Bonafire

During a routine "recruit more test pilots from LKO" mission, I stopped to consider the circumstances, and wondered, what the Kraken happened here? Did this guy just strap one too many boosters to his truck?

And here's the next one: tl;dr: That last dock (4 ports on 2 planes) was seriously difficult. Don't try at home unless you have unlimited patience.

Looks like my current career is going to be all about building seriously over-budget extensible orbital stations. Here's the first one. In theory, infinitely extensible structure, part count notwithstanding. Assembled in Mun orbit (lifter pics as "proof"). I'll add pics to the album as the station grows. Part mods: Stockalike station parts, USI MKS/OKS

I was a bit unsure whether this is a station or a base. I decided it's a station since it's in freefall. Parts from Stockalike Station Parts and Near Future packs.

When your at first clever looking designs become asymmetrically balanced through staging and/or propellant consumption. When you think that covering about 15km on Mun's surface to get to all four surface sample sites, in a tiny rover, will be "a fun trip". When you timewarp through your supposed aerobrake and end up orbiting Kerbol again. Guilty of all.

Oh my god, it's full of probes! I do hope I get to take them out in the planned order. I had to change the packing arrangement after taking the VAB screenshots, bonus points for spotting the two problems (good thing I tested unloading).

I haven't changed any existing parts, but I needed a bigger LV-N to reduce part count, so I made an 2.5m upscaled version that's equivalent of 4 1.25m ones in all aspects (except heat production, my upscaled version can melt itself running full power for extended time). Then, for good measure, I proceeded to make a 3.75m version...

Here's all the files for the symmetry attachment issue + fix: unwelded .craft welded .cfg symmetry fixed .cfg I'll also add the other part I had to modify (node order change), in case you want to have a look or it helps someone else with similar issues: unwelded .craft welded .cfg attachment fixed .cfg, now correctly attaches from narrow end of Mk2 adapter This is where I found some documentation on stackSymmetry and attachRules: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CFG_File_Documentation#Attachment_rules Future development suggestions based on these: Make the stackSymmetry configurable in the welding UI. Even more awesome if it's possible to detect automatically Allow to select the primary attachment node in the welding UI. Allow to change some of the attachRules in the welding UI. Display a warning when trying to weld something that is known not to work.

Looks like I found another limitation. I tried to weld a quad LV-N assembly from a 2.5m-to-quad-1.25m adapter and, well, four LV-Ns. The result was strange, and not actually usable as an engine. To find out whether this is possible at all, I took the weld result .cfg and hacked at it, and actually managed to produced a working part, except for one thing: the fairings won't come off, no matter what I do, at most I could get rid of fairing on one of the engines. Other than that, I managed to weld some parts, including one quite similar to the tug core posted by WuphonsReach above. It seems that more complicated parts require some .cfg tweaking on the attachment nodes to get them right. On the tug core, I had to add stackSymmetry = 3 to get the quad symmetry working right. On other part, I had to change the order of the node_stack* properties to get the part to attach correctly (I was able to attach it to top and bottom nodes, but not the side node I needed, it would snap but wouldn't connect). It seems that building the part to be welded from scratch in a clean VAB produces much more predictable results than cutting of parts from complete design and welding that. Anyway, with this tool I might finally be able to fly my creations without turning the game into a slideshow, keep up the good work!