Starseeker

In my experience, you just need the required number of engineers (it could be several) on board the craft somewhere

It's probably buried a fair bit back in the thread, but Nertea's said that he's not going to be making a 1.25m lab part, for balance reasons. Makes getting a lab on a 1.25m station a bit awkward, but hey, makes sense when you consider how cramped that part size is

Oh niiiiice, I'm assuming that's the single-bell Poodle's effects fixed?

I think it should remain compatible; however, there's definitely someone who can give a better answer. I'd recommend you take a look at ReStock; it adds a good few cosmetic variants to a lot of parts, including bare-metal variants of the 2.5m tanks, as well as reworking stock models & textures to be much more cohesive (and, imo, much better-looking overall)

Docking ports are fully compatible with stock ones, yep. As for the "extras" folder, it's an optional patch to add a "bare metal" skin to the SSPEx:R parts. However, I forget what its internal structure is like, so I can't tell you how to install it - just that it's completely optional (also it'll be reworked in the next mod update).

Has the fix for the Trajectories issues people were having made it into a release yet? If not, how could I get the fix?

Have you sent a probe into the SOI of another body?

Well, depends on what you mean. It doesn't add anything relating to life support itself; however, if you grab one of the common life-support mods (TAC-LS, Snacks, etc) there's special compatibility built into this mod that adds resources, part modules, etc. to work with it.

ooo, that looks interesting; might see if I can't do some neat stuff with it myself

One "small" translation unit (the first snap point with snapping on and shift held) is the perfect clip distance in my experience; makes the gap much, much smaller without clipping the port into anywhere weird

Ah. I suppose you're right; just, not looking forward to having to spend several minutes carefully nursing a craft to orbit when before I could hit a few buttons and then just make sure nothing goes wrong in the next minute or so (thanks to timewarp).

If you wanna mess around with the Waterfall editor, you could put a single-nozzle Poodle on the launchpad, use the editor to scale & move the plume to match the new nozzle, then put those scale & position offsets into the .cfg for the poodle plume. Honestly, I feel like this might be the better approach; having one engine part take on such drastically different forms doesn't really make a whole lot of sense IMO. Having the quad-nozzle and single-nozzle be separate parts, but with the same stats, would solve a number of issues - though it'd also break any craft using the single-nozzle version.

Oops, forgot to post those other shots I promised! Also, loving the look of that module!

Well, manual flying to orbit takes more time - and more importantly, attention - than I'm really wanting to always devote, particularly when it comes to testing launcher designs. So, perhaps a better-stated version of my original question: what parameters of my rocket should I be looking at when determining ascent guidance settings? And is expecting orbit at 3400-3450m/s always reasonable, or should I be including a buffer of 100-200m/s?

From what I recall, there's not an easy way to change plume based on part variants, and that's why there hasn't been a fix for it. It doesn't cause issues in stock, since the points where the plume comes out change & the particles aren't tightly-fitted to the engine nozzle, but with Waterfall that no longer works due to the difference between nozzle exit shapes.

Oh, it's got plenty of control authority, and isn't toppling over or anything. Just, for that initial pitch-over before hitting "hold prograde", I'm not sure if should I be going for like, the first mark beyond the vertical point on the navball, or the second, or what. I've heard "5 degrees" said before, but that seems to result in a pretty steep ascent.

Made a nice Mir-style modular station using the 1.875m station modules! Don't have visual mods on this install, so it's not as pretty as I'd like, but definitely loving these parts! When I can, I'll also grab a shot of the improved core module design that uses US2

Unfortunately, I don't really have all that much experience with manual flying to orbit- especially when it comes to the low-TWR upper stages that using CryoEngines tends to result in. The "pitch over a few degrees and hit hold prograde" thing also seems to take a *much* steeper ascent trajectory than MJ guidance does, at least a lot of the time; not sure if I'm just misjudging the initial pitch-over amount though.

So, I'm somewhat at my wit's end here. I'm trying to use the ascent guidance, but I can't seem to find a consistent pattern in the optimal settings for getting to orbit with 3400-3500m/s dV, with both classic guidance and PVG. I've been looking at launch TWR, upper stage TWR, pitch start & pitch rate for PVG, and turn shape & final angle for classic guidance, and what works for one rocket design doesn't work for another with all the craft parameters I looked at (launch TWR and upper-stage TWR) being the same. I've even had cases where adding boosters, then tweaking the thrust limiters so that launch TWR is the same (and upper-stage TWR stays reasonable), results in a previously-working launcher failing to make orbit, despite the extra dV from the boosters. Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? All I can think of is that either there's some variable(s) I'm not looking at properly, or I'm just going to have to trial-and-error every variant of every launch vehicle design I ever make, and I really hope it's not the latter.

All the Module-Manager patches that Stock Waterfall Effects uses have a bit in them that prevents them from being applied if Restock is installed, which is the "&!Restock" part in the first line of the config file. Remove that bit, and it'll work; this would cause all sorts of issues with Restock-touched engines, but none of the stock jet engines are affected by Restock , nor the Cheetah or Bobcat (and the RAPIER only minimally), so removing that bit from the patches for just those engines should work fine. Note: the Cheetah and Bobcat might be remade in a future Restock release, so that's something to watch out for w/r/t these patch edits. The jet engines, however, have (along with all other C7 Aerospace assets) been intentionally excluded from Restock, and will remain so for the forseeable future, so the patch edits for those engines should work through all future releases of Restock.

Oooo, loving the use of trusswork there - helps break up what'd otherwise be quite a large flat surface. The cable conduits are pretty neat too!

Ah, yeah, that'd do it! Doing some in-game testing, the "waterfall-kerolox-vernier-2" template seems to be the superfluous one.

Found some weird behavior with the Waterfall Restock config for the O-10 "Puff" engine: a duplicate of some part of the plume, shrunk and displaced a fair bit. It also persists even when opening the Waterfall editor and disabling drawing of every listed effect. Images: Here's my player.log: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-Vk0R2jqMXOjOD6S65ctFJvrpy3eiWfv/view?usp=sharing

Oh, found a small texture/model issue: there's a tiny gap between the main cylinder and bottom slope of the "Evening" short 1.875m habitation module.

I'm thinking red (the same sort of tone used on the Salyut 7), tan, olive, and perhaps some sort of black or dark grey. As for whether it'd be painted metal or thermal blankets, I'm not sure. It could be both, but that'd end up adding 6-8 extra part variants (rather than 3-4), which would start to make things really cluttered & hard to navigate. Ah, good to hear it can be done with just configs! Might take a crack at it myself then, see if I can get it working - and then perhaps see if I can add it as another variant switch on adapter parts. Alrighty, will do!