Daiya

Do you have a workhorse? I've found it useful to have a general purpose craft that has a consistent level of performance I'm familiar with. Mine is the Daiya CSM, a <del>ripoff</del> homage to the venerable Apollo. Everything's stock except for the Engineer unit. It has 2281 m/s of delta-v and 300 units of monopropellant, more than enough for extended jaunts through the Kerbin system. I like to have mission equipment and crew rendezvous at their target so I can send a lander to Mun and Minmus each and one Daiya can operate both.

Thanks, this has all been very helpful! I think my RCS idea was waaay too optimistic in outperforming the plain Kerbal jetpack, sadly.

So I'm trying to make a little suborbital Munar cruising pod powered solely by RCS for fine control. I'm so used to the Engineer plugin, though, that I have no idea how to calculate delta-v for RCS. The wiki says that a Kerbal jetpack has about 600, so I'd like to design something with at least four times the performance. I guess I could turn off gravity and fly straight up, but that'd be rather time-consuming for each redesign.

The flag of NESA (New England Space Agency)!

In my travels within the Kerbin system, I like to use a copycat Apollo style Command/Service Module that I tweak from time to time: I had been alternating between the decoupler, which is bulky and ugly, and the separator, which is more aesthetically pleasing but heavier, when I happened to notice that the large docking port was thin and lighter than both of the other ones. I flew a few test flights and found the port to work fine and I appreciated the little extra deltaV. Am I missing something here? Will there ever be a situation where a decoupler/separator module would make a life or death difference to my Kerbonauts?