JAFO

And this is why you should always edit a COPY of the savefile, and not the original.. or at least make a backup copy first. It would probably help if the "Instructions, Hints, FAQ" section of the OP made this clear. (Not that anyone ever reads instructions!)

Ahh.. well.. better late than never. If you bought KSP direct from the store, it's pretty simple to make as many installs as you like. If you bought on Steam, the trick is to leave your Steam install as stock, and copy/paste the entire KSP folder to another location on your hard drive, and mod/run the game from there. Repeat as many times as you like. This has the added benefit of Steam updates not breaking ongoing games due to mod incompatibilities. The only thing you lose out on is having Steam track your play hours.

By which I hope you mean 'making another fresh install alongside my existing install(s)' and not 'wiping out my old install'. You do realise, I hope, that KSP allows you to have as many individually customised installs of the game as you like?

I find it generally takes 5-6 launches to get GT 'dialed-in', and some craft (rarely) it just can't seem to get right. So if necessary, I manually tweak settings until I find what works best. If you can upload the craft file (ideally to KerbalX which will deal with any modded parts properly) and post a link, some of us could check your results and see if we can verify them.

As I asked in the edit to my post above, are you using GT correctly? Are you doing multiple sequential launches of the same craft, to get GT to optimise its settings as much as possible, or just going with the first couple of launches of a new design?

You absolutely will get different (almost certainly worse) results with MJ's ascent tool, because MJ does not fly optimal ascents, just "good enough" ones. And yes, craft design and the altitude at which you pop off the fairings will make a difference (I find higher is better - I generally go with 62-65km). But with the right design, GT is capable of excellent results. For instance, the usual dV quoted to reach 80x80 orbit of Kerbin is 3200. Using GT (and MJ just to circularise), I have achieved it using just 2800 dV. Edit: Just to be sure, you ARE going through the entire multiple-launch iterative process with GT to optimise settings as much as possible, yes? Because the first few GT launches of a craft will always be far from optimal, in terms of dV.

Ain't none of us "like" it.. it sucks, and is always a PITA. But it's better than the alternatives.

I don't see any reason to forbid that.. so far as I'm concerned (and as the mod page itself states), it's merely a bug-fix.

First pic of your science jet, for a moment I was wondering how on earth you'd gotten two Kerbals into a Mk-I cockpit.. then realised the tail of the plane was made from a second Mk-I cockpit! Clever idea.. don't recall seeing anyone do that before.

Ok.. now this is weird. In the notification email I got, the images are visible. But now I visit the forum, they're not.. all I see is the filename.

Well, at least now you can all start getting more creative with your craft designs..

So far as I'm aware, the drag system ignores nodes altogether.. they're irrelevant to what the drag system does. All they are is a means of attaching parts to each other.

Where has this been all my life? Thank you!

Impressive.. very nice work!

Ouch! Yeah.. I bet you were disappointed to learn he couldn't take a soil sample either.. on the bright side, at least you got an EVA report from the surface, I suppose.. (Interesting looking craft, btw!)

Odd.. They weren't mounted on the container walls, on the small sections between the pairs of doors, by any chance? Ahhh.. nevermind.. I see they exploded on landing.. for some reason I got the impression it was re-entry heating. Nice job so far, btw! Now the real fun begins!

I was about to make the same suggestion.

And if you want the Wiki data in a more practical format, check out my printable stock science checklists (see my sig for the link). They're still current for 1.5 - 1.6, to the best of my knowledge. You can see at a glance what science can and can't be done for any body and biome.

Nice job, and congratulations, @Challyss! One thing I'm curious about.. the way the photo album finishes, it gives the impression that the Minmus mission was a one-way trip. Is that the case, or did Jeb get to return home?

Yes, that's true about having to restart the game.. If loading times are becoming that much of an issue for you, have you considered moving the game to an SSD? That's what I did, and it improved loading times tremendously.

Have you tried UbioZur's Part Welder? It's not perfect, and has some limitations, but it can help a lot with reducing part counts.

For that matter, a link to a copy of the .craft file could be helpful, too...

Ok.. first time I'd heard of that.. so I had to do a quick read of the wiki page for it.. Interesting.. looks complex enough with all those Pitch Program and other parameters, etc, that I think I'm finally starting to understand why so many (apparently) RSS noobs come here, hoping for something simpler. Heck no.. I use MJ myself, mostly for GT circularisations and sometimes Munar landings (I suck at landing twitchy/tippy landers), and I justify it using exactly the same argument. My comment was made before I realised this was a more realistically designed implementation of ascent guidance. I was imagining people who are sticklers for imitating real-life being forced to compensate for "stock MJ's" launch guidance inefficiencies. Thanks, but I already found it..

Seriously? The go-to solution for all those reality-obsessed players is, "use MJ to get to orbit" and "overbuild your 1st/2nd stages to compensate for MJ's clunky inefficient version of a gravity turn"??? Ok.. that's seriously funny to picture. So is that a one-shot thing too, or is it something that is repeatable enough that GT might be able to (albeit badly, perhaps) try and work with?

Somehow I didn't notice that @Craze was using RSS, or else I'd have informed them that GT isn't designed to work with RSS, and won't work with it. So.. Having never used RSS myself, and considering all the requests we regularly get about using GT on RSS, what exactly IS the normal procedure in RSS for nailing a desired orbital altitude and circularising? (guessing here, but what I'm picturing is something along the lines of what real launches do.. which is to say, a combination of continuous-burn-to-orbit, and careful attitude/AoA control, along with a caca-ton of math to work out the correct launch profile in advance.) Because it sounds to me like someone would have to develop a custom gravity-turn program specifically for RSS. Except that clearly, with some you can, and others you can't. For instance, the shuttles used to throttle down for passing Max-Q, then throttled up again, and SpaceX merlin engines do the same thing. Granted, the shuttles also had SRBs which were designed for a period of lower lower thrust burning around Max-Q, but still, the main orbiter engines were capable of being throttled. In Apollo, the first and second stage flight profiles were designed so that the centre engines would shut off early, as a way of "throttling back" at Max-Q (stage one) and so that g-forces would not become excessively high for the crew (stage two). Is RSS versatile enough to permit such things, or is it just a clumsy "no throttles allowed" blanket ban?