Oafman

I am an incompetent administrator. If my predecessor was also an incompetent administrator, the space program is doomed.

Yeah not sure what you have above that in the picture, but you definitely have a 3.75m tank at least, so I'm doubtful that 4 x 909s is going to make it move very quickly. Even if that engine setup suits your needs, a permanent goal to keep in mind when you're in the VAB is reducing your parts count, so if there's a situation where one part can do a similar job to many parts, you should always go with the one. And a Poodle would mean none of these complicated adaptor solutions are required. Just a Poodle, and a decoupler, and you're good to go Oh, and some struts. Lots of struts.

Thank you, that's helpful. I have had a no-more-mods policy for a while now, and it will be nice if I could get one or two more

I've been struggling to get excited about .24. I'm not really all that fussed about contracts, though I imagine I'll warm to the idea at some point. And i had assumed that my nearly 3 year old PC would not allow me to take advantage of the 64-bit thing. But having looked at the specs, I have 64-bit, and I have 6g of RAM, so it looks like I'm good to go. No real idea what it means, but I'm assured there will be some sort of improvement in performance, and perhaps an increased ability to add mods without becoming a crashfest. So yeah, excited now. When is the release again?

I'm not great with SSTO planes, so can't add much, except one thing. Jet engines don't necessarily run out of intake air at the same time (at least, that appears to be the case, unless I'm confusing it with something else), so if you have multiple jets, they can cut out at different times, causing a loss of control. So set them to toggle on an action group, then switch them all off together when your intake air gets low enough that one of them is likely about to go. Oh and one more thing. Try to use as much of your jetfuel as you can building speed. This will mean you've built up as much velocity as possible from your jets (ascent profile dependent), and will also mean your craft is a little lighter, making the workload for your LFO engines slightly less

I must confess, it took me a couple of days to work this out too. Tried a reinstall, watched a bunch of stuff on Youtube, could not work out why I got no MJ menu. Then I noticed some weird part in the control parts section.....

It's in Porkjet's excellent Habitat pack

I had a weird thing once where I was trying to fit 4 tanks to a quad adaptor with symmetry. They all showed as green when I clipped, and let me continue building beneath them. But when I launched the rocket I found that only 3 of them were attached, and it soon lost control. Could something similar be happening here? If you zoom in very close you might be able to see a slight difference in the position of one of the tanks. Or actually, based on your aerial view showing CoM, cold it be that only one of the 3 tanks is actually attached to the adaptor?

It's a moon. Carry on.

Some people want to be astronauts, piloting ships by hand. Others prefer a more managerial role. Each to their own.

Actually, the arrival times are spread across around 30 days, so there will be no repeat of the frantic half hour where they all left LKO. It's an illustration of how tiny differences in maneuver nodes and the execution of those nodes is magnified over great distances. I'll hopefully put this all together as a mission report at some stage. But I've decided that I haven't sent enough silly vehicles (can you ever have enough silly vehicles?), so I'm building a few more things before the transfer window closes.

I turn as soon as my poorly designed and over-engineered rocket allows me to do so.

Very impressive. I love to see potential intake air of 13.20!

Do we know this for sure? I mean, if I start a new career save, won't I have to work my way through a bunch of tedious assignments in order to gather enough rep to go on to bigger things?

The big dome is a planetarium, with the night sky painted onto the ceiling. The tube-like structure on the western side is an enclosed half pipe, for kerbal skateboarders. Don't know about the other stuff, probably just snack research.

Hate to be a party pooper, but this sounds desperately dull to me. I've put a thousand things in LKO; putting one more up there does not fill me with excitement. I hope there will be more demanding assignments.

Wow you had a productive weekend! Kongrats

Laythe, obviously. Because jet planes and boats. And jetboats! I find Tylo and Vall kind of dark, even during daylight. Laythe seems to have the best lighting for some reason. And it has the best Joolrise, being closest to the planet. And aerobraking, and beaches, and just enough purpleness (unlike Eve which has a stupid amount of purpleness).

Umm, don't you just right click on the port and Disable Magnet? I've done that a bunch of times when I need to be precise Oh wait, it might be an option in Lazor rather than stock

Nice timing, because Oaf's Tours* is already en route! The mission objective was to test a range of silly vehicles, but we can convert that into some sort of adventure tourism..... * working title, the marketing team have been tasked with finding something more inspiring

Any chance of launching the lander with the rover undocked, leaving the rover where it is now, then landing a few metres away?

Master Tao gave you the 2 popular options. I use the Lazor cam, because I think the video stream from the docking port looks cool. But Navyfish's mod looks excellent too. Possibly. I hope not.

I assume that if you set control from the probe it doesn't actually set your control as being from the docking port?! I mean, it doesn't just have them switched around for some reason? As a solution, you could just install one of the excellent docking mods, and ignore the navball. If you're not keen on using such aids, you could use it just for this instance where a bug is making non-modded docking very difficult.

Where Alarm Clock really became important with this was not actually knowing the order of ships to burn (not hard to just switch to the next ship in line on the map screen) but in setting up all the timings in advance. Alarms set for 2 mins before each burn enabled me to see exactly where a clash was scheduled. The same should apply with entering Jool's SoI. I'll be able to see well in advance if 2 ships will be approaching Jool at similar times, and make a slight change to one to ensure I have sufficient gaps in my aerobraking schedule. All this effort just to get some serious hardware into space before it starts costing kredits to do so....

Here's one for astrogeologists. The USGS, in their awesomeness, have compiled a wide range of data into an unprecedently detailed geologic map of the Red Planet. Geoplogic map of mars (pdf) As if the map wasn't cool enough, the associated pamphlet (pdf) talks you through how the data was obtained and compiled, and also about the geologic epochs of Mars. (Also, there's no Earth/Exo Sciences category in the prefixes; it was a toss up between physics and chemistry, and physics won. Though on reflection, 'Space' would probably have been a reasonable choice...!)