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Cool! Thanks.

There should be a tweakable option that locks deployable solar panels in place. Tracking the sun is obviously very useful, but sometimes you design a craft where the a rotating panel will clip through another part or hit the ground or just doesn't look aesthetically pleasing. Having the ability to lock the panel in place so it doesn't track the sun after it's deployed would solve this. Anyway, that's it.

It's an awesome rocket to nowhere. Spend a decade developing the rocket and then what? Another decade developing a payload? The two should have been developed in concert.

I like these parts but I'm uninstalling them for now until some of the bugs are worked out. Oh well. Great mod, though.

Looks awesome. Can't wait for a heat shield. I've been using the DR 3.75m heat shield but there's some ugly part clipping and the 4m decoupler leaves an ugly little gap around the rim of the pod.

I do but I don't really like the stock tower. I usually make my own. The Ullage rockets from the KW pack are awesome escape motors.

Fair enough.

For Apollo at least, the pitch-control motor wouldn't be totally used to reorient the craft so the heatshield was pointed in the direction of airflow. It would pitch the craft away from the vehicle (firing for only 0.6 seconds) and then 11 seconds later, canards on the escape tower would deploy to reorient the craft. 11 seconds is a long time, and since we have enough torque from the pod itself to reorient it manually, we don't need the canards and can just do it ourselves. We do however need a pitch motor to to move the craft out of the way of an exploding rocket, like we have since we only have a blink of an eye to react. But again, my issue is that the pitch motor is too powerful or burns for too long and shouldn't be causing backflips in the pod with SAS enabled and it should be toggleable if we want to disable it for a normal jettison.

The new launch escape system part is neat, and I appreciate the fact that the part includes a small side thrusting motor to tilt your craft away. Unfortunately, I think the side thrusting motor is a bit too powerful, as it causes violent tumbling end-over-end of the spacecraft when activated. And if you want to jettison the tower when it's no longer needed, the tower itself tumbles away insanely fast. Anyway, I propose the ability to tweak the side motor's thrust and/or have the ability to disable it completely (maybe have 2 solid motor stages show up for it? You can stage it so that both activate if you want to abort, and only the vertical thrust motors activate if you want to jettison the escape tower). That is all.

It depends almost entirely on how they shape the core. Sure, they add 25% more propellant, but then they can adjust the shape of the core to get the desired thrust.

Ares I did have a ton of issues, but I don't think being underpowered was one of them. It would have used a 5-segment SRB compared to the shuttle's 4-segment SRB.

Well I'll be damned!

Thanks for the reply. I actually found out I need to fiddle with the J key to increase the extra height. I can't believe I didn't know that before. Thanks for your help!

For the Saturn V, how did you attach the interstage (procedural fairing) to the service module? I see you're covering up the SM engine bell, so I'm assuming the top of the fairing isn't attached to anything? Do you have the engine bell just attached to the LM docking port either directly or via a decoupler? I've recreated the Saturn V many times with procedural fairings and stretchy tanks, but that's the one part that annoys me... how to attach the interstage fairings to the SM. I've come up with pain in the butt solutions to make it look like the real thing, but I was wondering if there was an elegant method that I'm missing.

What camera settings did you use and how many frames did you take? Also, is your refractor collminated correctly? You've also got a lot of chromatic aberration which filters could help with. Edit: I cleaned up the image in photoshop and scaled it down to 30%. Looks a touch better.

Well the point is that I'd like them to fold out so they can be tucked away nicely when not in use.

All of the stock landing legs are pretty tall. This is good when you've got to clear a large engine bell but bad if you're landing on uneven terrain and want your center of mass to be as close to the ground as possible. I suggest adding stock landing legs that fold out wider than the current ones, or the ability to tweak the existing legs so that they fold out to a wider base. Lots of real life space craft have used landing legs that are wide rather than tall. Examples: The Surveyors Viking 1 & 2 Phoenix Chang'e 3 Cheers.

Yeah, I've suggested this before. It'd be really useful in some advanced booster designs.

So I hope this claw will come at the end of a robotic arm, though I doubt it. If it did, it'd be awesome for station building. It would also be awesome for collecting samples and depositing them into a container for analysis or sample return.

I'm of the opinion that a fuel tank that is twice as long should have more than twice the fuel and LOX as one that is half as long. I also believe that it should should have a dry mass that is less than 2x the drymass of a fuel tank half as long. My reasoning: It would allow for players to make more efficient designs and take advantage of larger single tanks.

My thoughts too. Have they even begun any work on ARM? I mean, if they're going to use ion thrusters like they've said they're gonna need to launch within the next two years to make the 2021 target...

Glad it's helping you out!

Here's a cool paper I found a while ago about Mars free returns via a Venus gravity assist. There's an awesome opportunity for a Mars flyby in 2017 with a Venus gravity assist. http://cmapspaceexp.ihmc.us/rid=1JWVZ8RM5-TQKTP4-18RG/Mars%20Free%20Returns%20Via%20Gravity%20Assist%20from%20Venus.pdf Mission duration would be 475 days (shorter than Inspiration Mars plan), and while it spends some time closer to the sun than Inspiration Mars' flyby plan, the overall radiation exposure should be less (assuming the same solar radiation output) because the time spent close to the sun is minimized. The launch delta-V is also less than inspiration Mars. The main drawback is the Earth arrival velocity, 13 km/s which is pretty high. Too bad NASA or some other space agency didn't jump on this opportunity. We could have had a flyby of two planets for the price of one. It's too late to design a mission now.

I love the BZ-52 Radial Attachment Point. It makes adding multiple small-sized engines to large size fuel tanks a breeze and aesthetically pleasing. Can we get a tiny (probe-sized) and large equivalent of the part? Thanks!

I'm all for changes that increase realism (to a degree). However, with a change like this, it'd be really useful for a stock version of Kerbal Engineer + the ability to view a thrust curve on a graph (which I would love!). I know Squad's taking the view that too much math and too many numbers might intimidate new players... but there is a simple way around that: make certain tweakables and displays (engineering info, orbital parameters) unlockable with science. That way, a new player won't be bombarded with numbers and options right when they start, and only until they've proven that they've got a basic handle on rocket building and orbital mechanics do they unlock the ability to see parameters or make fine adjustments.