merendel

I tend not to make long duration stations asside from the ocasional fuel depot. I'll sometimes make a LKO fuel depot consisting of a dozen orange tanks or so (normaly launched in pairs) so I can refule interplanitary bound ships if needed. these are normaly unmaned stations however as theres no point in sending up a crew. I do make heavy use of assembling larger vessles in orbit but I dont really count that as station building. Normaly I'll send up the drive core of the ship as one launch. the mission specific payload(s) get sent up and docked on, and then as many launches as needed to send up the required fuel for the mission. the drive core tends to stay the same from mission to mission as I designed it to be modular enough that I can hang quite a few orange tanks off it without too much difficulty.

While I agree on aim for science producing nodes first I actualy like being able to send up larger rockets fairly early on. One thing I've been doing recently is what I've dubed my shotgun missions. Normaly right after my first mission to a moon I have enough science to unlock most of the major science producing parts and some larger rocket parts. I then make a lander cappable of landing on mun, doing science and then returning to kerbin. Instead of launching these 1 at a time I use the larger parts to send 4-5 landers all at once. takes quite a bit to lift those larger payloads but the delivery stage gets them into orbit of the target and I drop them 1 at a time, get science and setup a return. I can normaly clean out both moons of the majority of their science potential with a pair of such missions to each (each pod has 2 of each experiment and a transmiter to send the first soil sample) Saves quite a bit of time only haveing to do 4 launches instead of 20.

KSPI works just fine with them. If your experiencing crashes on startup after installing KSPI with them try installing the texture reduction packs for B9 and KW. Both are rather large in their default state and take up a majority of the avalible ram footprint leaving little room for other mods.

Well then we'll just have to start a write in campaign to try and convince squad to hire you so you can legally add your new module to the base code of the game. Its not like having a modder become an employee is totally without precedent. Whats more satisfying than actualy being paid to do what your doing for free anyway

Chances are your runing out of memory. install the texture reduction packs for B9 and KW especialy, you may also want the active memory reduction mod. Because KSP is a 32bit program it cant use more than 4 gigs of ram. with all those mods its loading a ton of resorces into active memory and exceeding the cap and proceeds to crash.

Depends on how heavy it is. A bit of off balanced weight can be compensated for with a bit of thrust vectoring or SAS. If its too much and you cant counter balance with other needed parts... well my normal solution is to just bring a second one even if its just deadweight. As intresting as the new mechanics and parts are fractal I'd kill to have that heat helper in the VAB even if that was the only thing ready for the update . Being able to balpark if a ship will be viable or not if I send it to moho before I launch it would be a godsend. Flinging it out there at high timewarp just to test it out befor savescuming back to launch a real misison is something of a drag.

I primarly use liquid but I will use some solid depending on the situation. Lighter rockes will sometimes get some SRB's to give them a bit more kick off the ground. Larger rockets are almost always liquid however. I generaly have a couple lifter designes for progresively heavier launches. SRB's get tacked on for a bit of extra boost if a payload is on the uper limit of that lifters capabilities (and I dont for whatever reason want to stick a larger one on.

I've not found it all that useful for the transmission aspect. That 40% cap really cripples transmission to the point where most of my ships dont bother with antennas now. However I have found a use for it when dealing with mun/minmus. I basicly put a lab and a pile of fuel tanks in orbit around the moons. I docked a bunch of drop pods to this arangement. Each pod is little more than a small fuel tank and engien, a command pod and chutes, and a probe core with a solar pannle on it. The main lander goes down, gatheres science and returns to the lab. Kerbal moves all reports over to an empty drop pod. lab resets aplicable experiments. Drop pod is launched back to kerbin while the lander refules and drops down into another biome. Alternitively I can cart all the pods home at once when I'm done with the main mission and skip the fuel tanks drone cores and engiens.

Next time you see this happen try going in and out of map view. I've been noticing this off and on since 2.3 and that normaly makes the ship visable. I still havent fully figured out if the craft is actualy invisable or if my zoom is eroniously set to several KM out as I've only had it happen in high orbits not landed or close enough to any other planet/ship to tell for sure without spending alot of time trying to zoom in.

I have 3 primary lifters for various weight ranges. The central final stage on each of those designes has a small probe core, a pair of RCS tanks and a pair of thrusters straped to the sides. Initial stages always end up suborbital anyway and that last stage either uses RCS to flip around and do a deorbit burn once detached or just deorbits on RCS if its totaly spent(takes longer). This keeps my launch debris down to almost nothing. I tend to try and crash injection stages into the target planet on arival so very little extra is cluttering up space although I do have some flotsem floating in interplanetary space.