Noticeably FAT

A word of warning with symmetrical parts; if you assign one to an action group they will all be added, however if you later remove them and reattach them with symmetry, occasionally you will fin that now only the first part is in the action group. This includes everything attached to that part, so if you had a decoupler that you removed/replaced the engine underneath may also be affected. Also, if you check the action group it may appear that they are all there, but once you launch they don't actually work. This glitch seems sporadic, but it's something to check. I like to leave assigning action groups as long as I can, and once my ship is 'done' I unassign then reassign everything.

It's your ribbon going in your sig, so the real question here is what do you find more impressive? I start with whatever I've done, and if I've done multiple things I go with whatever I'm happiest with.

You're probably looking for Subassembly Saver/Loader.

I was about to type out a long reply explaining why I use it, but then it occurred to me that I really don't need to defend how I play a game. So, I won't.

I've found that high orbits make for easier docking. Sure, it can take longer, but you're dealing with lower relative speeds and have much more room for error.

Sweet. Let us know how it goes.

I've been trying to recreate that shot, but I can't keep Jeb on the ladder.

I have, unfortunately, more closely followed the Soviets. That is, I throw Kerbals at the problem until they stop dying.

Click on it where it says Surface/Orbit/Target. That'll toggle through each one, in that order.

Normal time warp can run much faster, and stops physics from being calculated on your ship (it goes 'on rails'). You have no control, it's just fast forward. Physics warp doesn't run as fast, and the physics calculations are still being done. You have control of your ship, everything just runs faster. You have to be careful with this, the way it does this (as I understand it) is the game is running fewer calculations each second, so it's faster but less accurate. This means it's much easier to go off course and/or rip your ship apart. One of the things I've been doing lately is using PW to orient my ships without wasting RCS (when I have the time to do it, it doesn't work so hot if you have a maneuver coming up in under a minute). It takes longer, but you can turn very large ships with very small probes.

Someone else can explain the 'why' a little clearer than me, I'm sure, but here goes. 1) the closer to your Pe you are, the less energy it takes to raise your Ap (I believe this is the Oberth Effect). 2) the closer your burn is to your proper ejection angle, the more accurate your trajectory will be. So by splitting up your long burns, you are staying closer to your ejection angle, and you're getting more bang for your buck as each small burn gets progressively more efficient. Kromey, if you add 'kerbal' to your search the image you were looking for shows up. Here's a link, I kinda don't want to hotlink from a guy who's likely to show up in the thread.

I kinda like the clean white look. I would like to see a little more gold and silver foil, but beyond that white is good.

I generally do about a 60-40 split, 40 before T. Not for any super scientific reason, but because I can't seem to ever time it right.

For me it's actually a tossup between docking from the map and docking a stupidly unbalanced tiny little craft. It was little more than a probe core, mapping dish, a single large solar panel and ion drive/tank. Then to move four of them from the delivery vehicle to the interplanetary mission I made a little 'tug' out of an RCS tank and thrusters. It had next to no ability to translate (it wanted to just spin), and more thrust than it could ever need.

Sure they do, just not as bad. I think it might have to do with how close I have them, but on the lifter I use the most I can only run them at ~95% throttle. Well, there's also the accomplishment of lifting large loads. If he's putting a station in orbit it's likely that he'll be doing plenty of docking, regardless of the number of parts on the station itself. Having said that, to the OP I'd say that you still might want to make your station out of smaller parts. Not because it's easier to lift, but because it will then be modular and therefore editable. My station looks nothing like what I initially planned (not that I did a hell of a lot of planning) because I've been adding/removing/moving parts. If I hadn't made it modular I would have been stuck with the original design, which was ok, but doesn't work for what I want now. ETA: Here is my main lifter design (the nuke engines at the top of the pic are part of the payload), it'll get 80T to LKO. It's not the most efficient design, but it's pretty simple. It's pretty stable until the asparagus boosters drop off and I lose a lot of struts. Then it gets better once the center jumbo tank + mainsail is dropped. You'll notice that there isn't a lot of struts holding things together, they are just strategically placed. The orange tanks are 'stitched' together at the joints, and there are struts at the top, center and bottom of the boosters. I also generally strut the payload to the boosters and some trusses at the top of the center stack. That doesn't help the lifter stability, but the connection between the lifter and payload tends to be weak, and that helps.

What a tweest!

Does that mean you could add rotPower and linPower parameters to the SAS .cfg file and get them acting as they should? Or will that just make the SAS fight itself?

Fairly often. At least before and after every major operation, and usually a few times between those. Cad monkey habits die hard.

Not that I'm aware of, but that wasn't a feature of IMN I ever bothered to use. The features it adds are IMHO well worth not having that. You're not forced to type in the number each time (though you can certainly do that), you can also bump it up/down by a given value. I find it much easier to add 10m/s at a time instead of manually reentering numbers. Also, no more guessing at the time. I just place a node and have it snap to the apoapsis/periapsis. Couple that with the maneuver planner and setting up maneuvers is a snap. I just have it set up a Hohman transfer to wherever, then fine tune it to get the precise orbit I want.

Having tried both, I think MechJeb's maneuver node editor is better than the improved maneuver node. They are extremely similar, I just found MJ easier to use for some reason. MJ will also give you a whole lot of other readouts. What do you need them for?

Absolutely. With the exception of landing and docking (and even then I'll still occasionally use Smart A.S.S. to help with alignment) flying isn't really that exciting for my any more. So, instead of going hands on with everything I just play KSP as a space program sim instead of a flight sim. I use MJ as the go-between between me and my (mostly unmanned) ships, instead of me on the controls I issue commands to the flight computer and let it do its thing. The extra data displays are also a huge help, I don't have the time or patience to add up everything in the VAB manually, and the faster I get a ship in the air the faster I'm back to running my missions so taking a bunch of guesswork out of my ship is a big deal.

MJ isn't playing the game for you. At best it's flying a ship for you, but KSP isn't just about flying ships, it's a space program sim that happens to have a ship flying component. In fact, for unmanned craft using MJ is even more realistic as you wouldn't necessarily have direct control of a ship, you'd issue instructions and the ship would execute them.

If you just want to get a Kerbal into space you don't need a massive rocket. You simply need to blow it up juuuuuuust right.

It wouldn't be a stock solution, but I've been wondering if the Damned Robotics parts are too heavy to make it worth the time to create a rotating OX-STAT array. Keeping it on target would a a manual process, but as Crush said you do have a pretty wide tolerance.

I mostly wing it. I'll test separate parts of a mission separately (mostly by docking them together before sending them on their merry way), but I tend to just assume they'll work at the other end. that bites me on the ass sometimes (ok, usually), but I have more fun that way. For instance, I just sent a giant mission to the Jool system. It has a CM/tug (for moving big parts from moon to moon, and for habitation), four mapsats, four mid sized rovers, a lander that should (but probably won't) work on all the moons, a large interplanetary drive for getting the thing to Jool, and a large stack of drop tanks for the lander (the idea being that I dock with and carry as many as I'll need for a particular moon, then drop them on the way down/up as needed). So far the mapsats don't have enough dV to get themselves into each moon's orbit (they have to break out of a highly elliptical and inclined Jool orbit first), and I used up about half of the lander drop tanks getting into Jool orbit. Oops. So, my next Jool mission will be another stack of drop tanks, and a large to small docking port adapter so the CM/tug can insert the mapsats. I now suspect that it'll need to push the rovers around as well, their skycranes should land them ok, but I doubt they have the fuel to change SOIs.