Corona688

A slightly-worse-than-the-best-engine-in-the-game engine isnt the worst-engine-in-the-game.

The poodle is terrific if you know it's just a scaled-up terrier with the same relatively low but super high efficiency thrust (and awful atmospheric performance). The game just calls it a "small engine" without pointing out its intended uses. I will concede that its boring and ugly. Another vote for the thud. They've built gimbaling into literally every large engine, there's nothing for it to augment. It fits a gap between two engines of larger and smaller thrust, except it doesn't -- you have to use them in pairs or more, so that gap is still empty. The vernier engine gives us even less reason to use them.

"station pusher", missed opportunity for "shover robot"

The upside to that is it'll make your 'change orbit of X satellite' contracts a piece of cake.

Not enough delta-V? Not enough fuel. You can tell from how much fuel the stock Aeris carries, about what it takes to reach space in a spaceplane that size.

Did you know that extendible ladders contain a small, dim light that's always on for free? That accidentally turned out to be very useful.

I've only just realized how completely the space lab module transforms career mode. Suddenly you can get tons more science for your buck, if you're willing to wait. Suddenly you've got a good reason to set up infrastructure, train your pilots and scientists, and timewarp instead of grind.

How many lumens is the mk1 illuminator again? That's another thing that's very hard to define units for in KSP.

"SSTO" and "rocket" are not a match made in heaven. "SSTO" and "225 ton payload" are not a match made in heaven either. "SSTO", "225 ton payload", and "rocket" all together will be a very kerbal kind of rocket.

I think they need to be balanced to keep energy in mind. I think electricity needs to be rebalanced entirely. Right now KSP's link between electricity and energy is marginal at best. As close as I can guess, based on the power output of fuel cells relative to rocket engines on the same fuel, 1 "unit" of electricity is worth about 40 joules. At 0.04 units per second, that makes the mk1 illuminator a one-watt bulb. That can't be right. Once electricity units actually mean anything, then and only then can they reasonably define how bright a light should be for the given power.

Pretty much what Apollo did, except they left an entire vehicle.

Yes, clicking is so unreliable when orbits are cluttered. Dragging is even more unreliable, you need to be zoomed in for fine control of time sometimes, yet zoomed out to see the results this can cause. This could just be accomplished by slowing down the mouse in proportion to time when dragging.

I agree that the contracts seem too narrow. They ask you build X using Y parts. They ask you to move tourist Q to plazes R, S, T. They ask you to build satellite E with F sensor in G orbit. They ask you to fly to Z, Q, R, where you must Y. Y, oh Y indeed? These missions are almost always unrelated to your own goals. They don't help you explore and they don't point out anything interesting. They're just noise which happens to earn money. Once in a while they help you get parts you wouldn't have otherwise, but those are the contracts you actually don't want to fulfill -- the instant you do, they stop helping you! More interesting and realistic contracts would be about solving problems. That's what most satellites are for. With the upcoming communication features, we might hope to see satellites which actually do something and contracts which reflect that. Other mission ideas: Deorbiting space junk. Can you build a craft which efficiently does this? Orbital resupply missions. Will you send regular shuttles or one big one? Will you get fuel from kerbin, mun, or a captured asteroid? Orbital repair. Solar panels on our fancy satellite won't deploy, can you send an engineer up to give it a swift kick? More interesting survey missions which send you places you might actually WANT to go. We don't need Kerbin far side missions. We don't need Duna missions when we've explored 1/937 Mun biomes. Orbital work like assembling station parts. Part testing. Sometimes these strange missions can be fun. They'd be more fun if the parts stayed unlocked after (maybe at some cost penalty, if we haven't unlocked them ourselves yet). Diverting asteroids. (Just how much reputation do you need before you get offered THIS mission?) In short, it'd be nice if contracts would reward us for doing interesting things and point us towards interesting things, instead of being randomly generated hoops to jump through. The world records are sort of that, I suppose, but they don't inspire any direction either.

I mostly can't even tell the difference between this and most of the stock parts, except for the fuel tanks which have become even more awful.

You could have built a perfectly good spaceplane and not even known it, even a good one can be a royal pain to fly. A few tips: Any plane which can manuever in high atmosphere will have a very strong nose-up tendency at sea-level. CoL should be forward of CoM for a change. It's normal to lose control in really high atmosphere, your wings stop working and center-of-thrust takes over. Since your engine is going to be near the center of mass, it won't have the leverage to push your nose up. RCS has been mandatory on all my spaceplanes. Run any dedicated jet fuel as dry as you can before going into rocket mode. This makes your craft a little bit faster and a whole lot lighter. Once you're in rocket mode, you want to leave the atmosphere ASAP. Nose-up 45 degrees or more until your apogee is above the atmosphere, and kill your engines for a while (flying out of control here is actually okay -- you've got some moments to get it back). Then start burning again to circularize when you're further out of the atmosphere. It's a fine line, so if you only just barely missed getting to orbit, a slightly different nose-up angle, less RCS fuel, or a million other things can make the difference.

I feel your pain! I do that to screenshots all the time >< Sadly the 'front' of the craft was in shadow or I would have screenshotted from there, but there's not a lot more to see, just the hatch and one more ladder on the center pod itself. There's not even a fuel tube, I just transferred fuel into the center tank manually before liftoff. It had 3/4 of a tank, I probably could have made it all the way to Kerbin with it if I'd been more optimistic and brought a parachute instead of a docking clamp. ...then again maybe not. I forgot about the heatshield.

All it amounts to is an extra stage, really.

1) build small 2) drop your material bays and empty tanks before you leave 3) Get rid of some engines before liftoff. You only need a high T/W ratio to land, not to leave. Makes it so much easier.

My understanding is that an efficient landing is a quick landing. Wasted time is wasted fuel, because the longer it takes, the more speed you have to cancel. So, you want to come down from a high orbit (since it's efficient to decelerate there) into an orbit that doesn't QUITE graze the mun or whatever. Once you're at the orbit's lowest point, thrust retrograde until your velocity is all gone. This will leave you falling gently from a kilometer or two, giving you time to get things steady without wasting whole minutes basically hovering. Don't bother slowing yourself down past 100m/s until you're below a few hundred meters. This strategy means your lander can't have too outrageously low a T/W ratio though, or you'll end up lithobraking instead of retrobraking. The logical extreme of this technique is the "suicide burn", where you time it so perfectly that landing and retrobraking are the same step. This is called "suicide" for a reason though, there's not really much margin for error.

They're not weak, they're bugged. Sometimes when I launch, I can right-click on a wheel and see that it has a huge amount of stress on it for no reason. When this happens, it acts like it's stuck in the earth, I can even see it jittering when it moves in that disquieting manner which happens when parts are so overstressed they lag relative to the ship. I can usually fix this by deleting the landing gear and re-adding it. I haven't had the orbit bug.

Congratulations, you have let him derail you. Just lighten up and ignore it.

Great. There's still other choices though. I'd build smaller.

It's not like there's not a lot of other choices until you unlock 4 or 5 more tech tiers.

KSP people love numbers, orbits are like that

That sounds very tempting. I usually use bang-bang control and action-groups for that, momentary pulses of 100% thrust to kill velocity. You have to be careful with that though, if the deactivation is missed for some reason it'll whip you around.