Corona688

When you hit 'M' instead of '<' repeatedly, turning a docking manuever into a fireworks show as KSP boggles in and out of the map during a delicate docking manuever.

I think it's based on impact tolerance. I hit the VAB with an entire kickback booster, and the VAB won. (I like to imagine it left one hell of a dent.) So if you hit it with modded parts with silly-high impact tolerances, it'll break. Or just wheels, which have stupidly high "impact tolerances" which don't seem related to the point they actually break at.

Inkscape can do it. Or rather, you can tell it to follow a path, and have that path be a circle.

The console version isn't under their direct control.

The parachute icon will show you when it's safe to deploy. Red is bad, grey is good.

It has a nice "face". Quicksave, drive till destruction, F9. Now you know.

Got 3 feverishly working science stations in orbit and another enroute to Minmus to hopefully land and become a base. If that works I might do the same to the mun but that'll need much beefier engines. Grappling command pods in orbit with the Klaw is awesome, the cockpit comes back online! Completed a long awaited combo triple rescue / mun landing mission which put career mode finances back at a stable 3 mil. With that, and some freshly unlocked mainsail engines, going to see how quickly I can bruteforce a super-small satellite into flying by duna. It's not in a good position for intercept right now, it's way ahead orbitally, I'll try and drop towards the sun to get ahead then power back on out. I think I can put something in orbit with 7000m/s dv, which might be enough. I wish I could unlock ion engines but that's just too much. Failing Duna, Eve might be more achievable right now.

Oh, and depending on how far you go, heat shields are still necessary for some things. I'd never try a direct re-entry from anywhere but low kerbal orbit without one. Indirect, stopping in LKO, is okay.

A kerbal rescue mission where the rescuee got spaghettified and krakened to the point he re-entered without a spaceship. If you're going to stuff someone inside a module bay, turn off their RCS thrusters first.

The problem with recessed engines is that engines don't work unless you point them at space. Still, I've managed this in two different ways lately: You have to look real close at the leftmost pic to see them, but there's a pair of ant engines behind the heat shield, angled 45 degrees forward so they can generate useful thrust while still being behind the heat shield. You can see it firing in the middle one. This works okay for my little return craft, since all it needs is enough dv to break orbit, but for anything big or serious, losing sin(45) percent of your thrust is unacceptable. Second way: Sideways spaceships. These can work great in space though they can be tricky to balance. As for aerobraking, I've had ENTIRE SPACE STATIONS pass through re-entry flames without a scratch -- because they were falling down sideways, in the position of maximum drag. Lightweight things like empty tanks, science modules, etc falling sideways generate tons of drag. Fast re entry might be better than slow re-entry, you get lots of heat either way but fast minimizes the time. If you can make it do that, you have a chance. Drag is still one of the harder to engineer things in this game of course. Lastly, counter-thrust during re-entry helps. Every bit of speed you bleed off makes things cooler. Slow thrust for a long time is very helpful. Those ant engines in the first pic are firing the entire time from 50,000m to 5,000m and I never get thermometer pop-ups on that "lander". RCS would be just as effective. I'm not sure if the heat shield is still strictly necessary or not. If you can get them, air-brakes are nice for adding lots of drag when and only when you need it, and moving your center of drag to where it needs to be to keep your craft balanced where you want it during re-entry. You can also open bay doors and stuff to make drag.

I had to do some digging to find out what the "space shuttle worm" thing was about. It was a minute piece of space debris which flew into the path of an RCS thruster and got blown away.

You could turn down the control authority on those tail fins a bit.

I'm getting really good at intercepts and rescues, I like building asymmetrical things, and love cramming the maximum amount of parts into a little space without actually clipping anything functional. Since getting the Klaw and ant engine, I can just grab entire pods and pull them into re-entry with a robot that's practically nothing but claw, probodyne,and heatshield. So I guess my favorite thing is little probes.

You can't change one without changing the other, though.

In what way is sandbox not "done"? It's the mode where you can do anything you could in career mode, just without tech or money restrictions.

I have developed a new appreciation for the ant engine. It's the poor man's ion drive. You can get crazy delta V with it for tiny probes because it's so LIGHT.

The whiners. You think it's got bugs? I actually remember the alpha... You think you can do perfect? In the wake of a major engine and architecture change? I invite you to try.

When they were introduced they'd slowly overheat at 100%. It was an interesting design constraint. Now that they don't, I don't think they'll ever put that back, it'd break a lot of designs.

Methods for balancing a single SRB and a single liquid fuel engine attached side-by-side and staged simultaneously.

My first successful docking manuever, way back when: Each extra 'ship' and 'probe' in the name was part of the resulting chain explosion.

My most hair-raising landing was a mun mission so badly mis-staged that the bottom 3 stages detonated when I hit space. Following a 20 second slideshow of atomic flame, there was absolutely nothing left but the topmost stage, which was just... hovering there, perfectly balanced on a 1.0 TWR. I landed it, spacex style.

Why is suit-color a 50 meg mod? Is there no moderation in texture sizes any more?

They're not entirely sure it's rescuing them at this point.

Wait, wait, how did you get the orange suit on EVA?

The one true answer to 'cannot deploy while stowed'.