J.Random

They never went to Mün, it was filmed in Kerbywood. Obvious.

Nah, all credits for this design go to some redditer. But this is rather unforgettable cannot-be-unseen-able "thing", so yeah, it came to my mind instantly when I've seen those toroids.

I suggest to either strut the hell out of them or change them to normal fuel tank. You have around five tons of fuel and engines holding on that tower of toroids and single docking port. Another example of similar design decision and what it can lead to:

Am I seeing a bunch of stacked toroidal fuel tanks there (gold-ish rings)?

Interpreting launch accidents as "throwing people at the problem until they stop dying" is quite retarded way of looking at it, I should say. Competing in "which nation lost less people" is not less retarded, BTW.

All? Nope. My first idea was to put one of those seats on a looooong line of girders and dock it to space station. That would be the place for Jeb to sit and think about Universe and Everything.

Don't forget that shuttle is transported to launch pad vertically and stays like that when astronauts get in their seats.

Most of the time, I quicksave right before the second try of the same maneuver which blew the ship at the first try.

Well, there are istg and dstg parameter for every part in the craft file (which I guesstimate as "ignition stage" and "decouple stage"). Setting istg to -1 removes part from staging, but I guess it may and most certainly will break other stages as well.

Can you clarify rules? 1st try: simplest asparagus design done in 5 minutes, standard orbit ascend sequence... escaped Kerbol. 2nd try: same design, burning straight up all the time... Still escaped Kerbin. What's the catch?

Do you have parachutes in stage 0, escape engines with decoupler in stage 1 and everything else in stage 2+? I don't think you do. If you decouple your command pod, the rest of the ship turns into debris, and whatever happens with that debris shouldn't affect your remaining ship's staging at all.

imho, TWR should be constant or slightly decrease with every stage (excluding final stages). If it's increasing, it means that you were hauling excess mass on previous ascend stage for too long.

Not before we try it on Earth. The main property of such colony should be self-sustainability. So the first step in colonizing other planets would be building a hermetic cupola, say, in Sahara desert and creating a self-reproducing living environment inside of it.