bewing

Autostrut problems during docking will either destroy your ship within seconds, or you are completely safe. There are no long-term consequences.

One hundred thousand times.

One reason to use a setup with a lot of SRBs (rather than multi-stage) is if you need the bottom-most part of the main stack to be accessible from the ground when you launch it. It's an unusual thing to need, but it happens to me when I launch my first Mobile Lab in the game. Another is if the thing you are trying to launch is basically an SSTO spaceplane, and you are launching it vertically. It can be difficult to mount SRBs behind the spaceplane's engines -- but strapping a couple SRBs to the sides or wings sometimes works. One other thing that I like doing is having a standardized first stage liquid fuel booster that just barely makes it to LKO. (If it needs a little extra help making it to LKO, then I strap SRBs to the sides of it.) Once I have several of these boosters in LKO (each with a little fuel remaining) I dock them together. This quickly makes a huge orbital fuel dump for me to visit -- when I need fuel, or when I have some extra and I'm just about to deorbit, so I can give it away.

The root part has 50% odds of changing during docking. So any part on either craft with autostrut that's set for the Root part has a 50% chance of suffering from ARD. (Either one ship's root will change, or the other one will -- so if you have Root autostruts on both craft then the odds jump to 100%.) It is wise to turn off all Root autostruts before docking. Similarly with Heaviest autostruts. If the new Heaviest part is on the other craft during docking, then the Heaviest autostruts will detach/reattach. So similarly, turn all those off during docking too. The problem with that is wheels and landing legs. They always have Heaviest autostruts turned on, and you can't turn it off. Note that this is true even if you don't have autostruts "turned on" in your settings. Landing legs and wheels always have autostruts. So for craft with wheels or landing legs, either 1) don't ever dock them, 2) make sure the "heaviest" part on your docking craft remains the heaviest part, even after docking (by adding fuel to it, because it's usually a fuel tank), or 3) make sure that the two craft being docked are smallish, because Autostrut Reattachment Disease hits big ships really hard, but is mostly not noticeable for small ships. And if you absolutely must dock a ship with legs/wheels to a big station, then quicksave first and cross your fingers.

Rigid attachment was invented because the devs thought that wiggly composite airplane wings were unreasonable. So you can rigidize them, and maybe it helps and maybe it doesn't. Maybe rigid wings can RUD during high-G maneuvers. I never tested it, and I don't know if anyone else has, either. I do know that it makes joints somewhat more fragile -- because you can get away with some really crazy bending without breaking for non-rigid joints. Autostruts were invented to help with noodly-rocket syndrome, and to prevent wheels from splaying under load. They are invisible, free, and zero drag. They can reach a long way -- and that is useful sometimes. Grandparent autostruts are safe and effective. With the other varieties of autostrut, you need to be very careful of Autostrut Reattachment Disease. If you have an autostrut to the Heaviest part (usually a fuel tank), and you use up the fuel to the point where it's no longer the heaviest part -- the autostrut has to disconnect from the old heaviest part and attach to the new heaviest part. This process is very forceful, and can be violent enough to destroy a craft or spacestation. The safe thing to do with these other types of autostruts is to use very few of them ... just enough to make your craft stiff. Like, try limiting yourself to 5 per craft.

I'll try to look into it too and see if there's a bug involved, somewhere.

Yes, radiator spikes on startup are normal. As Aegolius said, the rest of your craft has heat in it when you start, and the radiators automatically go to 100% load until all that residual heat is gone. Radiators are smart, and automatically go to 100% and never go over during normal operation. So you don't have to worry about them. Note that drills and converters have a special kind of heat -- "core heat". They also have the standard two kinds -- skin and internal heat. The core heat is what makes them run efficiently. When you turn them on, they are supposed to quickly ramp up their core heat to the optimal temperature. If you don't have sufficient cooling, then they will immediately start to overheat (the temp increase after that point is slow). When you are outside physics range of a craft, it goes "on rails". Drilling and ore conversion get switched to a mode called "background processing" for on-rails craft. Background processing gets updated once every 6 hours. If you return to the craft within that first 6 hours, or get back within physics range, then the last batch (up to 6 hours worth) of processing gets erased, and the drills and converters get retroactively shut off. They will also shut themselves off if they run out of EC. So it's best if you just start the drilling/conversion process and then switch away from the craft. Don't come back (or back in range) for 6 hours.

To fix it, two possibilities that I know of: Try opening your cargo bay doors. I don't know why, but sometimes that makes the CoL arrow appear. When you are building this SSTO, you are going to need to put some incidence on the wings. As soon as you do, the arrow will almost certainly appear. Again, I don't know why. Is it important if the arrow is missing? No.

I agree with Aegolius about the BigS tailfin. It adds mass and drag and contributes nothing, if you are steering with a keyboard and not a joystick. Drag is the big killer, because it eats your thrust and fuel in nickels and dimes. For the future: I understand that you hate canards, but they are aerodynamically far superior to trailing-edge elevons -- so if you ever want to graduate to building spaceplanes or seaplanes that actually fly, you are going to have to change your position on canards. No, the FAT tailfins won't melt. Even if you try to bring the cargo back down, the heating will all be on the wings and the nose. But if you are going to bring the cargo back down, then you should burn off the fuel in the tanks for a huge reentry burn and then you don't have any heating problem at all. Yes, the problem is in the ascent profile. Probably too much steering involved. You need to learn the proper use of the "F" key -- it lowers your nose a little without steering if you have the plane balanced properly. The best ascent with a keyboard involves touching no key except F all the way to orbit after you've gotten the spaceplane into level flight above the water after takeoff. You need to keep an eye on where the rapiers are putting out their maximum airbreathing thrust during your ascent. Maybe it's a little below 20km. You want to make sure that you already have the plane flying close to level when you hit that altitude -- which means you have to start gently lowering the nose (a little at a time) before you get to that point. But as said above, if you can't get the plane above 1300 m/s in airbreathing mode, then you have a serious problem ... most likely with drag. The one place you may need to protect your tailfins from overheating is in the 25km to 38km altitude range, if you can get your speed up into the 1800 m/s range. Protecting them from heat may involve climbing fairly rapidly through this altitude range. You do that by not lowering the nose during those altitudes, but only if you have a heating problem. If you are not experiencing overheating and part failures, then you want to keep the nose as close to prograde as you can. And, in fact, set SAS to prograde hold as early as you can while still making it to orbit.

Welcome to the forums. We are going to need a picture of what you are trying to do. In the FAQ for this section of the forum are instructions for how to post a picture.

The parts are not arranged within the categories. The editor defaults to displaying them to you alphabetically by part name. You can alternatively set them to display by mass or cost, sorted up or down. But that function is hardcoded into the editor. If you want them to display alphabetically, but you want them to be in a different order, then you need to change their names. And to change the names of the stock parts would either have to be done by hand with each new version, or by a script.

A few tips then: you need canards on the front end of your plane, because you need positive lift to get out of the water. Trailing edge elevons are worthless for water takeoffs. You also need to have the canards below the surface of the water (and therefore below the midline of the plane). This also helps to lift the nose out of the water -- which gets you up to takeoff speed. If you have a Rapier engine, that would probably be your best bet. Other engine options would probably be a Whiplash/terrier combo, Whiplash/spark, panther/spark, or whiplash/nuke, I think.

But some of us think that wasting real-time is the whole point of playing a game. :p

Almost all KSP parts float, with very rare exceptions. Of course it will float. Nope. It doesn't look like it'll have enough dV to be able to make more than one hop. So maybe 3 water biomes, tops. Yup, building a Laythe seaplane SSTO is pretty easy, actually. One of them can easily hit every biome on Laythe -- land and water.

Your horizontal velocity changes during the burn, so are you doing your centripetal calculation as an integral?

Additionally, you're only talking about something on the order of 300m/s of deltaV as the difference between a "good" return trajectory vs. a fairly "bad" one. And your craft is probably less than half full of fuel, and a lot of players throw away a bunch of fuel along with the whole bottom of their craft when they reenter at Kerbin anyway.

In the past I've tried to see how many random spots on the Mun I can visit in one go, with the most efficient design I can figure. No matter how I do it, I pretty much max out at 4. To hit 7, they will have to be quite close together (less than a few hundred kilometers). The inefficiencies involved in landing at unknown altitudes, doing reasonably precise landings, and making sure you can clear unknown terrain during your hops just burn up your dV like anything. Additionally, if the science reports require a crew, that makes it harder. If the science reports require a scientist, that makes it even harder. And if the science reports are surface samples, that also makes it harder. But if it's a survey that a robotic probe can do -- then you may also have communication difficulties, depending on how you are set up for CommNet. One other thing is the number of stars on the contract. If it's 3 stars, then it will require you to land super close to the waypoint.

Are you certain that this is for a brand new rocket? Not for an old craft file that you are loading into the new game? Once you delete and redownload the game, are you installing any mods? Do you have other copies of the game stored on your machine in other locations? What precise method are you using to launch the game? Are you logged into steam at the time?

Welcome to the forums. You don't need to EVA the tourists to get them into a new ship. But you do need the Klaw. I don't think you will be able to do this rescue until you have unlocked it in the tech tree. (It's also called the "Advanced Grabbing Unit.") Once you have it, you will need to practice with using it. It is tricky to use. But whenever you have a "rescue" situation, you will probably need it. To use it, you have to "Arm" it, and then you have to touch the other ship with it, at a 90 degree angle (or as close as you can get to 90 degrees). When you do that, the two ships will stick together and become one ship. You will be able to use the "Transfer Crew" function to move the Tourists into the other ship. Or you can transfer fuel into the stranded ship (depending on your settings). Or you can use one ship to push the other ship back to Kerbin. (You may have to be careful to turn off the engines on one of the ships -- you don't want both engines burning at the same time!)

Since they are rovers, they have wheels. If you open the context menu for the wheels, click the friction to "manual" and then crank it all the way up to 5 ... usually that will halt any sliding.

This is a known bug for the devs and QA team in 1.6, but I don't know if there is also a copy of the bug report in the public tracker.

Oh, sorry, I meant "simplified" -- the names changed a couple times and I forgot the final one selected.

You can't do it from a ladder. You line up the craft prograde and then bump yourself against the engine bell until you slide off. It doesn't work very well. You don't circularize. You just lower your Ap enough to make a rendezvous practical.

Suborbital means "outside the atmosphere". Otherwise it says "flying". To get credit for that contract you have to get them to black out while they are in space.

I would take the 1.25m fuselage and bicoupler. Passive stability requires low drag in the front, and high drag in the back -- and that's exactly what this pattern gives you. The MK2 version gives you high drag in the front and low in the back, so you're killing yourself and you need a lot of extra control authority to counter the instability, which adds secondary mass and drag.