SkyRender

Okay, I think I've topped the absurdity factor for now. Thank you for flying with Airbus Kerbin, with service to low-Kerbin orbit. Please keep your arms and legs inside the cabin at all times, and keep your seatbelt fastened until the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. In the event of an emergency, your seat may be used as an EVA jetpack, but it won't help you survive re-entry.

I've seen the crazy veering effect happen even when the wheels are all perfectly level with the runway, actually. And no, I haven't tested making them physics-enabled, because I don't know how to do that. The flag for it is either not in the CFG or not obvious. I suspect that a large part of why they're not is because of the fact that gear has to be able to handle moving at speeds well above their crash tolerance when taking off and landing both.

So I've noticed recently that, while the stock landing gear part certainly works well enough most of the time, there are other times where they become the unwilling hosts of the Kraken and start doing very, very naughty things. Like wobbling about during take-off and sending the plane veering wildly and uncontrollably left or right. Same sort of problem when landing comes up too: the plane will start doing the electric slide off in a random direction no matter how straight-on you are, but entirely at random. Now I've noticed that physics-less parts tend to be at the root of problems like this, and I've also noted that the landing gear is definitely physics-less. If they had that flag removed, I'm sure there would be some serious rebalancing necessary, but I also think this would be a very, very good idea. As they stand now, the landing gear are something of a hazard to use since you can't be sure if they're going to flip out and kill you or not.

For your situation, I'd recommend starting with Science mode. Sandbox disables science and funds both, meaning you wouldn't really get that much out of it. That said, you could also do Career mode and just revert to launch after any launch failure to prevent loss of funds. Contracts give you so much money that even that might not prove too terribly necessary, though. If you really want to get into the maths side of things, there are mods that can help with that, which tally up information and give you data like your current delta-V and thrust-to-weight ratio. A favorite for that is Kerbal Engineer Redux.

I refuse to give into K-Syndrome, myself, so most of those suggested currency names don't do a thing for me. I kinda like the idea of calling them Roots, what with the currency sign being what it is, but I honestly don't mind Funds all that much either. It has a certain charm, as with that old NES game Faxanadu where the currency was golds (yes, in plural like that; shopkeepers infamously informed you when you were under-funded that "this is not enough golds").

For some reason I keep making spaceplanes to carry ever-larger quantities of Kerbals into orbit on ever-more-absurdly-small amounts of fuel relative to how many Kerbals are going up. This is much easier with the RAPIER engine having shed half a ton of mass, and I can now get 17 Kerbals to LKO with an orange tank's worth of fuel and still have an embarrassingly large amount of fuel left over (around 17%).

It's the counterpoint to orDR? Actually, it just lets you give your rocket situational instructions on what to do under certain conditions. And you can tell it to do basically anything. Theoretically you could give it the entire mission plan for a complex operation and have it execute it from start to finish flawlessly, but in practicality you'd have to be a pretty amazing kOS programmer to pull that off.

A tip for smoother overall spaceplane trips: have your fuel placed to the sides of the fuselage, as shown in my first post, and use tweakables to adjust fuel levels and see how it measures with the craft's center of mass. Get it as close to perfectly centered as possible (ie. fuel drain won't shift the CoM), and as long as your center of lift is correct, you won't have any problems. Related tip: do this BEFORE you add landing gear; despite what the CoM indicator claims, landing gear is currently physics-less and will not in fact adjust your CoM at all in-flight.

You really should consider doing a massive base-building mission to a planet that also involves a return trip. It doesn't have to be as absurdly complex as that Constellation mission was.

Do a mission like this, but do it on Laythe.

Just a little. I launched this thing on a whim to see if it would be able to reach orbit, and the answer was "yes, embarrassingly easily and with much fuel to spare".

It was terrifying!

I read recently that the devteam wants to implement something similar to Kerbal Engineer Redux into the stock game, wherein you can see how much TWR and delta-V your rocket has, but they had a small problem in that they want it to be as non-intrusive as possible. Hence my suggestion: just make it a mouse-over of information when you move the cursor over a given stage. The added icon there is to change which body you're checking data for (since TWR varies depending on gravity and all). It's just a rough concept, but I think it would fit pretty well with the idea of both giving the player the information and keeping the whole thing fairly uncomplicated to look at and work with.

Probably my Jool system science expedition. Seeing as it was able to visit every single moon of Jool (as well as make a sacrificial dive into Jool for one of the probes) and obtain surface data plus have an orbital probe for each, I'd say it was worth it.

Not even a competition, Danny2462. I mean Scott Manley sometimes posts some pretty interesting things, but I have never once seen a new Danny video and thought, "Eh, I think I'll pass on that one".

Given that the current iteration of the contracts system makes getting a steady influx of way too many Funds very easy, I don't even bother trying to design rockets to be especially affordable. I keep them efficient, mind, but cost is less an issue than my ability to effectively guide them to where I need them and get them to do what I need them to do.

They're kind of related, really. It's hard to be serious about something you're not any good at doing, and it's hard not to be serious about something you've gotten really good at.

I'd say you're a serious player when you can do any of the standard operations (ship design, launch-to-orbit, orbital maneuvers, landing, rendezvous, etc.) with a reasonable level of efficiency and without really having to think about them or stress out over how well they're going. A high level of competence seems like a pretty good benchmark of dedication to me, as it really isn't something you can acquire through anything but experience.

Not my experience. But then, I am the guy who invented the two-mission tech tree maxing strategy, and the one who discovered that it works perfectly fine even with Funds in place. I could screw up mission #1 twice and still have enough to run it again, and mission #2 I could have similar results and still come through just fine.

A comprehensive Kerballed Jool system mission is technically more complicated, but hardly more difficult, than an Eve return. Then again, Eve returns aren't really that challenging overall either since it just comes down to good engineering. Maybe I've just been playing KSP too long...

Mostly I look for skill. Streamers that play badly for laughs aren't too hard to find (and they have to compete with the king of KSP comedy, Danny2462), ones who screw up fairly often are pretty common, but the ones who really do know what they're doing are the ones who catch my attention. Particularly if they keep their cool even when things don't go quite as planned and still pull out ahead.

Hell, I stopped using RCS three versions ago. Though if the massless flag remains on that new RCS engine, I may well have to look into using it for exploitative purposes during probe launches...

I think you mean ISP and TWR? That information has always been there, but a few versions ago (0.20 I want to say), they streamlined the item description boxes and stuck any non-essential information in a sub-section of the part description that you access by right-clicking while the description box is open.

It's rather sad that a thick skin is a requirement for releasing any sort of content these days... It seems inevitable that someone will come along and complain sooner than later that you did not make whatever you made to their specifications, often in a very rude, condescending, and/or vitriolic fashion. I rather dislike this trend; it says little good about the people who engage in that kind of behaviour, and even less about the societal pressures that convinced them that such behaviour is acceptable.

Context in linguistics is essential, as it allows us to shorten our statements considerably without significant risk of misunderstanding on the listener's behalf. This is an excellent example of that in action: nobody here is likely to see "1500dV" and think "1500 what?", save perhaps the pedantic. Everything in the game is measured in meters per second for velocity, and we know that dV means change in velocity, therefore we know when we see "1500dV" that it means "1,500 meters per second of change in velocity potential" without having to see it written out like that. Context. Learn to use it well, and you'll go far in improving your communications skills. Be pedantic about word use, and people will just come to the conclusion that you're not very good at catching onto context.