XtraChrisP

Go out and grab it while it's still in Kerbolar orbit! I made my first grab of a Class A a while ago and I was able to nudge it enough to get a great gravity assist from Mun. I was able to cancel out about 70 degrees of inclination with that assist! So yeah, the earlier you grab it the less you have to move it to make big changes, and def look for that Mun assist.

Please for the love of all that is holy, add a sort-by function to the tracking station. I have 72 flights out right now, roughly 25 of which at any given time have a maneuver queued up. It would make my life soooooooooo much better if I could a) sort by type, b) manually categorize and color my flights (eg red is my Duna flotilla, Green for the ships bound for Jool; you get the picture) and c) SORT BY TIME-TO-NEXT-MANEUVER. Sorry to get worked up about this, it just seems like such a simple and obvious improvement. Please make it happen. Other than that, KSP=best game ever

I like to put a relay sat in a highly eccentric (like, 100 km - edge of SOI) polar orbit. You get a crazy amount of hangtime and any relay sats on the far side of the moons will get a pretty good luck at the polar relay.

Well, without much to go off of here, I'm going to share something I did that was pretty stupid on the off chance that you did the same thing: Are you sure you chose the Mk2 Rocket fuel fuselage and not the Mk2 Liquid fuel fuselage? The rocket fuel includes the oxidizer your Aerospike needs to burn with the liquid fuel, while the liquid fuel tank does not, and if you don't have any oxidizer, your resources tab may show you have plenty of LF but your engine won't burn.

A couple things to remember: You don't stall at an airspeed, you stall at an Angle of Attack (AoA). Generated lift is proportional to the lift coefficient times the square of the velocity. Lift coefficient rises with AoA, until you reach a critical AoA after which it starts to drop off: your wing stalls. As you AoA rises, so too does your drag. At some point, usually around 5 degrees (depending on the airfield), your maximum L/D is achieved. This is the AoA you have to hold to get your best glide distance. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't get too wrapped around the axle with holding an airspeed, really you only need to concern yourself with AoA. Please note that all AoA indications, both in the AeroGUI and the NavBall are based off the nose of the aircraft. If you placed some incidence in the wings, you need to add or subtract that from your indications. So, once you figure out your best glide and maintain that, just know that there is nothing you can do, short of firing up the engines, to extend your glide. My advice to you would be plan on coming in a bit long and holding a sub-optimal glide slope. If you hold this and realize that you're coming in long, you can always dump some speed or altitude. If you're coming in short, you can pitch over into your best glide to extend it. If you're still short, well...

Get yourself a BigS rock!!! I found a Class E that was on a collision course with the North Pole. I launched an intercept mission and, using a really nifty gravity assist from Mun, managed to place it in an equatorial orbit. That beast fueled my Duna flotilla and still has plenty left over for my upcoming Jool mission

Interrogative - what does the DLC do? Does it have some cool components that tell you the mass of the asteroid before you launch a mission?

Holy geez! How the hell you plan on getting that up to orbit?!?

Clipping things into each other is purely cosmetic. They aero physics calculations will apply drag to all parts as if they were fully exposed to the air. And like others have stated, abrupt size mismatches will absolutely kill you. Use adapters, fairings, and cargo bays to keep your draggy bits out of the airflow.

I guess you could conduct an experiment where you use the AeroGUI to record the drag pre and post fairing deployment and various speeds and various altitudes. Then you can compare the dV loss due to the excess weight of the fairing to the dV loss due to drag. There might be a point where you're still burning high in the atmosphere where you might gain a little by popping your fairing, but if you're still coasting, then, as mentioned in a few other posts, deploying your fairing is counter-productive. You already traded the fuel for velocity, so increasing drag while decreasing mass both work against you if you're still in the atmosphere.

Even then, it will only decay if it's simulating physics on it, which only occurs if you're actively controlling the station or controlling something within physics range (2 km or so). Otherwise, as long as your Pe is above a critical altitude (20 km for Kerbin, someone back-check me please) then your orbit will be on rails and will not decay. If your Pe dips below this critical height, then when you control something else or go back to the station, your station/ship/satellite will simply disappear and cease to exist.

For you Xbox One guys that want to take nice screen shots: Press the Xbox button on your controller, then press Y to take a screenshot. Navigate to your captures and upload the image to OneDrive. Don't have a OneDrive account? Sure you do! You have some free storage under the Microsoft account you use to sign into your Xbox profile. That's a good convoluted way to get screenshots from your Xbox to the internet. Easy, right?

Cool I'll try the Ctrl-Alt-F12 key bind too. I've noticed that when you hit ESC, if you click on the version info in the lower right corner of the box it'll take you to a menu where you can choose a bunch of debug-style options. I haven't been able to access the debug menu in quite sometime because of the OP's issue so I can't say if everything from debug is there, but it seems like most of the options are available.

So just by cursory inspection I'm guessing your tumbling when holding retrograde is because there are so many draggy bits trying to point into the incident airflow. Remember, like an arrow, you want you want heavy parts up front and draggy parts in the back. You're right though, it does look cool, it's just not well suited to atmospheric entry if you're trying to hold retrograde.

Also keep in mind that for any high dV burn you'll have some horrifically long burn times on account of the low thrust provided by the ion engine. I remember I once placed a comm-sat in a polar kerbolar orbit. I placed the SAS to Normal, fired up my ion engine, set physics time compression to 4x, grabbed a sandwich, watched some Netflix, came back and... hmm... still 15 minutes of burn left...