Pecan

You're all right, I think - isn't it nice to have concensus :-) Unmanned rockets and manned flight should logically come first - rover wheels very early, if not first as well. Only later would you have the ability to perform manned space missions.

This is my first go at a VTOL SSTO for an orange tube (plus ancillaries) - 40t payload. In this version the payload is carried low in the centre to keep the CoM down.

In docking mode you just use WASD - spacebar toggles them between rotation and translation. Most people stay in staging like you do, I think, so we can use WASD and IJKL at the same time.

Hmmm, the only way I've been able to get things to overheat to destruction in 0.23(.5) was just low-temp-tolerance probe and booster. Overheating itself has been there but I haven't seen it get so bad for a long time, no. Oh good, that'll add to the fun :-)

That's what I do actually - keep a copy of the entire install. KSP won't be able to tell which you want to use so you'll need to create separate shortcuts for the different KSP.exe files (they're the program itself). Or, of course, you can run those files directly by clicking on them

Yes. In particular you need to copy "persistent.sfs" but you'll probably want the whole game-folder from within Saves.

Yes, decouplers stay on one part/stage or another. If it's meant to stay on the other part turn it over in the VAB/SPH.

Unfortunately OP says "So my idea is to make the probes really minimal, no RCS, no engines etc." (my underlining)

Some embedded Igmur albums are showing up blank-black for me, such as in http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86331-23-5-Impossible-Innovations-0-4, where two other people report the same thing. At first I assumed this was a fault in the way the OP had posted the album but I'm now seeing the same thing in http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86202-Better-SSTO-Spaceplane-Challenge-%28Pre-0-24%29. Is this related to the (very frequent) rash of 502 errors we're getting, or what is it?

Right - unless you're going to wrap them in balloons/footballs to cope with the impact.

Thanks for the clarification :-)

Yep, that's the idea. Short of an infinitely reusable 'space-tug' it's the cheapest suggestion I have:-)

Anyway, 'recovery' only applies to things designed to land on Kerbin. Why not just make your mothership reusable by leaving it in space, ready to go somewhere else? Eg; see the tugs in Chapters 7/8 of my tutorial and http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/83368-A-reusable-transfer-stage-a-good-idea, which is one of the more recent discussions of transfer vehicles.

What else will the mothership be carrying? Probes themselves can be pretty minimal anyway so it's possible that the engines they'll need for landing will be enough to push all the transfer fuel needed to get to Jool in the first place. Since you don't seem to have any plans for the probes to re-orbit I assume the mothership only has extra fuel and, presumably, engines - but since you don't need much TWR for interplanetary transfer those engines probably aren't worth the mass. That leads to a design where each lander has the engines and fuel required for their target and the 'mothership' is just the transfer fuel. Bringing those empty tanks back wouldn't be worth the components it took to do it. ETA: Railgun - you'd have to be REALLY low, and that means really fast. Your gun would have to kill all that horizontal speed and the probe would still have no way to kill the final vertical speed before that killed it.

Yes, anything attached or not that slows the debris' orbital velocity - rockets, bumping, dock/claw tug - will bring it back eventually. The simplest way to deal with final stages is to simple add a probe core, so it can operate on its own, and leave enough fuel after orbital insertion so that it can turn around, burn retrograde and de-orbit itself. Anything that pushes the periapsis back below 69km will work but ideally you want enough to get below 22km so it's deleted automatically. 100m/s deltaV should be sufficient, and remember that's without the payload and with the launch-stage almost out of fuel so there isn't much mass left to push, so you won't need very much fuel to do it.

Still, that's quite a bit of progress for a week of not asking the people most likely to have the answers ^^.

Either of the lunar transfer/landers in Chapter 5 of my tutorial (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79658-Exploring-The-System-A-design-tutorial-campaign?p=1183116&viewfull=1#post1183116). Just the write-up on designing vehicles for those missions should help, if you're using your own ships. Remember that you can EVA the Kerbal to collect the science and store it in the (rescue) pod to bring it back along with the stranded crew.

And several posts point out that the poll is multiple-choice; vote for each you will be using ^^

Think of the overtime payments! Lol

As I've said many times, I'm not a video fan. Cupcakes deserves an exception, especially for 'Today I Built A Rocket'

Black on black is all I see. "Nothing to see" is what the wiki reports.

Have a look at chapters 7 and 8 of my tutorial (link in signature) for space stations, reusable transfer vehicles and launching an orange tube. Meanwhile a couple of comments: I see no docking port on the command module so it's unlikely to need RCS fuel and thrusters. If there is actually one on it then you should be able to dock with the monopropellant in the pod itself, lose the excess mass of the additional RCS tanks. On your launch system the boosters' exhaust seems to be hitting the lower fuel tanks. This will kill all their thrust even if it doesn't blow up. If those lower tanks are a separate stage then use them after the boosters, which are heavy for their deltaV so should be used and jettisoned as early as possible.

Jets are VERY fuel-efficient so use them on spaceplanes and then, as all the others have said, only climb slowly above 20km, using all the thrust to gain horizontal speed. The higher you get the faster you can go - less aerodynamic drag - but also the faster you have to go - less air to feed the engines. Throttle-back as the jets get close to flameout through lack of oxygen, then they'll need less and keep working at reduced thrust. Once you've throttled-back so much they are no longer accelerating you then switch to rockets. Using rockets instead of jets you don't get any benefit from the wings so ditch them to save mass (and balance problems) - then you're back to a normal rocket design and should use a normal rocket ascent profile.

Sandbox :- my main interest is in designing vehicles and they may not be required in career mode at the time I'm feeling inspired. If they are required in career mode then sandbox will still be my R&D environment. Having said that, career mode will definitely get a fair share of my time as a proper 'system'. Science mode will continue to be just pointless unless you're desperate for an "end game" you can claim to have won.

I am developing a set of fully-recoverable VTOL SSTOs, currently using jets for 5 and 10 tonne payloads and pure rocket for 10 and 40 tonnes. The 10t-payload rocket is currently much cheaper and lower part-count than the jet version but is much heavier and, therefore, has a worse payload ratio. At the moment - before any sort of optimisation - the 10t rocket is LV-10-1 from my tutorial (Chapter 5) and the 40t version is basically just four of them strapped together. All very much a work in progress though, just for the design exercise. I am specifically trying to avoid the balance, part-count, wing-mass and flight complexity/time problems of spaceplanes. It's fairly easy to land within or close to KSC so I probably won't bother with the runway 2% - which would only be about 500 funds for the current 10t rocket. ETA: As the thread is asking whether it'll change my approach to debris - not really; I already design to leave none and spent stages are, at least in theory, parachute-recoverable. What it's changing is my approach to making sure things are recoverable in practice as well.