Saberus

Here's a link to Pebble's channel on Youtube: Pebble Garden

Current RTGs are just not up to the task of ion thrusters... even this beastie I made in 0.18.4 (IIRC) needed at least 2 RTGs to run the ion full power without draining the batteries: http://imgur.com/a/XYWON#0

UbioZur recommended Scott Manley, definitely a prime choice. The man understands spaceflight almost as well as most of us know how to breathe. Another good person to look at for beginner tutorials is Pebble Garden, all the words are on screen, letting you pause and read while looking right at what is being talked about, and it's nothing but good, soothing music. After watching some of their work, you should be ready to start making your own designs and sending Kerbals into the Great Beyond (take that as you will )

They make all manner of fans for desktops. Check if you're overheating by using a utility like CoreTemp. If you are, open the case and evict any dust bunnies. Give your heat sink a good cleaning, and make sure all the fans are turning. Get an IR thermometer and looks for hot spots while the thing is running. The list of things to check and do is a mile long, cooling is one of those things that gets so overlooked. And my Kerbals get to work via lithobraking from the KOSPLAY Facility.

I will attempt this on Monday. With my (lack of) landing skills, I will be attempting for either best TTI or best explosion first.

Well, that's 30m/s that my craft is going relative to Kerbin. I'm going straight up, not trying to match orbit until after 55km over the surface. So I'm smacking into the station while it has orbital velocity.... and I'm nowhere near that. So my craft is acting more like an anti-satellite missile than anything. My swear jar is nearly overflowing because I'm finding myself burning full-throttle away from the station in a futile attempt to match speed with nowhere near enough space to do so. I feel the best analogy is that I am doing the orbital equivalent of avoiding the onramp to a highway by cutting through the median, turning onto the roadway, then trying to accelerate to match the speed of traffic. Except traffic is 18-wheelers cruising at 60mph, and I'm in a '53 Iso Isetta. I just need to step back and stop trying to be a missile. Edit: Somehow that 30m/s is sticking in my head, but I'm wracking my brain that it doesn't sound right. I'm at work still, I won't be able to verify until I get home. I know my two attempts resulted in one fly by while being 12ish kilometers away and out into deeper space in a pointy, narrow parabolic trajectory, and the other time I'm burning like mad to slow down and just smash through Alpha Station's battery/ASAS...

Averaging my speeds between the two I still come screaming in at 39.1 m/s... I need to try a different tack. Maybe actually stepping back and completing a docking maneuver first, before going for some speed record. Learn to crawl before running a marathon.

::Raises hand:: interested. Still working on getting it. I'm still either shooting past the station, or smashing it to bits.

I need to rebuild my Blackball series and rebalance them for 0.21.1, it seems.

Before the forum crash I had a vessel that was a bit of a challenge to fly, but fun. The Munar Experiment Package MK3. I'm trying to retrieve the download as the vessel vanished from my KSP, but here is a video of another player sending it up (After slapping a Mechjeb onto it.) He did a very good job flying the ship. (Though he staged the boosters early, I can squeeze around 1000m/s before I have to ditch them)

Personally I use a mix of sepratrons and control surfaces to peel off the empties. A pair of R8 winglets angled to deflect the top away from the main mass works wonders, and adds a touch of stability to the craft, and I found that trick watching Pebble Garden's videos. A little nudge near the top from a sepratron really helps, as well as something that causes either drag or lift away from the ship. In space, the spinning technique is perfect, as the conservation of momentum flings the discarded stage from the main mass, then quickly ceasing the roll to make maneuvering easier. If you need sepratrons to remove parts in space, you might be doing it wrong.

Mine is from my first D&D character (2nd Ed.) I've used it for nearly everything internet related since I first got online. The full name is Saberus Alain Jacobi Ferdinand Jasperi de la Terras. The short version, Saberus Terras, is mangled Latin for "wisdom of the Earth"

Those are some big rockets. I can see how a little roll can be irritating, but in reality a bit of roll can help the rocket maintain a stable flight path. If you need to counter it and are having a hard time, try using ALT and the roll key that counters your roll. ALT sets the controls to trim mode, so after you set enough counter-roll, you can let go of the keys and the ship will hold that trim. The ASAS has trouble with the smaller adjustments, unless you hit caps lock to activate the fine controls, then it can usually settle out the rocket's wobble. Conventional SAS can help, but they add a good deal of weight as multiple are needed. SAS modules have the greatest impact when placed at the top and/or bottom of the stack you're trying to stabilize.

Whee... so I need to deal with a bit of excess drag when I stage, to hit the spacebar one more time? This does not bode well for the Blackball. (The lifter unit's name)

I've been tinkering a good bit with a few designs in an effort to make a generic lifter design to stick mission-specific payloads on top of. I'm trying to future-proof for when cost becomes a factor, and have my air-breathing jet boosters both jettison and deploy parachutes to float back to Kerbin for recovery, but I cannot seem to order the decouplers, chutes and possible separatrons to fire in an order I like. (Decoupler, separatron, chutes) Is there a defined order that parts are activated in a stage, or is it all a race condition?