Vanamonde

The answer to any "what's the prettiest" type of question is always Vall. (I'm sorry if some of you are sick of these screenshots that I have posted many times.)

The force of gravitational attraction involves the product of the masses involved, but orbital calculations for artificial objects ignore the mass of the ship/station because it's so much smaller than that of a planet or moon. But to be precise, removing mass from the station side of the system would indeed reduce the mutual gravitational attraction, meaning that the station, if still moving with its previous speed, would shift to a slightly higher orbit. Very slightly higher. This is assuming that for the sake of your thought experiment, that mass is simply vanishing. If instead you merely detached part of the station, the mass of the detached parts would continue to affect the other two bodies in the system. The barycenter of the station parts would keep going on the original trajectory, though things would get complex when the pieces drifted far enough apart for the planet's tidal gradiant to start to affecting them differently. (This is the point where Maltesh usually steps in to tell me what I've gotten wrong or over-looked. )

I would be very sad and frustrated, but my $15 has kept me entertained for over a year, so I would not feel ripped off. (By the way, I'm assuming that Squad stopped because they got hit by a meteor, or something, and not just that they got bored. )

Yes, I noticed you hadn't indulged your usual fetish for colored lights.

Thanks for shilling for me! Here's the thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies

RCS balance is helpful, but not at all necessary. It does mean that you have to manually control attitude as well as translation without the help of ASAS, but I often use subships that need to be asymmetrical for mission-specific reasons, and routinely dock them to my carrier ships. Sometimes it's quite a fight, but it certainly can be done.

For very small probes, you can use RCS as your main propulsion, even if you don't need it for attitude control.

Fully loaded, my interplanetary ships run at 1/3rd of a G or less. Fuel efficiency is how you move big loads long distances.

If you have a joystick installed, make sure that it is centered.

erikvcarlson, on two separate occasions the forum decided it didn't like my ISP and erroneously banned me. I had to email tech support to get it fixed. Perhaps the same thing has happened to you on the site rather than the forum?

There is an extremely frustrating but fortunately quite rare bug in which NERVA engines simply detach themselves and float away as you're coming out of warp. If you notice it in time you can undo it with a quickload, but that's just the luck of happening to see it because there is no notification when it happens.

If you put static fins but mount them at a slight angle, they will gyroscopically stabilize your missiles, even without a probe or other guidance.

I don't know whether you need tips on building or flying, but here's both: an example rocket and walkthrough instructions. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies

apoch1999, I suspect that on that first ship, the shaking is due to oscillations of those side-mounted masses, and on the second one, a long ship naturally flexes. Try applying thrust by gradual increments, or re-designing so that the docked sub-ships are aligned parallel to the main fuselage (first ship), or (second ship) move some of the masses to parallel assemblies which can reinforce each other with struts. And although those may be NERVA engines, they don't appear to be stock and may just have too much thrust and gimballing power for large ships of elaborate layout.

Post some pictures.

After a while you'll learn how to stay oriented, but until I figured it out, I used to place some light (so as not to mess up the balance) but easily visible part over the cabin-up direction, so that I could tell at a glance which way my ship was facing.

The SAS isn't doing that; the fins at the base of your rocket are. When they are at an angle to your direction of motion, the airflow will push the tail of the ship back to conform to the direction of motion, which in this case returns you to your earlier attitude and therefore flight trajectory. You could move the fins up to reduce the effect, or over-ride it by actively steering until the prograde marker drifts down to where you want it to be.

I got the impression you wanted to build your own rocket so I didn't suggest this before, but if you're getting this frustrated, how about trying my example rocket and walkthrough? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25008-How-to-reach-orbit-and-a-rocket-that-can-do-it-a-walkthrough-for-newbies

If you put your station's orbit above 160,000m, you will see a performance improvement because the game is no longer rendering the ground in as much detail. Also, a station doesn't really need RCS at all. You can rotate it on pod torque, though slowly, and it's not going to be maneuvering anywhere anyway.

I like planes. They don't like me. They fail on purpose, just to hurt me.

Mine's expresses the spirit of the enterprise:

So, Khan's in luck.

Using maneuver mode is difficult for newbies, but fortunately, it's optional. Have you tried matching orbital planes at different altitudes and warping to a close approach? Then you can try simply burning toward the target. It's not as fancy, but it's how we used to do things before maneuver node was implemented.

The KSP planets are smaller than ours, but they're not small. Minmus alone has about the same surface area as Denmark. You could spend weeks just exploring it. The only thing scaling up the KSP planets would do is force you to spend more idle time in warp while travelling between them. And that is why they were made this size in the first place.

Ah, another stock vs. mods discussion. I'll get the bucket and mop for the blood.