Jarin

I've seen this issue as well. I haven't tried saving the whole ship and re-loading it, though. I'll give it a shot.

My limits? About 700 parts. After that, things start randomly falling off on the launchpad, regardless of how I strut them.

I do believe this will be the first "new engines" mod I actually install. I'd been really leery of adding more powerful or "cheaty" stuff to the game, but the infrastructure involved in this one has won me over. Awesome work

The LT-2 is sometimes compressing under minimal weight as well, so be warned.

Viewing this even on small vessels with far more legs than necessary, even just on the KSC launch pad. I've even set ships down, then used the legs to lift them up (which worked just fine, so they had plenty of strength), then the legs on one side will slowly compress, listing the structure over to a 30~ish degree angle.

It would be nice if "recovered a vessel that rendezvoused with another vessel in orbit" was a thing for the postflight-report, but it's not. Yet. I hope.

This just means that Mechjeb needs to update its control algorithms to account for the SAS changes. Such is the life of a mod developer on an Alpha-state game. Personally, I think the SAS could stand to be tightened up a bit, but iteration is the name of the game, and I'm sure they'll continue tweaking.

Lost my first landing stage trying to set down up there. Thankfully my second landing stage recovered and shed the debris. Thank god for the KSP department of redundancy department. (yes, I do build landers on top of my landers. What of it? <.<)

Meet the overengineered mess that is the Stack'o'boosters Mk.2: Note the ring of thrust-vectoring engines strapped to the solid fuel boosters. Those are left over from the Mk1 design, which was the only way I could keep the damn thing stable, lacking reaction control rings. And once I DID have them, I saw no reason to change the setup. This unit makes mun and minmus landings with plenty of fuel for wasteful return burns. It also makes a dandy one-way "extended deployment" trip outsystem to fly past Duna. The duna flyby netted finally netted me enough science to unlock the LV-N, though, so the Mk.3 is on its way!

My Jeb just finished returning from a wilderness excursion after attempting just this exact maneuver, followed by an unassisted fireball re-entry. He immediately set off for Minmus.

I must be misunderstanding how this works, because it seems like the "higher-tech" antennas seem to require more power for no actual benefit...

This is everything I wanted to see. I can have a long-flight probe around the system, and only worry about the sample returns for manned missions. And that only because it would take forever to transmit and re-collect that many samples. Edit: Honestly though, it does feel a bit off. This might fall into the "consider rebalancing" category?

Oh, so repeated transmissions are a lot better than I thought, then. Nice.

Edit: Take with a grain of salt. I may be misunderstanding the mechanics. See this post below. So, I decided to do some science on SCIENCE, and find out what's worthwhile to transmit and what's not. Now, here's my setup; I have a vehicle in free solar orbit with plenty of solar panels, so data transmission is effectively free and limitless. This is our "research probe" setup. Granted, mine is manned, but Hermore Kerman volunteered for a one-way mission permanent deployment, so it amounts to the same thing. Here's the data, transmitted up to the "break even" point where the transmissions equal the value of a single return. (sorry if the formatting screws up for anyone, it's being a bit inconsistent.) Materials Bay Mystery Goo EVA Report Total 1444 | 288.7 313.9 | 125.5 202.9 | 95.7 (86.2 @3) 1 275 | 55 110 | 44 88 | 44 2 235.7 | 47.1 85.6 | 34.2 52.8 | 26.4 3 202 | 40.4 66.5 | 26.6 31.6 | 15.8 4 173.2 | 34.6 51.8 | 20.7 19 | 9.5 5 148.4 | 29.7 6 127.2 | 25.4 7 109.1 | 21.8 8 93.5 | 18.7 9 80.1 | 16 Now, the left-column totals are a bit misleading, because you'd have to do a full round trip for each and every one of those values, which could get exceedingly time-consuming. On the other hand, by running repeated transmissions, you are effectively "drilling the science-reservoir empty" for that particular area, so it could decidedly be seen as wasteful, so the return totals are a comparison for the potential that's lost. Crew reports, of course, are at 100% return value, so you can and should run transmissions until you've mined every area empty for those. Conclusions: With the materials bay, you should *really* consider multiple return missions if you can manage it, as just two returns is far more than you will *ever* get with transmissions. Run-dry transmissions for the materials bay ONLY for locations you don't feel like you can reasonably get return missions from. Mystery Goo is a bit better. Its 40% return rate means that it breaks even at only 4 transmissions, and not nearly as much is lost. A good candidate for any far-flung science probes. EVA Reports are even better, very nearly breaking even at 3 transmissions. Send an outbound-flight flyby of a bunch of planets and transmit back your sacrificial kerbalnaut's observation's to your heart's delight.

Deleting all my old saves and mods and starting a clean career. SCIENCE HOOOOO!

It's stock. Small and white, if I recall correctly. Somewhere near the other decopulers, but not right next to them.

This is some impressive work! Especially for a first major excursion. I've been wanting to attempt something bigger*, but I've been held back by lack of a success with lifter engineering (and frustration with performance issues on a 3-year old computer). I figure I'll take another stab at it with 0.22, hoping for some performance increase, and maybe running a proper program from first-principles to re-learn some things I may have missed (and get research, of course). *than I've done before, not bigger than this crazy project

Biggest thing I'm looking forward to is the comedy writing inherent in Kerbal science projects.

I am going to cry tears of blood if I have to upgrade to Win8 to get proper performance on larger ships...

They've already said that there's more parts planned, and even designed, for after research is implemented. Hell, there's supposedly a hyperdrive planned. I suspect ramjet and scramjet engines (and their associated intake systems) will be included at some point, which will replace the current "airhogging" methods of SSTO.

One of my favorite books used "Vogon Poetry" as a descriptor for programming a particularly ugly/crazy bit of code that still functioned. I've taken to using "Kerbal Rocketry" in similar fashion. Something insane or absurd that still manages to work.

Jeb says "any test you can walk away from is a good test"

Yeah, but the smaller rover has so much less momentum when accidentally ramping off of ridgelines. <.< Edit: Also, thrust/weight ratio doesn't go away in a vacuum.

I expect I'll be building the vehicle as semi-flight capable. Probably a standalone vehicle that can land and reorbit by itself, and just happens to have wheels. Also, I've seen mention of using ion thrusters mounted dorsally to hold a vehicle down in low gravity. I assume that would probably only be useful on really small/light vehicles? Alternately, since I fully expect to have a mini-refinery on the utility vehicle, just low-throttle regular engines, since it could refuel itself... Edit: Honestly... since I'm basically building a micro-spaceship anyway... might I be better off just using landing gear and assuming it'll fly/float most of the time? What's the weight capacity and steering like on landing gear? Could I still use it as a crane vehicle?

Well, it's just a Minmus base, in my case, so getting down to the surface is trivial. And I finally got a stock heavy lifter that I feel good about, so I'm wanting to get into some bigger projects. Can I refuel through a KAS cable connection? If so, I might not bother having a fully-dockable rover, and just use my MUV for vehicular fueling.