Vostok

Wow. That is ridiculously insanely crazily splendid to the Nth degree.

"Strut your stuff."

Something I might suggest... If you can grab a kerbal by his helmet with the claw, and then get him to ragdoll... Then push him downwards (away from the claw) by his body with landing legs, the rubber bandy-ness of the ragdoll might become a source of propulsion. Not to mention a fitting sacrifice for the space kraken.

If constructive criticism is helpful, you might find it useful to sketch the shape of the whole ship before going for the hard final outline. Try drawing perspective cubes, cylinders, cones and wedges. You will find that pretty much any 3d shape (excluding complex surfaces) will be some sort of combination of basic shapes. If you can manage perspective shapes, you can read about vanishing points, and one, two, and three point perspective. Then all you have to do is to assemble your basic shapes to make the ship. (if you visualise every part of the ship as a piece, that might help! - the fuel tanks are just cylinders, the wings are flat wedges or cuboids, the cockpit is a cone with a cuboid on, et cetera...) Perspective in drawings will tend to make them look a lot more dynamic. Currently you have a very Technical-Drawing thing going on, where all the lines that are parallel in real life are parallel in your drawing. This is not the case, due to the fact that one views an object from a single point. EDIT: Here's a wee example Hope it helps

I tried to use a kerbal as a rotational bearing by having him ragdolled and grabbed by two claws at once. Turns out the game doesn't like this very much.

I'd like to offer a piece of my ancient work, if you could give it the once-over, that'd be cool. It's a short story that I did way back when I did that sort of thing, depicting Jeb very unlike anything I'd heard then. Perhaps it's been done again since, who knows? Anyway, this is 'A Shade of Darkness'. (complete with pictures) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/12175-Writing-Artwork-A-Shade-of-Darkness

I can confirm it. That rocket does not look like me.

I believe there is a green splatter texture somewhere in the game files. Probably it was once intended to be applied to parts that kerbals have crashed into at high speed. It's a shame it never got used, really.

There have been a few times this would have been useful to me. For example, performing a lunar rendezvous on an apollo style mission, several times have I taken off in the wrong direction, believing that the service module above me was orbiting in a different direction. So, not pointless as far as I can tell, and barely large enough to be screen clutter.

I plan on docking wheels to an A class asteroid, then landing it near KSC and driving it to the space center and having it as a pet. I'm thinking of making a collection, starting small and then seeing if it's possible to land an E class with wheels.

Maybe not so much a reskin, but it would be nice if the tank ends were more like the new SLS parts (you can see the fuel container caps, and some internal stuff). The blank flat ends just look ugly, and it doesn't feel as if they contain fuel, they're just tubes.

Aww, that's a shame. It's still open for attaching to ragdolls though >

I figured that gyroscopic stability would help prevent the pivoting... Maybe multiple claws could be used to make a swashplate arrangement? Or the blades could be on an axle supported by trusses, again to prevent the pivot.

I know it's already possible, I just wondered if it would make it easier

I've been thinking... Does anybody else reckon that the claw's 'free pivot' mode will allow it to be used as a helicopter rotor bearing? If it doesn't we can always use it to dock with a ragdolled Kerbal, and then dock another claw to the same ragdolled Kerbal, and use the ragdoll as a hinge or axle. I reckon that attaching a claw to a ragdolled Kerbal, while not particularly very ethical, might become quite an interesting system. Kerbal-jointed rope anyone?