IncongruousGoat

It's invaluable for small, lightweight landers due to its pancake-like form factor. So, for something like this:

Extending & qualifying @suicidejunkie's advice, you need the R&D facility to be at least level 2 in order to transfer fuel in flight. Since it sounds like you're being limited by the size of your vehicle, I advise a pad/VAB upgrade, followed by building a bigger rocket. You can go pretty much anywhere with 1.25m parts, it just takes a lot of asparagus.

Visit Jool at some point. Actually. visit Jool a lot. The moons offer a good variety of destinations, and there's no better place to learn how to use gravity assists.

From the NBC: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/06/spacex-launches-us-air-force-x-37b-space-plane.html

Reusing boosters and Dragon capsules is all well and good, but what I'm looking forward to is the day F9's price tag drops. If that doesn't happen, all the reused boosters in the world won't make a difference in the long run.

If memory serves, it's the "Run Test" button that's the new feature. The old part test contracts were all for parts activated through staging.

Ah. Well, then unlock the barometer for the science. Otherwise, you should have everything you need to reach orbit.

Are you trying to get there with a manned craft or with a probe? If your craft is manned, then you probably want propulsion systems for the lander, fuel systems for building bigger rockets. If you're building a probe, you want propulsion systems and electrics, with electrics taking priority since it contains the probe core and solar panels you'll need. Space exploration could come in handy regardless of what approach you take, just for the extra science from the barometer (although the wheels would allow for the construction of some nice rovers). Everything else is mostly a toss-up, although fairings would be helpful to have.

Yeah. For those parts (as well as all engines, parachutes, and decouplers) the part has to be tested by activating it through staging, not by pressing a "run test" button in the context menu.

You can tilt the entire craft on the launchpad by rotating the root part in the VAB. However, it's worth noting that tilting the rocket on the launchpad is only something you would want to do if it has little in the way of control authority on the first stage, since tilting the rocket only serves to automatically start the gravity turn without the need for any user input. A well-designed rocket will theoretically fly a gravity turn without any control input, but most players (myself included) fly the turn manually, if possible.

As far as I know, ICBM's steer themselves while well into flight to compensate for things like wind. I seem to remember hearing that Titan II especially would constantly adjust its trajectory-much to the amusement of the Gemini astronauts, who likened it to a dog sniffing around for the right flight path.

51 degrees south would leave you dumping boosters on Brazil. So, no. You can't launch at that inclination from Canaveral.

All this talk about the weather brings up an interesting point: If Musk wants to substantially increase launch quantity, he's going to have to find some way for the weather to matter less than it does now. Going back to the ever-popular airline comparison, airlines wouldn't be as effective if every airport had to shut down completely every single time it rained.

Saturday June 3rd, 5:07 EDT

It wouldn't be all that random (language is too structured for that), and it sounds horribly impractical compared to existing random number generators. I think I'll stick with std::rand. Even then, it'll still not be random. Let's say we're typing English. If we're going by number of times each key is pressed, then we're going to be biased towards 'e' and against 'x'. Letter distribution simply isn't even enough. Plus, a program storing all my keypresses and then sending them over the internet does not sound like a thing I would ever install.

Try checking the flight log (F3). It should list the cause of the explosion, which might help you figure out what's wrong.

What I typically do instead of attaching vessels radially to each other is attach them vertically to some common base purpose-built out of modular girder segments. Although that's probably not the kind of solution you were looking for.

Unfortunately not.

*Glances out of window to look for inevitable flying pig*

Creatively circumventing the rules is allowed and, in fact, recommended. Both pad assembly and Kerbal cages are 100% legitimate Caveman techniques, although neither is strictly necessary to complete the challenge.

I don't think it qualifies as a bug, since the current burn time indicator isn't an unintended result of code. The implementation itself is just... crude. I would say that Squad hasn't improved the indicator because they're afraid they can't make it accurate enough (think drop tanks, staging mid-burn), but the current state of the indicator throws that theory out the window. I'm frankly very surprised no dev has, at any point throughout KSP's development, taken a couple of hours to sit down and work out a better burn time indicator. There must be some complication I'm not thinking of, but nothing comes to mind.

Here's a screenshot of a sample input, just to give people an idea of what kind of output the program produces from what kind of input: http://imgur.com/lbesisr Feel free to put it in the post, or to not put it in the post. It's just an example I threw together with about a minute of fiddling with inputs until it produced something interesting.

All right. I've got an initial release out for the solver program. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but I think I can safely say I've gotten a basic version working on Windows. The release can be found here: https://github.com/tmaxthomas/KSP-optimum-stage-calculator/releases/tag/v1.0 Any and all comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

That's good to hear. I don't have much experience writing things that have UIs, so a lot of this has been foreign ground for me.

Ah, point of order... I ended up switching to C# and .NET, since it was much easier to get around my problems with .NET than it was to find a C++ UI library I could actually use (insert licensing issues here). It does mean that it won't be available for Mac, and that I'll have to set up Mono and recompile for Linux if anybody wants it for that. EDIT: I have been made aware that things compiled for Linux with Mono will run on MacOS. So that won't be a problem.