity in considering dV and TWR requirements separately.

You can't make a radial decoupler a root part. I think what I'd do is use cubic octags on both parts, and join with a stack separator.

I'm looking for a mod to provide a mini claw, working similarly to the Advanced Grabbing Unit but considerably smaller, like 0.625m scale or even below, to connect my new rover to my existing base module without having to faff around with docking port alignment. The Transparent Pods mod had one, but that mod seems to be unmaintained now. I tried KAS but it seems like the magnet and harpoon don't count as a docked connection, and the winches and pipes require Kerbals; I need to make a connection capable of resource transfer without Kerbals being around. I know there's Tweakscale but I'm considering that a last resort, I really don't trust it to not cause bugs. Any other suggestions?

So just how restrictive are these issues, as it were? Does it mean I can't put a docking port on a robotic arm or gantry to allow it to line up with another, for example so a rover can more easily dock with a surface base? Does it mean I can't put docking ports anywhere on IR craft for fear of bugs? And if I can't use IR to line things up, anyone got any other suggestions, besides using the stock claw or other parts that have the same module?

"I'm playing 1.1.x despite frequent bug-related issues and/or bugs affecting the way I play." Well, crashes for a start, though they don't have a huge impact really, I've been lucky. More significantly, the reputation of wheels and legs as buggy directly influenced my craft design. I like the result, but it's still the case that I'm not using functions the stock game offers because they're buggy. "I knew, so no". I'd rather play a different game than suffer the dreadful performance of KSP 1.0.5, now that 1.1.x has proven it can be so much better. Yes but I only really play the one I answered for in Question 1. I hoard most KSP installs. Right now I have one main install I'm playing, a backup of that before the last time I added or updated its mods, and a clean copy of the game that stays untouched and gets copied when I want a different install. I also have several 1.0.5.1028 installs still around, an install of the 1.0 demo, and a zip with installs from 1.0.4 and earlier.

To get around this problem, maybe grant the experience for flight on a vessel with certain parts. So an engineer doesn't need to fix a wheel to gain experience, they just need to be on a wheeled vehicle on the surface of another planet and that gains them the "wheels" piece of experience. Imagine they're monitoring systems, maybe pushing buttons to tweak motor torque and tyre pressures.

Works for me. The planets all load in their correct orbits and as you can see above I landed on one without a hitch. I've encountered the odd graphical glitch, like Leouch's atmosphere being invisible, but nothing serious.

Those figures don't seem that far off some of the smallest orbital launchers flown actually. For example the Russian Volna is an orbital launcher conversion of the R29R submarine-launched ballistic missile, which is 14.4m tall and 1.8 m wide weighing 35 tons. The Volna can put 100 kilos to LEO, or a bit more if the submarine sailed to the equator to launch instead of doing it from the near-polar Barents Sea.

In general chemical engines make a lighter ship overall for Mun and Minmus trips, unless you're doing repeated landings and refuellings then the LV-N can shine. "Break even" is more or less Duna, you can go chemical or nuclear and the ship mass ends up about the same. For trips to Dres and Jool the LV-N will be much more mass-efficient. Moho too, though you might also consider ions for extreme delta-V because Moho missions can use a lot of it if you aren't careful. Ship mass is a factor too. On small probes and even lightweight Kerballed ships the LV-N is just too heavy itself, so chemical or ion propulsion is the way to go. On very large ships the LV-N doesn't provide enough thrust and you'd need to spam too many of them, so instead consider the Rhino, one Rhino provides as much thrust as 33 LV-Ns.

Ack. Career mode sucks and shouldn't count

This made me realise something. So far as I can tell, nowhere in the game is Kerbal sex or gender specified. We have Kerbals with masculine and feminine faces by our human standards of appearance. We know they're "meant" to be male and female, Squad have confirmed as much and it says so in the savefile, but it's never explicit in KSP itself.

Got out with my little Skywatcher Heritage 76. Got nothing on Mars, just a bright orangey-red disc with no discernible surface features. Saturn was better, the rings were clear and at 50x I thought I saw a dark line across Saturn's equator-ish, but I'm not sure if that's real or my eyes making things up. Don't think it's the ring shadows, they ought to not be visible at present. Really my scope isn't cut out for planetary viewing.

I think the absolute most efficient way would be a rover or hopper equipped with the Mobile Processing Lab, and precision-land it at a biome junction then travel the short distance between each biomes. The massive amounts of bonus science from the MPL will help. Also good is a base or space station with the Mobile Processing Lab, and use a lander to visit various biomes and take science results there to convert into massive amounts of bonus science. Also good is to land at a biome junction even if you don't have the MPL. Also good is to send probes with the gravioli sensor to orbit a bunch of places, I believe it gets per-biome results in both high and low orbits. Bad is to rove between biomes, except at junctions. They're just too big.