bewing

Yeah, the way landing leg/wheel autostruts work is that they attach your landing leg directly to the most massive part on your current vessel. When you dock, suddenly the combined vessel may have a new "most massive" part. At that point, all the autostruts on the one vessel must be detached from the old most massive part, and forcibly attached to the new most massive part. There are large forces involved in doing this, and it can be an extremely violent process -- as I think you have just seen with your ship. Preselecting a known most massive part, and forcing it to NOT change during the docking can help.
 
 

"Getting to Duna"? That usually just requires picking a good launch window. As I understand it, anything from day 20 to day 236 works OK, with increasing quality -- with day 236 being extremely good. Are you already familiar with launch window calculators and deltaV maps?
As far as putting up a relay goes: it sounds like you only lost control/comms when you lost your line-of-sight connection to Kerbin. So the easy answer to fixing that is to just wait until daylight over the targeted part of Duna before you deorbit each lander. Kerbin is always on the daylight side of Duna, so you'd always have LOS if you wait until daylight. If you really want to bounce through a relay in orbit so that you have constant comms -- then the relay has to sit on the night side of Duna. And it's best if it stays out of Ike's SOI (to avoid slingshots), so a fairly polar orbit is best. And you want the orbit to have a really high Ap (at the edge of Duna's SOI), so that it stays in that spot for a long time before quickly completing the rest of its orbit. If you really really want constant comms, then you need at least 4 relay sats -- which gets to be a total PITA. My personal preference is to not bother with any relay sat at all, and just do everything when my landers have LOS.
 
 

The mass and shape of an asteroid are controlled by something called a "seed". The OP asked if there were any way besides getting lucky with a random number generator to set the mass. The DLC provides a way of setting the asteroid seed by hand and viewing the changes instantly. Once you know the seed that gets you the results you want, you can copy that seed into the savegame file. And that will conjure up the same asteroid that you were looking at in the DLC.
 

Around 30 degrees is max lift, but also very high drag. Above 30 you lose lift. (Of course, FAR changes all of that if you are running modded.)
0 to 5 degrees gives good lift with minimal drag -- and if you are short, it's more about minimizing drag than about creating lift. Because if you are short, that means you have many kilometers still to cover -- which means you need speed. Lift just gains you a little extra altitude -- which won't get you very far if you don't have any speed. And maximizing speed while minimizing drag means "stop your descent as high as you can". If you are too low, and also short -- you just aren't going to make it, unless you have some engines and fuel to burn.
 

Yeah, you can do that in stock to some degree. You can make a wing and then save it as its own vessel. Then use the "Merge" button in the Load Vessel dialog to attach one to the other. You need to be careful which part of the wing is the "root" part. You may need to use the reroot tool to set that.
Alternately, in the "Advanced" construction menu (button in the top left) is a section for "Subassemblies". Which is exactly what you are talking about. You make a wing, drop it in the subassembly zone, and it gets saved. Then when you want a wing, you load the subassembly and stick it on.
 

Yes, multiple docking ports have been able to dock simultaneously since back before version 1.0, I think. It hasn't changed.
 

Generally, without that setting, your Ap will drop some random amount -- depending how how low your Pe is.
 

Behind, and only a little. The two balls touching each other is good.
Generally, your engines should be attached to your fuselage. If you want them to look like they are attached to the wings, then you use the Move tool to adjust them.
But no, in general you want your engines aligned with your prograde vector, which you want to have aligned with your fuselage.
There really isn't one. It kinda depends on your flight profile. A shallow flight profile with lots of wing allows you use minimal numbers of engines.
Two Rapiers are easily enough all by themselves, for 33 tonnes -- with a shallow ascent.
You don't want to raise it. A prograde at zero means you are thrusting horizontally, which is pretty much what you want. So lock your nose prograde and burn like hell until your Ap is at 71.5 km. But if you are losing control, then you should be looking at adding more stability to your design. However, you should probably be hitting 1500 m/s at something more like 24km. Between 26 and 29km you want to switch the Rapiers into closed cycle mode -- and by 30km, you should be at something more like 1700 m/s.
Now you are getting into spaceplane aesthetics and religious questions.
If you don't have any wings, why the heck aren't you launching a rocket in the first place? The wings are there to provide lift for your plane while it flies horizontally and picks up speed. They create drag, but provide lift and fuel storage, so they pay for themselves. But if you use wings, it takes longer to get to orbit. Many players seem to like to rush it. So they put on little tiny things that they call wings, and put their nose 30 degrees above horizontal, and blast their way to orbit on massively overpowered engines. The smaller the wings, the more engine you need. The two methods get you to orbit with similar deltaV and cargo capacities.
 

Welcome to the forums.
First guess is trim. Did you try Alt-X?
 

KSP uses a game engine called Unity. Unity uses a physics library called PhysX. Inside PhysX is a bug in their spring equation that makes wheels and landing legs (anything with a "suspension") bounce. Usually it is controllable with some tweaks in your craft design. Unfortunately, we can't fix it since the Unity/PhysX sourcecode is not public.
Planes in 1.4.4 usually bounce like that if the wheels are loaded very heavily. Try removing some fuel and the bouncing may go away.
That really has to mean that one of your engines is still on. Or you landed on a hill.
 

If you are willing to grant that the distant stars don't move much (in an angular sense) in a lifetime, then an orbit is fixed with respect to the distant stars, basically. Or in another sense, orbits are always in "universal coordinates". 
 

Well, for connecting, there are klaws and there are modded hoses (since you are playing modded).
The traditional workaround for the bug is to make sure the wheels are off the ground at the moment that docking happens. If you then switch focus away (to the KSC or another vessel) and then switch back, then the bug won't happen.
 

To damage them without destroying them, you have to bonk them from the side. They are "designed" to withstand forces on their feet.
And yes, this feature still exists, but sometimes tweaks in various parts of the code make it more or less difficult to get a leg into a slightly damaged state.
 

There's been a bug with admin strategies for a while -- at least at Tier 3. It actually doubles whatever strategy you select. So if you say 50%, it's really 100%.

The service modules have "jettison boxes" around the doors. When you pop the doors off, anything attached to the doors comes off too. So the game thinks your tanks are attached to the doors. To make it not happen, move the tanks farther from the doors.
 

Yup, you found an odd non-Kerbal vehicle that has been embedded in a rock for a very long time. (That's how it's supposed to be.)
 

It's been that way forever. SAS settings don't persist. I would argue that they can't, because only Normal, Anti-Normal, and Stability hold their directions over time. Every other setting moves. And that's the way that rails work, too. If you switch away from a craft so that it's on rails -- then it will hold exactly that orientation. Which is exactly what SAS stability mode does.
As an enhanced feature for users for the last few versions, if you remain in physics range of a vessel when you switch away from it, it will temporarily remember what SAS mode it's in until you switch focus back to it. But it will always revert to Stability mode once you refocus it.
 

Nope. Maybe you are thinking of the FAR mod package?
Stock aero does not model any of that stuff.
 

(Heh. April 11 is less than one month ago. :p )
Well, with room for that many Kerbals, it's gonna be very heavy. So you aren't going to want to move it again. So if it does mining and ISRU, then you will want some way of getting the refined fuel out of that ship and back to orbit. So it's going to be more about what additional rovers and support ships you will need for the base.
For the base itself, you just need solar panels, a couple radiators, some drills, storage for Ore, storage for fuel, and some way for a rover to attach to the base and suck the refined fuel out.
 

The Reliant and Swivel? Nope. No new model and no variants for those. What you are seeing must be entirely from a mod.
 

Wings in general create lift and drag. If you are going to be flying level for a long time, then they support the weight of the plane while you do that. So if you are going to be doing an extended "speed run" to build up velocity at 20km altitude during your airbreathing phase, then wings can be good. Since they always create drag, they will always slow you down a bit. Since they create lift, they will save fuel while they create drag. So it's a tradeoff. The exact wing geometry makes almost no difference. Wings produce basically the same lift no matter how you place them.
If, on the other hand, you are going to be doing any "pitching up" stuff, then no -- you almost certainly want to be going for the absolute minimum wing surface possible.
Depends on your piloting skills, the types of parts you choose, and how carefully you work to minimize drag. Although you almost never want to reach mach 3 at sea level. You want to get past mach 1, and then get yourself into a climb as gently as possible. The harder you maneuver, the more of that initial speed you are going to waste doing your maneuver.
No. Landing gear is only shielded if the majority of it is inside a cargo or service bay (or sometimes a fairing) -- and you are willing to watch the extended wheels clip through the fuselage.
If you don't do that, then the drag on any radially attached part is always the same, no matter where you place it. Clipping parts together does not shield them from anything.

The colliders from your toroid tank are bumping into your target vessel before the docking port can connect. The placement order of the parts shouldn't matter, only their final location. If you leave the locations the same, you should get pretty much the same result. But a few centimeters can make all the difference.
 

Once you are in the CB's SOI, if you have a probecore on your ship, then you can use KerbNet. KerbNet has a reticle with a Lat/Lon readout, and it allows you to place named waypoints at the reticle location. So you place several around the equator.
Then you can use the indicators on the navball to determine when you are crossing the equator, and you eyeball your orbital line to make it pass exactly over all the waypoints.
Additionally, of course, satellite contracts and rescue contracts typically spawn with pure equatorial orbits and you can target those for reference.
Additionally, if you are willing to cheat a teensy bit, you can use SetOrbit on any piece of debris to teleport that part into a  perfect equatorial orbit of any CB -- then target it to use as a reference. Or launch a cubic octag or whatever and use SetOrbit on that.

Yeah, somehow one of your mods has messed with commnet. The button to disable commnet in the settings does work in a pure stock game, and allows infinite comm range when you turn it off.
 
 

No, you don't need a connection back to KSC. But in your ship with the pilot, you do need 1) an advanced probe core (or a MK1-3 pod), and 2) a relay antenna of some type. Also a direct antenna on the unmanned craft, any probe core, and (usually) line-of-sight.
But yeah, that's kind of the point of the new "remote control" feature is to allow pilots to drive little rovers around on planets, even without a KSC connection.