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The center of lift and center of mass should be pretty much centered, but you want to account for the fact that the center of mass will move as fuel is consumed. It's important to have lots of ram-air intakes so your engine(s) can keep operating even at very high altitudes and you can get to near-orbital velocity before switching on the rockets. It also helps to use only a single jet engine so if it flames out you don't go into a spin. This design is very stable, but it uses ion engines instead of rockets, which I wouldn't advise doing on your first attempt. This one is stable going up, and uses rockets making it much easier to get into orbit, but it's unstable upon re-entry. It takes off vertically from launch clamps and lands with parachutes/legs.

Amending Newton's Laws Cutting Funding Baiting Neutrino Traps Fluoridating Fluids Contaminating Airlocks Counting Geigers

Kerbin still doesn't look right without clouds.

You could turn off he markers before with F4. I also preferred it the old way, sometimes it's nice to your base marker in the distance.

Probably a few weeks, but that was back in like 0.9 or something, before there was a map view.

My first rocket-free SSTO. Have to time the take-off carefully so there's enough sunlight to power the ion engines.

This is the most recent Duna lander I've made. Margin of error is very low though, can't burn more than about 5-10% fuel on descent, so you have to be very accurate with your insertion. After landing the parachute rig detaches with separatrons, one at a slight angle so it flies clear of the lander. The aerospikes break away after the ascent and there's an LV-909 in the center and two medium radial RCS tanks to handle the rendezvous. The struts are probably excessive but I wanted to make sure the chutes didn't rip off. Unless you're making an effort to play vanilla, the best thing to do is get the Kethane and KAS mods so you can refuel your landers on the ground.

You've pretty much got it right. For doing stuff near bodies you want higher TWR, because you need to complete your burns before you orbit too far or because you need to slow down rapidly. Since Kerbals don't run out of food or anything, for interplanetary stuff the only thing that really matters is ISP. Though you'll typically want at least a 0.2 TWR out of impatience.

Yea I typically stop at about 50 meters to be safe, depending on the size of the ship. One time I did a really aggressive intercept burn, misjudged my deceleration timing, and plowed through the target's solar panels.

It's rare that you did it by accident, but it's not that hard to do on purpose, you just have to match you inclination and use RCS to tweak your intersect when it gets close.

I still use them on my first stage. The fact that they always burn for the same length of time makes it easier to time separations with them. With LFB's you have to do more work to make sure your mainsails don't burn through fuel faster than the boosters.

The biggest issue is that it's tricky to find flat ground outside of KSC. You could just use KAS and build a crane to move the sections around. Also you should use the spaceplane fuselage sections for the links instead of those heavy fuel tanks.

For adding parts to a station it's best to build a tug with a docking port on top, then stick the station part above that with docking ports on each end. That way you can dock the end of the fuel tank to the station, then undock the tug and deorbit it. Docking ports are more wobbly than decouplers, but detaching the tug via decoupler will nudge the station. I recommend the quantum struts mod for building your station. The strut gun part allows you to strut docked ships together. You can stick some girders on the side of your tug and use them as attachment points for struts, that way you can attach struts from the tug to the upper part of the fuel tank.

Pronouncing a word spelled backwards is not the same as reversing audio of the word pronounced normally.

I'm pretty sure it can't be done on the Mun, the gravity is just too strong. You could do a partial burn with a spacecraft to slow down, then jump out and finish the landing in EVA though.

Like gerbil, but with a k.

The only parts of it I use are the info panels, the landing/aerobrake calculator, and SmartASS. I think those features should be added to the vanilla game anyway as part of the ASAS module or some new part. It would be nice to unlock better computers in career mode. The auto-pilots often waste fuel and bug out, making them too unreliable. They can be useful for helping new people learn how to do the maneuvers though. Actually seeing your rocket go through the maneuvers in-game is a much better guide than reading or watching a video.

It depends on the size of the payload. For small spacecraft I just go straight from LKO. For larger craft I find it easier to refuel than to try building a massive vehicle, so I send them to Minmus first to refuel from a kethane lander that I keep there. The low gravity makes Minmus more efficient than the Mun. After refueling at Minmus I can usually get into solar orbit with only about 120 units of fuel/oxidizer. Since time is not an issue for the Kerbals I usually just go into solar orbit, match inclinations and time-warp until I have a transfer window.

All of the ambient tracks on the Black Mesa OST. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C7TXzeMaBI&t=28m12s

Sunshine, but don't watch the trailer, it spoils the movie. Europa Report and Elysium also come out this summer. Not sure how spacey Elysium is going to be though.

I may or may not have been listening to Daft Punk.

It would be easier to just have two ships with the docking ports on the noses, that way you can point them normal/antinormal and you don't have to worry about rotation.

Most "lag" in KSP is caused by the CPU bottlenecking on physics calculations. In the settings there is a slider called Max Physics Delta Time, sliding it to the right will slow down the simulation and give you a slightly better framerate. Other than that, there's nothing you can do except buy a better processor. Even the fastest modern processors reach a point where they choke with KSP though because it doesn't have proper multi-core support.

Set the other ship's port as your target, switch the camera to chase mode, and use RCS translation (IJKLHN) to close the distance.

In vacuum, you can use time-warp to stop a ship from rotating and potentially save RCS fuel and/or time.