SRV Ron

SRBs used in this early Career ship gave the boost needed for Jeb to orbit Mum and return.

It's probably happening during orbital turn with that top heavy load. You do, however, need to brace both ends of the decoupler or it can come loose, braces or not.

Encounters with inactive ships don't show up in map mode until they reach the SOI of that object. If the station is the active object and the future encounter doesn't show up on the current orbit, then, it may be a bug. I have seen slingshot maneuvers not occur for inactive objects during map mode in time acceleration, yet encounters will show up once the ships reach the SOI of the planet or moon.

Mods with lots of parts do slow down loading time. Any other slowdown depends on the ship and the texture details.

Once I added a ring of stabilizing clamps. A successful flight.

That's an excessive amount of mass on the LV-N given their efficiency. I would suggest having the upper stage dockable to the lower 7 tanks sent as a drop tank assembly to a core of fewer LV-N for better overall efficiency for interplanetary flight.

Sorry about the initial confusion. Your station has come under Laythe's SOI which is not apparent in the first screenshot.

While under Jools SOI, it is fine. Then, it comes under Laythe's SOI which then alters the station's path to the surface via aerobraking. That is clearly shown for the capsule where its Pe is well inside Laythe's atmosphere.

Update. Noticed the probe along with your capsule. Apparently, the probe you dropped off prior to the capsule being captured by Laythe is also being capture by Laythe, but that capture path didn't show up until later in the second screenshot. Since its path is similar, atmosphere drag is causing it to crash to the surface.

Laythe has an atmosphere starting somewhere around 60,000 meters. Aerobraking doesn't appear to be factored into the maneuver. Had this been any other moon in the Jool system, the maneuver would have taken placed as planned.

Looking at the data, your satellite will dip into Laythe's atmosphere resulting in sufficient aerobraking to give it the final fatal flight path.

When returning from Mun, Minmus, or the other planets, I always aim for a reentry window about a third in the atmosphere. That results in a gentle slowdown from the high return speed to the final landing. Apollo did the same as the capsule didn't contain the resources for a skip return while too steep a reentry would destroy the capsule with high g forces.

Rocket so tall the launch clamp failed; Then broke in half

Landing probes using RCS is easy. Flipping back upright risky. If the probe is light enough, a Mun landing is also possible. (Version 0.21)

Probes. the way to go on one way and dangerous missions.

With using the Kerbal School of Hard Knocks and testing, I found that placing a pair of Mainsails on the last asparagus pair with Skippers on the rest gave me the best performance on the one fuel can design. All mainsails used too much fuel due to high thrust ratio, all skippers used too much fuel due to low thrust weight ratio.

Attempt to catch an intercept of Moho as it crosses your orbital plane. That way, you don't have to adjust your orbital plane to match Moho's, a maneuver that will take tons of fuel to do. It make take several Kerbal years to find that ideal intercept window. The same is true for orbiting Eeloo. Do the intercept as it crosses Jool's orbital plane.

Placing a full orange fuel can in orbit; Of five at once; Just requires efficient design and effective bracing for stable controllable flight.

I find sub assemblies and placing in pairs easier and more useful then attempting 1 to 1 or worse yet, trying to set up staging when one has placed boosters all at once with symmetry.

"As for my own preference, I'd like to see KER made a stock feature; perhaps unlocked later on in the tech tree after interplanetary missions are doable." Designing and flight testing a rocket using the Kerbal School of hard Knocks is part of the fun. So is piloting one without Mechjeb. Still, such tech should be available for those that want to later use them to speed up processes such as assembling space stations or interplanetary ships in orbit.

Start with the payload and design the rocket around it in stages. Stay as simple as possible. This is how I came up with this 200+ ton to orbit monster.

When someone is able to propose it, a slinky rocket. 100 donuts tank stack SSTO. No braces. One SAS allowed under the pod. No clipping tanks inside each other. Nothing else between the 100 tank stack. No other fuel tanks. No cheats or mods. Stock parts only with engines on the bottom only. It is possible with careful flying and the right engine setup if I got this close to a stable orbit. The person that can do this with the fewest donuts tanks wins. Warning, the physics of donuts tanks stacked like this are a frame killer.

Not true. If you copy the game out of the Steam folder, it behaves the same as the store copy. You can also have multiple copies for stock, modded, alternate Kerban, Real Universe, etc...

If staging is clean, where the spent boosters are dropping off without hitting anything, just eliminate them. Those should be firing if they are on the correct staging location.

There was a cluster of four orange tanks and mainsails onion staged to that single one. Those got the payload to apogee with fuel left for 2/3rds of the final insertion burn. The single mainsail finished the job. Actually, five LV-T45 would be enough for the core as any more would interfere with staging. The Novapunch and KWRocketry gives a much better performance level overall without creating frame rate killing additions of all the engine clusters. This 110 tons to orbit example shows that better efficiency even with SRBs Anyhow, it was a first effort to see if it could be done. I did this in stages. First was the test of the core and four boosters onion stage. Then, the second ring to a suborbital test to work out the bugs in bracing and fuel line placement. Finally, the outer ring to push this into orbit and having to fix issues with lost braces and boosters falling off on the pad. Final fix to brace the decoupler under the payload which broke during the insertion to orbit burn. Once done, a good launch to orbit. Want to talk about inefficient, check some of the other designs being used to place the same payload into orbit. In most, there is way too much fuel being thrown into lifting the payload into orbit with the results of launchers being way too big and inefficient. Last night's flight, at 1,452 tons during launch, placed 216 tons into 100+K orbit. That is a ratio of 6.7 to 1. If aimed at the payload of 185 tons to a 100k orbit, I am sure that this ratio can be brought down to six to one or less.