Brotoro

We need nuclear reactors for exactly what you asked for in your first post: ion powered probes. Solar panels are fine (at least close to Kerbol), but they are bulky and fragile. If you want to make a powerful ion engine ship, compact nuclear reactors in a variety of sizes would be the answer for powering them (and other kinds of electric-powered drives).

What we need are nuclear reactors for power in space.

My first ship to a moon of Jool was my Fido rover that landed on Laythe. Back in the days before real rover wheels, it used aircraft landing gear and RCS power to move.

Below is the comparison image for the NASA Saturn V vs. my KSP Mark Twain ship that I used to explore the various planets and moons of the Kerbin system. I measured the height of the Mark Twain in two ways: 1) stack up a bunch of fuel tanks next to it and estimate its size based on the tanks having a diameter of 1.25 meters, and 2) put the rocket on the pad and have a kerbal climb to the top of it, then jump off to measure ground level. The two methods agreed to within 0.4 meters.

Photographed the nova tonight.

Went out for an hour around 9:30 PM... Saw three Perseids in an hour. Went out again at Midnight... saw four bright ones in ten minutes... OK! So I go out my camera and took pictures of the same area of the sky for an hour (30-second exposures). I saw several more bright Perseids during the first half of that hour...but only one lame one was captured in my camera's field of view:

I drove all the way around Duna using this rover. It works very well. I used very similar rovers on Eve and Laythe. I've also tested it on the Mun and Minmus (which is why it has the RCS), but it works better with more gravity. Lots of wheels is good because it puts less strain on each wheel so they don't blow (the Duna mission was unmanned, and I didn't blow a wheel). I used ASAS to keep the rover stable when it caught lots of "air". Complete Mission Report Here.

Deutschland, über alles.

When the hydrogen boils (as some of it will over time because no spacecraft fuel tank insulation is perfect) it turns into a gas, so the pressure in the tank increases. You have to vent the gas or you can exceed the structural limits of the tank. No, you can't use a massively strong tank to contain the high pressure because that would be too heavy.

I use LV-909 engines in both the upper and lower stages. Requires some clipping. The complete mission

Most of my payloads have been in the 20 to 24 ton range because that's the capacity of the reusable launcher I've been using.

"Tidal waves" have nothing to do with tides. Jool is not gigantic (it's only the size and mass of Venus), but it IS very close, so it will cause a large tidal distortion of the shape of Laythe, yes. But the whole bulk of the planet will deform to this prolate ellipsoidal shape, so the depth of the oceans over the solid surface does not have to vary greatly with location on Laythe due to Jool's tides. There would be very large transient tides when Vall and Tylo pass close to Laythe, however, because of the small distances in the Jool system.

If we want workers to do the manual labor, we should genetically engineer apes. Nothing could go wrong.

Install the Maneuver Node Improvement mod. It lets you reopen collapsed maneuver nodes simply by pressing the "o" key.

They banned it in the Star Trek universe because almost any genetic engineering they tried just resulted in people with funny bumps on their forehead.

The air on Kerbin is not 10 times denser. The oceans are not 10 times denser. The ship parts are not 10 times denser. We know this from moving through the air, floats in the water, and from the given sizes and masses of the parts. So not everything is NOT 10 times denser. There is no reason that the outer parts of the planets in the Kerbol system have to be made from any exotic matter. All you need is super-dense matter in the cores of the bodies... then you can proceed as normal with the other Physics as we know it.

It doesn't matter whether you have an abundance of heavy elements in the Kerbol system... the densities of most of the objects in that system are far beyond that of ANY known or predicted element. To make the Kerbol system, you would need some sort of super-heavy state of stable matter to exist. You wouldn't have to make whole planes out of the stuff...it would only need to exist in the cores, with normal elements on the exteriors of the planets. Or Magratheans.

Plutonium is produced in supernova explosions just like uranium and other heavy elements are, so you could certainly find it there. But, because of its relatively short half life (compared to the time it takes to form a solar system and develop inteligent life that might be interested in plutonium) the plutonium in our solar system has decayed away long ago.

I've had several of my rockets apparently attempt to reach the Kerbin-Mün barycenter... Especially if Jeb is driving.

My Pseudo Saturn V is not supposed to LOOK like a Saturn V, but is supposed to work like one. Full mission report here.

2 km west from here:

Reentry heat damage. Sure, one needs to deal with it in real life, but it will place strict limitations on the wild and crazy and entertaining designs that I see many people using (and enjoy seeing).

Are you saving the photo using a compressed file format? You can make large images fit into smaller file sizes by compressing, and, in some cases, losing some of the information.

In KSP? Nothing. But I did play a little in Photoshop:

It's not the highest point on the planet, and I didn't look everywhere, but the highest spot I found near the equator is this one (6,498 meters): Here is a view of the area. It's not just a single mountain peak, so it's a a fairly good-sized landing area: And here's the little ISA MapSat scan I did for my quick search, with the landing site indicated: