Terwin

The engine I use the most is the Nerva. Once your craft is lofted into space, you want the best available range. Dawn can give you a long range, but Nerva coupled with ISRU gives unlimited total range with the longest possible hops between refueling. While large ships can have part-count problems due to the relatively small thrust, Tweakscale addresses this meta-issue by letting you combine X nerva into one part, where X is between ~0.25(0.625m) and ~16(3.5m).

Which engines do I not use? Any engine smaller than 1.25m, and the Dawn Ion engine. I tend not to find a lot of use for the small engines(perhaps because I tend to haul around too much junk. I don't think I have ever even attempted to bring back just a pod+chutes, I always use my engine as a heat-shield). The ion engine I don't use because it has capped range. The nerva I can always refuel with ISRU, but the dawn can only be refueled from Kerbin.

I can't say I would mind the lightbulb becoming stock, but SQUAD has shown a preference for ensuring each engine has it's niche, even in the end-game, so any engine that is likely to obsolete so many other engines seems unlikely to become stock( at least not as-is). But that is fine by me, as I'll happily install the mod. Of course if you combine it with Tweakscale, then you have a whole range of engines with awesome ISP...

I use solid-fueled boosters in my first stage, generally with some fuel tanks stacked on top of them so that the remaining stage(s) are more or less at full fuel when the slid boosters burn out. Depending on how heavy my payload is, I may or may not have a set of liquid fueled boosters as well. This is around the lunch-core that takes the payload vessel to orbit and will often help with the initial departure burn. not really asparagus, but SRB+drop-tanks->Liquid boosters -> liquid fueled core -> payload vessel(usually nuke powered)

I have 15 KSP install directories and the downloaded zip files since I started(0.90). I do not see a great deal of reason to remove them. (one of those installs was for verifying that I can't move research result windows in vanilla 1.1.3 and may get binned eventually, but I still have a 0.90 interstellar mod install that I have yet to play, so don't hold your breath on that). Would be nice if my preferred mods were updated before I get to a point where it is not worth the bother of updating my 1.1.2 save, but that is hardly stopping me...

I generally play windowed, often with something else I am doing on the other screen and a browser open to the wiki(generally a tab on the science page for high/low boundary numbers).

While there is a great deal of entertainment to be had from landing on each building, you can get that science more easily by just touching your craft to the building. Just last night I got science from the flag pole, admin building and astronaut complex with a jet-powered 3 wheel cart piloted by Bob, who would get out after I pulled away from the building to collect and reset the experiments. (I was trying out a mission from the '[x]Science!' mod)

From what I understand, Mechjeb and Engineer for all just adds the functionality flags to the stock pods, so using the mod mostly keep you from needing the additional parts, allowing your ship to only use stock parts and thus break less during updates. The for all mod does not actually implement the functionality however, you need the mods for that.

I had heard about KSP in general terms from friends and coworkers, but never got around to actually looking into it. Then my wife made the mistake of buying it for my birthday. She had been warned it would cost her a lot of time with me, but she did not have any better ideas and got it anyway. I try to be a little more attentive and talk about KSP less when she talks about regretting her purchase...

If you are over the canyon, then you are slightly farther away from the center of mass. The center of mass is not at a point that is at the minimum possible elevation, but the point that has the lowest average distance from all the mass of the planet, so unless there is something heavy under the canyon that counters the lack of material in the canyon, gravity would indeed be less over a deep canyon than over a mountain. If you are *in* a canyon, then you have the mass of the canyon walls actually pulling you *away* form the center of mass. Acceleration from a given body only increases consistently with reduced distance so long as that mass is far enough away that the entire body is pulling you in a consistent direction. finally leading up to zero gravity at the center of mass(as the mass of the entire body is balanced around you and it is all canceled out)

In Space I think I have only had to get out and push once(returning from the Mun, pushed to get Pe low enough to eventually reenter), around KSC, I push my rovers backwards all the time after I have nosed them up to a building to get data from that building's biome. (I generally only have KSC science rovers before I have powered rover wheels, so pushing backwards with the pilot is the intended reverse gear).

Looks like anything using the large ISRU(4.25 tons + at least 1 drill for 0.75 tons) is better off with LV-N engines. That matches pretty well with what I generally do.

I realize I'm a little late to the party, but the whole autopilot discussion wanted me to reference Curriosity and it's sky-crane According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory#Entry.2C_descent_and_landing_.28EDL.29 "During the entire landing phase, the vehicle acts autonomously, based on pre-loaded software and parameters." And I must say that a sky-crane has got to be at least on-par with the difficulty of any landing I make in KSP, so I consider autonomous probes to be quite adequately capable as of 2012. Now, that said, I have a communicatron on each of my scansats outside of the Kerbin system, and have generally considered it an appropriate part to put on anything that leaves the neighborhood since before 1.0, so I am quite interested to see how the antenna range feature changes game-play, and I suspect I will be leaving it turned on once I have tried it out. (the only RoverDude mod I have uninstalled is USI-LS, and that is mostly because I don't plan my missions in enough detail to handle the home-sickness time-frame well. (I generally do a gender-paired crew with 3-5 seats per kerbal including at least one 'privacy' pod for long missions, and that seems like it should be enough for a year or three with proper selection of the individuals involved, then again, there was a time I was working from home and when I was calling in to my weekly meeting, I realized I had not spoken a single word since the same meeting the previous week, so my perceptions of normal human needs may not be very accurate))

Even with their lower thrust, I suspect ion engines would get a lot more popular if you could produce their fuel with ISRU. I use LV-N's because they are the most efficient engine that I can refuel, as such it can get me to the most places for a given fuel:payload ratio.

1&2 Like Squad telling us that the wheel/landing leg problems are related to Unity issues that they have not been able to work around and may require waiting for a new Unity version? How about telling us that they fixed every CTD that they could reliably reproduce. (indicating that there were some CTD bug reports they could not fix because they could not get it to happen locally) 3) Volunteer testers are not generally in a good position to determine when it is in the best interests of a company to release the next version. Setting marketing and financial reasons aside, 50%+1 of the testers could easily get over-excited with a new, not quite finished feature, or hold out for a version that has every feature that they deem important. After all, how many people will volunteer to play-test a new version of a game that they do not already have strong feelings about? 4) Which major bugs has Squad not acknowledged? They acknowledged wheels/landing struts(Unity issue), Random CTD issues(fixed all the ones they could reproduce), Orbit decay(Bug fix that took an issue from 'small but only annoying' to 'tiny but potentially serious'). The only other issue I have seen (unable to move research window) is probably mod related(I have dozens) and not annoying enough to even work out which one is causing it. Wheels we even knew about before the beta-test period started I am not saying your ideas are bad, but what have you asked Squad to do that they have not already done, aside from handing over full control of the release cycle over to volunteer testers?

I mostly use this for Kerbol SOI visits, both leaving minmus and returning to Kerbin. My standard procedure is(After refueling on Minmus), burn from Minmus until the time to Kerbol orbit is not going down very fast any more, then set a node shortly before leaving Kerbin SOI where I drop all but 50m/s so that I know that buring towards Kerbin for 100m/s will get be home. Once back in the Kerbin SOI I will usually burn a fair bit to get my periapps where I want it and have a fairly quick trip down to LKO. So long as I have > 1 km/s once I am in LKO I am pretty good. (I generally do retro-burns during reentry instead of using heat shields, so I like to have plenty of fuel left for reentry. Not generally a problem when I am using an Ike capable ISRU ship for training and Kerbin SOI missions(Duna ships get extra engines because I need more engines to SSTO from Duna on NERVs)

If you want to keep your part-count down, I would recommend tweakscale, it will scale up your parts increasing functionality in line with the increased mass. (example: a 400% drill has the same stats(weight, energy usage ore production, etc) as 64 normal drills(4x4x4=64) but also has 4x the reach for getting past long pieces of infrastructure(and takes a lot more surface area). I generally use a 2.5m nerv in place of ~5 normal sized engines for example. But anything that actually improves performance over using multiple stock parts is not really on par with the 'balance' of stock parts(Nuclear Lightbulb from Atomic age for example has 1500 isp and ~7.5 times the thrust of a nerv not to mention gimble and 850isp in atmosphere. Even at 20 tons it is still the go-to engine for any ship large enough to use full size ISRU to extend it's range)

For colonization I like RoverDudes USI colonization mods, as they will automatically transfer resources between storage facilities that are reasonably close without needing to actually connect everything(which seems to be kraken bait) But for a highly efficient launch from Minmus, I find launching my interplanetary ship with just enough fuel to land safely on Minmus where I top it off using ISRU to be a highly effective approach(especially since I use ISRU for just about all of my interplanetary trips aside from the initial scanning probes, so I already have all the parts)

No losses. There was a time or two here I got distracted when I was attempting to land, or I needed multiple attempts to return to Kerbin(there was even one time I had to have the kerbal in the drivers seat eject in orbit(or close enough to orbit to get there on jet packs) because the Mk1 pod on the nose was the only part I could not seem to bring home intact(sent up a rescue craft of course), but no games were saved with dead kerbals.

I am aware of the benefits of transfer windows, but attempting to figure them out was always more effort than it was worth to me, I would just load up lots of dv and some ISRU, then so long as I could get to orbit from my target planetary body, I was generally in good shape. (Moho is a bit of an issue as there is no light-weight moon to top off fuel on for the return trip, but you can always use fuel tankers to handle that) Using Nuclear Age and Near Future Tech engines I have been to every planetary system and returned form every solid body except Lathe, Tylo, and Eve. Using only engines from stock + tweakscale(to reduce part counts), I have been to Duna and back as well as a visit to Moho that was on it's way to rendezvous with my first attempted Eve return vehicle (I was also using USI-LS, which provided a lot of constraints to those missions), but 1.1 came out and I set that game aside... Currently I have my first school-buses approaching Minmus and the Kerbol SOI in 1.1.2. Will probably wait for USI logistics to be fully functional again before I go very far though(so much easier to refuel when it is automated) Also, all of my docking to date has been with the klaw.

Labs can still reset goo and materials experiments(if manned, even by a pilot), and everything else is repeatable without labs/scientists. I generally do not bother to take more than one of each experiment if I have a lab or scientist on board, I just make sure that they are accessible(for unloading, resetting, or both).

Yep, Labs will now take the experimental data out of the experiment, but on the plus side, you can have multiple labs and load repeated experiments in to each one until they all have a copy of that experiment without any sort of undocking process. Also, experiments are loaded instantly, labs can hold up to 750 data(for even the largest Eeloo experiments) and any science accumulated will be properly added to your total when the lab is recovered.

The only part of the MPL I get much use out of before I have more than enough science to unlock the stock tech tree is the ability to store as many duplicates as you like of a given experiment. I am more than a bit OCD, so visiting every biome on the Mun and Minmus is something I generally do as a matter of course and the MPL lets me get those last few fractions of a point of science without an extra mission or two. In my first few games I did not even time-warp for interplanetary trips, I kept taking Kerbin SOi contracts and completing them while waiting for my Duna ship to arrive.(I have gotten better about this, otherwise I would never have gotten to Dres, Jool, Eeloo, and back) In my current (started in 1.1, now in 1.1.2) game, I have 2 MPLs, both loaded for station contracts, the first one on it's way back to Kerbin, and the second currently trying to rescue the second of 3 scientists from Munar orbit.(it launched with no scientists on board, just an engineer in the MPL for restoring experiments before my first scientist rescue). As that ship is my first with ISRU, it will be visiting every unvisited Mun biome, Every unvisited Minmus biome, and slipping out to the Kerbol SOI to give me my first 3 star kerbals(6 rescues and 2 previously rescued kerbals) before heading back to the barn. Even fully loaded, I am expecting less than a hundred science from the MPL processing, but thousands from the MPL storage capacity(this is also my first ship with a negative gravoli detector, so lots and lots of science to be gathered). The only reason I don't have the entire tech tree unlocked just from the Kerbin SOI is because I use the community tech tree, and while I may have just about all the nodes with parts in them unlocked before I go interplanetary, life support concerns are usually the only thing that keep me from spamming all available biomes.(but now that USI-LS has large fertilizer canisters, I may have more spamming ability)

I have been generally happy with 1.1(waiting on community tech tree update for 1.1.2) The higher frame-rates make launches more nerve-wracking. I think I had 1-2 CTD and a KSC science rover with wonky wheels, but most of my problems have involved low fuel, inadequate TWR, reentry heat, or lithobreaking as opposed to game stability.

I will generally re-use an entire rocket design, usually with a few tweaks. Once I get ISRU I tend to use it extensively, and my 3-star training/tourism designs just swap out crew capacity for a few extra tanks to be come Duna/Gilly/Moho ships. The biggest changes in my ship designs have been in accommodating the recent USI-LS changes for interplanetary missions(kerbals now get home-sick and get tired of cramped quarters combined with the need for recyclers to keep food usage reasonable), before that I would basically use the same ship for all missions.(interplanetary would just have extra fuel/ore tanks clipped inside)