mrclucks

The fins you have seem a bit large for your rocket, have you tried using smaller ones for some minor savings? Based on what you said about aerodynamics, the draggynes of your flat top isn't enough to flip you. Another thought, do you need the twin boar engine? You might be able to just use a mainsail with no fuel tank. Add a decoupler to the bottom of your poodle and the mainsail underneath that and use fuel lines to direct the fuel into the mainsail. You could probably also save dv by not even stopping to circulize in lko and just go straight up to the mun, but that would require some good positioning of the mun before you did that. You would only need like 2k dv to get out of the atmosphere and then be able to use your high ISP poodle for space

I've only seen it once since 1.0 and that was in 1.0.4 I make a habit of screenshotting every time I see the castle, which was alot in .90(multiple times a week) I am curious tho, is there somewhere on the mun where there is a sand castle? I'd love to recreate that scene

Fuel lines, cuz it lets me add some interesting stages and also acts like a strut. Silly fuel lines, you're not made of metal!

Now that you've invaded eve, what are you going to do next?

Your craft looks like its going to land and return from the mun or minmus. My approach would be the second smallest 1.25 m lfo tank with the terrier, with some slightly longer tanks on a decoupler attached to that center tank. Outer tanks should be in 3 or 4 times symmetry, have nose cones at the top, be feeding into the inner tank to take advantage of onion staging, and should have terrier engines which should be a bit lower than the middle terrier so you can use them as stable landing legs. Using that design should give you plenty of dv to circulize your orbit around the mun or minmus, de orbit and land, take off again and return to kerbin. You could probably use it to make some or all of the burn required to get an encounter with that planetary body, but keep in mind that you'll probably want to keep the outer tanks at least untill you take off and start returning to kerbin. ascent, stage would either be A. a couple long 1.25 tanks with a 45 or 30 engine and a couple of srbs, or B. an adapter to go from 1.25 to 2.5, big orange tank and a skipper engine. Regardless of how you build you must remember that you rarely need more than 2 points to connect to make something stable(fuel lines act as struts FYI) and add fins to the bottom of your rocket to help orient you rocket during ascent Oh and use Kerbal Engineer, its a lifesaver and makes you much more informed

When playing career I tend to do the needful mission at a time within the kerbin system and get to day 100ish before I go about interplanetary and start warping like crazy(even with many other mission going). Last I checked I was around year 53

I've never had a contract that would expire in a few weeks(besides ones I had accepted years ago). Are you sure it's not the time it'd expire from your list? Still you could probably do the mission in a hurry. Strap a butt load of fuel with a few lv-ns to get +10km/s dv and make some aggressive burns Side note: I've never seen that sort of mission, even with mods. What mods are you using

Seconded You can go launch to eloo, wait for a window for moho, miss and orbit a few times, finally capture and land, take off, wait for a window back, miss yet again, and you'd probably still only be halfway to eloo

Got a minmus, duna, ike fly by mission, set up a drone with minimal science but with an antenna to complete that for cheep. Launched a mogo flyby mission, but I had to wait 3years for kerbin positioning so I wouldnt come zooming in at many many km/s, but luckily I had a few hundred dv to get into a capture and slightly degrading orbit. Window for eve opened up so I sent the science probe I had to go investigate it and Gilly. I also had suicidal tourists wanting to go through dunas atmosphere and sub orbital flight to the sun so I made a craft just for them and added a docking port just in case I wanted to rescue them later. Was a few hours from launching them towards duna when I realize I hadn't deployed the solar panels and they already had no electricity. Being as I didn't want to risk any of my own kerbals I was forced to make a probe to go off and open the solar panels using it, which is pretty hard when you only have 50k to spare and the tourists are on a highly elliptical orbit not to mention I haven't unlocked docking for MJ and haven't docked manually myself. And after half an hour of carefully planning a rendevouz and 20 minutes of trying to dock, I have opened the panels. This is probably the most satisfying feeling I've had from this game

I think you have a problem..

Use sandbox and try to build a small ssto, then a medium sized one. Then build a medium sized one that can haul up cargo. Do it again for a large ssto. That should take at least 100hours and is very satisfying which each successful step you make

Was about a week ago, but I was mid-early tech tree(no hitchhiker capsule) and had 16 tourists wanting to land on the mun and/or minmus. So I constructed a strange rocket with mk1 command pods facing all kinds of directions, drained all monoprop and disabled reaction wheels in all but the root command pod. After adding parachutes and airbrakes I tested to make sure it had enough parachutes (it did) and then made the different stages of the rocket and launched it, which was very difficult and nervracking when you're putting your last 200k of funds into a rocket. Fast forward to reentry on kerbin, I had about 200m/s dv left, so I decided to slow down at periapsis most of the way, even tho I had autosaved and tried it again without slowing down which worked fine. So I went from 200k to almost 3mil with one rocket that took around 2 kerbin weeks, and I also got more than a thousand science (unsure of the exact amount) with an unorthodox rocket.

Re entry is harder now. There is also altitudes where if you're going certain speed (interplanetary speeds) then instead of heating up very rapidly, you'll just explode as if you hit a brick wall. I believe ablator is much more important now. In 1.0.3 it was said that you could return from the mun and even minmus without an ablator shield, but in .4 you need a shield even from the mun. Personally I've always used ablator since reentry hearing became stock, but my ablator is being used alot more in .4 than in .2. .I do miss .2 in that I could return a probe from jool and even with a periapsis of 10 km, it didn't completely explode as long as I had ablator and was pointing it prograde

You're either backwards, or your satellite needed something equipped that you forgot to add in the VAB. If you really do meet everything then I suggest you time warp and go out very quickly so your satellite with 'stabilize' and after a few seconds the contract for will complete

Whenever I land my aircraft I always start bleeding off speed at least 1km away so I'm barely maintaining levelish flight even with a bit of throttle. Then once I go in for the kill/landing, I throttle down to 0 and try to touchdown with an angle of attack 5-15 degrees up which should have you drastically losing speed safely. I've never had an aeroplanes/ssto design that wasn't able to land and stop using this design(except for the ones that spun out of control after the first minute)

I agree that sas should have an option for finer control and can be cheaty at times, however for everyone saying we should get rid or severly nerf it I bite my thumb at you. If you don't like the use of a feature in ksp, don't use it. It's great that you want to play more realistic but there are people that are just starting out and without it they would rage quit after a few minutes and flame anything about ksp

Rotate your craft so the connecting mode is on the bottom and then hold alt when attaching so the nodes connect. If you have trouble with that then build your satellite with decoupler/seperator included, but not on a trip connector so you can use symmetry to make your sat. Once it's built, take off your decoupler/separator which should have your satellite with it, put a trip coupler in place and add your sat to the decoupler. Xeon engines need Xeon tanks to run, that is what chaia was saying

It may be due to the angle your craft was hitting the atmosphere causing a lift effect Which would be a radial/antiradial (I'm not quite sure which) effect. Are you activly using the craft? Are you using physics warp?

Try doing all four readings with one probe, that way you can save from building the others and just add the baramoter and spectrometer while focusing on adding more dv so you can easily get into orbits to get your readings

I recently started a career giving myself 500k at start, a thousand or so science, and increased rewards by 10% and decreasing penalties by 10%. The science and money boost is to skip most of the "can't quite get to orbit yet" stage without just completely dominating the tech tree(let's face it, after doing a career many times, there's no fun grinding just to get into space), and the penalty reduction and rewards boost is to make it less frustrating and more freeplay-ish without taking away the challenge. All other elements are at 100% to simulate a normal career

I try to get my mission control to third tier asap so I can accept all non ridiculous contracts as soon as I can. Keep denying the stupid ones like test SRB in orbit till you get the satellite contracts, test part at launchsite, and tourists. Once I can either no longer accept anymore contracts or no good ones pop up I'll go to my VAB and see all the ones I can do in one shot. There's been multiple occasions where I launched a rocket carrying a bazillion tourists so I can go to the mun and minmus (and cross off flyby, orbit and suborbital) with almost no funds left. Sure if I failed then I would had to start a new game, but the payout can get you from 500k to a few million, and that's before I've even recovered my craft. It's also a great training mission for any new Kerbal. .On that note, does anyone know if tourists give you more money if you level them up more? Would be totally sweet if they double their initial payout once they get to level five

I had a similar design and weight reach over 100km by going at 45 degrees up from the start. Get smaller wings for the back and maybe some control surfaces in from for pitch if you need them

Try less AoA with your twr being 1.05. Unless your time to apoapsis starts falling fast, you'll be increasing your orbital speed more and your apoapsis height will increase at a lower rate, but then your orbital insertion burn won't be as great. If everything is in the perfect balance you'll be able to keep prograde after the initial kick untill just about apoapsis where you hold your heading to circulize. I hope this isn't confusing and makes sense

Like it has been said, back up your saves after you have something big or significant. In my non os drive I have a folder for ksp with all the stock versions, all mods I downloaded separated by version, and all saves(which I should really seperate by version and mods they rely on). I also back it up every so often to my external hard drive so I can always resume whatever I have been playing. It's precautions like this that only takes ten or so minutes to go back to, rather than an hour for having to rebuild and relaunch everything. You can always just back up your saves to your desktop since saves are just a few megabytes

TL;DR: give me ideas for core space station stock, or with remote tech and/or interstellar. Plz & TY Anyone have any ideas how to get a good core going on for a space station? Last time I tried multiple piece space stations was in .90 with remote tech and interstellar installed. Needless to say my core stage was a large generator with power distribution, an array of antennas able to communicate with omni capability up to the mun and point to point up to eloo, Plus RCS and a command station for at least 6kerbals(for control of probes unable to communicate with KSC). That core stage alone was usually in the 175-200 part count limit alone, without any fuel depot connected. I'm now playing ksp .04 and haven't installed remote tech and haven't used much of interstellar yet. If anyone can give me lowish part counts for space stations with or without one or both the mods, it'd be greatly appreciated