rodion

The core knowledge I needed to understand docking maneuvers almost certainly came early on in the form of the soothing, honeyed voice of Scott Manley, after that it was just several hours of slowly and painfully getting better at fine craft maneuvers. I'm pretty decent at docking, nowadays.

In earlier versions of the game people used to do this often when they were docking parts of the 2-meter (Rockomax) size, by mounting three Clamp-o-Trons on a 1-meter tri-coupler each side, then lining them up perfectly and hopefully getting them all to attach to each other at once. Now, however, the Clamp-o-Tron Senior part exists to facilitate docking very large parts, so it's sort of useless to go through the trouble at this point.

In my mind I figured the best way to update part textures is to have an extra tab in the VAB that lets one select parts on their craft and pick out different skins for tanks, engines, and such, without modifying their position or function of the part itself. The placing of attachment points and the width of the part would have to be kept standard, but otherwise, there is nothing stopping the parts from being reskinned at will as far as I can see. Instead of just having the X-32 tank with only its heavy banded, riveted design, or the X-16 with its strange(ly pool-like) crimped texture all down the sides, why not add variations so they can all be crimped, or all banded, or [x] or [y] texture consistently, or any other combination? People like nothing more than to make their rockets look exactly the way they want, after all.

That launch vehicle design is way too complex and large just for depositing a small payload on a relatively close planet like Eve. I landed a rover on Eve with comparable mass and complexity to yours using a launch vehicle that probably wasn't much in excess of 40 parts without payload. I can't remember the exact launch vehicle I used, but I'd bet it looked something like this: Also, are those radial engines mounted above the payload part of a skycrane? You can easily delete that and replace it with just a couple of parachutes; the extreme atmospheric density of Eve enables parachutes to slow any small or medium-sized payload down to soft landing speed easily without retro burning, despite its high surface gravity.

Yes, currently your kerbals serve little practical purpose on your missions except to operate crewed-only modules, plant flags on bodies and fly gaily around with their MMUs. Probably the most useful thing any kerbal can do right now for you is repair rover wheels that get damaged during use, and clear floating debris away from ships (by bashing into it at speed, of course...whether this maneuver is taught formally in the kerbal astronaut academy is unknown). Of course, development of the kerbals' possible activities is far from over, no doubt in future versions of the game the range of things kerbals will be capable of will be expanded greatly.

When you read about accidents and tragedies in the history of real-life spaceflight, and just for a moment, you struggle to understand that a space agency could actually be accountable for the amount of money it spent or deaths it caused. Don't they just go back to the VAB screen?

Nothing very spectacular, this is just in a way a little sentimental snapshot celebrating the departing 0.20-and-before terrain. It was taken at probably just under 4,000m above sea level. Even though the new terrain and especially mountain regions will be obviously vastly more procedural and fancy and exciting, the view reminded me that sometimes, when you get the light and the angle just right, even the old (kind of weird) geomap-drawn mountain ranges can still look really very nice.