Fearless Son

The exact height they can operate at for an extended period before your plane begins to lose altitude will depend a lot on it's mass. As they approach their flight ceiling, air-breathing engines gradually drop thrust, even if you have plenty of intakes, and a more massive plane will begin to lose altitude more quickly than a less massive plane due to that decrease in thrust.

Ha! We are Kerbals! We live for the challenge of space exploration! Summon the Kraken, I say, so that we may prove our valor in overcoming it! Let's do this, Mooooooooooar Booooooooooooooster!

That is some mighty Electrosphere-looking aircraft you have there. Where did many of those parts come from? They don't look like stock (though they should be.)

Saw you post this on Twitter, wondered if they was a wheel beneath the front section or if it just skidded along on it's belly, pushed by the wheels at the rear.

"Look, ma', no arresting wire!"

Not even necessarily Kerbin-bound stuff. I would love, for example, to send a flying explorer drone to Eve. It lands, pops its heatshield and fairings, then gently unfolds its long, straight wings and spins up it's propeller. It occasionally lands to take samples and let it's solar panels recharge the batteries that power it's electrical engine.

Is that a modded part? Because I've been waiting for Squad to add a two-seater Mk1 inline cockpit for a while now.

"KRS A Significant Surfeit of Boosters" "KRS That's An Impossibility, You Can Never Have Too Many Boosters" "KRS Enough Boosters That I Can Touch Down On Eve In My First Stage"

I credit SimEarth for instilling me with an appropriate understanding of the word "biome", where it was a direct factor in the gameplay: (Does this mean I'm old? Oh Kod, it does mean I'm old...)

Are you trying to post the actual craft files themselves, just a series of pictures of them, or both? First of all, the forums themselves do not host any files, you need to find external sites to host those things and link them to the form. For craft files, KerbalX is popular, you would need to go there and make an account to upload your craft to. As for pictures, most image hosting sites will work. Imgur is pretty popular for that, and works pretty well with the forms. Again, you need to go there and create an account to upload photos you take. Other than that advice, welcome to the forums, @kerbalkrasher!

Yeah, "biomes" always felt like a misnomer or awkward translation because it implies the presence of life that is distinct to that region, and only Kerbin shows clear evidence of regionally-distinct life beyond an endolithic scale. "Ecotopes" would probably be more accurate term, since that implies a spatially homogeneous region of geography that can include both biotic and abiotic elements, so it would apply to Dres as equally as it would to Kerbin.

See, that seems like even more reason to use the Sentinel. Need to see those asteroids coming from far enough away that you can avoid them. (I'm being facetious, but I did once detect an asteroid on a collision course with Kerbin. To my disappointment, it didn't cause an extinction-level disaster when it impacted.)

Legitimately, yes. I can think of other uses for them too. Imagine a mk 1 passenger module that still has it's rear hatch accessible without causing a ton of drag. Heck, give it some variable geometry articulation and you can make it a small control surface or airbrake by changing how the edges of it are inclined. Would be good for non-gimbling boosters on ascent vehicles too.

I feel like KSP needs a kind of "aerodynamic shroud" attachment for sticking on the rear of engines that'll let the exhaust breath through while providing some straking that will break up the air and make less of an induced vortex behind attachable engines like this. Also, it might look good as an aesthetic feature on some rocket designs.

I sent a trio of communication relays into Duna orbit, along with a rover: The relays were released one at a time into a resonant orbit so they're all in line of sight from one another. Feels extremely satisfying. The rover was inspired by NASA-style Mars landers, and so came in with an aeroshell and heat shield structure that was honestly probably unnecessary on Duna, but I wanted to do it because... NASA. The aeroshell had some drogues and a standard chute, once it was low enough the head shield was jettisoned, the aeroshell detached, and the rover was lowered on a skycrane. In the picture above, the skycrane had already rocketed off after detaching the rover, and the aeroshell survived the impact with it's chute and is gently rolling by in the background. Unfortunately the rover flipped over when driving over a hill and exploded. FML

If you've been to the Mun and back, then you can go to Minmus. It's a lot more forgiving and requires less delta-V to land and return to Kerbin than the Mun, it just requires somewhat more delta-V (and a better understanding of orbital inclination) to get too it in the first place. That in mind, my advice is to use whatever you already have with the standard recommendation of "Moar Boosters!" It sounds flippant, but it genuinely is something that will help in this. You need to front-load your delta-V in this mission since you require so little by the time you get there. Adding more boosters to your launch stage will get it up in orbit with more delta-V to spare for matching Minmus' orbital inclination and a substantial portion of your transfer burn.

Awesome! Just be careful if you try to aerobreak. Eve is, uh, pretty unforgiving compared to Kerbin and Duna.

I'll use Sepratrons if the empty boosters are pretty massive to give it that little extra "oomph" the decoupler's can't quite manage, but most of the time I don't really need them if they've been properly placed and balanced. I also usually make sure to throttle down a bit before detachment, then go full throttle just as I activate the staging. Usually does enough to get the main body out from the middle of the boosters before they risk turning back on it.

Alex up there summarizing my opinion on docking mods, but don't let my opinion stop you. Sounds like you're struggling a lot with the RCS part of docking. One of my recommendations is to learn when to alternate between RCS and SAS. You almost never want them on at the same time while docking, and you might find one working against the other. But switching between the two can make things a lot less frustrating. For my part, I only use RCS when translating (moving backward and forward or laterally) while I only ever use reaction wheels to change orientation (direction of the craft.) That way, I don't waste monopropellant trying to turn or introduce "wobble" in the translation from oddly placed RCS thrusters messing up my translation with micro-pushes. The process is mostly one of translate, rotate, translate, rotate, translate, rotate, repeatedly until docked. It sounds like you have the rendezvous down if you can regularly get within fifty meters of your target, so getting lined up with it and moving in sounds like your big challenge. I assume you are right-clicking on the port you want to dock with and doing "Set As Target"? That gives you a more precise thing to aim for when moving in. You should also right-click the docking port on your own craft and select "Control From Here" so your navigation tools know that is the part you want to use as the "nose" of the craft. Further, if the other craft is controllable (i.e. it has a probe core or a pilot aboard) and has its own reaction wheels, then I find it's worthwhile to switch to that craft with ] or [, then set the first craft's docking port as it's target, control from the port you want to dock it to, and rotate it around until it's lined up with the incoming craft. Then switch back to that craft and bring it in. This is much, much easier than trying to translate one craft around another until it lines up with the desired docking port. Oh, and one last thing, once you have the craft lined up and close together, turn off the SAS. This is important. The docking clamps have some magnets in them that will line them up with each other if they're close together, but the force of those magnets are pretty weak and will be overwhelmed by an SAS system trying to keep the craft "stable" instead of letting the magnets pull it into alignment, and you may end up bouncing off.

I find that's actually one of the places where I am least likely to use auto-struts, but it has a lot more to do with my preference for very carefully manually strutting radial boosters. Mostly this is because auto-strut tends to attach to center-of-mass, and I very intentionally make sure my radial boosters have a pair of attachment points that are in axial alignment with respect to each other but are balanced across the center rather than right in the middle of it. Specifically, the separator attachment is near the front of the booster, while the strut is near the rear of the booster to stabilize it. That way when the boosters detach, they peel away starting from the top instead of from the middle, which is helped if they have any aerodynamic stabilizers near their rear. This, I find, helps avoid problems with the boosters knocking into each other or the lifting vehicle as they detach, causing a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly during ascent. Plus it looks really cool.

I can't say I've ever used those cargo bays, despite using the Mk. 2 Lander Can. Mostly I end up stripping the sides off of it entirely and just mounting what I need to mount on it's slimmer sides, then using a fairing to occlude drag issues on the way up.

I tried the tutorial, which was mostly trying to tell me how to stabilize a tumbling capsule in orbit without S.A.S. and with only RCS thrusters (this was before the game had reaction-wheels, when those parts only function was to let you turn S.A.S. on.) Gave up on that pretty quick. I think the first thing I tried on my own was launching an ion-driven communication satellite into LKO. The ion drive was so weak it couldn't circularize though, and my launch vehicle was both overbuilt and under powered.

I meant it has a benefit over pure RCS thrusters due to having an adjustable throttle. Makes for easier soft vacuum landings. There is one benefit it has over LFO engines though, and that is that it doesn't require any fuel flow connection. Now, that's not much of a benefit, considering how the game currently handles fuel, but it can be handy if you don't want to fuss about which nozzle is draining from which tank.

The Puff might (might!) be a little more useful in low gravity landing situations, due to it's throttlability. I sometimes use them for "land a new surface station on Minmus" contracts where I expect the trip to be on-way and I don't need a lot of delta-v. A small monopropellant tank and a Puff or two usually gets a smallish module down pretty easily.