Reactordrone

There's an issue with the layering in the VAB when you detach stages the removed stage icons sit in front of the engineers report information. It makes it harder to make adjustments to upper stages since you have to completely remove the lower stages to see the vehicle stats.

If Duna is behind you a little bit a standard Hohmann transfer will leave you ahead of Duna so you'll need to boost a little higher than Duna's orbit in order to slow down and let Duna catch up. You'll use more fuel getting into the higher orbit and you'll be faster when you encounter Duna requiring more fuel to slow down, but if you're not far past the transfer window the delta v penalties shouldn't be too bad.

If you take into account the surface area of the Mk1 compared to the Mk1-2, the larger pod should come out at about 3.4t for the same thickness of metal. Add in the extra seats, batteries, reaction wheels and monopropellant and it comes up to nearly 3.7t. Given that larger volumes need to be built heavier to withstand the same pressures as smaller containers and the higher impact tolerance of the Mk 1-2 I don't think an extra half tonne is too much of a weight penalty. It's equivalent to a Mk1 being made from 4mm thick metal and a Mk 1-2 being made from 5mm.

Had a go this afternoon. Not massively fast at 22 min 52 sec but it gave the Mun a good whack.

About 5° off the pad then hold prograde. You should have liquid fuel left in the tanks in orbit. I would usually drop the tank before final orbit and complete using the OMS engines though, to avoid debris.

They've both got enough to reach orbit so you may not be turning early enough,especially with the slim shuttle. With that one, you want to maximise the horizontal speed that you get out of the solid boosters with a fairly hard turn off the pad.

After noticing that the mainsail had very similar stats to the Proton's first stage engines I made a proton replica yesterday that can easily get 60t into low Munar orbit.

The likelihood of what exactly? The likelihood of someone launching or the likelihood that the exchanges will result in mutual destruction?

Expand station missions don't require newly launched hardware. I've completed several by just docking multiple ships together and the only thing to watch is to make sure you're in command of the correct piece when you dock.

Had a quick jaunt out this afternoon. Forgot to get a screenshot before takeoff but I do have a shot of my plane flying over an unspecified ocean in an unspecified direction about 15 mins after takeoff. I also had to quickload and land again cause I forgot to take the F3 shot Good short landing capability with the reverse thrust so I was able to land right alongside the pyramids with little difficulty.

Satellite contracts don't care if they're launched manned, they just have to be unmanned when they reach their final orbit. You could even use the manned ship as the satellites and just have the Kerbals step outside for a minute.

If you build the transfer stage around the station you could swap out the shielded docking ports for regular ones and use those (with a few struts) as attachment points. The main lifter could then attach under the transfer stage tanks.

I've done an aircraft launched satellite just for the novelty but it's not easy to land the launch aircraft quickly enough to switch back to the probe for the circularisation burn.

As a work around, if you have the surface scanning module it will start to display ore concentrations at 1km above the surface. For places like Minmus a 1km warning is plenty of time to stop but it's obviously not as good as the 3km warning that the radar altimeter gives you.

A 100km orbit shouldn't be a problem. Docking ports have a very small decoupling force so unless you're using decouplers on maximum force and very light parts they shouldn't move away too fast to be switched to using the [ ] keys.

Drove for about 170km on Duna coming out of the highlands to refuel a stranded lander down in the lowlands and was treated to a nice eclipse just before sunset. A nice easy 75km run left to go.

That degree of deflection isn't used in flight, it's only there for braking and so that the pilot can get in and out without the canard surface being in the way.

If you have a docking port or command module / probe that's facing the right way click on it and select control from here. If you don't have one you could try adding a docking port in place of a decoupler to get the control point without increasing your part count.

Oops, I was looking at a pre juno tech tree in my science save. Replace the engine and intake with a pair of podded junos high on the rear fuselage and it works.

Something like this works, Wide track gear for stability, thrust reversing engine to help you slowdown. Elevon1 for roll control, delta deluxe winglet for yaw and forward mounted tailplanes for pitch control.

I use them on early 2.5m rockets to increase thrust when only the skipper is available. Two of them plus a skipper brings thrust into the 1000kN bracket for about 5t engine weight.

Then again, the green conical section isn't part of the tank, it's the Thrust structure assembly that distributes the thrust over the bottom of the tank. http://www.apollosaturn.com/sibnews/pg5_2c.gif

You wouldn't even need them to be procedural. Squad could ditch the tank butts all together if they remodeled all the fuel tanks to look like actual fuel tanks with sidewalls and hemishphereical ends. ( tank butts ) The Kerbodyne fuel tanks do have hemispherical ends (and I would assume so do all the others under their dust caps). The structures on the top of the engines are the covers for the engine mounts and engine turbomachinery. There's no tank structure in them. The Vector is the oddball rocket because it's just an engine bell (in the same way that the jets in the game are just nozzles), in reality it would be longer and everyone would have to offset them to hide most of the engine when making space shuttles.

The first thing to check is your orbit direction. If you mouse over the AN/DN nodes they should be close to 0°. If it's reading 180° you're perfectly aligned but going the wrong way around. ETA- looks like the contact says inclination 180°. That's a retrograde orbit so if you launched to the east you'll definitely be going the wrong way.

Flying Scooters were often used in Supermarionation shows to avoid having to make the puppets walk.