bewing

That is what fairings are for. Add a fairing, right click to open the window for the fairing, then click the "interstage nodes" button.

I'm going to disagree slightly with Aegolius. I think ^this is the correct reason, thermal conduction.

Theoretically, if you do a gravity turn and then keep burning all the way until you are heading to your destination planet and you do it exactly perfectly -- yes, that would be slightly more efficient. However, doing an interplanetary transfer requires fairly precise timing. If you increase to an interplanetary speed while you are still in the atmosphere then you will blow up. If your interplanetary burn ends one minute too late, you will miss your target by 10 Gm. Also, interplanetary travel requires a lot of fuel, so you may want to refuel in orbit before you leave. For these reasons, it's better to establish an orbit first.

Actually, I think it's LeftAlt-click that you want.

I thought there was a button in MJ that said "get me into orbit"? In any case, after you've done the "pitch to 85" step, the easiest next thing to do is turn on your SAS, click prograde, then click to map mode and watch your Ap rise to 70km. But maybe you have to stage, too. But your numbers are wrong for the current version. You want to be at 45 degrees by 8km to 10km. WAY below 40km.

For the rolling, the KSP control algorithms are kinda bad when it comes to 3-way symmetry. If you go to a quad-adapter and do everything 4-way, I bet your rolling problem goes away. Additionally, it sounds like you should be using tailfins instead of winglets. Maybe one of those LF tanks on top of the thumpers at high priority, so it will empty and be discarded early. You don't want the decoupler pushing at the CoM of the spent SRB. You want it pushing above the CoM, so that the noses of the SRBs splay out on decoupling. Putting the tailfins at the bottom of the SRBs will help accomplish this by adding a torque. edit: I built a stock version of your ship (with some small modifications) and I'm not having any trouble at all getting it to LKO with 1600 m/s remaining in the transfer stage.

You really should try both methods and compare fuel/dv in orbit. I was doing something similar as an exercise several months ago -- and I found the "circularize at Ap" method to be noticeably more efficient.

Ah, snark -- you jumped to a conclusion on that one. That's not what he said. He said he goes up straight until 50 to 100 m/s, then cranks it over 10 degrees and then verifies that it's at 45 degrees at 10km. I find myself that if prograde reaches 45 degrees at 8km, that's more like it. So 10 may be a little high.

Throttling is almost never useful -- it almost always wastes much more dV than it saves. Just so long as your gravity turn is reasonably aggressive, you are almost always much better off burning at full throttle until your Ap is where you want, then coasting to Ap, then raising your Pe above the atmosphere. Circularizing is usually a mistake too. If, by the time your ship reaches 40km, your Ap is not high enough -- then crank your nose all the way over to the horizon and keep burning at full throttle.

Welcome to the forums. As said above, the tutorials exist to demonstrate the user interface to you, and to show you what is possible -- it's not a guideline to show you what's clever when designing. Because the tutorial knows you're going to be landing over the ocean, and it knows the altitude of the ocean, and most people do not want to descend on a parachute for ages -- so you set the number so the parachutes will open quite low. Fine maneuvers are for docking and rendezvous, as said above. And RCS thrusters are about the only things you can use for fine maneuvers, so that means they are "best" by default. So the thrusters need fuel, and the fuel comes in the tanks (or a limited amount in the crew pods). Once you are an expert at rendezvous maneuvering, you may well decide that RCS thrusters are worthless and you never want to put them on another ship again -- because they add mass, drag, and useless complexity. Tanks are adjusted in increments of 10% of the maximum, and the max of that tank is 120. So the number can't be just anything. But the amount you need depends on your maneuvering skill. Since Wehrner is educating newbies, he is suggesting an entire tank of monoprop (RCS fuel), with 96 units in it! Once you have some skill, you'll only need a couple of units of fuel for a complete docking. If you add something and then your rocket runs out of fuel before you get to your destination, then you needed to add more fuel. Or you can judge by the DeltaV readouts. Or you can just guess. Many players here are adamant about following the math. Others are just as adamant about playing by "feel". Isp is the rocket definition of efficiency and it's listed in the part's info window, as said above. Have you perused KSPedia? It goes into more detail about explaining all this. That's basically what it's there for. It really sounds like that's the next source of answers for the questions you are having. So yes, in order of level of detail for answers to rocketry design questions, you have: tutorials, KSPedia, the Wiki, Wikipedia, trial and error, these forums, then engineers at nasa and spacex. (BTW, it is useful to keep in mind that this is rocket science -- so this stuff is not simple and can't be explained in a soundbite.)

It's just another mediocre part that happens to cost a lot of science. Having to actively monitor it and guess which section of the ground it's referring to as it sweeps past in orbit is not an easy task. The actual information it provides is very difficult to use. It does not update any survey scanner maps. What it does do is tell you exactly where on the ground to find the very highest ore concentrations. However, that's almost always a completely impractical thing to know. And even if you do want to know that, you can find out the same thing by driving around with a surface scanner.

You can't do it with maneuver nodes. Matching planes is always a question of timing. There are two times a year when you can transfer and end up in the correct plane. However, those two times do not correspond to your optimal launch windows. So there is no way to get anything like an optimal dV transfer. So, the best way is to use a gravitational slingshot past some CB to change your plane during your trip, and save you some dV at the same time. This is enormously tricky, and requires even more precise timing for your transfer. The second best way, as said above, is to do the transfer at a good window and then use all the tricks at the destination and during your midcourse correction burn to minimize the cost of your plane change. This is easy and fast and has very little in the way of timing requirements.

You've gotta fly a lot higher than that to get the fuel benefits of full afterburner -- at least 20km. You need the engine to be on the edge of choking.

Well, he meant to make it the root part of the missile subassembly, and you actually can do it -- but it's a bit tricky. It doesn't need to be visible to make it the root. And it's still a question that we can't figure out the answer to: if the probe core is not the "control from here" part on the missile when you decouple, then what is the controlling part? Because clicking "Control from here" does nothing, AFAIK, if that part is already controlling the craft. But yes, since you clearly are running a heavily modded game, that's gonna make it a lot harder for anyone else to do any tests or make any suggestions. But even in version 1.3.1 I've never seen 2 control dimensions just stop working.

The numbers given above are vacuum dV numbers. Unless you click a button, the staging dV numbers are atmospheric dV numbers, and they are very different. If you launch, the dV numbers show your dV according to your current atmospheric pressure, so many of the dV numbers will increase as you gain altitude. To get vacuum dV numbers in the editor, click the deltav "tools" button on the bottom, and click the Vacuum button.

Well, not really. The benefits of flying higher and faster counteract the efficiency boost. In the image -- flying 30% faster, so you reach your destination 30% sooner, while spending about 30% more fuel per second. So it comes out about the same in this case.

Well, congrats. Those are actual bugs. I've reported them to the devs.

Wow, how do you find all this crazy stuff? Of your list of troubles, the only one I know about is the undocking problem. It's been an issue in KSP for ages, but almost nobody can manage to make it happen twice. And unless we can do it repeatably, the devs can't fix it. They've tried. The way you fix it after it happens is by using a persistence file editing tool. If you need it in the future, just search the forum for "Can't Undock". As far as your fuel problem goes: ^ this is correct. If it isn't working like that, then you need to post your craft file here so that other people can test it and verify the problem. The staging GUI never ever breaks. So the way you keep it from breaking is that you just use it normally and it doesn't break. So, once again, if you can make some other funky thing happen, then you need to post your craft file so we can all verify that something is broken.

Yes, on the console you delete parts off a craft by dropping them back in the parts bin.

Just for clarification: I assume you mean an SSTO spaceplane? I know there's somebody around here who's going to comment about SSTO rockets. Building SSTOs is mostly about the challenge -- they aren't terribly practical. So if it's about the challenge, what are the rules for your SSTO? Cargo, crew, destination, etc. But in general, the tips are always: reduce mass, reduce the part count, reduce drag (except at the back end), and increase the fuel load.

Resources are randomized for each new game when you start. Each biome will have a randomized base resource level (which can easily be zero), and then a small additional random variation as you wander around that biome.

Well, if you think you did everything right then do a steam validation on your game. Steam's file error rate has been very high recently.

Laie is right. 1 Kerbin atmosphere is just a little over 100 kPa. Jool's sea level pressure is right about 50 times that. And the Isp of all the engines goes to zero above sea level. Of course, drag is significantly worse than Eve sea level, even at 10km altitude -- so you'll still have all the Eve-style drag problems on the way up.

If you are building in the VAB, then default mode for any part you place is Radial symmetry. If the parent part is in Radial symmetry, then any child part that you attach to it is also forced into Radial symmetry. You cannot mix symmetry modes between parent and radially-attached child parts. So the problem in your example is most likely because your I-Beam was placed with Radial symmetry. So make sure you change to Mirror symmetry before you place the parent part, or build in the SPH (so you don't have to bother remembering to change for every part).

Foxster is correct, closing intakes does nothing positive whatsoever, and has not done for many versions. And you have the main points of dry mode. It provides significantly less thrust, somewhat better efficiency at low speeds and low altitudes, chokes in the mid-600 to low 700 m/s range (depending on altitude), flames out at about 17.2km, it can supercruise many designs at up to 15km, and can take a very low-drag airplane supersonic quickly and efficiently. So for small planes it's a really good mode for takeoff. You get up into the 700 m/s range and a decent altitude and then kick it with the afterburner. At max speed and altitude, full afterburner will still give you better fuel efficiency for a long-range trip -- but the afterburner will eat a huge amount of fuel to get you up to that speed and altitude if you don't/can't use dry mode.