AHHans

I don't know. Why don't you give it a try and let us know about the results? (Then I don't have to do it myself.)

I don't have much to add, but here are my 0.05€ to this topic: Normal connections between two parts are a bit "bendy", i.e. they can move against each other when the forces become large before breaking off. If you set this to true, then the connection to its parent part will not move but will just break when the force becomes too large. As in real life, this movement acts like a spring during an impact (e.g. a plane landing) and usually reduces the maximum force between two parts by spreading out the acceleration over a longer time. So rigidly attached parts tend to break apart on even lesser impacts. But they don't shift around during lower accelerations. (I never use that option in my craft.) Two things about the sides of a fairing: one is that the number of sides only actually gets changed if you edit (or create) the fairing after changing the number of sides in the PAW. (So, yes, if you just change it in the PAW nothing will happen immediately.) The other is that the fairing pieces can collide with your payload after deploying the fairing. (This is even more of a problem when you use "clamshell deploy".) If your payload is not cylindrical but e.g. has a 4-way symmetry then setting the fairing up so that the pieces are on the sides and not the corners - and thus are ejected away from the corners - can keep your payload safe from collision. (I figured that out the hard way when a fairing kept damaging two tires on one of my rovers when it had three sides.)

I don't know how FAR does things, but the way the stock engine works flaps or spoilers just don't make any sense. Any aero-surface will always cause lift, even if you completely hide (clip) it into another part. So you cannot change you wing area by moving parts into or out-of each other. Similar for spoilers: you cannot disrupt the lift of an aero-surface by putting another part into the airstream around that surface. (Because there is no airstream...) You can make airbrakes, as you already found out. You can also increase the pitch of some aero-surfaces to generate more lift without pitching the whole craft up, but as you say that's not the same as actual flaps. And, well, elevons are just control surfaces with both pitch and roll control active. (But in my experience it is better to have some control surfaces dedicated to only pitch, because otherwise you'll loose pitch trim as soon as you enter roll commands...)

IMHO it is best for all kinds of rotors (in KSP) to keep the RPMs constant and control (whatever you want to control) by changing the blade pitch. But if I understand you correctly you also arrived at that conclusion. If you only ever need 10% rotor torque, then I'd suggest to lower the motor size in the VAB/SPH. That way you don't need to carry unnecessary weight around with you. And finally to your actual question (yes, yes, I do get to that): with the new changes in 1.9.0 you can indeed get classic main-rotor / tail-rotor helicopter to work. If you set the blades on the main rotor to do pitch and roll control and the blades on the tail rotor to do yaw control (with the control direction to the front), then SAS can use the tail rotor to keep the craft from spinning. Even without a counter-rotating rotor setup. I put a small test helicopter that does this on KerbalX: Basic Helicopter In a heavier craft (with a more powerful and thus torque generating main rotor) you may have to "trim" the tail rotor to keep it from slowly rotating. You can either do this with the manual trim as @OHara explained, or by setting the deploy angle of the tail-rotor blades to an appropriate value.

Hi, welcome to the forums. KSP should run fine on that machine. KSP is in general more CPU intensive and less GPU intensive than other games. And it really likes to have RAM, so the 16 GB RAM help a lot. You'll see some slow-down when you fly large craft with many parts, but a faster CPU will "only" push that limit up to somewhat higher part numbers. So it's IMHO really only a gradual difference. I can't say much about the GPU, but I think it should also be fine. You may not want to turn up the "Terrain Shader Quality" to ultra in the settings, though.

Ah, welcome to the club! The battery extension for my Jool 3 (Vall, Pol, and Bob) rover/lander is currently on its way to Jool. (It has an RTG, so it surely doesn't need big batteries, does it?)

For me the procedure that @HvP outlined also works best. The one thing I'd like to add is that for me it helps a bit to place the first single decoupler on one of the cardinal directions on the rocket. That makes it a bit easier to see if I got the placement of the SRB (or whatever) right.

I'd like to thank @Mars-Bound Hokie for hosting this fun challenge.

I can see that. I spend much more time designing a rocket than it takes me to get it into orbit. So I don't worry about the number of launches. (Both of which is a fraction of the time it takes me to design and test a plane.) And I like to imagine how my Kerbals conquer space and build infrastructure there, so I don't mind docking most craft to my fuel station, and shuttling my miner to and from Minmus to refuel the station. Reminds me of a space-station contract I once had: antenna, docking port, power generation, space for five Kerbals. - Hmmm, I could slap a docking port on my tourist shuttle. - Do you mind if I bring a few tourists? And land the "station" back on Kerbin after you paid me?

Well, then don't. I wanted to know how big people let their payloads grow before they think about using other solutions to reach the same goal - like splitting up the payload, or refueling in orbit. Not in the least because I noticed that even my biggest launch wasn't really all that heavy compared to what I had orbiting the different planets. I certainly didn't want to start a contest of who has the biggest rocket or so. As I already wrote, with spaceplanes it is a bit hard to distinguish what is the launcher and what is the payload: My spaceplanes are SSTOs where you cannot detach anything (well, without breaking the craft...), and where I take the full craft for the full trip. In fact, there is very little that could be taken away from the craft in orbit without compromising some part of the mission. (Without the wings and the RAPIERs (in air-breathing mode) I couldn't fly them to land at the KSC anymore.) So I think that the whole craft counts as payload. On the other hand if you use a spaceplane to get something into orbit which separates from the spaceplane and goes on to perform the mission, while the spaceplane lands again, then the spaceplane itself wouldn't be part of the payload. And there is a grey area in between...

Before refueling. That additional fuel didn't get into orbit in the same launch.

If you still have the craft file, then just remove all the launcher stages. If a stage is used for both, finalizing the orbit and transfer to the destination, then just remove as much fuel as "feels right" for the circularization burn. No need to actually redo the launch. My goal was to get a general overview what people lob into orbit, so there is no need for unnecessary precision.

Ah, yes. One more reason not to go around littering the solar system.

My question was about the payload in orbit, not the mass of the launcher on the pad. Again, was that the mass of the launcher of the pad, or of the payload in orbit? My question was about the latter. In general: no! But with spaceplane SSTOs there is really the question of what is the payload and what is the launcher. So for e.g. my passenger shuttle that I use to ferry personnel to and from the space-stations around the Mun and Minmus I say that the mass of the craft in LKO before the transfer burn is the "payload". (Because the Kerbals without the craft couldn't get where I want them.)

Yes. Set the "Spring / Damper" settings from auto to manual in the PAW, then you get the sliders. You might have to switch on advanced tweakables in the settings.

To me the legs behave as if the lander is too heavy and the springs are fully compressed. have you tried fiddling with the spring settings of the legs?

I use Linux not Windows, but even on windows I expect it to be something that is controlled by the OS and not the program (here KSP) itself. So I would look there. (Does Windows have a right-click menu for the "open windows in the tool-bar at the bottom"? (I'm don't know how this it properly called.) I don't expect that you'll have a "Move To Desktop" option there, but maybe there is something useful.)

That's one way. Switching to "mantain stability" as @GuyWithGlasses recommended is another way. (And one way to quickly do this is to tab the <F> key!) What I usually do is to switch to "radial out". With the navball in surface mode this means pointing straight up.

I got 1.9.0 from steam as usual as an update. (On an ubuntu 18.04) If you don't get it when doing a fresh install via the steam client, then I'd guess that there is something wrong with your steam client. Do you see the notice from the 12th February that 1.9.0 is out in your steam client? When selecting which beta version you want (or don't want) do you have the option of selecting 1.8.1 in contrast to "NONE - opt out"?

Hi @Quasispecies, welcome to the forums. Are you using SAS retrograde hold while landing? In that case it could be that it tries to keep up with the retorgrade direction that starts to wildly change when you slow down to a near stop. SAS is supposed to switch off retrograde hold when your speed goes below 1 m/s, but if the speed changes too fast then it can get confused and keep retrograde hold when it shouldn't. Or are you using another SAS mode? If so, which one?

Hmmm... does that count as the biggest contrast here?

My first though was: "No from that low an orbit you don't." Then it occurred to me that 48 km is within the atmosphere of Eve. But your screenshot says that you are in an 48 thousand km by 13 thousand km orbit, just next to Gilly. From there it can be done in theory: from your apoapsis you need about 200 m/s to drop your periapsis down to just above Eve's atmosphere, to say 100 km - 150 km. If you then burn at the periapsis of this highly elliptical orbit you need less than 250 m/s to leave Eve's SOI with enough speed for a Hohmann transfer to Kerbin, where I hope you can aerobrake. (If you can't aerobrake, then you won't be able to capture at Kerbin with that amount of fuel!) The problem with this is, that you have to get lucky for everything to line up: the ejection angle from Eve's SOI is essentially fixed by the need to do the two burns at (or at least close to) the apoapsis of your current orbit and the periapsis of the resulting, elliptical orbit. And this direction needs to line up with Eve's orbit to get you on a Hohmann transfer and a transfer window from Eve to Kerbin. My approach would be to get onto that elliptical orbit, set up a maneuver node at the periapsis with 230 m/s or so, and then use the "next orbit" button until I get a solution that is close enough that I can fine-tune it to an encounter with Kerbin. (Well, actually I would just get back to Gilly's SOI, and send a rescue mission. But that wasn't your question.) Another version would be to use gravity assists to get you back. But I suck at those... P.S. Please don't change the default font size of your text. For me the large font is just annoying.

Well, you aren't the first one to do this. And probably aren't the last one...

I don't know, but it could be that the grip pads help here too. The surface of the grip pads has the "is supposed to touch ground" ability that normal parts don't have, so it might help. I agree! And my suggestions are not meant to point out mistakes, but to help work around a bug in the program. But the issue has been pointed out ages ago, so I don't have much hope that this will be fixed anytime soon.

Well, if you still have the craft file then just remove all the stages that get detached during ascent and, if needed, remove some of the fuel from the transfer stage that would be needed to circularize. This isn't about precision, but about getting an idea what people are up to. Well, my space-plane SSTOs are not meant to transport craft into orbit, but are the spacecraft on their own. (In particular my person shuttle to rotate crew from and to the space stations in the Kerbin system.) So if your big SSTO was only meant to put a payload into orbit and it cannot go further than LKO it's really up to you if you want to include that. Hmmm... well, if your SSTO was a mission like the Spacelab missions of the Space Shuttle (i.e. the mission was to only be in LEO or LKO), then the full orbit mass of the SSTO counts. Same here. But not really because I try to keep my craft small (I don't believe in making artificially big craft either), but because if a craft gets big, then I launch it without most of the fuel and refuel in orbit. (With ore mined on Minmus.) Well, it is hard to compare stuff launched into Earth orbit to stuff launched into Kerbin orbit. The kind of missions that you do in a RO/RSS game are necessarily different than what you do in a stock game. So should a 100t LEO craft count as 100t or as more? Or less? 100t because your goal was to only have 100t in orbit. More, because you needed a much bigger launcher to get it into orbit. Or even less, because you just wanted to go to Mars and for getting the same science payload to Duna you only need a much smaller craft.