RSF77

I love these things, use them on almost every manned space craft now. One of my favorite uses for them is for science equipment, especially placing mystery goo since it offsets the mass of my ship anywhere else. It would be nice if there was some kind of end adapter piece for it though to keep odd textures from the parts its placed next to from showing on the inside (fuel tanks, etc), also whatever you place on the bottom or top of the container gets moved when you move around their respective parts instead of truly being attached to the container itself. Not a big deal or anything, just an idea.

Sometimes when leaving kerbin I like to do mun flybys as close as possible, one time I actually came within about 300m of one of my kethane units sitting on the surface then almost hit a slight hill. Did some quick maneuvering and avoided that, but it would be interesting to see if I can get close enough to take a solar panel off or something one day at kerbin escape velocity.

Limit terminal velocity also seems to stay on if you enable it in sandbox then switch to a career mode save where you can't open the utilities window to disable it, since some mechjeb menu items can't be used until you research them now. This irks me, because if I wanted to fly rockets myself I wouldn't have downloaded the mod in the first place. If you went back to way it was I wouldn't complain.

It's an outline that projects from the base plate on the procedural fairings mod before you attach the actual fairings.

I usually put a strong reaction wheel (using mod parts for larger rockets) on my first or second stage for control during ascent then slap a mechjeb unit on it. After I make orbit and jettison I just switch to it, point retrograde, turn on the engines and switch back to my main vehicle. Pretty much the same thing for any other body or the mun, just make it autonomous capable for at least a minute or two and crash it into the surface. When solar orbit though I usually don't worry about leaving debris since the chance of ever encountering it again is pretty much nil.

Using this mod might help, especially with mechjeb since engine gimbal seems to cause wobbling while using it: Kerbal Joint Reinforcement http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55657-0-22-Kerbal-Joint-Reinforcement-v1-4-2-Properly-Rigid-Part-Connections May or may not though because of the obj_base collision but who knows, sure your rocket is actually positioned above the base on launch? Another option might be playing with the rate of physics calculations in the KSP options, cpu lag could be causing it or something. I know changing that slider to the right some makes my game immensely faster with high part counts, also making vehicles hold together better.

The most efficient way to do it is burn until you push your ap way out past the muns orbit somewhere (watch out for mun encounters though, plan accordingly), then burn retro at the distant ap and watch the map until your pe appears on out the other side. Now just adjust your pe and circularize accordingly, best way of changing any inclination but takes more time warping.

If you aren't opposed to using mods, mechjeb has a very nice way of doing this buried deep within its menus. 1) Go to your Smart A.S.S. (<~ hilarious btw) 2) Choose the ADV tab I think its called, the last one. 3) Click the arrow until you see the mode called "SURFACE_VELOCITY". 4) Just below that, click the other arrow over one so it says "BACK" or "REVERSE" or something like that. 5) Execute and your craft should orient itself. 6) Burn until you're lander is vertical. 7) Profit. It will want to get wacky on you if you happen to burn all the way until you are ascending again because it will attempt to turn your lander upside down because reverse direction actually changes to up, just be sure to keep that in mind and disable it if this happens. If you burn slowly and steadily to kill horiz velocity without being so much to nullify your vert then it lands if perfectly. Without using mods, a pretty inefficient but fairly easy way to get close is make a maneuver node above where you want to land and drag the retrograde marker until your projected path is a line directly down or a little forward or back depending on which direction you are orbiting. If you're quick about it you can do this as well while already on a descent path, just make a node close to the ground and it should get you at least close to where you want to be. Otherwise when you are low enough and near 0 horiz velocity you can just look almost directly down and pay attention to which direction your ship is oriented then turn and burn until the ground stops moving under you. Just make sure you are always burning upward and toward your retrograde marker (when descending) and eventually you will kill horiz velocity. While still moving downward at an angle at some point the retrograde marker may quickly change to the opposite side, cut your throttle at this exact moment and face upright for your landing.

I use the mod linked in the above post, works good. I think there is also another one somewhere that lets you store data in a part but I havent tried it.

If I'm not mistaken TWR is supposed to be taken into account when figuring delta v, so delta v would be the total change in velocity that you have left with your current ship regardless. So number 1 would go further, but probably much slower and have very long burns. I'm not really sure what else it affects in game aside from craft stability maybe, but if I'm not being conservative I usually place extra/bigger engines just to cut down on the burn time. With some bigger ships and more massive fuel tankers nuclear engines can start racking up serious burn times, especially if your are going somewhere other than the mun or minmus.

This is funny because just this morning I dragged jeb to orbit "airskiing" on a released KAS winch. It worked.

More parts and the ability of the game to handle them without crashing.

Infernal robotics telescoping pistons, attach landing gear to those and extend them when landing.

Thanks. Does this help with Novapunchs tendency to crash ksp?

My horizontal stack winch doesn't seem to work. I couldn't get Bilgas Kerbal to grab it so I ejected it, now it seems there is no way to retract or extend it as the option doesn't show up in the menu. This is the way all the other winches appear to work so I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or maybe a bug in this particular winch. Does good ol' Bilgas need to get our there and beat on it a few times with a wrench or should I stay away from using horizontal stack winches for the moment?

I've been playing around with extraplanetary launchpads lately and even though I have yet to set up a functioning launchpad on the mun, I did devise what I think to be an interesting method of getting a smelter there. For ocd reasons I couldn't allow myself to carry the smelter "upright" as it is in the design hangar and it took some serious playing around and one massive subassembly but I finally did it! About the only way I could think of to carry it this way was with a rocket and lander pulling it to space instead of pushing it, kind of tricky since this disallows a main thruster right down the center of mass and thrust. Also, the smelter is very wide on one axis so that limits the boosters I can strap to it and when turned on its side it screws with the symmetry option in the vehicle hangar so a large subassembly was required. What I did is I made a simple smelter as it will sit on the mun with nothing much other than a huge battery from the near future mod and some attachment points, I figured a clamp-o-jr and a KAS fuel valve would do until I see if this works. After that I crafted the rest of the rocket and lander in its entirety as a subassembly to be attached to the top of the smelter, this was to make sure that I got everything symmetrical enough that hopefully I wouldn't run into too many stability issues. Well... what I got was this monstrosity: I plopped a large flat fuel tank on top of a lander that somewhat resembles a water spider then strapped two massive boosters to either side of it using KW Rocketry Griffon XX engines, some of the biggest engines in my part collection and combined I believe they are about on par with that ridiculously power engine from Novapunch. Overkill? Maybe. I also think I might have just invented a new kind of staging, not sure what you would call this. The large Griffon XX boosters feed from the heavy fuel tank on top first (yes, they are actually attached to that and its a little inefficient). From there the two auxiliary boosters feed from the large boosters, these two smaller boosters are meant to help with vectoring and the final burn for orbit as the two Griffon XX boosters can push the apoapsis all the way up to a good 90 km or so. Then the four atomic engines which i've hidden inside fuel tanks feed from the aux boosters and also feed from the central fuel tank on the lander, though I usually disable fuel flow from the central lander tank until the final burn. The large boosters eject, the large top tank ejects forward when coasting, the aux boosters eject and when it gets to orbit it looks like this: A water spider with a smelter strapped to the back of it. Without RCS help it maneuvers around like a cinderblock, but I did place some high power RCS thrusters on it to help and some tanks are on the bottom of the lander. I plan on using the top docking port to attach an assist module to it with more RCS fuel and liquid fuel to pull it to the mun, its got enough dv left to make it to the mun but im not so sure about the landing and definitely not the return. It's completely reusable as well for lifting and carrying payloads of various heights: Yay! Infernal Robotics. Maybe not as impressive as some of your crafts, but I can't believe I actually made this thing functional even if its not the most realistic. What are some of your odd rockets and ships that you've made?

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/53428-Lander-cans-showing-up-in-staging-process-what-does-it-do They do "nothing much" is the answer I got. Is it just me or does this seem to imply that they do... in fact... do something? Hmmmm

Do you have fuel lines? Asparagus staging? I can't tell but it looks like the last big rocket with all the poodle engines doesn't have it. Also structural connectors, tie everything together. This seems like basic stuff so sorry if I missed something here, I haven't played career mode so for all I know these parts aren't available.