Benaiah

When you dock 2 things together, then are then treated like one ship until you undock them. All then engines and chutes and such as thrown together in the staging. If anything needs rearranged, you can do that after they dock just like you would in the VAB. Hope that helps.

http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220221-mechjeb MechJeb has a docking autopilot, but I've never tried to use it. It has a lot of features, but you are free to only use the ones you want. Very soon though, the game is going to update, and you'll need to wait for the mod to update and redownload it. PS - Scott Manley helped me learn how to dock on youtube. Maybe he can help you.

Much speculation, such informative, much enlightened.

...you use the last part of your lifter to make the transfer burn.

I made a floating base on Laythe though it happened across more like a week. All stock, all legit. First picture is fully assembled, but I added extra pictures to show the process.

I keep closing steam and reopening it. It can't be happy with me.

Nonsense. You are only saying that because that's when they always release updates...

I decided to build a station around an asteroid orbiting Mun. It's a class C. The station is all stock. It's hard to get a good shot that shows off the whole station.

I run almost no mods and I have the same problem with the largest sized decoupler. Other sizes work fine.

I read up on grappling issues before I attempted to get an asteroid for my orbital asterMunbaseroid and found much talk about speed and angle. In my experience, however, speed is irrelevant and angle is everything. I think speed can compensate for a bad angle on smaller crafts but then introduces some other problems. Just do your best to make sure the claw is lined up with the angle of the surface of the asteroid (all the "fingers" touch at the same time) rather than pointing directly at the target marker on your navball - this is what screwed me up at first. If that doesn't do it, you've most likely got a mod related bug.

If the mod community has not done it yet (I can't find one), it's either not as important as you are making it seem (it's not) or it's harder than you are making it seem. Maybe both? You are not "all" the experienced players. We are not all mad, bro. It's been explained by experienced players why 50 is as good as 0 or better. More like there are some experienced whiners who are whining about no big deal. I don't think you understand the word "pander." You meant "cater" but tried to pick a synonym that had a negative connotation. You failed. Also, making the game more accessible is not a bad thing. Double fail. Also... You mean a noob can learn to use the throttle controls...but you can't? I'm assuming you had to adjust the throttle controls every time when they were defaulted to 0, right? Did you just only ever use solid fuel boosters? The throttle doesn't affect you then, anyways...

Answer to the OP: It would have to be a mod, and after looking for you, I did not find one. Sorry. Commentary on comments: It's actually kinda strange. Almost none of my rockets require 100% thrust to take off, and it would be inefficient to do so (such amaze). Also, none of my rockets can lift off at 0% throttle, which is crazy (much physics). This is mind blowing, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction: 50% is real nice, and if I need 60 or so, I'm almost there already. People plan missions in their head while at work, spend hours designing complex rockets and planes, assemble them in orbit through tedious but rewarding rendezvous and docking, and struggle hard against having to waste time changing a throttle setting at launch. I am playing a kerbal sized violin for you while I enjoy the throttle setting change because it saves me .2 seconds at EACH launch.

I was messaging my friend on steam, and he was like, "Awww crap. I forgot to pause before hitting shift-tab...now Jeb is stranded on Mun. That's OK. Now I get to plan a rescue mission." I was like, "what game are you playing?"

I'm seeing a trend...Jeb is actually in a long-term module on Minmus (or Ike, I can't remember) because, though I picked someone else for the mission, this game loves to reset your pilot selections.

I came in here expecting to laugh knowingly at the posts and feel good about how far I've come in 600 hours of play. But then again I did just forget to put chutes on that one rocket and had to do a powered landing with all the extra fuel that I should not have brought. You all make me feel like a noob again.

No...I actually spent a lot of time on it before I realized that. So sad. I did a lot of reading about Eve and other people's Eve missions and somehow missed that one important fact.

Hey, y'all. I'm on here a lot gathering ideas, learning from everyone's questions, and riding the hypetrain to the next update, and I've gotten to the point where I actually want to post stuff so it only seemed polite to introduce myself. My name is Benaiah, and I love KSP. Steam claims that I love KSP for 622 hours, but I'm sure some of that is AFK time. I was introduced to the game by a friend, but I have to admit, however, that I would never have been able to get past the learning curve without Scott Manley. I've always being interested in sciencey things (and also inventing words), and I've really enjoyed learning about things like orbital mechanics. At this point, I haven't gotten bored with all stock parts, but I do roll with engineer. I initially got it to track D/V while building a ship to return from Eve. Unfortunately, it was not able to compensate for my lack of smartness as you will see below. Accomplishments: I've been to Mun, Minmus, Duna, Gilly, and Laythe. I've also landed on Eve and wasted many hours trying to build a return vessel that utilizes jet engines because I am awesome. I've put off going back to Eve to conquer it because of the shame that shade of purple now induces. I can make an SSTO space plane, but not one good enough to take anything up with it. I made a space plane that once I brought to Laythe, flew down to the surface, landed near and picked up Bob (whom I had previously, intentionally stranded), and flew back to orbit to dock with a return ship. I've also managed to bring a plane in from orbit and land on the runway. Obviously, those things do not account for all of my time played. I waste a lot of time in sandbox building themed ships from various sci-fi universes that can be brought to orbit and actually function. I've also spent time building military style ships and testing them on my star destroyer. Sins: I have put off going to most other planets and moons because phase angles are so annoying to me. I've never killed a kerbal because I abuse the quickload and whatnot. Once, I actually went in to the game files to "resurrect" Jebediah on my saved game. I feel like this goes against the way the game was meant to be played, but I can't help myself. I am horribly inefficient with ship design, particularly the lifter. My ships are always just way too big with way more fuel than necessary. I definitely suffer from moarboosters syndrome. Hopefully this was not too long. Now I will attempt to post my favorite pictures:

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that, although you get an advance of funds for contracts, there is actually a failure penalty that is more than the advance. If you take a bunch of contracts for the advances and then fail them, you are seriously going to be in the hole.