UmbralRaptor

ôð. Especially if it extends down to the bottom of Jool's atmosphere.

Aerospikes are of painfully limited use for getting off Kerbin. Initially their Isp helps more than the LV-T30's TWR, but that's gone by the time you're 3.5 up. Very late in ascents, TWR doesn't really matter, and again their Isp is an advantage. But for the several km/s in between, the LV-T30 outperforms the aerospike. (Greater TWR at the same ÃŽâ€V)

Either edit the file/restart KSP, or figure out where a 0.20 compatible version of DEADBEEF's Edtools is hiding. =/

You want vertical snap. Edit /KSP/settings.cfg, and change VAB_ANGLE_SNAP_INCLUDE_VERTICAL to true

The Skipper is not particularly good for anything. It's "useful" in that it fills a gap in thrust, and has thrust vectoring. That said, you get similar TWR and higher ÃŽâ€V out of 3 LV-T30s. (Or 2 LV-T30s and an LV-T45 if you need the TVC) edit: The Skipper is also easier to use than a Mainsail in that a single orange tank is a reasonable amount of fuel, and it runs enough cooler to avoid the heat transfer bug.

Inspiration Playing with numbers until I have a rough design or give up Build/test/redesign until it works Launch and/or get bored

The temperature variations could be interesting, though the gravity and atmosphere curves are already well known. (Oh, and the presmat barometer can't measure below 1e-4 atm, even though the tops of planetary atmospheres are ~1.5e-5 to 2e-7 atm...)

~4-5 km over the Mun with the first version of ISA mapsat. (Back when there was a narrow range between low enough to work and high enough to not hit a mountain)

The LV-T30 has better Isp and TWR than a the Skipper.

Right Shift + F12 The linux version of KSP uses shift instead of alt.

Yeah, I also tend to spend more time building launchers (and planning missions) than actually carrying them out. So many craft stranded in LKO because I never bothered to send them to their destination... >_>;;

Craft that are not currently active do not use resources. Yeah, it's an oversight with probes.

Isp is a measure of propulsive efficiency. With the ingame unit choice (seconds), it measure how many pound(force) * seconds of impulse one pound(mass) of propellant provides. Higher is better, as it gives you greater ÃŽâ€V for the same mass ratio. edit: I should probably mention how ÃŽâ€V and Isp are related...

If the command pod has a parachute,

Currently all scanning has to be done while the probe is in focus. Timewarp helps greatly. I would speculate that out of focus scanning will be needed for some aspects of campaign mode (eg: mining)

In a modern computer? o_OThe Radeon X300 in my ancient (2005) P4 has 128 MB, and the FireGL v7200 (CAD version of a Radeon X1800) on my slightly less old (2006?) KSP box has 256 MB.

The reloading only works with CFG files IIRC, For a new plugin, you'll have to restart KSP entirely.

What mods do you have installed? Some have issues with 0.20.x, and can greatly reduce performance. Graphics-wise, turning down terrain detail can have a large effect. Though it may be worth trying all of them.

For mainsails, I would argue that you want to stay at or above 2/3 throttle. If the craft needs to go below that, consider a redesign. (Obvious exception: SSTO)

The only thing affecting stock rocket engine efficiency is ambient pressure. Throttle, heat, speed, etc don't factor in.

People tend to overengine (or underfuel) rockets. For rockets with lots of stages, I'm with Foamyesque -- the VAB should be your throttle, and you should be dropping engines as you burn fuel. TWR is a lot less important once you're mostly pitched over anyway, as gravity drag stops hurting so much...

This. SRBs have fairly good mass ratios currently, and this is further enhanced with the staging. Assuming you had 1 OKTO, 2 stack decouplers, and 3 RT-10s, your 'payload' (the probe core) was ~0.35% of the mass of the rocket on the pad. If you used a BACC, the probe body was an even smaller part of the overall mass.

"Moar boosters, moar explosions" is very overplayed. It still has an appropriate time and place, though.

You want to replace the SAS with probe cores or crew pods. (And a single ASAS)

Actually it hasn't. They still explode when run at full throttle for ~20 s on an orange tank. (I just tested)