jimmymcgoochie

We're going to need a bit more information- your KSP version, a mod list and the game logs are a good start.

For all that this is a game about rockets and space, I've been spending a lot of time doing plane stuff recently. And today was no exception- new jet engines for the HJ-A to make it the HJ-B and significantly faster- whereas the old configuration could barely hold 300m/s at 10km in a slow descent, the new engines make it capable of holding 450m/s at the same altitude in level flight. (I took the existing HJ-A, loaded the design that included the new engines and saved the edits after repainting it. Some minor details have changed as a result, but it's still the same craft as far as KCT is concerned.) It can probably go even faster than that, but today's flight only needed a speed between 400 and 450 for 3 minutes so 405 was as fast as it went. Good thing too, as the moment I turned off the MechJeb autopilot, this happened: Unclear what that pointy tail bit actually does for the plane, but I'm guessing whoever made it wouldn't have put it there without a good reason. It shouldn't be too hard to repair when the next contract comes up. The upgrades haven't made it any easier to land without massive lairy skids- in fact this one was even worse due to the rear landing gear having steering enabled, in the same direction as the front wheel. And just for the record, I landed westbound... I also checked out a couple of rocketplane designs from the RP-1 Discord server, but none really met my needs so I decided to make my own. Tested to 75km (the limits of the X-2 cockpit) and 1500m/s, it handled both fine and turned out to be a pretty good glider. Which meant absolutely nothing when I tried to land it and discovered it's even more prone to rolling over on landing than the HJ. The solution? Stick tiny little wheels on the wingtips so that even if it does tip over, the wings don't hit the ground. Simple! And it's worth mentioning Custom Parachute Messages now, since I used it on the drag chute for this plane. Great mod, well worth adding to your RP-1 games, it not only gives you the pattern-encoded parachute from Perseverance, but is also fully customisable: I tried to code in Terranism Space Program, but it only accepts 8 characters per line so that didn't work too well- but It's Not Rocket Science fits nicely! Expect to see a lot of parachutes like this in the future. The good news is this plane uses all tooled parts; the bad news is it'll still take nearly six months to build. That's half a year that I'm not making any rockets. A few KCT points were bought and distributed to try and fix this problem: And now for the only rocket launch of this update- Red Clarinet 3. It was originally only meant to be doing a downrange distance contract, but the engine failed to ignite and when I rolled it back to fix it I made some modifications to add a bio sample capsule- it was 8 days to replace the engine and another 8 to add the capsule, and I'm not in that much of a hurry. Refitted and rolled out again, Red Clarinet 3 took to the sky. The contract was easily fulfilled, the biological sample experiment completed for space low and the payload recovered safely in a flawless mission. Flawless, that is, apart from the annoying RSSVE cloud shadows bug. I'm now nearly at March 1953 and still nowhere near orbit, though I downloaded a 20-ton orbital rocket from the Discord and began hacking away at it trying to make it work with the tech I've already unlocked, to moderate success. With a bit more work it might make it to orbit, but it requires integral structure tanks which I don't yet have unlocked and which are expensive both to unlock and tool. Coming soon: Rocketplanes probably, so I'd better get the pilots doing X-1 proficiency training! Forgetting to do the training delayed me in TSP so I'll do my best to avoid repeating that mistake here.

"We don't need those little SRBs on this thing." Proceeds to put even bigger SRBs on it 2 minutes later. Thumpers are overkill, you could do a Titan 3 style launch with those- light the solid boosters on the pad, then the core engine when the boosters run out. Which is completely unnecessary for a simple LKO rendezvous, some Hammer boosters with the thrust limiter turned down would do the job for half the price.

Your Dropbox link has expired. Random guess- is the fuel tanker on a later stage to the crew ship when they dock (e.g. the tanker is on stage 0 but the crew ship is on stage 1)? Maybe a mod is getting confused by that and decides to make everything stage 0, triggering the decoupler and parachutes; but without access to the logs, mod list or screenshots (please include screenshots, they're very helpful- or even better, a video!) that's the best I can do right now. If you replicate the designs and use the cheat menu to put them in orbit, then dock them together, does the same thing happen? Does docking something else to the crew ship trigger it?

Screenshots please. If you’re using auto struts, those are particularly prone to glitching when robotics are involved so turn them all off before moving the robotic bits.

Screenshot please. Are you picking a flag for your agency in the main menu when starting a new game (or through the flagpole in the KSC), or picking a mission flag in the editor, or putting a flag part on your vessel, or planting a flag with an EVA Kerbal?

Screenshot? Sounds like this save might be corrupted, try loading an earlier one?

A plethora of launches to report on today, spanning a year of game time due to glacially slow build times. First up, Red Piccolo 2- largely the same as its predecessor, but with the newly unlocked XASR-1 engine config producing double the thrust and a third fuel tank to provide the extra fuel needed. I also fixed the thermometer so it works this time. Its mission was to cross the Karman line, a task which it was more than a match for: an apoapsis of over 150km and breaking speed and altitude records along the way made it a very profitable flight on top of the science data gathered from the upper atmosphere and low space. On its descent back to the surface the fins got ripped off, then it smashed into the ground and was destroyed exactly like how I thought the Red Piccolo 1 would. Red Piccolo 3 was next, but I forgot to screenshot that one for most of the flight. All I have are a few shots of the return section- bio sample capsule, avionics, science gear and a parachute- however the mission went flawlessly and useful science data was gathered, along with more contract money. The design was essentially the same as the Red Piccolo 2 above, but with some extra gubbins on top of the avionics and two decouplers to ditch the fuel tanks at either end. A noticeably longer build period later and Red Clarinet 1 arrives at the pad, the first 1.25m diameter rocket using the RD-100 engine, launching a camera, bio sample capsule and some sounding payload. It broke 2km/s and 300km during its flight, smashed the 60km target for the sounding rocket contract and returned safely from a suborbital trajectory, yielding a significant contract payout and a lot of science. Twenty science from that single rocket gets a free KCT point all of its own. At this point I should have started the upgrade for Mission Control to allow an extra contract to be accepted, but I forgot about that and spent it all on KCT points instead. The next launch was Red Clarinet 2, nearly identical to its predecessor but with new aluminium fuel tanks and the RD-101 config packing about 30% more thrust. Angled slightly on the pad to get some downrange distance, it dispensed with the spin stabilisation used on the Red Piccolo rockets (well, it would make the photos blurry, wouldn't it?) It went even higher and faster than before, helped somewhat by the lack of heavy sounding payload, reaching 3km/s and 400km. Despite the parachute getting a bit hot during re-entry, no harm was done and the science payload was recovered safely. Another ~19 science gained makes for another free KCT point and a whole lot of nodes that can be added to the queue- enough to keep R&D going for many years at its current rate. This mission also completed a contract for low space film return, netting an extra 30k funds. At this point I finally upgraded R&D, though it'll take over 6 months to complete so will probably be ready at the end of the year. The final launch for today is the Red Oboe 1, created by sticking a lightly modified Red Piccolo on top of a Red Clarinet with some fancy avionics to give it proper control. Attitude control will be handled by movable fins and the engine's thrust vanes providing limited gimbal ability. This mission has a minimal science payload, but then again it doesn't need one: it's going for the 3000km downrange contract. The first stage uses the RD-101 and stretched tanks of Red Clarinet 2, while the upper stage uses new 40cm aluminium tanks; between the two is a decoupler with two spin motors on it designed to spin and ullage the upper stage after separation, then decouple from the upper stage to lighten it. The first stage performed well until the engine abruptly cut out a couple of seconds early. The separation system worked exactly as intended and stage 2 took over, boosting up to higher speeds and altitudes than ever before- over 5km/s and 900km. The success of this flight is one step closer to orbit, however it's almost October 1952 so first orbit will have to wait until at least 1953. If I decide to do some plane-related stuff then that will only push first orbit back further. Coming soon: Pushing towards orbital velocity as improved technologies become available, though Red Oboe 1 was almost at the limits of the current launchpad so I might need to build a bigger one.

As far as I remember, it should already sort by time to next node? If the stock tracking station doesn't do this, the mod Tracking Station Evolved definitely does- as well as sorting by celestial body, craft type, mission duration and ordering by various parameters including name and MET, it also allows you to search for a specific craft name in the tracking station and go right to it. I'm not entirely sure that it's working fully with KSP 1.12 due to the stock alarm banner covering up some of the TSE buttons, but on 1.11 and earlier it's a massive improvement.

Nope, I'm done with those. I have an entire orchestra to get through just sticking with the musical instrument theme, but I've already done pastry-type things and if I reused names I'd just confuse myself.

Montage can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/Q5CTX3d Brand new RO/RP-1 career report can be found here:

RP-1 isn't so bad. I mean, I've done it before* and that went fine**. But, that was on easy mode because it was my first try, and there's a load of new stuff now to make life more difficult, and now I'm going to be using moderate difficulty settings. But come on, how hard can it be- it's only rocket science! A few ground rules for myself before I start: each mission gets one (1) retry if I do something wrong; if I mess it up on the second attempt then that's that; however if it's a game glitch or bug then I reserve the right to take multiple retries. I'll be trying not to just repeat everything I did last time too, which is necessary to some extent because of pressurants and residuals which would make my earlier designs non-functional, and while it would be nice to try and compete with my unusually speedy achievements from last time (first crewed orbit in 1957, crewed Moon landing in 1960 and Mars landing in 1965) I have no doubt that I'll be slower this time both because of the higher difficulty settings and the higher difficulty in general thanks to RO and RP-1 changes that I didn't have last time. The first big question: what do I build first, a rocket or a plane? Rockets at this stage are mostly single-use whereas planes are reusable, however rockets can also much higher and faster and so will actually get some science data whereas the plane will have to maintain a fairly high speed and altitude to get any science at all, and even then from only one experiment since flying low science was removed from Earth. In the end I went with a rocket, the same basic design as last time- Tiny Tim booster, 38cm Aerobee rocket with the WAC engine and some science stuff stuck on it. One thing I'll be reusing from my last playthrough is the Rainbow Codes naming scheme, since this avoids having to think of proper names for stuff. This first rocket is Red Piccolo 1 (because the piccolo is the smallest woodwind instrument). Simulations said this thing could hit an apoapsis of anywhere between 95km and 122km depending on variance- using one propellant more or less than the "normal" values and/or differing ISP and/or thrust- but the real thing was quite lucky and drained all propellants pretty evenly to reach an apoapsis of 118km. It was only after it reached the apoapsis that I realised the thermometer on this thing was "shrouded" and so wouldn't generate any science data at all. At this point I considered range safety-ing the rocket as it dropped below 40km and science generation stopped, but instead I let it fall back to the ground near the KSC. And then- *boing* For reasons I can't quite work out, the first impact with the ground at over 100m/s only destroyed the engine, sending the rest of the rocket bouncing away at a shallow angle at about 30m/s or so. Further impacts sheared off a couple of fins, but the majority of the rocket survived intact and was recovered. I really wasn't expecting that! On the plus side, recovering a vessel from a flight gives 5 science- a pretty big deal when the first set of nodes cost 1 science each and the combined data from the barometer and thermometer from flying high gives 6 science- which got the research labs up and running earlier than expected. Various speed and altitude records were broken up to 100km and 1200m/s, each of which paid out a few thousand funds. With those payouts, the contract for first launch and some advances for a crewed flight to break the sound barrier and an X-planes contract, three KCT points could be bought. Even split so far because of the one point you have to put into the VAB at the start of the game to make it not take decades to build anything. My strategy for investing KCT points hasn't been decided yet, it's not clear whether getting rockets launched more frequently or research moving faster is the better option. Three months later, my first plane is ready. I stole it off the RP-1 discord and repainted it, then stuck one of my four pilots (by some weird coincidence they're all female) in the cockpit to take it for a spin. The design performed as advertised, reaching an altitude of 16km before having to descend again as the cockpit wasn't pressurised and the pilot would suffocate beyond that, and then reaching supersonic speeds in a shallow dive before returning to the runway. Test simulations showed that this thing can hit 400m/s if flown correctly, but it's easy to rip the wings off by being fat-fingered with the controls at that speed. Landing, on the other hand, is a little bit dicey- due to the nose-high landing gear configuration the front wheel touches down first, making it prone to veering to the side and ending up in a massive drift; on the first simulation this resulted in a lot of explosions, but since then I've mostly got the hang of it and the skidding can be controlled to avoid crashing. After skidding off the side of the runway I lost the bonus payment from the "break the sound barrier" contract, but the plane was intact and taxied back to the runway like nothing was wrong. The sound barrier contract paid well- 21k funds on its own, enough for another KCT point by itself- and with more X-planes contracts available the plane was recovered and ready to fly again the next day. Unfortunately, I bungled the fuel levels leading to it running out of fuel before completing its contract and forcing an emergency landing, where once again it did a massive powerslide but avoided damage. For the second flight in a row, the drag chute opened during the takeoff roll, which I blame on the setting that makes it deploy on ground contact and which I fixed for future flights. Flight number three was more successful, completing the contract and grabbing some supersonic flight science- an experiment that needs at least three flights to complete and which is just possible with this design. On the way back to the runway the pilot decided to "test the low-speed handling characteristics", which I think translates to "whoops I'm overshooting, better do some barrel rolls to try and slow down"... But it was a good decision- even with the drag chute deployed, the plane was *this* close to skidding off the end of the runway. Two more flights followed to gather the rest of the supersonic flight data, worth a total of 15 science. No contracts for those flights, but kerosene is pretty cheap and the plane could be turned around within a day so it wasn't really that expensive. The first science node to be researched contained an engine upgrade to the XASR-1 config- twice the power, but only 40 seconds of rated burn time. Adding an extra fuel tank, a biological sample capsule and a parachute kept the overall delta-V the same but greatly increased its scientific payload; the test sim was successful, peeking above the Karman line, and the rocket was put on the build list as Red Piccolo 3. Another design was also tested, this time a much larger rocket using the much larger RD-100 engine and 1.25m fuel tanks. Even with a camera can, bio sample capsule, parachute and 150 units of sounding payload on top for a contract, this design still managed to fly to over 300km altitude and return the payload safely to the surface. Provisionally named Red Clarinet, it will likely be added to the build list as soon as the tooling costs can be paid. The upgraded RD-101 config would make this thing even better, but that's 10k funds just to unlock it and I don't have enough for that and the tooling. The beginnings of a downrange rocket are taking shape- perhaps double stacking Red Piccolo stages on a Red Clarinet will push it over the 3000km mark and complete that very valuable contract? Coming soon: More sounding rockets of varying sizes, plus the possibility of a rocketplane.

Launched the first rocket of my brand new RP-1 save. It hit a maximum apoapsis of 118km, near the upper end of what I got in test simulations (variance and residuals produced an apoapsis of anything between 95km and 120km, so there’s no guarantee that something that worked in one simulation will work in another- or the real flight!), then dropped back down towards the KSC, hit the ground at about 100m/s and- Bounced? And somehow survived!? The engine was destroyed and a couple of fins were lost, but the majority of the vessel was still intact and recovering that gave five science I wasn’t expecting this early. When the first set of nodes cost 1 science each, getting 5 is a big deal!

THIS. So much this. Have you SEEN the state of RSS? Most bodies have two terrain modes: steep hills or millpond flat- Mars, the Moon, even large swathes of Earth are unnaturally smooth. The terrain textures (and most of the height maps) are mostly built from real data, so half of Phobos is covered in ridges like rice paddies where it looks like the limited radar mapping hasn’t worked particularly well; Mercury’s texture looks weird because of how visible imaging cameras work on fast-moving spacecraft (and nothing has really been there); the Jovian moons are really odd looking with areas of sharply focussed terrain and others where it’s all blurred, no doubt as a result of images taken at different distances in Jupiter orbit since nothing has really been to any of them; and anything from Saturn out is a mess owing to the extremely small number of probes that have been there (a total of one Saturn orbit mission, Cassini/Huygens, and nothing but Voyager 2 which flew past Uranus and Neptune). And all that is with the highest resolution textures available for RSS, which are so large that they break SCANsat and you have to disable its visual scan systems to avoid crashing the game all the time. Also, real planets are BIG- they need suitably BIG terrain textures or everything looks awful in flight and in orbit, but that takes up a lot more memory and processing power. Compare that to the recent Show and Tell videos of KSP2 with all the highly detailed terrain and atmospheric effects going into places like Gurdamma, then imagine trying to apply that level of detail across a planet that has several thousand times more surface area in a realistic way. And now that Ganymede is done, let’s start on Earth which is several times larger again and which everyone will pay attention to (wouldn’t you like to be able to launch rockets from in front of your own front door? Sorry, your entire town doesn’t exist except as 3 grey pixels on the map and a flat expanse of empty terrain with one tree randomly plonked down in the middle). The real problem with real life is that in many cases the details just aren’t known, certainly not well enough to create realistic looking models for a space exploration game. Either you have to use the limited information available, or just make stuff up- at which point, why not just use fictional planets instead? RSS hovers close to the uncanny valley: fine at a distance, but get up close and the details start jarring, breaking the immersion. I’ve already explained why this is a bad idea from a gameplay/balance perspective (TL;DR, parts balanced for stock scale are puny in real scale, parts balanced for real scale are overpowered for stock scale) and also from a game development perspective (TL;DR, adding a large feature like Sol system with all the work that entails isn’t a good use of development time since it isn’t a core game mechanic, doesn’t fit the “Kerbal” thing at all and only a small proportion of players want it). I also feel obliged to point out, again, that the developers have explicitly stated that KSP2 will stay entirely at Kerbal scale, so no real scale planets will feature as part of the base game.

Hmm… I figure 800 to land, 800 to return to orbit and at least 300 to return to Kerbin. The margins are going to be very tight on this landing! Still, if all else fails you can use the old “get out and push” technique to get your Kerbin periapsis down.

Am I just misremembering things, or has Kerbin’s atmosphere shrunk? I’m sure it used to be 85km but now it’s only 80km?

Uh huh… So those two “Mun landers” that flipped because you took the really draggy pod and made it even more draggy? You’d need a whole lot more gimbal and a whole lot more fins to make that thing stable- decoupling the first set of boosters removed both, and it’s no coincidence that the rocket flipped on the axis that the decoupled fins would have stabilised it.

I’m not too sure how the addition of an electric motor and two hypergolic propellants would outperform the tried and tested TEATEB, which is storable, hypergolic with liquid oxygen and has been used for decades for exactly this purpose, including in the massive F-1s of the Saturn V.

Fourteen months after I started it, my first RP-1 game is over. It survived a dead GPU, a somewhat ill-advised KSP update from 1.10 to 1.11 which was (and still is) unsupported by RP-1, and all manner of other distractions- both from KSP and other games. I’ve spent most of this evening setting up a new RP-1 save in the experimental branches for KSP 1.12.3 and a new JNSQ install with a heavy emphasis on off-world construction and mining operations, both to try out mods I haven’t used before and as a bit of pre-KSP2 colonisation experience (and to see if I get any inspiration for Audacity, which is still going on the back burner). I’ll probably make reports for both in due course.

All good things must come to an end, and this report is no exception- fourteen months after I started it (some of that was due to a dead GPU and doing another career report as a result), it's time to wrap up Terranism Space Program with the last missions arriving at their destinations. First on the list are the four White Herschel S probes. Essentially identical to the four at Jupiter, only with beefy RTGs and slightly better dishes to cope with the longer range, these four won't be targeting any moon in particular, but rather will be aiming to get flybys of as many moons as possible- and Saturn really does spoil you for choice. Flyby contracts for Mimas, Enceladus, Rhea, Tethys and Iapetus need completing, but with four probes available it should be easy enough to get all of them. During these flybys I discovered how puny the SOIs of these moons are- I'm fairly sure that at least one of them has an SOI less than twice its radius meaning space high effectively doesn't exist. The encounter with Iapetus was particularly fortuitous- that probe had the most delta-V remaining and the trajectory was favourable to attempt an orbital capture, something that it could just manage with its available fuel. Not a very picturesque moon, mostly dark grey and barely visible against the backdrop of space even with ambient lighting boosted waaay up, but it'll yield a nice science bonus. All this Saturnian action came at a cost though- during the long warp to these missions arriving, a number of the Astronaut Corps retired. The rest would retire while time-warping ahead to the Blue Bishop Neptune's arrival several years later. The Neptune flyby contract was completed, then with a bit of trajectory fiddling an encounter with Triton netted a second flyby contract. That encounter wasn't easy to get since Triton orbits retrograde and the probe was orbiting prograde. The last to arrive was Blue Bishop Uranus, which is where the Kraken made its last stand: first the "warp to node" stock button managed to overshoot by three hours, messing up the capture burn considerably and resulting in a negative periapsis. After fixing the trajectory so the periapsis was a mere 10km inside the upper atmosphere, the probe did a successful atmospheric pass and gathered several minutes of flying high data. And then I pressed timewarp, and- Instant teleportation to 120km inside the atmosphere, causing the big relay dish to explode and cutting off any further gains from this probe. RIP Blue Bishop Uranus. After several decades of time warp, where I discovered that at really high warp numbers data transmission is reduced significantly (probably the same Kerbalism bug that reduces science gathering at high time warp and which I've come across before in this report and elsewhere), a lot of data had come back- but yet the White Herschel probes had terabytes of data between them, Blue Draughtsman Mars had a few hundred gigabytes still and for some reason Blue Bishop Neptune was on its merry way right out of the solar system. Ah well, time to land the Blue Draughtsman V on Vesta like I said I would. A prominent crater near the north pole was chosen for the landing site and the probe made a flawless landing. A bit more time-warping and then I decided that the report would end in the year 2000: Final scores: Barely 1200 science short of 400k, how annoying, and over 27,000 KCT points in total including almost 3000 I didn't even spend. This career has taken up a significant amount of my spare time for over a year. Now that it's over, I'll be moving on to something new- but I'll definitely be back for another RP-1 run in the near future. The mods have changed a lot since I started (pressurants, residuals, research speed tweaks and much more) and next time I won't be using easy mode settings so the margins will be a lot tighter all round I'll probably come back and create a super-montage of all the best images from the 116(!) Imgur albums for this report, but to finish up, here's one that I'll definitely include in my loading screens in future: END Terran(ism) Space Program

A few other Mystery Goo reports yield interesting observations: on Kerbin, the Goo will naturally move towards water, accumulating on the ocean-facing side of the can in the shores and escaping into the water when splashed down; it also vibrates ominously on Bop..

Full logs and mod list please, to find them use this guide: Your laptop specs would also help- CPU, RAM and GPU are the important bits. Are you putting mods into the Steam copy of KSP? This is A Bad Idea- Steam seems to cause corruption in KSP when mods are installed, so try the following and see if it resolves the issue: Copy your save files (KSP/saves/*your save name*) and paste them on the desktop. If you use CKAN, make a modpack for easy reinstallation later and put that on the desktop too. Delete all mods from your Steam copy of KSP; Disable Steam cloud syncing (right click KSP in Steam library > properties); Uninstall and reinstall KSP through Steam; Once KSP is reinstalled, select version 1.10.1 in the Betas tab as this is the best version to use for RSS/RO at present; Verify the files once reinstallation of 1.10.1 is complete; Copy the entirety of KSP (Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program) and paste that somewhere else (desktop, somewhere in your documents, anywhere that isn’t inside the Steam folders). From now on, use this new copy and not the one controlled by Steam; Install your mods into the new copy (CKAN modpack from step 1 if you have it) and copy your save games into the new copy too. You can have as many copies of KSP as you want, on different versions and with different mods in each, CKAN makes it really easy to keep them all under control and Steam is good for getting hold of the different versions- just remember to copy them before modding the copies.

At the risk of merely repeating what has already been said… With a hefty solid booster like the Thumper producing a lot of thrust and a relatively small single point of connection to the core booster, the physics system will naturally make it wobble. You can solve this in several ways: Put the decouplers near the top of the boosters- use the Move tool in the editors to reposition the boosters since they’ll attach to the middle when placing them. This should not only reduce the pivoting but will also mean that the boosters get pushed away from the core once decoupled, avoiding collisions. Use struts. A carefully placed strut will hold any wayward booster in place by adding a second point of connection between the booster and the core. Turn on “advanced tweakables” in the main menu settings. This enables a lot of extra features that are very useful, including autostruts: they’re like normal struts, but don’t add any extra parts or weight, however they are limited to connecting to either the root part of the vessel, the heaviest part on the vessel or the “grandparent” part- for any given part, the parent part is what they’re attached to (SRB > decoupler) and the grandparent part is the parent’s parent part (SRB > decoupler > fuel tank in the middle). As a general rule I use grandparent autostrut for the boosters, grandparent autostrut for any fuel tanks I’ve stuck on top of those boosters* and root autostrut for the nosecones, which keeps everything in place. Heaviest mode can be glitchy when staging as it recalculates the new heaviest part, root mode is great for engines to avoid compressing your rockets when under thrust with physics warp on, and grandparent mode works great for parts attached radially as they can form connections to lots of other parts and lock everything tight. I’m not a big fan of rigid attachment mode- yes, it keeps things very still but in my experience it also makes the connections brittle and prone to snapping under extreme forces. Use a mod such as KJR or QuantumStruts to do it all for you instead, but that’s boring…

Wings generate lift solely based on their angle of attack against the direction of travel; a vertical stabiliser will generate no force if it’s properly aligned. You can also turn off certain axes on individual control surfaces to, for example, restrict your tail fins to only deploy for yaw control. What you’re seeing is probably related to wheels rather than aerodynamics- turn on advanced tweakables in the main menu settings, then override the friction control on your front wheel(s) and set them very low (<0.5), which should stop most incidents of veering off to one side during takeoff and landing and the inevitable fiery explosions that follow.

Is the game freezing completely at “Expansion Loading Complete”? Or when the spinning Loading thingy is displayed? Or before either of those things? Try and find your log files (they should be at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Squad\Kerbal Space Program\Player.log, if you’re not on Windows then use this guide: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/83213-stock-support-bug-reporting-guide/), upload to a file sharing site then post a link here so someone can take a look at them. If you downloaded KSP through Steam, try verifying the game files and then reloading KSP, that might fix it. What version of KSP are you on, and do you have any mods installed?