Read up about the 450 ohm version of the ZS6BKW antenna. It is truly a multi-band antenna, and can be run without a tuner on some bands (40, 20, 17, 10 and 6), and is easily tuned on 80 and 12 meters too. 30 and 15 can also be tuned.

On the shorter wavelengths, you'll have many lobes and nulls.

The exact dimensions of a ZS6BKW depends on what part of the bands you want the best match on, on if it's a flat top or inverted V configuration, and on what type of ladder line you use. G3UKV's dimensions for an inverted V ZS6BKW with 450 ohm feeder, published in Sprat #130, is 12,2 meters feed, and overall top length of 27,5 meters.

My ZS6BKW is not high enough above the ground yet - only 6 meters - but it tunes up well on all bands from 80 to 6. The important thing is that the ladder line leaves the antenna perpendicular to the top part, and that it's not excessively bent, or too close to the ground or to metal. At the end of the feeder, I've attached 50 ohm coax. A string of ferrite beads around the coax would probably be a good idea too, to avoid noise pickup or RFI from the coax, but currently I'm just sitting under a tarp next to the antenna and running QRP.

AFAIK, as long as you keep the radials straight, a bit of a slope will not increase total loss, but will change the impediance as you say. The radials' job is to help the field lines back to the feed point, so any vertical angle should work as long as it's pointing straight back to the feed. Since your antenna will be sort of a half-reversed half-regular ground plane, I imagine it would affect the radiation pattern compared to the same vertical on a perfectly flat radial field.
Buried radials mean more loss, the deeper the lossier, so if you bury your radials so deep that none of the energy gets through to them (useless radials) you'll have an almost perfectly "matched" antenna in terms of VSWR.

I'll now wait to hear from somebody who knows their antenna theory better than me and has the EZNEC plots and practical experience to show for it. I'll just say that I've run verticals on ground sloping just as much as you have, without any particular issues matching the impedance. 

I just want to mention that in some jurisdictions working on the house AC wiring is strictly reserved for licensed electricians, and doing it yourself could be both illegal and void your insurance.

When people use "HI HI" (hai hai) on voice, I tend to answer "hello hello".  
A better rendition of HI HI in voice is to laugh like this: hahahaha ha ha! hahahaha ha ha!

An earlier poster said not to worry with grounding the center conductor, only the shield, when the antenna is disconnected (since the lightning energy will mostly flow in and on the outside of the shield) but I imagine it might slightly help protect the feed line itself. Perhaps allowing the lightning to flash over inside the cable protects your house by sacrificing the cable?

There is another concern here though, with a loop or dipole for example, and that's static buildup. The "center" side of the antenna may build up static while disconnected, that could harm your equipment or trip your lightning arrestors when you connect the antenna to the radio. The cure for that is either to touch the center to ground before connecting it, or even better add a high value resistor between each side of the antenna.
That's better. What's good about it now is that the strap joints are overlapped and bolted; my guess is that the solder doesn't help any. It sounds like it should be OK until you can get the guy to weld the straps together and to the rods; if you had intended to leave it like it is, I think it would require frequent inspections.

While I'm an engineer, RF and lightning is outside my field of expertise so be aware that some of this might be wrong, but it's how I understand it:

Just as an example of what a lopsided ground solution might do: Suppose you make an awesome ground system for the antennas, but bond it poorly to the AC and phone grounds - then if a neighbor's house is as poorly grounded as yours was when you got it, it's struck, the strike (or at least part of it) could travel out on his phone line, come in on your phone line and AC wires, follow them into your shack and enter your ground, frying some of your house wiring in the process.
If the radios are unplugged they might be fine (traveling through all those wires limits the lightning energy which actually makes it all the way to the shack) but suddenly one night you could have an electrical house fire caused by an undiscovered defect caused by the lightning.
This just highlights how important it is to bond the AC and phone grounds to the antenna entry panel with well-connected, short, wide strap.

Personally I would concentrate on getting your ground straps welded or at least bolted together before adding more rods. I've heard that solder evaporates in a lightning strike, and a strike usually consists of multiple pulses. The overlap you have should help, and clamping the straps together should help until you can get them welded.

Incidentally we're having thunder today so we've disconnected the power and unplugged our appliances here. Posting via mobile.
Yikes! Good that you fixed that.
Since you cut it yourself you probably would have noticed if it was actually copper clad aluminium - other people reading should watch out for that because some stores sell that as "copper flashing".
 
Solder, even silver solder, is not a good idea for lightning ground connections as far as I've heard. Covering the copper with solder might be a good idea to avoid copper run-off though. If you dig it up again try to get the straps welded or irreversibly clamped to each other, just as the connections to the rods.

 
I would suggest that you add a couple of buried radials to the vertical, of the same size as the house ground ring with rods on it. They should point away from the house. It might slightly detune the vertical, but you'll quickly correct the tuning. These radials will not be for returning radiated RF to the feed - it is for directing lightning energy away from the house; as far as I read from the Motorola lightning standard, they should be of different lengths too, to avoid tower "ringing".

Even so, let's not get too carried away here. You don't have a 200 foot tower. Perhaps you can just lower the vertical away from the house whenever you're not using it?

Another potential source of RFI is the MPPT solar charge controller - most of them are not properly rated for interference though there are exceptions.

Something like the Alinco DM-330MVT perhaps?
http://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/7397

It's switch mode but has a noise shift feature that you can use to tune the switching frequency out. I've used one - or at least a European version - on Field Day, and I like it. I think it might be ideal for you.

I would not immediately recommend it for a remote-control location, since the noise shift has to be regulated by manually turning a dial on the front panel, but some of the reviews here say that they either haven't noticed birdies or easily cured it by adding a capacitor on the output.

Survivalism and preparedness is a good thing, as long as you avoid becoming myopic about it, and stay realistic. For example, some store food but forget how to secure water. Some people store types of food that they don't want to eat. Some people only have a shelter-in-place plan, but no bug-out plan. Some people focus only on communications, or focus just on the end of the world without preparing for house fires or tornadoes.

Back in the day some countries only let their hams talk about "matters germane to the amateur radio service", so signal reports, rig talk and antenna talk was all you'd get out of them. It's good that it's been softened up most places.

With CW you should be able to have ragchews on QRP. I've been working mostly QRP SSB lately, and I've ragchewed a bit with nearby stations, but whenever I get a longer distance contact I want to keep it short on purpose so the other guy/gal can take advantage of the good ionospheric conditions and work more people. I'll often keep listening to the following contacts to learn more about the operator, and those that I talk to more than once I can ask if they got the virus cleaned from their daughter's computer, ask where to get the schematics for that homebrew amplifier we talked about last time, etc.

If you like to both share more meaningful contact, and talk to many people at the same time, consider checking into a net.
I don't have a K1, but I'm in the boonies sometimes and in the summer it has electric fences, causing time-predictable spark gap clicks that may or may not be tuned by the length of the fence wire.  

Yes, as I said the KX-3 really is more in the class of those venerable spy radios that SOE operatives deep inside enemy territory would use, rather than the manpack that - say - artillery observers a few miles ahead of the front might carry with them.
They were not light by today's standards but they were back then. The transmitter and receiver would not be in the same unit, and the receiver might be a pocket radio such as the Type 31/1 "Sweetheart". When the operatives had to stay for longer than what was planned, they did stuff like steal batteries and fishing poles to improvise spares, and as far as I remember they charged the batteries by taking turns at vigorous hand-cranking. (No solar panels in those days.)

They did not have reliable communications 24/7, but they had skeds at favorable times. They could also get orders through public broadcasts, using '"Allo 'Allo"-like messages read on the BBC after the news.

There's an article available online, in Norwegian, about a trip that Gisle LA5EKA took in the Norwegian mountains. He visited places where SOE operatives were during the war, and stayed in a reconstructed SOE hideout that was given to the Norwegian Trekking Association by one of the heavy water saboteurs.
http://break.org/gisle/fjell/tafjord2005.php
Here's a picture of Gisle's KX-1 operating next to some genuine equipment from WWII.
http://break.org/gisle/fjell/Tafjordfjella%202005/target64.html
The top shelf holds the Sweetheart; one box is the receiver and the other is the battery box - you'd put one in each pocket. The delicate crystal earbuds are on the table next to a Heayberd battery charger and straight key.
That's really cool.

Actually, you can strike that now. Just tonight I got an honest 58 to 59 signal report on an intercontinental 5W SSB contact. The other guy has an excellent antenna, and I have a full size dipole, but we were both quite surprised that I was so loud over there.

Really? Such as? I gave an example of a situation where your signal is below marginal, where 3 db more might make the contact possible but still really hard.

My example of going down from 58 to 57 is not from DX work. If you want to be 58 or 59 on SSB DX you don't work 5, 10 or 20 or 30 watts with marginal antennas. Then it's more like going from 54 to 53 when you go from 20 to 5 watts.
You're welcome to make an argument that the receiver is good enough without extra filters, or that it would be better to use a different receiver architecture, but tying it so strongly to transmitter power level as you do does not make sense.

It seems you still haven't addressed the counter-arguments to this - the QRP operator, even with a compromise antenna, could have a high noise level and hear adjacent stations or narrow RFI sources that would be helped by the roofing filters. Also some hams like to work QRP non-portable, go portable with elaborate antenna systems, etc.
That's a bit like saying that an AK-47 is a very effective submachine gun.

20 watts is not QRP by definition; this limit is of course arbitrary but you have to draw the line somewhere. QRP is more about being efficient than effective. I would not trust my life to a 20 or 10 watt HF radio in an emergency any more than I would a 5 watt HF radio.
Thank you for this admission. I guess we don't need the documentation I asked you for where you claimed that the military had found out that 20 watts was enough on HF SSB in any situation - because this documentation appears to not exist, whether classified or publicly available.
Actually many successful QRP contacts might end up around 55 to 59+ somewhere because some operators only have patience for working the stations they hear well - without knowing their power level. (I almost never identify /QRP even when running QRP.) A 3 db gain won't turn an impossible SSB contact into an easy one, but as I said it might elevate it from impossible to still very difficult.
They can if the QRP station has more QRM, QRN and RFI to deal with than the QRO station, or if the 1kw station has a compromised high-loss antenna and makes up for it with more power delivered to the antenna system.
I see QRP operators complimenting and thanking their counterpart quite often. If you're operating portable QRP with a compromised antenna, and adverse propagation, the other person's antenna, receiver features and operator skills are doing much of the heavy lifting. But note that the QRO station's linear power amplifier doesn't make it hear the QRP station any better.
Are you seriously trying to say that a whole manpack - whether it's 4 or 10 kg - is more modular than a smaller and lighter radio that can be built into a manpack? That Elecraft should force their customers to bring out their powertools and soldering irons to rebuild it into a trail-friendly QRP radio?
People who go hiking for many days want to save as much dead weight as possible, because they need to carry their food and survival gear.
Of course, which is why I said it, if you mostly work 100 watts anyway; but if you only need 5 or 10 watts, you can't leave the excess weight and power draw at home with a FT857; with a KX-3 you can.
It's not difficult, given time and and a simple power tool to mount the KX-3 into a frame and construct a manpack around it. If demand is high, somebody will offer it for sale or build it themselves.
I've run both QRP and high power club stations. The signal level difference between 5 and 20 or 10 and 20 is smaller than the decibel difference between 20 and 100. In the same post you manage to say "3 db can make a huge difference to the signal to noise ratio." Another contradiction you make.

The reason I personally wouldn't bother with anything less than a 50 or 100 watt PA, is that I would want the extra weight to have a noticeable effect, at least an order of magnitude.
I see you're worried about too much cable salad - but some HF manpacks are indeed constructed as modules and since the KX-3 is a kit, you could also just buy a bigger enclosure, mount your PA stage inside it, and cut holes in it for the connectors. But you'd still have to make the same electronic connections inside this box, and then the question arises - why not just mount a K3 and and a battery on a pack frame and call it a day? I mean since milspec ruggedness isn't something you care about in a military manpack?

Citation needed. You claimed that the military found a 20 watt HF manpack on SSB to be enough for dependable communications (documentation which you haven't shown). You seem to reject that a manpack user would have different communications requirements and circumstances and than a backpacking radio amateur.

As far as I know, they use encryption, frequency jumping and digital communication with power-efficient modes, and can use external amplifiers if they want. For longer distance communications they are limited by the same propagation that HF amateurs are limited by, but thanks to relays, they aren't necessarily dependent on a dependable HF path from point A to point B to exist, but can communicate via various ground stations, naval vessels, E-8 JSTARS

Sure, but they don't exclusively rely on SSB manpacks.

When did they start type-approving them? I haven't kept current on that it seems.

It is possible to learn to hand-solder surface mount components, but you're right since the K2 does not use surface mount components (except for the DSP option) it is easier to repair.