AbacusWizard

I highly recommend Action Group Manager and I'd love to see something like it in stock.

Easy workaround: set debris to visible and everything else to invisible. Select all the debris you want and recover it, then make everything else visible again.

You might also enjoy setting up some orbital infrastructure close to home--I usually build space stations at Mun, at Minmus, and Low Kerbin Orbit, plus small atomic-powered crew transport skiffs to travel between them and a fuel refinery on Minmus before I even start going interplanetary.

"Any crash you can walk away from counts as a landing." (McQuack's Maxim)

Not necessarily--I generally keep mine at T2 because I don't want my contracts list to get cluttered up with a bunch of asteroid stuff before I'm ready to actually go after asteroids.

"Toggle all solar panels," "run all reusable science experiments," and "toggle all air intakes" as default specific action groups would be magnificent. I almost always devote custom action groups to these anyway, so at the very least it would save me a lot of clicking in the VAB/SPH.

Also I tried making a rocket car once. Here's Jeb riding on it, because Jeb is craaazy. And here's Jeb on the ejection seat with parachutes, because craaazy doesn't have to mean death-wish.

Can I interest you in my other two favorite games, NetHack and Dwarf Fortress?

I think Career Mode has a lot of potential as a learning experience--the tech tree offers a gradual introduction to new parts instead of overwhelming a newbie with everything at once, and the contract system provides inspiration for interesting challenges. The main problems I have with it as it currently stands involve the building upgrades. I can't get much done with only 30 parts (especially if I only have tiny fuel tanks to start with), lack of EVA makes science difficult, and most importantly control groups ought to be available from the very start. (Their absence doesn't make the game more challenging; it just makes the interface annoying.) And while I'm dreaming, I'd like large docking ports to be available earlier.

After applying a quickfix to jury-rig my version of KSP to 64-bit, I installed EVE for the first time and it is BEAUTIFUL. Clouds everywhere. I've also been using Clamshell Fairings ever since I first discovered it because confetti in space looks silly.

Wow! I am impressed! Now land it on the Mun.

I've been wanting a sortable Tracking Station for quite a while--and this would be one of the most useful ways to sort it. I'd also love to be able to sort by "next to experience a SoI change." As it is, I've been prefixing asterisks (and sometimes suffixing destination information) to the name of any ship with a maneuver coming up (for instance Wayfarer Probe becomes ***Wayfarer Probe (to Duna) ) so that I can at least easily pick out anything that may need attention in the near future. Sortable lists would make that so much easier.

"Mission Control, this is Jeb; am I cleared to land? Over." "Uh, negatory, Jeb; there is some, uh, debris on the runway. Advise staying in holding pattern for, uh, a while. Over."

SPACE DISCO Someday I'm going to make another one with an attached dance floor.

Oooh, that's a very good point! I'll have to make use of that when I finally get around to trying RemoteTech.

This is the number one feature I demand. I don't care about achievements one way or another, but if I get a pop-up window congratulating me on my game progress every time I do something, it shatters any sense of immersion that I've gained. If achievements are introduced, the first thing I do upon downloading every new version past that will be to turn them off; if that is not an option, I'll find a mod that does so.

Three. Tripods are better (just ask any Martian).

I tried the procedure last night. I haven't had enough time yet to report anything for certain other than "the game still runs," but I think I observed a smoother transition when I got within draw distance of a space station. (Usually when I pass the 2.3 km mark on an approach towards a complicated craft, the game stops for a second or two before continuing--this time, as far as I can tell, it didn't. Progress!) I'll try installing a bunch of pretty visual mods and see what happens.

I've done this with the winches and harpoons from KAS before and it works quite well, both for keeping the lander on the ground in low gravity and stabilizing unwieldy tall structures. *thunk* *thunk* *thunk* *thunk* Instant guy wires!

We already have an achievement system; it's called

Colonizing Laythe with a surface outpost, a dockable rover, an orbital habitat and fuel depot, and a spaceplane that could go back and forth between them. All stock; all honestly launched. (Not that the spaceplane would work at all with modern aerodynamics--but it worked very well back in the day.)

Urg, that reminds me of one time when I was viewing all my science records from a trip to, I don't know, Duna or something, and clicked the "keep" button over and over and over again to close the window... and only noticed when the ship's antennas all started opening that I had been clicking the blue button instead of the green button. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I generally build a launcher specifically around each payload (though almost always to the same general pattern, so it's probably high time I start just saving the common trends as subassemblies)... but I do like to set things up so that once I'm in orbit I'm using existing infrastructure as much as possible. As a general rule I put Orbital Command Stations (lab, crew quarters, fuel storage, two- or three-person lander) around Mun and Minmus, one each, as soon as I have docking ports and enough science experiment tech to make it worthwhile, plus a large fuel depot and a "Starbase Alpha" (hotel, science clearinghouse, and docking hub) in LKO--and a few small nuklear-powered tugs and skiffs to move cargo and crew from one to the other. Once it's all in place, the only things I have to launch on a regular basis are standardized rockets or spaceplanes (depending on my mood) to move crew up to Starbase Alpha and back down to the Space Center. (Extrakerbestrial spacecraft are special cases to be dealt with on an individual basis--small individual probes for uncrewed one-way-trips; huge interplanetary motherships for taking crew and lander to where no kerb has gone before.)

The only mods I use all the time are Kerbal Inventory System / Kerbal Attachment System (KIS/KAS). They actually give kerbalnauts interesting stuff to do on EVA, the modifiable struts and fuel hoses make certain tasks much more practical, and the ability to repair, modify, and even construct ships while in orbit is revolutionary. I also generally install Clamshell Fairings, because the stock confetti fairings seem silly, but that's just a visual preference. Waypoint Manager is extremely useful if you're doing a lot of go-here-and-do-science contracts; not so useful otherwise. Beyond that, I'd say check out the entire Umbra Space Industries catalog; everything RoverDude makes is solid gold. http://bobpalmer.github.io/UmbraSpaceIndustries/

I've been using a two-seat harpoon-gun-armed interceptor (using KAS; it could probably be done in stock with the Klaw instead) called the H-Wing to deal with the dozens of debris parts from rescue missions (and the occasional booster stage that doesn't get jettisoned before going to orbit). I rendezvous with the unwanted component, latch onto it with the harpoon, tow it into a suborbital trajectory, detach, turn around, and maneuver the H-Wing back onto a stable orbit, then pick its next target. Works remarkably well, and I've developed quite a knack for fuel-efficient rendezvous planning. I've recently decided, though, that BIG components--like labs and crew quarters--should be left up in orbit for possible future use (KIS means I can build them into larger constructions), on the grounds that getting something heavy up into orbit is so expensive that it'd be a shame to throw it back down for no reason.