The Wall

I've been using this mod fine for a few days, but suddenly when I loaded KSP up today switching control to either of my craft with Kethane detectors makes the game lock up and drop down to minimal FPS. I looked at the data dump and it gives an XMLException pointing at the config.xml file in the Kethane installation; when I open this file, it's entirely blank. How can I fix this?

I've never had issues with going to Minmus by setting it as the target (so it and its orbit light up yellow). Then I can see little AN/DN (ascending/descending node) markers on my Kerbin orbit; burning normal or antinormal here to my orbit until the nodes are 0.0-0.01 degrees before doing the transfer burn has always worked fine. I do the same thing when I arrive in Minmus' SoI; doing the same kind of plane adjustment lets me tilt the orbit to the inclination I want. I have occasionally had an issue with the Mun where I've ended up reaching orbit going the wrong direction compared to what I want to dock with, but if I've caught it before the periapsis retrograde burn to get captured by the Mun, it didn't need ridiculous amounts of delta-V to correct. It took much more when I had to swap the direction once captured, doing alternating normal/antinormal burns to flip the orbit over the poles and back down. I'm not entirely sure where your issue lies here, but I hope this helps?

I found that just using RCS exclusively for maneuvers up close was far more reliable than using a rocket; it avoids the needs to reorient the ship and allows for pretty precise movement.

You'll want your thrusters evenly spaced around your centre of mass for translational movement without causing the craft to spin. This can be thrown out if you burn fuel (and I don't know a way to make the VAB shift the centre of mass to simulate burned fuel) from the stage you want to dock, or if you dock something with it before going on the dock it with something else. (Since both of these can shift your centre of mass; losing fuel from a high up fuel tank shifts it down, and docking something shifts it towards whatever was just attached.) Beyond eyeballing or making sure that stage is full of fuel before needing to dock, I don't know how to avoid it; the second can be avoided by finding the centre of mass of the paired units in the VAB and spacing the thrusters around that, if you know they'll be joined. If you don't, the only way I know of is to have the thrusters around the centres of mass of each individual craft prior to docking.

Oh, wow, embarassing! Yeah, I am; I had that URL on the clipboard for some reason and must have forgotten to clear it. Just fixed it. Since the angle's a bit awkward and I can't load KSP right now to take more, it's exactly symmetrical barring the ladders leading down from the cockpit to the bottom (to allow vertical landings); down the central body it goes inline docking port->FL-T800->FL-T400->aerospike. On ascent, I only have one pair of intakes open and open the next two pairs individually as I need them to minimise drag, and have an action key bound to close the intakes and kill the jet engines. I suppose I could try and snip off things like that extra cockpit at the front (the Mk.2 is the root part), but I originally hoped this plane would be able to fly by and pick up stranded Kerbals. I could try and clip down the parts, but increasingly a Munar SSTO seems unfeasible without at least swapping the aerospike for a NERVA in orbit, or even adding a couple more tanks once I reach orbit? I suppose that could add an extra challenge too, though; a spaceplane chopshop in low Kerbin orbit to refuel them and rearrange their engine blocks as needed.

I've managed to make a SSTO spaceplane, but I'm rapidly discovering that it's extremely tight on fuel; the most I've been able to squeeze spare from it after getting to a stable 75km orbit is about 75-80 units. This isn't a problem in itself, since I can always refuel it before taking it elsewhere -- the issue is that after a complete refill of the tanks it just has enough fuel to pull off a Mun landing and nothing more, running out completely around 20m above the Munar surface. At the moment I have one FL-T800 and three FL-T400s supplying an aerospike, with two fuselages for the turbojets. I'm stuck for ways to make it either more fuel efficient or to sneak a higher carrying capacity onto it; does anyone have any ideas? Plane in SPH: http://i.imgur.com/jVGs74c.jpg

I've been trying to make a reasonably small spaceplane to take a couple of Kerbals (or maybe a tiny payload instead of the added nose cockpit, if I can get this to work) to orbit, but I'm finding that after a short while in the flight the nose pitches up beyond my ability to keep it down. It varies depending on how I've configured the wings but it usually goes out of control between 300-400m/s. I've seen people manage to reach well over 1km/s before needing to hit the rockets to finish the orbit off, and I'm not sure what's causing the issue here for me. I took some screenshots showing the centres of mass/lift/thrust if they illuminate the issue to anybody better experienced with horizontal takeoffs than me. Imgur linked to avoid filling the OP with large pictures.