Valiant Corvus

It makes very little sense. Progression wise it's all over the place in terms of actually giving you a gradual progression in terms of parts as you reach benchmarks (From ground to space, from space to orbit, from orbit to moon, from moon to beyond). I don't understand why unmanned tech is so far down the tree when that's usually the starting point of space exploration.

Satellites are pretty ridiculous in this game since you can use them to finish damn near every contract, especially if you use an ION thruster. If you can manage to make the satellite light enough, you can actually use that to land on atmosphere-less planets/moons. I've been able to land on almost every planet in the game (The exceptions being Tylo and Moho because of their high gravity) with an ION powered satellite and a parachute for planets/moons with an atmosphere. Basically my "Go anywhere do anything design", which costs almost 70k with the lifter and weighs less than a ton on the final stage. It has 7-8k dV iirc and is light enough that the parachute will actually slow it down enough to do a no power landing on Duna. Only problem is getting to the ION engine in the tech tree, though that's a simple endeavor by just doing a bunch of Minmus missions since they're stupidly easy and give lots of funds/science.

I play KSP because it makes me feel smarter than I actually am. And I like setting goals for myself and actually having to spend time to sit down and think out a gameplan rather than charging in blind.

Actually I found it pretty easy. Do a few missions, get far enough to where you can reliably get a rocket to minmus, raise enough funds for upgrades and marketting campaigns, then dump 100% of your funds into Science (I can't remember the name of that campaign) Within a few missions to Minmus you'll have your tech tree maxed out. The only thing that's slightly annoying is accumulating funds, since it's just a grind really.

Worked like a charm, the rockets now separate properly.Thanks a bunch.

So I needed a heavy-ish lander for Minmus to do some jump hopping from landing sight to landing sight for some contracts, and I had a problem with parts colliding with each other when trying to get into orbit. So my line of thinking was then "Okay, so how about sepratrons to push the parts away from each other?". I added them in, put the staging in the right order, and did about 4-5 missions successfully before calling it a day. The next day I load up the rocket and try to do some missions, but now the sepratrons on the 2nd stage just fly off without doing anything and the rocket collides with itself. The first stage fires fine and separates fine. However, the 2nd stage ones just fly right off and the rocket collides with itself. What baffles me is that it wasn't doing this the other day. Help?