Juicy

Jeb decided to get into the tourist business early. I wonder how far his accomplishments will go using only fleas.

Somewhere in the universe, some little Kerbals are playing a game called Human Space Program, and complaining on the forums about weak reaction wheels.

I put them on everything, including airplanes. They're awesome! We need more of em! Bigger ones too!

I'd consider career if rocketparts didn't cost any money. I like the unlocking parts of the space center bit, I like the leveling up my Kerbals bit, I like the science (that's why I generally play science mode) but I hate having to watch my money while doing testflights or random oddball constructions. I wouldn't mind having to build rockets within a certain budget for missions, like, "make a vessel capable of orbitting the Mun costing less than 100k" as a mission parameter, but if I want to make something bigger personal toy within that game, I don't want to feel limited by my budget.

The simpleton option, ofcourse, would be to stick two shuttles against eachother, one a dummy that you'd ditch after you left the atmosphere, when drag is no longer an issue and a gimballed engine can keep you flying in a somewhat straight line.

G-forces affect my ships, which is good enough for me. Try opening a single chute at high speed below 1000m with several full fueltanks strapped below your lander and see where the fuel tanks go with the radical deceleration. The Kerbals themselves? Well, they're tough little critters.

Non-mechjeb. Eyeballing and guessing just feels more Kerbal to me.

That Hyper Edit is pretty ideal for this kind of testing is logical, given the lack of other means to test. Though for low altitude testing, I find rocket pods on radial decouplers for lift off and gaining some initial speed work just as well.

The solution to this one might be *less* control surfaces, spinny wheels and gimballed engines. I went from an avarage of 16 moving control surfaces to only 4, replacing the rest with rigid fins, and my rockets became less wobbly as a result. I've read from people who had similar results by disabling the gimbals on their rockets, so it's something worth experimenting I guess. Control modules can apparently be too effective and eventually reduce control instead of adding to it!

Attach lifting body Mk2 tanks radially in a symmetric manner? Like, 4 of them with their top or bottom side facing towards the center of the rocket? Sure, they might cause a bit of drag, but it should still be stable?

So I wasn't totally wrong when my rover got stuck on the edge because I wanted to test whether the pool was a bio-me.

It used to be the landing gears that people used as joints. Things could be attached to the "leg" of landing gear, and would move a bit when lowering/raising landing gear. But I haven't managed to make such connections for a while.

Sadly, no. Which is why Infernal Robotics is quite popular, even if it has one small drawback (it may mess up badly on docked vessels). On the other hand, it's easier to use than expected, even from watching the introduction video. I think it used to be possible to use landing gears as joints for a while, pretty sure I once attached a light on one which moved with the wheel on opening/closing, but when I tried a few weeks back, that no longer worked.

The advantage of the drag increase (since 1.0.1) is an increase to lift. It's not just a matter of going faster, it's also a matter of going up. Planes can climb at a slightly lower throttle, provided they have the wings to take advantage of that. Yes, building SSTOs became a little harder again. You don't want to add an infinite amount (or size) of wings to get infinite lift (since it'd add too much drag), but you don't want to keep them too small to minimize drag either. The ideal band moved a little and was tightened up.

If you mean the "purple ball", it's the Center of Thrust, not Center of Pressure. It's more or less the place where the expanding gasses from the explosion of the fuel enter the exhaust. So it is exclusively the force generated by the thruster(s) and does not include any other forces applying to the vessel, like drag, gravity, etcetera. The builder only shows the static forces acting upon the ship: Center of Mass, Center of Lift and Center of (maximum) Thrust. Center of Pressure is a derivate of CoL and CoT, but would also require a Center of Drag, which varies depending on direction&heading, speed, and air pressure (altitude), and thus is not shown during building.

Other: I'd like to design and build my own secondary bases using resources aquired through mining. Why else keep a base on the Mun long after did every experiment on every biome, if not for eventual settling?

Ah, good to know I'm not the only one always expecting Superman to flip over when he raises his hand in front of him while in flight!

"Clockwise" is a tricky one to decide. First, you have to decide which side of the planet is up. But, to make that decision, you'll have to figure out what side of the star it's orbitting is up as well, even just for reference. Be thankful KSP doesn't feature multiple star systems (yet!), since then we'd also have to figure out the top side of the galaxy. Just for reference, ofcourse. And that would get even worse if we expand to universe levels, with multiple galaxies floating around. There is no up in space! Ergo, there is no left or right in space, so there is no clockwise or counter clockwise either. It's all relative, depending on your position and viewing angle. Prograde and retrograde become much simpler concepts then, it's either forward or backwards, with other directions being derivates of those.

Infernal Robotics is great, main reason why I didn't upgrade to 1.0.4 yet, simply because IR isn't updated to that yet. My current base is based on IR, since it makes docking sooo much easier! (just don't ever use IR parts while two vessels are docked!) SCANsat was the first mod I installed. It gives pretty maps, and a reason to learn to make satellites/probes, learn why satellites/probes take specific orbits, learn to make polar orbits with your eyes closed, etcetera.. Anyway, mod-updating is something you want to consider. Patches may break mods. And you don't want to loose half your ships because some patch broke your 5 months old mod that no longer got updated. Squad tries to keep stuff "intact" for minor patches (x.y.Z patches), but stuff may break in mayor patches (x.Y.z patches)

Not wanting to turn this into a suggestion thread, but it could use a small overhaul. Like, a lower datacap, but faster science generation at the same data:science ratio. Alternatively, I'd suggest adding a small version of the MPL, while giving the current version (which IS called the "large" version) the perk of being able to recover science. So adding it to the large version would add to the MPLs data and count as recovery, while the small version would only be able to process the data (with only a single Kerbal on board) and the data would still have to be either transmitted or physically sent to Kerbin. The large processing lab could then stay in its current location on the tech tree, or even move to tier 6, while the "smaller" version could be placed on tier 4, keeping both purposeful.

Nope, just the data. The amount of data the MPL gets varies a lot as well. There doesn't seem to be any relation between the amount of science data the MPL gets, the amount of science points you'd get directly from an experiment, or even the datasize of the experiment itself (atmoscans have a huge amount of data to transmit, but generate an amount of points for the MPL similar to the materials bay). As long as an MPL hasn't seen the results of a particular experiment in a specific biome/zone, it can be added.

You can do experiments again to fill up your MPL. So even if you already turned in your crew report from launchpad long before you had your MPL, you can still do it again to fill up your MPL. It won't give you direct science anymore, but the MPL still gets the data to investigate.

Or, third option, disabled the oxidizer on any one of the tanks.

The biggest problem is that IR parts go haywire after docking. If you dock a vessel with IR parts to another vessel, you simply shouldn't use the IR parts untill you undocked the vessel again. So the vessel has to return to its original state again before using IR components, or bad things happen. Similarly, if you build a ship with two segments and use dockingports to connect the two segments, expecting the two to run autonomously from eachother after "undocking", then you shouldn't use any IR parts after seperating them. Again, bad things will happen to at least one of the two. The cause of this is supposedly that the root of the vessels change after docking (seperately, they have a root each, docked together, they have only 1 root, so the rootpart which is used by IR disappeared)

Long radial placed stages indeed tend to collide every time, and can't be escaped. Short, single or two-tank boosters can generally be escaped before they angle in far enough to collide with my main rocket. I need to put the radial decoupler on the top tank of my two-tank boosters though, so their rear angles in. If I put the radial decoupler on the bottom tank, the frontside angles in and it WILL indeed hit my ship. 3-tank boosters tend to angle in faster than I can clear them, but I rarely use those for efficiency reasons anyway.