SecondGuessing

Really? I hate using chase view. It makes me feel sick, and it's easier to just move the camera around to check all the axis, for me, anyway.

It's almost certainly a CoM issue, but it could also just be the SAS unit getting twisted out of linearity by the way SAS units fights and then the whole ship correcting to that direction, rinse and repeat.

This happens to me whenever I alt-tab out when the game is loading. But there's more Es there than any other letter.

The issue is the ASAS: it has a tiny impact tolerance, and so it breaks from the change in acceleration when you eject the fairings. Add struts from the capsule to the large tank. Edit: Oh wait, you said it worked. Doh!

Surely you wouldn't really gain much, as the potential energy you'd start with would still be the same.

Days since the last Kraken attack

This, or set up the staging so the stage and the nuclear engine are on different stages and leave a second or two between them. It could also be that you don't have any struts, especially from the capsule to the large tank (the large ASAS has absolutely useless tolerances, and will snap at the smallest wobble). Plus, you're going oddly horizontal given how low it seems you are, although I've never looked down again when launching so who knows.

I find landing a lot harder than designing an SSTOs, even space-planes. I seem to have somewhat good intuition when designing SSTOs, but landing I find to be a pain, and always underestimate the fuel requirement to re-rendezvous from the planet. But orbital rendezvous was much harder to learn to start with than SSTO design or landing.

There's not much point doing it unless you're going to be putting a lot of stress on the join. It's actually quite difficult to do, as very often only one of the ports will correctly dock, and so you gain nothing.

A space trampoline.

I don't see any reason not to use it, the way the game's construction system works means many completely feasible and realistic designs are not possible without part clipping.

A sun-synchronous orbit doesn't meant you're always in the sun, it means that the illumination over an arbitrary point will be the same every time you pass over that point. L1 would work, but KSP doesn't support Lagrange points. I don't see much of a way to do it with KSP's physics. If you put yourself in a high polar orbit around the terminator, though, you'll be in the sun for a long time before you finally get eclipsed, and even then it'll only be for a very short while. A little nudge towards the terminator every now and then would mean you always stay in the sun. There might be a distance at which you can be in a retrograde orbit that matches the rotational velocity of Kerbin, too.

I think, if I were an astronaut, I'd be more worried about the highly lethal mono-prop, or the fact I'm sat on top of a controlled explosive, rather than the non-penetrating alpha radiation emitted by an RTG. I have a similar set of rules, TS, although I don't use deadly re-entry because all it does is make the game more tedious (it's easy to survive deadly re-entry with any ship; just put yourself in a slowly decaying orbit and wait). When it comes to probes and manned missions I typically say that I need to have a probe in the medium before I can said a Kerbal there. So I need a satellite before I send an orbiter, a probe lander before I send a manned lander, etc.

I think you may be fitting you stack separators incorrectly. There's basically no reason to use separators, they add more debris and, in the medium size, protrude more and so get in the way. I use the large ones sometimes on sub-orbital stages, just to reduce vertical height.

Yeah, I will. I haven't really done anything in my current saves (I haven't even left Kerbin SOI), and it'll be nice to restart with some knowledge and design plans under my belt. I'll probably convert some .crafts though, just for fun and nostalgia.

I don't think it should be easy to run 300 part ships, but currently borderline systems are choking at 150 parts, which isn't enough to do quite a few things in the game.

It's the expectation that the consumer is provided with by Squad. And how you expect me to somehow know that you have edited a post and thus go back, re-read the edit and address that point, is beyond me.

I don't think 'good graphics' is something we need worry about with KSP. The Unity engine is most likely the issue; games like Borderlands 2 handle physX quite reasonably, but I believe they handle physX using more than one core, which is obviously going to work better.

He shoots, he scores.

More caricatures and strawmen, what a surprise. I give up, there's no point discussing anything with someone replying to points you aren't making.

I feel I already stated that nobody ever sides with the consumer in this area... I don't give a minced oath about what you think you need to run this game, I care about what the devs are telling people will run this game, and as such people are clearly going to be disappointed by their machines, which exceed the specs recommended, are handling it awfully. If you're told that x new radiator will improve the performance of your 1.2l engine but in reality it barely works, and really you need a 2l to use it, then you're right to be miffed. And if you don't want people making snide comments at you then don't, when told the game runs poorly on machines on which its touted as running acceptably on, say 'well it works perfectly well on my 4ghz machine!' as though that's a solution to any problem. Besides, your caricatures of my point and dull little 'Regardless, your claim that "ram usage will speed things up!!111", is highly inaccurate' comments hardly place you on the moral high ground, friend. All I have said is that the game currently runs poorly on computers which it should run better on, and that in .20 we've been told that the optimisation will increase performance; and that the people who just say 'get a better PC' aren't helping anyone and are just being boorish. All you've done is argue against a strawman and nicely exemplify my latter concern. That's an awful excuse and you know it. Building a 150+ part ship is required in order to do many of the things in this game, and if a system can't run that then it clearly shouldn't be being touted as a recommended system. And they add caveats about the state the game is in due to the fact it is still in development, and I have acknowledged this. However, this only adds to my point, that the game needs better optimisation. In fact, by saying that the system specs are somewhat arbitrary due to the development the devs themselves are saying that the game needs to be optimised far better in order to reach its potential. The 'everyone else does it' defense is equally hollow. Peculiar, because, you know, I actually stated exactly this in my opening post: 'Hopefully .20 will boost the games use of RAM and lower its CPU hogging, which should help a lot of people.' But of course, you've just caricatured my point again. The only premises you need to accept to be agreeing with me are as follows: the game currently doesn't run very well on baseline systems; upcoming optimisation may help to improve this issue for many people; saying 'get a new PC' is not at all helpful. I don't see how any of those points are deniable, and so far you haven't shown any evidence to the contrary.

I thought I'd go for a minimalist approach.

I didn't say more RAM usage will speed things up, I said better optimisation will. No, it's a staple of PC gaming that there are minimum specs and recommended specs, and that the distinction is that one will just about scrape by on lowest settings and one will run adequately on normal settings. What? I don't care at all that you can afford a good gaming PC. Good for you. The point is though that you are being completely boorish in stating 'oh it's fine, I can run it okay' whilst using a machine that is far above the recommended settings. However, the majority of people cannot afford a strong gaming PC, and thus suggesting that the solution to the problem that their machine, which according to Squad is a recommended setup, chokes up is to 'just buy a new PC' is just boring and pointless. All it is is tacit smugness. Then perhaps Squad should tell people that their 2.0Ghz dual core isn't going to cut it, rather than imply that it's a recommended setup. I'm not arguing that a better PC doesn't equal better performance, I'm arguing that a recommended PC should play the game in the way the devs feel the game should be experienced, and this is clearly not true, unless having a yellow clock is meant to be the way to play.

Nobody cares what you get; you're running on a machine that massively exceeds the recommended system specs, of course you get incredible performance. The specs on the KSP site aren't minimum specs, they're recommended specs, which implies the game will run well on that machine when it comes to doing standard things, which it doesn't. And again, congratulations, you have a machine that massively exceeds the recommended specs and runs it extremely well. Who'd have thought it?! Lord, it's like talking to people with six figure salaries about how bad the public sector cuts have been.

The game runs fairly crappy on even high end computers. Again, I can play Crysis 3 on this laptop with medium settings at around 40fps, but two 80 part ships trying to get near each other will choke it down to 15/10 fps, and that's with half texture detail, 2x AA and texture quality set to 'Good' . This is clearly a problem with the game. The game has fairly low quality textures and models, animations are few and awful, and the physics processing is not especially extreme, and yet it performs badly. Of course, this is because it's a beta, but pretending that there isn't an issue is pointless and fanboyish. When the game runs poorly doing simple things on machines that exceed the recommended system specs then there's problem, and saying 'well get a better computer' doesn't help, because people have been told by Squad that the game will run on the system they have, and yet doing basic things will choke it. You don't need to know anything about computers: if the game runs poorly on systems that meet the recommended settings then there is a big problem that needs addressing. But of course, people never seem to side with the consumer. Edit: I'm not expecting the game to perform well at this point, by the way; it's too early in development to expect anything particularly impressive. But, pretending that the performance is good is silly, and telling people who want to improve the game's performance 'your PC just sucks, buy another one' is less than helpful.