cantab

Yes, an inclination greater than 90 degrees is a retrograde orbit. IMHO, in the situation you are now, just land the lander, then launch it to match the returner's orbit as best you can. You'll need a touch more delta-v and a lot more finesse, especially if you don't want a long wait for Moho to rotate you into position for the ascent, but it's probably far preferable to trying to make big orbital changes now.

I used Blender for a bit a year or two back. Its controls are VERY different to anything else, and I did find myself trying to use Blender controls in other stuff. More common, in Linux you can paste selected text by middle-clicking. I regularly try to do that in Windows.

Tested my Munar orbiter. First time round the controls locked in the capture burn for some reason, I hit x but nothing happened. By the time I'd throttled down with shift I was on a collision course. Killed the game and restarted to go back to my last save that time. Second time round the controls were fine but I still mucked up the capture burn and got a periapsis of just over 2km. I watched as the mountains got closer and closer before chickening out and burning straight up. That put periapsis behind me, but below the surface, so I slightly panicked and wasted the last of my fuel in a futile prograde burn. Leaving Jeb to get out at apoapsis and push the capsule into a stable orbit. So I had to rescue him. Made the revised Munar orbiter, with slightly more fuel and a much improved launcher, and performed the rendezvous without a hitch. Who needs RCS? Orbiter I'm now happy with. Lander probably wants further testing. And I've learnt to give a decent safety margin on my delta-vs.

One. Just one person.

It's been shown that the KSP system is stable. So to put the planets and moons "off rails", the system would have to be revised - and I'm not sure by how much.The orbital drift others have described is probably because in stock KSP Kerbin does not orbit the Kerbin-Mun barycentre, whereas with the n-body mod your ship will. (Assuming the modder didn't fix this already). Similarly Kerbol doesn't orbit the Kerbol-Jool one. That can be fixed without needing to take the celestials off their rails, though the rails may become much more complicated.

Don't remember. Possibly xkcd.

You definitely want to stage, even "regular" staging will let your rockets go further.

Whereas I think they shouldn't be. I think the game is more accessible if players are encouraged to "wing it", to build rockets by intuition and guesswork, and find out if they'll reach orbit by trying to reach orbit. I played for over 50 hours before doing some manual delta-v calcs and then installing KER, and I don't think I needed or wanted it from the start.

I think the only thing you lose by representing a craft by its point mass is tidally-induced rotation and breakup. Rotation doesn't really matter with our godly reaction wheels, and I suspect a ship large enough to break up tidally would be too large for other aspects of KSP's physics.

Seems to me that already KSP has a healthy modding community and that a fair number of mods have made it "into stock". Other than FAR, I'm not sure what mods really need to be in the stock game.

Probably the forums reflect the game itself. I imagine if KSP went massively multiplayer and became popular both the game and the forum would be full of penii.

The engine clusters look gorgeous. However, I fear your TWR is still too low for an efficient ascent, and considering you've showed vacuum not atmospheric delta-v you might fall short unless you're careful to land on high ground.

Knock up a rover and take it for a spin round KSC. There's some neat stuff there, and all round it's probably the most detailed area in the whole game. Do a free return Mun flyby. All you need to do is make orbit, set up and make one precise burn (about 850-900 m/s dV), then hit the timewarp and watch. Try and crash two rockets into each other.

Trialled my Mun landing craft. I'm planning a two-launch mission profile. The orbiter goes up with a single Kerbal and space for a second and parks in Munar orbit. The lander goes up with a single Kerbal, lands on the Mun, returns to orbit and rendezvouses with the orbiter. The orbiter then takes both Kerbals home. This reduces the lander delta-v requirement letting me make it lighter, which I kind of need. Anyway I sent both orbiter and lander on free-return flybys. And discovered that the lander, if it's full of fuel, will tear its chute off upon opening on Kerbin. My poor Kerbals.

I've landed and returned by EVA from a 17km Minmus orbit, so the reverse should be possible.

Career is definitely set to get richer in future updates, with the plan for money and reputation along with science. I suppose if you can land and return rockets on Eve, Tylo, and Gilly, and a plane on Laythe, you probably can go pretty much anywhere you like anyhow you like. Course, I've yet to land on the Mun.

Wait until you get really far out, then it only takes a small nudge to set you hurtling back inwards.

"Realistically" there'd be one intake per engine. Maybe two with some single-engine designs.

Low orbit maybe? You'll go faster. Or a "hopper" lander that can fly about.

The Apollo program used a craft where 5/6 of the weight was held up by jets, to simulate lunar gravity. You could try something similar, if there's a way to disconnect an engine from the throttle, or else use solid boosters tweaked to the right thrust and infinite fuel so they don't run out.

Small asteroids will be treated like spacecraft, so movable but without their own gravity. Said gravity would be negligible anyway. Big asteroids will be on rails, such big ones wouldn't be feasible to move anyway, not even for Whackjob.

Been practising rocket landings on Kerbin before I go for a Munshot. Quite a lot of explosions. One time when I set down on a slope and the lander started sliding fast, I had my Kerbal bail but he was still moving with the lander. The blast threw him 400 metres. And then there's this landing. Hey, any you walk away from right?

There's a few of them around the hangars. I assume they're meant to be ruins of smaller buildings, yes.

Everything floats in KSP at present. I imagine if they ever fix the ocean behaviour, then the asteroids will sink.

Minmus mission: Returned from the second EVA landing with a razor-thin margin of fuel, largely thanks to sloppy rendezvousing. Decided not to push my luck further, and made a small inclination change to fly over one of the Flats. (Ie not the Greater, Great, or Lesser Flats, but the ones that are even smaller.) After getting that EVA report, return to Kerbin. Mun polar orbiter: Waited around to get EVA reports from over the Polar Crater and Twin Craters, then returned to Kerbin. Sun mission (ie Kerbin escape): I nearly messed this up. Escaped Kerbin, grabbed the Crew and EVA reports, then burnt for return to Kerbin. Even lined up a neat, though needless, Mun gravity desist. Then went to do Minmus stuff. Then checked back on the Sun mission to find the encounter with Kerbin I'd set up was nearly a full solar orbit away! So had to burn the right way this time to get back into Kerbin's SOI on a more reasonable timescale. Good thing I had enough fuel. All told, just over 1000 science points earnt from the three missions. While I could do more science with the starting tech, there's 1330 points to be had just from EVA landings on the rest of the Minmus biomes, I think it's about time to unlock some tech. I might also grab Engineer Redux, save me hand-calculating any more delta-vs.