HvP

When it doubt try to eliminate the simplest possible problems first. Probes and rover wheels need electricity. Are you running out of battery power? Also, if you have the other ground stations turned off and the ground occlusion set to the higher difficulties you may lose a connection to the tracking station when you go over a big hill or past the horizon.

I agree with Red Iron Crown's answer. When you are trying to attach larger diameter booster tanks to radial decouplers it's easy to miss the decouplers and accidentally surface attach the boosters to your central tank. The trick is to rotate the camera in the VAB so that one of the decouplers is facing directly towards you, then grab your booster tank with the mouse and make sure that you point at the very center of the decoupler directly underneath the point of your mouse when you click to attach. If you watch carefully you'll notice that the booster segment you are holding will snap toward or away from you ever so slightly when you hover over the central tank and then the decoupler. Sometimes it's a small target to hit correctly, but it's easier to see what's happening if you have 4x radial symmetry on and then you can see what the tanks on the two 90 degree angles are doing. Then you can just grab the decoupler once the booster is attached to it, change the symmetry number to what you want and then reattach the decoupler/booster combo back onto the central tank again. If you are worried that it doesn't put your booster high or low enough then you can always use the translate gismo, hold down shift, then slide the tanks up or down after attaching them.

@Bayesian Yes, it's in the Main Menu / Settings / Graphics Under the Rendering column look for the slider labeled "CommNet Line Brightness Factor." This can also be changed from the in-game Escape menu settings. I think that's what you're looking for.

Definitely "Aim Camera". Sooooooooo helpful for docking without mods. See this thread for a demonstration.

If you are playing in career mode you will have to upgrade your Tracking Station and Mission Control building to level 2 in order to gain full access to maneuver node editing and patched conics. There are mods like Precise Node and MechJeb that allow you to edit nodes more accurately, but you will still need the Space Center upgrades to be able to use them in career mode if I recall correctly.

Reputation affects the value of contracts you are offered. Higher reputation will make more rewarding contracts available. While declining contracts will lower your reputation it will also weight the contract system so that you are offered fewer of those types of contracts you have declined. If you are early in the game it may be better to accept a few contracts that you like and let the others gradually expire so that others will take their place (this will still slightly weight the contracts to offer less of those that you passed up, but not as heavily as if you had declined them outright, and it won't lower your reputation.) World first records will still be awarded to you without needing a contract, so you can still get speed, altitude, distance records to increase your reputation slightly. Things like escaping the atmosphere, first orbit around a body, first rendezvous, first docking around a body, first landing on a body... will always award you more reputation whether or not you have a contract for it, but doing them under a contract will get you more rewards.

If your center of mass is too low down then aerodynamic pressure can push the tip of your rocket around causing it to flip. Place the fins as close to the bottom of the rocket as you can and check that your center of lift is below your center of mass. Also, try not to steer very far from your direction of flight, especially during the speed range between 300 and 600 m/s. Use frequent slight nudges instead of turning it hard over.

Yes. You need to add one of the slim profile round probe cores to your main ship that you will control from. You also need to have a pilot and a relay antenna. This will allow the pilot in your mother ship to act as the controller. Keep in mind that the deploy-able relay antenna you currently have on the controlling ship should work but it's range when transmitting to a communotron could be a bit limited. It should be fine for controlling from the surface though. Also consider that the regular communotron antennae have to be deployed to function and are subject to damage when flying in an atmosphere above a certain speed. The surface mounted Communotron 16-S will not break in atmosphere and might be a better choice for your drone. I'm assuming that there is already a probe core on your drone. I would suggest using the F12 cheat menu and the "Set Orbit" hack to test that your configuration will work while out of comms of Kerbin before you launch a full mission.

Actually, you can, if you brought along the proper infrastructure on your mothership. The ship that you want to use to control your unmanned craft will need at least: a pilot, a relay antenna, and an advanced probe core (or command pod that acts as a probe control point, with an additional second pilot.) See This Thread for a discussion about what is required to control an unmanned probe from an orbiting ship.

You probably hit F4 at some point. It toggles the vessel indicators off/on. I've toggled that off by accident many many times reaching for F5. There's also an option box for it in the main settings menu for "Show vessel indicators."

It allows you to place and use maneuver nodes while in the map mode in flight, but you'll also need to upgrade the Tracking Station to level 2 which allows you to see the patched conics predictions for your orbits.

I appreciate that. The Cygnus is IMO one of the most gorgeous space ship models ever built for film. I'm not sure I could even come close to doing it justice, but now I think I might give it a try once a few mods are updated for 1.2. That's an excellent idea. I haven't used LLL before but combined with Tweakscale, Ubio Welding, and Hangar Extender there's a good chance of getting a good replica of the Cygnus after all. There's so much detail in the original that I would have to devote considerable time to it though. Perhaps after the 1.2 release settles down. Of course, if you want to give it a go I'd love to see how creative you can get with it

I don't know how I missed that when I was looking through the suggestions. It looks like some modding progress has already been made so I'll be sure to check in on that thread from time to time. Thank you for the link.

This doesn't seem like much of a priority, I admit, but it would be nice to have the option of placing lettering on the hull of your ship that would show in flight. Options could include fonts, size, placement and/or the ability to toggle between horizontal or vertical orientation of the ships name. Perhaps include some decals or flag placement ability as well. If fully customized placement is too buggy, having a field on the hull of the craft that is predefined to display the vessel's name could be a decent option in a way similar to how the flags on certain areas of parts can be selected and toggled. I'm sure this has been suggested before, and I bet that it's not as trivial a programming challenge as it might seem, especially considering the variety of parts that a user might decide to decorate this way. But with the graphics overhaul a work-in-progress it seems like it might be a good complement for one of the updates after 1.2.

My OCD would require I make V.I.N.C.E.N.T. to scale so... maybe I could throw a couple of air intakes one on top of the other and pretend he's retracted into his shell, haha. With the crash damage mod maybe I could dent one up to look like B.O.B. My first idea was to try the Cygnus, but I chickened out. I'm not sure a passable version can be made in stock, but it would surely require the hangar extender mod and a LOT of girders.

The crew of the U.S.S. Palomino was lost after discovering the U.S.S. Cygnus in the vicinity of a black hole. This KSP recreation features all stock parts and its statistics are as follows: 174 parts; 40 tons; 9.3m x 8.3m x 8.1m; Crew of 2; LV-909 engines x 3; LF=1620 + Ox=1980 units; Reaction Control System, RTG and solar electrical generation

This isn't really a bug so much as a quality of life enhancement. The default behavior upon taking a Kerbal EVA is to reset the camera to a wide zoom level and shift it to an orientation that usually ends up obscuring the Kerbal behind the craft. This requires you to zoom your camera again and drag the frame around to search for your Kerbal in order to see him or her again. The pre-release phase seems like a good time to change this camera behavior if many others find it as annoying as I do. It seems like the better option is to reorient the camera so that it always shows the Kerbal from behind and at the previous zoom level, or simply not shift the camera at all. It would also be helpful for the camera not to zoom out again after boarding the craft as well (which is especially annoying after boarding command chairs on rovers.) Does anyone else see this as a problem? Is it worth adding to the bug tracker?

"Galaxy Quest"! I might be a bit biased, of course.

Weaseling is commonly defined as being intentionally ambiguous, usually as a deflection. Squad started as a marketing company. Weaseling is marketing 101. Words such as "may" , "could" , and "might" are called weasel words for a reason. Maybe it's just my cynical nature but I do not expect those redesigns without a positive statement to affirm that they are included. We can all just wait and see. My assumption that they definitely weren't included follows from this post from Arsonide responding to the direct question "Will Porkjet's Revamped Rocket Parts be made stock? If the answer is not yes then it must be No," to which his response was, "Unfortunately these things are not this binary. Right now the answer is "Not in 1.2", as originally stated. In the meantime the community will have access to the assets."

Unfortunately, no. They've weaseled their way out of that for some reason. At least that's what it appears from the responses on the latest devnotes thread.

A bit like that, yes. If the reputation meter was more prominent and you could target which contract paths you wanted to explore then I could definitely see a reputation reward for hitting some of these high value sites being translated into recruiting more scientists. Maybe even reducing the cost of hiring Kerbals from the Astronaut Complex. My line of thinking was that atmospheric scans of Kerbin's atmosphere provided a buff to engines used on Kerbin, but you would have to do the scans for Duna and Laythe if you wanted the improvements to work in their atmospheres. Pressure and gravity scans could reveal information that would tell you when to set your parachutes to auto-deploy. That would also encourage players to send small, light uncrewed probes to sample the atmosphere before designing big manned missions to those worlds, because then you could benefit from having engines tuned to land in their specific environments; to know the elevations within scanned biomes; and understand at what air density mark a parachute is safe to deploy on that world without tearing it apart. Surface samples and seismic scans could increase the thermal efficiency and ore extraction rate of ore drills within only those specific biomes that were tested. Thermometers and Science Jr. labs could test the radiant energy and micrometeorite prevalence in orbit of different worlds to boost the strength and efficiency of solar panels and radiators operating around those worlds. Maybe you have to have a thermometer on a craft for ISRUs, radiators and other heat managements systems to work at peak efficiency. Or even have thermometers work as thermostats to auto-deploy radiators when necessary. Kerbal EVA reports from the surface could expose previously hidden waypoint markers for exploration contracts within specific biomes. EVA reports from orbit could unlock a wider area at a time, but surface reports would unlock a greater local density of targets. There's a lot of related opportunities to make the science experiments contribute to the gameplay rather than slowing it down.

One of the biggest concerns with how science is treated in KSP, that I agree with, is that there isn't enough to do once you get to a planet or moon, and that the experiments seem decoupled from what it actually takes to advance the relevant technologies. But most suggestions for improving this usually end up requiring such a massive overhaul of the system that I don't think it could be implemented until a 2.0 edition. A new game. I suggest something a bit more moderate. Instead of entire expansive biomes being representative of all of the science available in that area you should have to explore the surface within biomes and use your scientific instruments to guide you to pockets of high value samples sprinkled around within the biome. Imagine if the value of surface samples followed a random distribution between and within biomes in the same way that ore concentration is revealed by the orbital scanner and surface scanner. Sites of particular value would essentially be highly localized "Easter eggs" that increased the science data returned, even perhaps allowing full transmission values from the surface. The gravity experiment, seismic detector, thermometer and all would be used to help guide you to these pockets to sample. Examining these sites should generate a contract branch that helps you explore nearby related features and return reputation and funds as you do so. This would make EVA exploration worthwhile and increase the utility of rovers and planes. If a player chooses a science career then running science experiments should be part of the fun and a gameplay investment. The best games are the ones that allow you to expand upon the potential you have built from the resources you've invested previously. More boldly, it would be nice if there was a "recipe" of experimental data that could be combined inside the mobile processing lab that would lead to "scientific breakthroughs" for the body that you are investigating. You should be able to add to the body of knowledge for that world with these breakthroughs that would give you valuable information about how to explore that world in future missions. It could unlock radar altitude data for landing, increase resistance to crash damage, improve the performance of engines, reduce heat damage, increase the efficiency of solar panels and RTGs, etc...

Kerbal Engineer does have an option that will make this easier. In the Flight Engineer box that's open in your screenshot click edit and find the Orbital subsection. You will find a list of available statistics that you can add to your information readouts. Among the info you can add are the ones for "Time to Equ. AN" and "Time to Equ. DN". Click the "INSTALL" button next to the appropriate selections. These will show a counter for how long until you reach your equatorial ascending node or descending node along your current orbit. When the timer ticks down to near 00 then just burn Normal (towards the north pole, the purple triangle on the navball) if you are at your descending node, or burn Anti-Normal (South, the purple triangle with dashes around it) if you are at your ascending node. Note, those selections are specifically for your inclination relative to the planetary body you are orbiting. If you want to find your inclination relative to another spacecraft that you want to rendezvous with then you need to go into the RENDEZVOUS subsection where it says "Selected Category" in the KER edit menu. From there choose "Time to Rel. AN" or "Time to Rel. DN" to show when you need to burn to match planes with another craft you have targeted. You can also add this information to your HUD displays by clicking the KER toolbar icon and clicking the EDIT button next to the various items listed as "Orbital", "Vessel", "Delta V", etc... There is a treasure trove of other options too that you can add which you may find quite helpful. I hope this made sense.

Well, Wednesday is still better than Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

If you right-click maneuver nodes it will give you two buttons (- +) on the underside of the icon. One advances the maneuver forward in time one orbit, and the other brings it backwards again a full orbit. Placing one maneuver node down in front of you and pushing the + orbit button after right-clicking on the node will show you the effect on your orbital intercepts if that burn happened one orbit later, adding another orbit every time you press it. HOWEVER Place a maneuver node ahead like normal, and don't advance the orbit buttons, but instead create your rendezvous burn node to show the predicted orbit after the burn just like always. Then place a second maneuver node on the predicted new orbit and you can see what future intercepts look like several orbits after your first burn by simply advancing the + from the node right-click buttons on the second (otherwise un-adjusted) node. You can now adjust your first node to fine tune to see if you get a close approach after three or four or five revolutions of your new orbit (rather than so many revolutions of your current orbit.) The orbit buttons on the first node shows you what your intercepts look like if you burned on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd + revolution of your CURRENT orbit. The buttons on the second node can show you what your intercepts look like after 1,2,3 + revolutions of your NEW orbit after the burn.