LionsPhil

I love the one with it neatly on the tower, snapped apart.

Yep. Watch your speed indicator, not the craft. Find the thottle value where you can hold it constant, and make tiny adjustments from that. When you're almost down, looking at the rocket can help know when you're going to hit by seeing it approach its shadow.

I have found the most glorious quirk with the RCS modules. When they're snapped free (or, presumably, detached in a controlled manner, should such a thing ever happen with Kerbal rockets), they carry on applying the last force you had set, including SAS forces. Given they're invulnerable, scattering some from orbit will probably leave them rolling around the terrain below you. Here's one from an experimental big-wheel (1X3 adapter shrouds) ground vehicle enthusiastically tumbling its way back to the vehicle assembly building after the project experienced deferred success.

Three-men-in-a-tin-can is the most exciting part of the space program. ;D But, yeah. Steering via looking at the actual rocket is basically useless. I guess if you're trying to make a jet plane you might get away with it with the camera in chase mode.

...and after all the work porting and licensing for Xbox, you may find that 'rocketry simulation playset' isn't really a very sofa-and-beer game.

I tend to use them how I believe they're used in real life: SRBs to assist (sometimes for pure first stage) take-off, and liquid toward the end. Obviously you want something you can throttle back when you begin to escape the clutches of the atmosphere and want to go somewhere other than 'straight up, as fast as possible'.

Purple is the direction of the space centre. It looks like showing the tutorial is controlled by some lines at the top of the configuration file in the game's directory, which you can open in a text editor like Notepad.

For some reason IBM like mucking about with normal scrolling (or middle mouse) events. If you go to your UltraNav settings and poke about a bit with toggling smooth/non-smooth scrolling you may find it starts working. But, yeah, more generally a PgUp/PgDn bind for panning the workshop view would be useful.

As a workaround, if you're on Windows 7, you can click the volume control in the notification area, hit 'Mixer', then drag the slider for KSP down below your other programs.

This is my best with stock engines and scaled to the tower: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/prb/junk/spess/Thor%202%20Quad%20Mk3.craft Uses the 3rd party 1-to-4 and escape booster parts, and is currently 15,000,000M out doing 1.3KM/s because I am bad at plotting orbital trajectories. It'll go straight up at full throttle with SAS on to 100KM and still give you a half-full-tank quad-liquid stage and a full single-liquid orbiter with an escape thruster as a last resort. (Or to 10KM with a two-tank quad.) It's predecessor is interesting in that it's such a tempramental little bugger---it works pretty beautifully so long as you do all the right things at the right time, otherwise it fails explosively: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/prb/junk/spess/Thor%20Duo%20XL%20Mk2.craft User Manual: - Turn on SAS and don't turn it off until the ship is down to the last two liquid stages unless you like large explosions. - Time the launch for when the top of the ship is not wobbling toward the launch tower. - Take off at default throttle only. If you raise it, it'll rip itself apart. If you lower it, it'll unsteadily topple into the launch tower. - Throttle up gently to full once clear of the tower, else the solid engines will run dry too far in advance of the liquids and it'll falter badly during the climb. - Never ignite a stage before the previous one is clear. There's enough debris ejected that the explosions will cook off the fuel in the stages still attached. This is a very pretty chain reaction but somewhat outpaces the rate at which you can skip ahead to ejecting the command capsule. - The capsule separation stage has an escape thruster. Its function is to drive the pilots violently into the ground when the rocket turns upside-down. If you run out of fuel in space it is also your last-ditch hope for a de-orbit burn. - If you modify anything, you need to move the chute back up the stage list to the top, else it fires too early and is destroyed by the escape thruster. Follow these simple guidlines and you too can have many happy hours of drifting helplessly through the featureless cosmos in the remains of your Thor Duo XL Mk2.