Brofessional

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v1qq0lxrqtnyyma/Bodkin%20Mk1%20SSTO.craft It uses the Aviation Lights mod, and I have Mechjeb on it for monitoring the intakes. I used Editor Extensions to make the engine clusters. 1- toggle jet engine and intakes 2- toggle rockets 3- toggle aviation lights 4- toggle docking port and light I made it to go to my station at 120km, but I've taken it as high as 200km circular and landed on the runway, though I had to use about 40% of the RCS to help with the de-orbit at that altitude. It carries nearly twice as much jet fuel as it needs, so try to cruise for a while and burn off the excess jet fuel before switching to the rockets, I usually keep about 15 units of jet fuel in it, just in-case I come in a little short on the re-entry.

With most designs the center of mass should be slightly behind the center of lift. That will make it easier to get your nose up during take-off, and as the fuel tanks are drained, the center of mass will shift forward. You also have to watch drag, all those nosecones and stuff look nice, but they increase the drag significantly due to KSP's aerodynamics (or lack thereof) Don't forget you can tilt your canards in the editor to give you more influence over the center of lift if needed. Landing a glider on Eve would be pretty easy as long as you're not too picky about where you land. You'll never get far trying to fly on rockets only though. They're too inefficient for horizontal flight. This is my most reliable SSTO

If you're using RCS during ascent, you're doing it wrong. Anyway there are some smaller RCS tanks in KSPX that will likely get added eventually.

I lower my throttle until 7-10km, then pitch to 75 degrees at full throttle, then 45 degrees at 20km, 25 degrees at 30km, and zero degrees by 50km. It all depends on the TWR and stability of your rocket really. Slower rockets can't turn as soon. The smoother your turn is, the less fuel you'll waste on steering losses.

There's an option in Steam's settings to save a .png copy of your screenshots in a folder of your choice. The quality is better and it's much easier to find your screenshots for uploading elsewhere.

Windows 7 uses superfetching. Having idle RAM is just a waste, so it keeps recently accessed data in the RAM in-case you access it again. If another program comes along and needs the space, it will dump the superfetched data to make room. When you sleep/hibernate or shutdown, it dumps the data. So as you mentioned, it climbs back up again after you resume play. For example if you boot up your computer and start photoshop, it might take 15 seconds to open the application. Then if you close photoshop and immediately open it again, it will only take 2 or 3 seconds to open because the data is still loaded.

I kind of hope they make it so you have to research the EVA-packs through the tech tree. It would make those early-game missions more unique, and it would make for a good milestone in your research.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Sunshine.

Rockets twitching and shaking themselves apart was not an intended function though. That's like flying an airplane with a bunch of holes in the wings, then complaining that it's easier to fly when they fix the holes.

No, but the improved SAS in .21 makes rockets/planes a lot less likely to shake themselves apart.

This is my latest one, trying to keep the framerate half-way decent so it's not that big.

It can help to use Quantum Struts to "lock" the cargo in place once you lift it, so it doesn't swing around.

My rovers tend to come out looking like dune buggies, with RCS to help with getting up and down slopes.

You shouldn't be able to see the galaxy and such with the sun in view like that. Vanilla KSP also has this problem, but it seems to be worse with the universe replacer mod from what I've seen.

I imagine escape towers will become much more important when we can actually train Kerbals with meaningful stats. You won't be so careless when you've got time and resources invested in them.

Unlike the launch clamps, a base anchor should completely disable physics on whatever it's attached to.

I had a design very similar to Tw1's And this one that's more like a typical crane, it gets very unstable with heavy loads though.

Chase view is the best way to avoid getting disoriented, I always use it for landing and docking.

All of the info panels need to be part of the vanilla game. As it is you pretty much have to install either MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer to perform accurate maneuvers. The maneuver node handles need some work so it's easier to fine-tune the trajectories, but I don't think the entire functionality of the maneuver planner should be added.

They ions are fine as they are, but they do need to add the large scale ion engine from KSPX, simply to reduce part counts.

For a single-ship mission I typically aim for 85km. If I'm doing orbital construction I aim for about 130-150km so I can use the higher time-warp speed when doing rendezvous.

It would be nice to have a realistic sound option so you can't hear things in vacuum, it's not super important though. The engines would still be audible if you assume the player is listening from inside the ship, they would just sound different. One thing I REALLY want though is sounds for the wheels. Sounds for the motors and sounds for soil/gravel/ice/etc. crunching under the tires. Subtle wind noise when applicable would be great too, it would help with the sense of speed.

That would look terrible up close though. Even with KSP's downscaled universe, they should be a couple hundred meters thick at least. If the rings don't look good and you can't fly around in them, what is the point of having them?

The problem with doing a Saturn analog is that the ring would be difficult to render. It's easy to just make a ring texture with transparency from far away, but when you get in close it has to transition smoothly into millions of pieces of debris.

The medium legs are extremely wobbly and unstable, they were the first legs added to the game and they really need to be updated/replaced. The small ones are wobbly as well, but not as bad, and it's less of an issue because they're only good for lightweight probes anyway.