RoboRay

Those were all stock parts from a decade ago, except the cargo bay. The modder for the old Mk3 parts expansion that included this cargo bay quit the game and took down all his mods long ago.

I was also hoping that a CKAN Flatpak or AppImage might be in the works for SteamDeck-compatibility... just commenting to express interest. On a side note, packaging in one of those distro agnostic formats could simplify general Linux support, and would support other distros with immutable filesystems.

I didn't create the artwork... I just updated the numbers on the RSS map for the smaller scale. Going to quarter-scale is really easy, as it simply reduces all the costs to half. Credits for the artwork and original math are in the upper-left portion.

For anyone else playing 2.5x scale, I converted the RSS Δv map to quarter-scale. It's not an exact match (RSS is about 11 times Kerbin-scale), but it's close enough (and slightly over-estimates how much you need, so it gives you a little extra safety margin with these numbers).

I think there's a designed-in assumption that people will want to have fun through exploration. Designing around eliminating possibilities for min-max grinding tends to negatively impact people who play to have fun rather than to optimize production.

Look two posts above your own.

You've probably already thought about it and I don't know what may be near you, but a lot of industrial/manufacturing operations depend on ancient computer equipment to run the production machines. Also commercial enterprises that are highly regulated for financial/privacy/medical or other informational or record-retention reasons often have old computers/networks that they are required by law or regulatory compliance reasons to maintain. Good luck!

FASA Gemini is Best Gemini!

I lag my target on purpose to ensure I never reach Ap ahead of it. This way, I can maximize fuel efficiency with the "once around" rendezvous technique I described above. I burn only as much propellant as I would use to circularize normally, with none wasted pushing my Ap higher to enter a slower orbit and drop back to a target behind me. (Or waste time having to wait a lot of orbits for my phasing to cycle all the way around the planet and catch up to the target the long way around.) Trying to launch directly to rendezvous requires perfect timing and ascent profile, and usually some additional propellant expended on corrections, which is why we don't try to do it in the real world. Soyuz flights to the ISS used to do a similar but longer, three-orbit approach to rendezvous, but started doing once-around just a couple of years ago. I have Phase Angle in my "Target Info HUD" (everything in it hides itself when I don't have a target selected for automatic decluttering) and find it useful for all kinds of things, not just launches. YMMV, but I find it a really critical parameter in understanding situational awareness of your positional relationship with your target.

I use Phase Angle to Target for this. I launch when the phase angle is 340 degrees (target is 20 degrees west of the launch pad) and I usually reach Ap no more than 100 km behind the target. I don't completely circularize, just bring Pe up out of the atmosphere then continue easing Pe upward until I get a close rendezvous on the next orbit.

Unless you get extremely discouraged by lots of mistakes and a huge learning curve, absolutely! Start by throwing out everything you know about playing KSP, but keep what you've learned about orbital mechanics and spacecraft maneuvering. This is almost a completely new game. The tech tree is radically different from the stock one. It fixes everything I hate about the stock one, too. If you find KSP boring now because the things that used to be huge achievements are now trivially easy, RSS/RO/RP1 is for you.

I did a quick test in 1.8.1 and the current version seems to be fine.

I actually waited for that moment to get the screenshot.

Yeah, but it struck me that the issue you noted with tech tree progression is kind of related to the one I was struggling with this weekend and helped me figure out how to express it. One of the things I really like about the RP-1 tech tree is that it doesn't force you to stack a lot of short tanks because you "don't know how to make tall tanks" yet. It's really the diameter of the tanks that drives difficulty. I like building rockets that look good and a stack of the same little texture pattern over and over doesn't do that. I tend to use several different lengths of tanks to break up the texture patterns and, with UKS granting wider tanks at the same tank it grants longer length narrower tanks, I end up not using the longer tanks much at all.

I also think sorting the SRB and tank parts into tech tree nodes by diameter would work nicely. Right now, it seems like you unlock a tech node and get the shortest tanks in two or three different diameters, then unlock the next node and get the next longer lengths for those same diameters. So, you end up cobbling rockets together from lots of short tanks and never using the longer ones because you've moved on to larger diameter tanks by the time you unlock the long ones. Having to use lots of short tanks isn't a difficulty challenge... it's just an annoyance for aesthetics and artificially inflates the needed part count for a craft. If you want to retain length progression with the tanks, I would still suggest sticking to one diameter per tech node. So, you would end up with something like: Short 1.25m tanks > Long 1.25m tanks > Short 1.875m tanks > Long 1.875m tanks > Short 2.5m tanks > Long 2.5m tanks > etc. Keeping the little probe tanks off in a parallel side node still make sense. The excellent RP-1 tech tree is structured something like this and it plays through very nicely.