Kurld

Well, I guess I'm confused... what are these parts supposed to be used for?

Aside: is there a mod that will show you your impact point while you are in flight view? I know of one that will do it in map view, but, well it's not super useful for precision landings since map view is zoomed out so far.

Like Jens said, it will be very hard to get a circular orbit this way. The thing at play here is that your new delta-v is not instantaneous. You will have to burn for some amount of time near your ap in order to arrive at orbital velocity. The lower you can get this time number, the easier it will be for you to circularize. You can do this by either having ridiculous TWR or by arriving at the ap already at close to the desired velocity. The way you do that is by an efficient ascent as Jens described. One thing that will help in any case is to start the circularization burn before you get to the ap. For instance if your burn is to be for 12 seconds, you might start your burn at T-6 seconds. This will help "average out" the thrust so that the entire burn is close to the ap.

I was working on a ship last evening and managed, with the mirror symetry and the offset tool to hide one of the small radial engines "inside" the main body of my craft. I noticed I had an "extra" engine in the staging flight display only after the ascending craft was hopelessly out of control...

It can be frustrating, but it is doable and once you do it a few times becomes somewhat routine. Sounds like you just need to bring more fuel for your lander. Also consider that if your thrust to weight ratio is relatively low, you will not be able to slow down enough without starting your descent burn very early. Minmus has way less gravity and may be a better place to start.

I didn't know about this, thanks.

Got tired of playing career mode and started a new sandbox.

I don't know of any way to do this. The best I've been able to figure out is to move them to stage 0. It's annoying to me that we don't have more control over this part of the game.

Not at all. To me, they look a lot more like Bart Simpson.

I am really enjoying KIS and KAS. Thanks for all the time you put into these mods, KospY. It's really opened up the game a lot for me. I think I found a bug, probably similar to the one noted already on GitHub. I tried to attach a strut between two connectors. One end (maybe both) was mounted to a cubic octagonal strut. As soon as I attached the second connection my EVA became "stuck" to the strut. Any movement using the jet-pack causes the ship to react violently. Warping time causes spontaneous disassembly.

You can also adjust the separation force and (I think) torque for the decouplers when you are in the VAB. Most stock forces seem WAY to much. So I typically set both to be very low for most cases. If your central rocket is under power at all the separated objects just kind of slide to retrograde.

Well, I had the same idea. I wanted to build low-weight capsule for space tourists and made one with a probe core and 4 chairs and hid it behind a heat shield and some fairings. Being a decent sort of alien overlord, I commanded some astronaut engineers to test it out first. They all exploded and died due to re-entry heat. I guess it still treats them as EVA or whatever since the vessel itself was unharmed.

I thought maybe it was because I had some of the parts rotated. But no. I tried again and it made another invisible part. I'm still on 1.02.

This. I find it helps me zero out relative motion if I orient the target vessel so that it is pointed at normal or anti-normal on its orbital navball.

One thing I managed to do once is use the alignment widget in the VAB to somehow wind up with something that looked right but I actually stacked on top of the docking port. I didn't figure it out until I started taking the craft apart in the VAB to try and figure out what was going on.

I tried to weld a Docking Port Jr. to the end of 3 cubic struts. The resulting part is invisible in the VAB. Am I doing something wrong?

I read about a mod that slows the frame rates drastically when the game is not focused, which should achieve what you want. I don't recall the name, but I saw it a few days ago in the mods sub-forum.

Sort of off topic, IRL, didn't they use superheated water as the propellant? Or am I mis-remembering?

Replace unity with an engine that is not so incredibly limited in what it can do. I'd like to see proper 64 bit support, multithreading and hardware acceleration for physics calculations. If they can solve the n-body problem that would be awesome. More eye candy would be nice to have.

FWIW, I had a contract to test the "Twin-Boar" engine on sub-orbital trajectory of Minmus. I actually used the engine as part of my lift vehicle. When I got to Minmus orbit, I dectivated the engine and used my lander to get into a suborbital trajectory. I then dragged the icon for the Twin-Boar in the staging display so it was above the current stage. When I hit the staging key (re-activating the Twin-Boar) the contract completed.

Granted, but you don't die. However, your butt-cheeks and various other bits are hopelessly stuck together when it dries. I wish I could get that image out of my head.

Assuming that Ven's revamp is the same size/proportion as the actual stock part (I don't use that mod); I've added a version to the download that has no aft BPC (the forward cover "nosecone" sits basically flush on top of the 2m capsule).

I'll see what I can do. Not a lot of time recently, but doing this shouldn't take long.

I'll try to get one up later today from another computer.

What would be the limitation there? Video memory?