AHHans

Well, people play differently! Apparently @5thHorseman doesn't like orbital refueling as much as I do. Essentially all my interplanetary craft launch with only enough fuel to get to my gateway station in a 500 km Kerbin orbit. Which is refueled with a large miner from Minmus, just as @Fierce Wolf said. Exceptions are craft like Eve Anywhere which was designed to be self-contained or Nauvoo Asteroid Station which got one refueling visit from my Minmus miner in Kerbin orbit and then moved to Minmus orbit where it took several trips of said miner to fuel it up. (Doing it in Minmus orbit not only saved round-trip time but also saved the fuel needed to get into Kerbin orbit.) So, yes, it depends on your playstyle if a refueling depot is worth it. I like building deep-space infrastructure, and also have several craft that do multiple interplanetary trips and refuel in-orbit when needed. But if you "just" want to launch single missions, then the hassle of (multiple?) trips to Minmus might be too much, when you just can build a lifter big enough to get a kiloton or so of payload into orbit.

Well, not necessarily lost, but stored until the next try. It is "only" lost if none of the tries are successful and the generated science has reached 100%. Well, then something is wrong. Either your memory, or in your game. Whatever happens, each "try" should generate a message, either saying that new science was transmitted or saying why it wasn't transmitted. Do you use any mods that change the number of deployed science messages? Or the the amount of time-warping you can do?

Ah. That explains why you haven't encountered the "parts just falling off" bug yet. That one is new in 1.8.x.

Not really, at least not always. Locking pistons in a partially extended position works well in my heavy asteroid tug, which uses 5 Klaws at the end of large pistons to have multiple points to grab to an asteroid. This one doesn't really have any force on the pistons when it is being saved or loaded, the force is only there when I rotate or accelerate the asteroid. I guess that's why it doesn't experience these problems. It didn't work so well on an Eve lander that used landing gear at the end of pistons to adjust its ground clearance (and pick up another craft that way). I don't recall what exactly went wrong, but it was extremely wobbly. Well, a) it was better with 1.7.x, I think they still need to iron out issues from the change to the new unity version. And b) it doesn't make the craft totally unusable, it "just" gives them a limited lifespan. (And if you think about how well real life craft fare in Venus' atmosphere, then that lifespan is actually pretty good.)

Well, I also usually add a probe core to all my craft, so I could do without a lot of the pilots. But I like to have someone to blame when a landing goes wrong. ("Wasn't me! Jebediah crashed the plane, not me!" ) It also helps to have control during the plasma blackout phase of reentry.

Well, if you don't have a relay network around Eve that will give you 100% coverage, then you'll always have times when the station won't have a connection. If it happens to only try to transmit at these times without a connection, then you'll miss all the data... The one way to be sure is to pay attention to the messages that are coming in while the deployed experiments are running. P.S. There is an "always" missing in there...

Well, what I do on occasion is to use the cheat menu to check the profession of a prospective rescuee - before deciding if they are going to be rescued. Actually only 43 are in space, three of the "active" Kerbals are crewing the Kerbin exploration plane and it's refueling rover that are currently parked on the apron in front of the SPH. So I guess they are also twiddling their thumbs on Kerbin.

Ah, btw.: did you also have parts of your planes fall off on loading? I mean literally falling off, not moving around for a while and the falling off or so. Just when you load a plane, a part of the wing doesn't attach to the rest of the plane and goes its own way. Well, I have to admit this happens to me mostly when I saved the game in mid-flight, and usually if I load that same save again it does attach everything where it belongs - well, with the "usual" shifting around. Well, you can attach struts to the - non-moving - base of the rotor. But I don't know if that works. P.S. As one of my favorite youtubers likes to say "I'm fake laughing, only the tears are real." P.P.S. I hope this will get fixed soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Meh! Those little green buggers get stranded in LKO every other Tuesday (and Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...) And I actually get paid to pick them up. (I have 75: 46 hanging out in space somewhere and 29 twiddling their thumbs on Kerbin.)

Yes, I think so, and probably not. I also have that effect on my craft. I do use autostruts a lot, but always to "grantparent". So that won't safe you.

Well, a simple refueling stop where you dock, transfer fuel, and undock at the same docking port does not count. But if you pick up a transfer stage or whatever, then that stage is "old" and needs to be detached for the station to count as "new". I don't know what happens if you dock, and then split off a part of the new craft. I think it then still counts as "new", but I don't know for sure. Also, what do you mean with "released"? "New" means that you clicked "launch" in the VAB or SPH after the contract was accepted. If it was already on the launchpad or anywhere else when you accepted the contract then it isn't "new".

Well, you don't need an extra antenna if you have a relay (network) in place, that the "communotron 16"-class antenna in the control station can reach. The extra deployable antenna "just" always allows you direct connections to the (fully upgraded) KSC if you have line-of-sight. I believe that the deployed science uses the same path finding algorithm as all other craft, so it may or may not use a certain relay depending on what gives it the best connection. But do I understand you correctly that you didn't have a working connection all or most of the time until you got the rover into place? Did you get several "experiment generated science but is lacking a connection" messages? Yes, that's IMHO a bug in the implementation. I think that the deployed science works in the way that it checks every now and then (in the first version way too often, now (in 1.8.1) maybe every 10 precentage-points of generated science) if it is powered, there is a connection, and it has science to transmit. Then you either get a "experiment generated and transmitted X amount of science" message, or a "experiment generated science but is lacking a connection" message (or a "experiment is not powered" message, but that shouldn't happen with RTGs). If it doesn't have a connection at one time but does have one at a later time, then it will transmit all the accumulated science. But if it already is at 100% generated science then it will not check again, even if not all (or none...) of the science has been transmitted. The only reliable way to fix that is to walk up with a Kerbal (preferably a scientist) to the experiment, pick it up, and place it again, thus resetting the whole experiment. I don't know if "just" walking up to it, and hitting "enable experiment" in the PAW will work.

Looksee here: Wiki Page on CommNet (IMHO that page says all there is to say, but if you have further questions, then ask away.) I don't know about any mods that display the current region where you will have connectivity. "Current region" because that will change with the relays moving around. I'd also suggest to move this thread to "Gameplay Questions and Tutorials" or "Add-on Discussions" depending on where you'd like to move the discussion.

I wanted to illustrate the difference between just looking at the Isp of an engine and looking at what engine is best for a given craft.

Well, in real life I'd be less interested how efficient a certain engine is in converting fuel to mechanical work but more interested how fuel efficient a certain engine is in e.g. my car. The most efficient (in converting the energy in the fuel into mechanical work) Diesel engines that are currently built are the engines of big cargo ships. While you might be able to construct a truck than can carry - and be powered by - one of these monsters it wouldn't be an efficient truck. So in order to answer the question "which one is more efficient" one needs to know how you define efficiency: Isp is the value that gives you how efficient an engine is in converting fuel into kilo-Newtons of thrust (or kN-seconds for the physicists). If you want to know what is the most efficient engine for a certain craft, then I'd say: stick a selection of engines onto it, and see with which of them it gets the most dV - while having an acceptable TWR.

Maybe. It's a common enough issue, but I don't really consider this a problem. I also think that you got the gist of it right. KSP cannot read your mind. So if you have RAPIERs and NERVs in the same stage, then KSP assumes that you'll want to use both of them at the same time and calculates dV and burn time accordingly. If you don't want to use the RAPIERs in orbit (which is fairly common) and still want the calculations to be correct, then you need to help KSP understand that you are not going to use them. I myself do that by having the RAPIERs and the NERVs in different stages. Except for activating the RAPIERs the for first time I don't use the staging system to activate engines on my spaceplanes, I use action groups instead. I also move the stage with the currently active engines to the bottom of the staging list, to help KSP get the calculations right. And welcome to the forums.

Well, IMHO most of the fun of the game is designing your own craft, so instead of pointing you to other craft I can give you some general tips: Design your craft from the top down: What do you need to return to Kerbin, what non-rocketry parts (science parts) do you need for your mission (What do you need to land and get back to Kerbin? Only applicable once you actually want to land on Minmus, the Mun or so!) What (how much dV!) do you need for maneuvering in orbit? What kind of booster will get that into orbit. A few grams at the top of the rocket cost as much as a ton of the bottom of the rocket. So try to shave of as much weight as possible at the top without compromising your mission. (Do you need all that monopropellant and ablator?) But still keep a healthy safety margin. (Yes, getting that balance right is literally rocket science!) A good booster will need ca. 3200 m/s vacuum dV to get into Kerbin orbit. You'll need a TWR of at least 1.3 at the start of the first stage to get off the launchpad fast enough. At a TWR larger than about 2 you are loosing efficiency, you either waste efficiency by ascending too steeply or by getting too fast too low in the atmosphere. (On airless worlds a high TWR doesn't have an efficiency penalty.) As @Fierce Wolf already hinted at: different engines are good for different stages. Solid rocket boosters are great for getting you off the launchpad, but most (and all that were available before 1.8) loose they utility quickly. The reliant and swivel are good lifter engines, but at best mediocre in vacuum.(*) The terrier is useless in atmosphere but great in vacuum. (I use it a lot even in late game!) Have a look at the Isp values of the engines in different circumstances (in atmosphere and in vacuum) to figure out which engine to use when. (*) The reliant and swivel are also outclassed by later game engines like the skipper, mainsail, or vector as first stage lifter engines. But early in the game they are what you have.

Well, until I had 100 h or so (probably more) in KSP I would have liked to have seen something like this. (Same as: "enable advanced tweakables", "Kerbals on EVA have lights that can be switched on", etc.)

Rear Ended Station Station Rear End Station at the Rear End Station TMI Station SCNR!

When placing a part with symmetry enabled, then at the top left - below the "place a part", "move a part", "rotate a part", and "set root" buttons - you get a field saying either "Vessel" or "Parent". That means that the (radial) symmetry will be done around (only) the parent part, or around the whole vessel. Except that this doesn't seem to work... It usually only does symmetry around the last part that was placed without symmetry. In a case like your example I would place one pair of decouplers (in radial symmetry around the vessel) on one side of the side-tanks, and then another one on the other side of the tanks (where there isn't one already). Most of the time a symmetry-group of decouplers (or engines or whatever) show up in the staging list with only one symbol (and a small number saying how many there are in that group). But when that group is selected, e.g. by clicking on it in the staging list, then it shows up with one symbol for each part, with small numbers from one to the number of the parts.

Sometimes a picture says more than many words: P.S. Yes, I probably could have chosen a better color, but I'm not going to re-do it.

O.K. First the easy part: the changes in stages 2 and 3 are as expected for adding some mass to the lander. (I guess you knew that already.) Another issue is that the stock dV calculation often has problems getting the calculation done for all stages at first: some stages first show a wrong (I only remember: none at all, or too low) dV value, but if you do a small change it will give you the value. This small change could be taking away a part and attaching it again (e.g. a nose-cone), or just left(!)-shift clicking on the vessel to move it around a bit. That usually "fixed" it for me. I have the impression, that this happens when the program has trouble figuring out for how long each stage will burn. Usually because (as you have in your case) multiple engines run at the same time, but some burn out at some time and are staged away. It is even worse if you use fuel-cross feed to feed a stage with tanks from another. In this case it works better to use the external fuel pipe instead of the crossfeed in the decouplers and (manual) fuel feed priorities on the tanks. (But "better" does not mean "always correct".) To check if KSP got it right I usually check if dV, start-mass, end-mass, and burn time all make sense and are consistent. But wiggling the vessel a bit with a left-shift click usually works for me.

Yes, but if you want to mount it to a 1.25 m or a 1.875 m stack? In general: different people have different preferences. I for myself, e.g., essentially never use the mainsail or skipper: my "heavy booster" sub-assemblies all feature a recoverable Twin-Boar in the center.

Well, my design for an early 5 person craft is: MK1 pod - crew cabin - upside-down MK1 pod - MK1 pod - heatshield That has enough reaction wheel torque to keep upright under most circumstances, doesn't have the squishy crew cabin at the bottom where it gets hot, and has more hatches to make rescuing people easier (no need to have the pilot exit the craft to let a rescuee in). It has a strange waist, but all connections are at the same size, which keeps the drag down. But of course other design are also possible! IIRC this doesn't happen (to me) when the Kerbal has something to grab to when exiting the capsule. I.e. when, after clicking on "EVA", the Kerbal holds onto the capsule. As soon as the Kerbal is free, they orient themselves in space (IIRC head to normal or to north), and that usually includes hitting the capsule (with their hands or feet or whatever), which sends the capsule spinning. On crewed parts that don't have anything to hold on to (e.g. the MK1 crew cabin) this happens immediately after going on EVA.

How about: The slightly higher Isp does make a difference for your craft. You want to mount it "radially". You have a 1.25 m mount. You have a 1.875 m mount. But probably the number one reason is: You only need the thrust of 1 skiff.