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I was considering using demons as my naming theme for when 0.22 comes out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons_in_the_Ars_Goetia

What you could do is to have players start a new career mode campaign with no parts unlocked at all, and your first action is to decide between three starter packs that contain rocket bits, plane bits, or rover bits. Any of the three packs would let you work on science to unlock more, but would give your early game flavour.

This is my standard tanker/tug. It reaches orbit with a lot of fuel still in its launch booster, so you can use that to top up the tanks of your payload and give a bit of extra delta-v at high thrust for your departure burn. Once you ditch the launch booster, it's one orange tank and one LV-N. It accelerates really slowly, but it has enough kick to push a small space station into Eeloo orbit.

Landing large rovers on Duna can be done with refuelling in Kerbin orbit and use a nice big nuclear engined tug. Just remember to give your rover rocket engines of its own for landing!

The system for automatically painting struts is a nice touch.

People actually have tried this one in reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_Rocket#Helicopter_to_orbit

I will definitely grab the updated version next time I play. It looks like most of the important stock parts are covered now. Quick work! Painted solar panels are a bit strange though...

I bounce back and forth between doing practical engineering missions and aesthetic craft design. If you're bored of functional designs, browse through the spacecraft exchange forum, get some ideas, and build something pretty. If you're bored of pretty things, take a look through the challenge section of the forum and start learning tricks for doing things more efficiently.

I very rarely play with mods, but I've been hoping for a system like this for a long time. Everybody knows red ones go faster.

Mission Planner's Report: I have been testing to plan an optimal flightpath for the Triton booster, and discovered a problem. With a payload of a Rockomax X200-8 fuel tank (mass 4.5, drag 0.2), the booster performs flawlessly. Standard gravity turn started at 10km, finished under control at 12km: Reaching 100x100 LKO with payload intact and a small fuel reserve: However, if you use an unmanned PPD-12 Cupola Module (mass 4.5, drag 0.4), the booster flips over uncontrollably during gravity turn and fails to reach orbit. This was supposed to be a gravity turn... My formal recommendation is to avoid high drag parts on its payload.

I thought we were designing a Jool mission, not running an entire space program building up to it. What do we need an LKO satellite for?

How is collaborative craft design going to work? We don't have subassemblies in stock yet, so are we just going to end up passing half finished craft files around?

Sure why not. I'll apply.

There's not much point designing ships yet, because we don't know which parts you'll have available. For all we know, the tech tree might be really harsh and not give us decouplers or parachutes until we've done suborbital science flights.

I decided that despite the name, dunebuggies do not belong on Duna.

Transmitting results won't get you as much science data as a full return mission though. I think it might be better sometimes to launch a science bay seperately. Do science bay stuff on unmanned probes, and not even try to connect them to crew pods.

I'm hoping that we won't have to always use the science bay part. It looks like an awkward shape to fit into a lander. It'll be tricky making a good looking manned science return craft if we have to haul that thing back home with us.

If we can take samples on our missions then the reports should be interesting. It'll be nice to finally find out what Minmus and Eve are made of. Even the big lumps of rock like Ike and Tylo might have some fun secrets ready to be found by a bit of EVA geology.

The hoversled goes up very easily. Getting back down with precision is much more difficult.

"A rocket simulator."

Simple, easy to land, and holds a lot of colonists.

Has there been any suggestion of difficulty levels in research? I vaguely recall the devs talking about difficulty settings like a harcore mode with no crew respawning. If research is to be a resource, you could have difficulty levels there too. You could, for example, have easy mode where a few suborbital trips gets you all the bits you need for a Mun landing (big engines, lander cans, landing legs, etc.), but to get all the same tech in hard mode you'd have to really push at high altitude jet flights and science in low orbit, performing lots more experiments.

Now I'm imagining transferring data just like we do with fuel transfers. Right click on some science package, alt-click on the mothership, and "input data". Yes, this would be an awful way to handle it, but the idea amuses me.

It took me over 7 hours to get this [expletive deleted]ing thing into orbit around Moho. Argh.

Having magnetism and radiation sensors in the scientific instrument section would be neat , even if it had no effect on gameplay. If anybody really wants it, go out and do some of the work yourself. Find equations describing the shape of the fields, and post them in the dev forum as a suggestion.