Wanderfound

Poke around and you'll see that a fair few of my heavy cargo designs have tailstrike guards. They're very handy when you're trying to get an overloaded plane off a short runway; you can just crank the stick hard back without worrying about hitting anything. The VTOL jets are fuel hogs; you need to minimise their use. Kill as much of your orbital velocity with the more efficient main engines as possible. Come in to the surface of the Mun on a shallow angle, and just use the VTOL to control the last few hundred metres of the descent. Don't use them at all when getting back off the Mun beyond a momentary puff to lift the nose. On the return to Kerbin, you want to aerobrake. If you can get your periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere at all, then you can make it home, even if you're totally out of gas. The first time I took Longreach to Minmus, I think I had six units of oxidiser left as I departed Minmus SOI. What went wrong with the satellite drop?

How about lowest total √ cost after recovery?

"I think I can probably get away with it" is not a very good argument for the ethics of appropriating someone's else's stuff and putting your name on it. The modders are already giving away their work for free; there's no space for any pseudo-copyfighter justification here. It's a clear Wheaton's Law violation, mate. If you want to do this, create a recommendations/list site that becomes so popular that the modders come to you asking you to promote them. Get with the Tao.

Any bonus for leaving no space junk behind at all? I'm thinking of doing pseudo-Apollo: spaceplane to orbit, deploy a docked-together transfer stage + lander, sending them to the Mun or Minmus and back, return them to the spaceplane cargo bay where they'll be refuelled, land the whole lot back at KSC, rinse and repeat as many times as possible. Why the limit on the mass ratio?

"Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission" works better in rhetoric than in reality.

Mod packs (i.e. all the downloads in one): bad idea, pisses off the mod makers, and for valid reasons. Mod lists (i.e. a list of mods that work well together, with links to the maker's download sites): good idea, go for it.

Okay; killing time before the .26 drop, so I figured I'd finally make a serious attempt at this. Launched, flew to orbit, computer crash, reload, Kerbpaint glitch. Oh well. 35:15 start time. Hit the brakes. Down we come. Smidgeon toasty, but nothing serious. A few S turns to wash off speed. Still too quick, and running out of time. Give it a loop. Bugger trying to brake on the runway, land on the paddock and then taxi up the berm. 41:42 at stop, so that makes it 6 minutes and 27 seconds. Fairly conservative; there's probably plenty of time to be shaved if you really try. Apart from a second's worth of taxiing thrust when I misjudged my braking and stopped on the runway edge berm, it was dead stick the whole way. Anyone else?

Cool. Spaceplane + lander time. I wonder how many times I can get Brutus to Minmus and back on a single tank?

One last bit of train related geek culture:

Also: y'all familiar with this one?

As mentioned elsewhere: The Station Agent. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340377/ Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, trains. What more could you want? (seriously though, it's a fantastically well-made film. Very much worth the time)

While it's certainly true that the max-air max-altitude approach is highly effective in stock aero, I would like to pop in with my usual point that it's by no means compulsory. See https://www.dropbox.com/s/lbnz9s8k9h7gwgb/Kerbodyne%20Benchmark%20StockAir.craft?dl=0 for the tuned-for-stock-aero version of the Kerbodyne Benchmark. That's running three engines from two intakes. Crank it up as fast as you can before you climb out of the rich air, then shut down the RAPIERs and continue climbing on the turbojet alone. Once the turbo chokes, turn the RAPIERs back on (using closed cycle oxidising mode) and let the rocket-driven ram air revive the turbo. Do it right and you'll have the apoapsis over 70km before the turbo chokes again, with plenty of fuel remaining for circularising once you're in space.

I'm also in a similar position to this, albeit with far fewer mods (and a presumably much dodgier computer). A "how to read the error logs" tutorial would be a very useful thing if it's possible.

Y'all seen The Station Agent, btw? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340377/ Highly recommended; sadly underhyped.

See https://www.dropbox.com/s/il93oc28t9228j5/Kerbodyne%20Dairyman%20TSP.craft?dl=0 for a tailstrike-proofed version of the Dairyman, btw. It's definitely landable without them, but no sense in making things harder for no reason.

BTW: I didn't manage to catch a screenshot, but I got one of those "ad pretending to be a Facebook notification alert" jobbies yesterday.

Incidentally, this kid (who quite enjoys the hypestuff) was born during the Nixon presidency.

Another vote for the editor UI stuff. Stockifying Editor Extensions, RCS Build Aid and Part Angle Display is so obvious that I'm stunned it hasn't been done already. Ditto for Kerbal Alarm Clock. On the less utilitarian end, Kerbpaint, EVE, Chatterer and RPM are good candidates.

All of the mods!!! More seriously, I lean heavily on the "utility" mods that fix some of the holes in the stock game's UI. Current faves: Kerbal Flight Data Kerbal Flight Indicators RCS Build Aid Editor Extensions Part Angle Display Kerbal Alarm Clock Enhanced Trim Plus aesthetic enhancers: Environmental Visual Enhancement Chatterer Kerbpaint Aviation Lights Raster Prop Monitor Also highly recommended: Fine Print Ferram's Aerospace Research Goodspeed (like TAC Fuel Balancer but better) I'd normally recommend Spaceplane Plus as well, but for that you may as well just wait a couple of weeks for .26 stock integration.

Seen this? Early days, but promising and developing fast. http://kerbalx.com

As everyone else said. The thing I found helpful was not to start by trying to dock big ships and stations together. Instead, build a pair of small, highly manoeuvrable ships that each have a docking port and well-balanced RCS. Launch the pair of them and practice rendezvous and docking with those until you get the hang of it before moving on to big stuff. And go slow. At the point of contact, you want your relative velocities to be below 0.3m/s. Get lined up, close and stationary, then use the RCS to slowly approach. Hold the nose on target while you use the RCS translation controls to keep the target and prograde markers aligned. If translation makes your nose swing around, your RCS isn't balanced well enough. Place the thrusters evenly around CoM.

Yeah. The "do it yourself" option is useful for mod-writer sorts. For the general audience, not so much. This one could really do with a user-friendly stockified version.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60933-Optional-MechJeb-Modules-for-FAR-NEAR-km_Gimbal-(Sept-7) Word.

Nope. Yup. It's not an incompatible-parts thing, it's a designed-for-radically-different-physics thing. A good stock plane is usually a really bad FAR plane and vice-versa.

Cool, glad that's sorted. Have you tried any of the smaller stuff yet (de Minimus, Velociraptor II, Benchmark, Goblin, etc)? Epinephrine is one of my best, but it's a bit oversized for a lot of things. Do the explanations for Ferram's analysis tools that I posted in the description of Dairyman make sense?