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Should also add incase you are deciding whether to read that article or not (it is something of a spoiler itself): It does include data on anomolies that are currently buried. The only anomoly mentioned as buried and on Kerbin does not appear to be the one you describe

Yeah I have an aversion to killing them off. But I generally disregard their sanity and have no problems sending 1 kerbal in a lander can to eeloo and back. I do have a thing where they have to wait for their return transfer window on the surface in their suit rather than in the can. Everytime I switch back to that ship it feels like he's just been for a walk. My argument is that Kerbals are all somewhat insane as a base-level of existence. The solitude is unlikely to damage their weird little psyches. The station thing really doesn't bother me, I regularly have far more crew aboard than return capsules currently docked. I can generally dock straight off my launch these days so sending those capsules up feels trivial and there are ports dedicated to those alone always sitting available. I must admit spaceplanes are my major diversion from this set of ethics. Almost all my space stuff is done with the orange suits. White suits are my spaceplane testpilots and they do die from time to time. I dont build aborts into rockets, on the very rare occasion it goes that badly wrong i can usually manually save the pilots. Spaceplanes all get fully fledged abort routines since the situation comes up a frightening amount of the time, yet the difficulties involved in ssto spaceplanes and hypersonic sub-orbitals means even abort routines dont save them all. Feels right to leave them as dead, as a ex-roguelike player I dont scum/simulate and they are heroes on the 'Lost' wall at the barracks.

I find performance varies between my machines mainly based on their RAM rather than chipset speed/config. My main gaming rig is AMD Quad Phenom (4x820). 6GB DDR2 RAM. GeForce GT220 1024MB. This runs crisply up until 500ish parts. However the game is 'playable' on my aged monolithic cored laptop with 2G RAM. I would say that 2G is kinda low, but as long as I do not let the camera look at kerbin itself (look at the sky) during launches then the fps is acceptable. On the weaker machine I made a point of killing off a lot of the graphics settings and I keep a clean house with regards to debris/part counts. If you know your rig struggles then help it out.

It is something of an issue on Eve as people have said. It will still work if you use plenty of strong legs and lighten the craft as much as possible. If your landing legs get 'stuck' embedded into the ground then raising/lowering them individually will shake them free prior to liftoff

There are a bunch of restrictions imposed by my mod selections. For example, I'm almost always running RT2 (Lite) which shakes up the whole probe game. I also use a satmapping mod, so I try and do completely map worlds that I plan on visiting 1. Unmanned before manned. Anything outside the Kerbin SOI has to be at least orbited by a probe (LZ survey) before a landing is green-lit. I'm fine with shooting kerbals unprepared at local moons since rescue inside Kerbin SOI is 'trivial' 2. Realistic-ish vehicles. I dont use DR or FAR, but try and build like I do anyway. This means no 'pancake' launchers, nice tapered rockets for me. I don't asparagus with symmetry greater than 4, mainly because it trivialises getting heavy payloads into LKO, but also because the fuel-lines end up looking like a spiderweb and I find it ugly. Anything entering an atmosphere does so in an aerobraking fashion, I try and stick around 22/23 degree descent vectors. I also tailor each launcher to it's payload and dislike using over-powered ascent vehicles (since im gonna deorbit it anyway) 3. Nothing manned leaves Kerbin SOI without a docking port, even if mission profile does not call for it. Just because if you don't have one you will wish you did. 4. Recovery/reuse. anything ditched into any body with an atmosphere carries chutes, this includes drop-tanks on ascent. Any orbital stages that are dropped after circularising must be able to independantly de-orbit themselves. This is partly in preparation for future career-mode updates, partly because I have a general aversion to waste in any form.

Quite right. But I highly doubt KSP team would ever release a feature that smacked in any way of 'arbitrary' RT is an excellent example of what Deadweasel is saying it is. Another complexity layer to slow the flow of the game and add realism/immersion.

Mine lately have been independant. Just stuck to a rocket and then ditched in orbit around their destination to deorbit and land themselves. Bodywork is generally pancake tanks and they land on poodles. Sent off a phone, but i'll edit in some pics when I get home

Most folks are bang on with the solar panel suggestion. I'd also agree that a mun land/return as a single ship is somewhat easier than an apollo style lander/cm. And as folks said, you dont have docking ports yet. Dont rule out your probe idea. Transmitting data back vs returning it is not really balanced in 0.22 You dont actually 'lose' any science, you just have to keep retransmitting the same experiments until they stop yielding, at which point it will equal bringing the science home anyway. It's still worth trying to bring a probe lander home for the experience, but if it gets stuck its not the end of the world. You do lose out on eva/crew reports and surface samples with these probes however. Next priority after solar panels? Chase down the electronics branch at the bottom of the tree. It starts with solar panels/batteries and progresses through a lot of science modules. You can easily cap out the tree without leaving Kerbin's soi just by getting all the sci modules to various Mun biomes

A big part of the hassle for me is getting the first prograde kerbin soi escape burn down. While you want to make an inclination change, it's probably not until a good way down the road and you don't want to suddenly find yourself under-speed and trying to push further prograde from the ascending/descending node (which is like 90 days off the periaps). Just give it loads of gas, and aim for intercept at the point where eeloo's orbit dips inside jool's.

Moho launch window. Sent a CM/lander. Eve window, sent a gilly lander. Dres window, CM/Lander, Eeloo window, CM/Lander. Time comes for the Moho mid-course correction, discover serious staging error. Fix error, fix same error on all other CM/Lander flights. Dres mid-course adjustment Moho approach... oh my word what a lot of dV to capture, 25 min burn on a 30min encounter for 3.8kms. No longer happy about return fuel reserve. Discover very late that crossfeed is on for my docking port and the lander tanks have been drained by the nuke, refill lander from interplantary stage. Recalculate return fuel. Calculate next Moho window, get refueler/rescue into LKO. Sigh, realise Eeloo CM is going to need a refuel too Sigh, logoff

I use RemoteTech 2 so I have a lot of static sats and such that are permenant, along with probe rovers here and there. Most of my sci-probes come back, I prefer to return science rather than transmit it, spamming to drain the pool feels fake to me. Certain probes are profiled not to return. I generally land 2 on eve and drop one into jool for transmitting. Duna gets a probe lander without return to test chute design for the manned followup, this mission generally does no sci. I similarly dry-run laythe with a sci-free probe lander.

I put an Extraplanetary launchpad and kethane base on Eve. Because launching is so much fun and Kerbin wasnt hardcore enough. Seriously, it's useless, I musta been drunk when I first made that call, then it was just funny.

Yeah each of the radial decouplers in the game has a 'trick' to it. Once you learn to recognise what each one looks like when properly mounted they do all work just fine. The hydraulic manifolds in particular are nasty, they lie very flat and can be hard to inspect in dense asparagus setups. The thing here is to get one working, test it on the pad, then to sub-assemblies with it. Make a point of learning this one, they are very useful for heavy stages. For the manifolds the tank wants to be as centered as possible, check to see how much of the decoupler itself is visible on either side. For the short and long spacing radials do a rotate-around and check. The black bar of the decoupler itself should be vissible. If you only see the little black studs/supports on the short ones or only the strut-like frame on the longer ones then its wrong and is clipping. Look for the vertical black 'bar'.

Just noticed this bit when Kasuha highlighted it. If this is a really big issue, and the window of time in which you are at intercept is too small to perform a stress-free dock then there may be an issue with how you plot the intercept. If your intercept is at a really steep angle you will find docking almost impossible because the orbital effects are more powerful than your fine-manouever abilities. Their individual trajectories are a problem if they are trying to pull away from each other at 20ms the whole time. Ensure you intercept like you would on a planet, try and come up behind and parallel to it with the lowest possible relative speed and the longest 'encounter' window. Should give you both more time to pull it off and less orbital interference

It's a useful trick to remember. While it seems most common on Eve (and makes some kinda sense, very massy ship under high G-field on dubious surface), you can sometimes get one or more legs 'stuck' like this on just about any body. I find I'll often get one of the legs stuck in the ground on moons with a lotta slopes. Leg up/down always clears this, though on low-G worlds you can actually tear it free with a delicate combo of rcs/torque Good luck with your eve-ascent. Not got this one down yet in .22 as I havent yet unlocked the aerospikes and have no designs for this flight that dont use them

It sounds like you are doing it just right, but once at a close encounter are never quite getting the relative velocity down. My bet is also on problems with orbit/target settings on your navball. Once you get your nice close 1km intercept you want to burn retrograde all the way to 0.0ms. Leave em hanging dead relative to each other. They will try and slowly drift since their orbits wont be perfect matches, but it gives you a nice static frame of reference for the final RCS approach. While burning rcs to approach the target (h), you want to use the strafedrive (ijkl) to bring your green prograde marker over the purple target prograde, otherwise you drift just past him on a relative drift. Remember that once the navball is in target mode the green markers are your speed relative to target, so you want them to sit directly over the purple markers to get a straight approach-vector. Keep at it, you understand the problem and seem to be doing it 99% right.

Put in a lot of docking practice and expanded my LKO station considerably. Much aided by my new launcher which has been letting me send upto 90 tonnes at a time, I lifted some 10,000 units of fuel into place. Decided to put my new docking skills to use and build apollo-style cm/lander designs for each planet, installed alarm clock and got them all parked round kerbin. Got bored waiting for transfer windows and sent my station to Duna intercept instead, mainly to see if I could, looks like it will establish LDO just fine with 10% fuel margin. It masses 348 tonnes and took some 6 orbits to get onto a vaguely acceptable trajectory.

Exactly. Today i made my first orbital rendezvous without use of mechjeb or other similar assisting mods. Its so far from the first spark of fire for the cave-kerbals that im proud beyond all reason. I know it's considered something of a rite of passage for ksp players, but it means so much to my kerbals that i couldnt care less about what it meant for my meta-game (docking is a game-changer for interplanetary voyages obviously, but it pales into insignificance next to the sheer accomplishment for my little green guys) (edit: disclaimer; drunk as allhell, forgiuve typos/bad english/fireballs/dead kerbals))

Thanks for the comment on the chutes Smidge, it's given me something to think about. As for why it's a weird design mixing nukes with chutes: It was originally intended as a prototype interplanetary-lander-return for Duna. Designed to go lko-duna surface-kerbin surface as seen in the OP screenshot. Idea was to use the chutes on the radials to help the landing there, then ditch those sub-assemblies completely on ascent from Duna and use the main pod chute for Kerbin return. (It's a career ship. The monoprop tanks are actually goo, and the central body below the pod is 2x materials bays and a 400 tank, it's a sci-ship with no transmitters) Im aware the nuke alone wont do twr>1 on duna, but was hoping the 48-7S's on the radials would give me enough grunt to get off duna (then drop em empty and nuke back to kerbin). That said I havent actually crunched the numbers, I tend to fire it and see, then plan a glorious rescue if/when it all goes wahoonie-shaped. If I can just get out of Duna's atmosphere and up towards the 40km mark then im hoping the nuke can take over having developed a better TWR Ultimately I did switch out the 800 drop-tanks for a ring of 400's and moved them up out of the way, using girder segments to then extend the legs past the nuke. I also after several tries managed to get the nuke positioned so that it's shroud doesnt hit the legs and the design now 'works' in that it doesnt suffer crit failures. Got a couple of them circling Kerbin now, going to test them at the next Duna window. Edit: gonna switch the flag since OP has been answered

Some good tips here. Will add that it's usually worth de-activating torque on the probe part you have fitted. Let the wheels do the work (or switch to dock mode). Minmus is always a tricky one to drive on. You do seem a little slow to launch,this is probably over-power (over-torque from the wheels), as seen by the little wheelies you pop, I find shifting the CoM forward a little helps with the start. (while you only have 2 wheels actually in contact with the ground you obviously cant accelerate much, but doing so would be dangerous anyway as it increases the wheelie and can lead to flip-on-launch) Have to just keep tweaking the design to get them as responsive as possible. And remember that a design is usually tailored to a specific body (or more accurately it's gravity). Some folks like to build very light rovers with a lot of drive power for low-gravity worlds, then add a downforce ion engine to keep it on the ground, not experimented with this myself

You are correct in that FAR is the improved atmospheric model. That and deadly re-entry will effectively mean redesigning the majority of your craft to meet the new physics. These 2 mods will probably add a lot of 'replayability'. When it comes to adding non-stock parts, you may find that the authors of these 2 mods have recommendations of their own. I would say that things like fairings are going to be essential to streamline your payloads, i'm not actually certain if FAR comes with such. You might want to look at b9 aerospace if in-atmosphere is your thing. For rocket parts to play with I often use NovaPunch, though its quite a bulky package (you can always trim some of the un-needed parts) Theres also a mod floating around that adds several more planets out past eeloo, they are particularly tricky to get to and explore and add further 'eve-return' level challenges. I forget the exact name of this mod, but the main new planet added is called sentaur and you can probably fish it up with a forum search

I see this on some linux distros also. Whilst my external USB numpad allows zoom through it's + and - keys, the main kboard versions of those wont do anything. I find clicking the scrollwheel and mouse move is the only alternative that works. (probably my scroll-wheel is considered MMB per The Fog's post above)

There have been a few threads on this lately. Docking with multiple connection ports is doable but requires dead-on alignment, a few people report weird problems with this where it should work but is hard to get to actually happen, it may be the magnets fighting each other, ensure SAS is off for the piece being added. Im assuming here that the ports can actually dock, hopefully you've tested somewhere and they are aligned right. Remember the game will dock multiple ports like this but will only consider one of the ports to be the 'official' docking point. Theres some kind of structural strength bonus with docked ports that the others will not benefit from, so be careful with widely-spaced multiple-point docks as the 'hard' dock may be off-centre and result in something that breaks up under thrust. Your ports seem nice and clustered but it does look like you would benefit from a senior docking port in your situation. the multiple smaller ports will be weaker structurally due to the game's docking limitations I mention above

The shuttle (various incarnations of it) is one of the most often 'imitated' real-world ships. You might find a design that could give you ideas on the spacecraft exchange forum, or even in the mod release forum (im pretty sure i saw a part-pack somewhere that facilitates shuttle design) Im not suggesting you just use someone else's design, thats a bit boring, but you might get ideas to help your own design. Plus if going for realism your shuttle engines ought to be lit alongside the solidstage. NASA has the equivilent of a fuel duct running from that jumbo orange tank into the shuttle itself, thats why they can pound thrust (and use the shuttles thrust-vectoring) during the launch, yet still seperate with full fuel on the payload (shuttle itself). (I watched a launch the other day and was pretty thrilled to see that the thrust-vectoring is highly visible, All the way through the ascent the shuttle's own engines are clearly canted over to compensate for the off-centre nature of the solids)

Another thought, and something I use from time-to-time on smaller launches. You can use a solid only first stage. Drape the ship in enough booster to get a twr of something like 1.4 and dont light the liquid at all till the drop. It's like launching off a mountain-top and often lets you do away with a lot of liquid anyway. Beware stability and control when running solid only. No thrust vectoring so you better have built it right