Fraktal

Daily fail: after setting up survey equipment on the Mun, I tried to have my scientist let go of the ladder he was on in order to jetpack to the command module hatch so that we can go home. I ended up staging off the lander's engine instead because the cursed "previous/next craft" button switched from the survey equipment to the lander instead of the kerbal.

Perfect refueling! Just enough left in the fuel hauler for it to deorbit itself.

It is buggy, unfortunately. By itself it works as advertised: have a kerbal equip it as an inventory item, go EVA, go where you want it, click the deploy button, move the kerbal to aim it, then drop it. It will stick itself to the ground and you can now have an engineer kerbal use EVA Construction to add a docking port to it. Actually lining up a landed vessel's docking port with the anchor's is the hard part. The problem is that the ground anchor is NOT exempt from the physics easing introduced a couple major versions ago: when a landed vessel enters physics range, the game raises it above the terrain a bit and then loads it so that none of it explodes due to suddenly being affected by gravity incorrectly causing the engine to think it crashed into the surface at high speed. The ground anchor, however, is MEANT to intersect as part of its normal operation, but the easing code doesn't care and raises it several meters up the next time you load it - and due to being autostrutted to the ground once deployed, it will NOT fall back down, meaning that your whole base will be floating from that point on.

Another cargo-related problem, this one's a definite bug. If tooltips are enabled, they also show up when mousing over inventory parts in the PAW during flight. If the part you mouse over on the PAW is Breaking Ground deployable science equipment and you click the deploy icon, the PAW closes but the tooltip does not. Instead, the tooltip keeps indefinitely following the mouse around until you open another PAW and mouse over, then out of, any inventory item, at which point it disappears as normal. Are you calling the tooltip hiding command from a mouse-out event handler? Because it sounds as if the event doesn't fire if the PAW gets closed this way.

Just had a very good haul on Minmus. First trip there on my current game, landed and scienced 5 biomes in one mission, then got back to Kerbin with only 12 m/s of fuel left. Would've had a greater margin of error if I hadn't gone for the polar biome right off the bat from an equatorial orbit, but at least it's out of the way now.

That one is caused by the symmetry parts technically being new parts, I think. I've seen a similar issue in Ship Sections: place a part without symmetry, give it a section name, move it elsewhere with symmetry. The counterparts will not inherit the original's section name, but instead get assigned to a default one. Grab the original again and put it back down, counterparts now properly inherit the original's section name.

According to the wiki, all parts have G-limits, but 99% of the time it's set to 50g. Only wheels and decouplers have a different value, so I think it was copy-pasted ridiculously high as an anti-kraken measure.

If you're using KER, it's roughly the mass with which you'll get 3400 m/s of dV if your sea-level launch TWR is at least 1.4. Any lower dV and you won't reach orbit. Any lower TWR and you'll lose too much dV to pushing against gravity. For an upper stage, you can get away with less TWR but too low and you won't be able to circularize in time. That's really the best I can say.

Look at it this way. At least the game is future-proofed in terms of hardware utilization.

It was just a launcher update, not a game update.

Command pods have built-in antennas, but those cannot transmit science data even if in range (they're also weak, so a relay will only connect from close range to begin with).

About to attempt my first return from Duna to Kerbin. Never done it before, so now I'll get to find out how risky interplanetary aerobraking at Kerbin without a heatshield really is. Also turned out that Astrogator's auto-generated maneuver node for the return was a load of BS that missed Kerbin by 3.5 million kilometers, so I tossed it out and made my own that not only costs less dV but actually intersects Kerbin's SOI.

Eh. I had single-digit meter differences in Mun and Minmus relays and they still drifted off after a year. I use probe cores almost exclusively as onboard avionics for manned craft, so I only need the comm uplink back to Kerbin for maneuver nodes.

I use only a few equatorial sats. 'Few' as in, I used to go for three per body but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off. So now I just use one sat in a medium-height orbit and learn to live with having a limited transmission window.

Try a <0 km periapse reentry from the Mun. If that doesn't work, try it from Minmus.