cantab

Agreed, in the first pic that looks like the Moon not the Mun, and the spacecraft is definitely the Orion CSM. And in the second I think the darkness is just because it's a photo of a screen.

Sounds like you've covered all your bases. Pics?

Pick any real or fictional thing you think is cool, recreate it in KSP.

How much fuel do you have left? If it's more than 2 units, you should be able to make orbit, though you won't have much for the rendezvous. Keep swapping between map view and EVA view (with M) to help align orbits and get an intersect.

Depends on the size of the asteroid. A biggish one you can "land" on, though it's still pretty "loose". A small one you more rendezvous with. Deimos (not an asteroid, I know) is just big enough that if you jump you won't escape it.

I've not stranded any in career yet. Once my ships reach orbit they work great. It's the reaching orbit bit that doesn't always go to plan.

How do the craft files handle symmetry? Do they actually list a part once with a flag to say #x symmetry, or do they list each time and the symmetry is just handled by the UI.

I think spoilers

Even tuning everything down in the game doesn't set the graphics as "low" as they can go. There's more room for tweaking in the config file, so keep that in mind. There are also "welding" mods, that let you combine multiple parts into one or have ready-made combinations, and thus reduce part counts on bigger ships.

The Kerbol system is about 1/10 the size of the real solar system, for both planet and orbit sizes. Surface gravity on Kerbin, however, is the same as Earth, meaning it would still hold onto its atmosphere. It also implies either that Kerbin, and the other bodies in the system, are unphysically dense, or that the gravitational constant is stronger. And, of course, the smaller scale lowers delta-V requirements making everything "easier".

Left Shift being throttle up has caught me out so many times when trying to cycle through objects in map view. Typically by the time I realise my periapsis is below the ground. And I can't use Right Shift instead, because that's the Mod key on Linux since Alt-click gets intercepted by the OS to move the window around.

That's one impressive mission. Great use of gravity assists.

You'll need a mission to recover the old data. Rendezvous with the old craft, EVA over, take the data out of the old capsule and any experiments, and EVA back to the new mission. Then if you like you could land the new mission in a different biome for more science, or just head back to Kerbin. I'd say go for the recovery, it'll give you some good rendezvous and EVA practice.

This near-perfectly sums up KSP as well as it does Mythbusters. http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/mythbusters-remixed.htm

Indeed. An actual asteroid belt in KSP would teach people that they're really empty. I'll second a telescope part or two being nice. I'm thinking it could be a science experiment. You'll get a bit if you just plonk one down at KSC. You'll get more if you take it away to a nice dark mountaintop. And you'll get lots more if you put it in space.

Caps Lock switches between coarse and fine controls in a craft, I've no idea if it works for a Kerbal. Possibly not, since there's no indication of it. I think if it were changed it would have to be a fine/coarse switch like that, just weakening the jetpack would stop you doing things, and an automatic surface/orbit switch would switch when you want it least, like when you're killing your horizontal speed for an EVA landing.

Not built one myself, but I'd suggest batteries and/or an RTG. You don't really want the thing going dead when it passes into Kerbin's shadow. And some RCS, just in case you've got a tricky bit of docking and want to dock the station to the ship rather than the other way round, or if you need to avoid a crash with debris.

At least on Linux KSP doesn't insist on being launched from steam. So a copy made of the game will play just fine whatever Steam do.

Send your usual replacement rover transport empty, have it pick up the current rover and driver, and fly them across the water.

I'd bet money Whackjob's broken a thousand tons to orbit. The same rocket would land it.(Of course, then you've got to get that thousand ton rocket up to start with. But there's always sending it up empty and fuelling in orbit. Or just building a rocket capable of launching a rocket capable of launching a thousand tons to orbit to orbit.)

I've tended to just name series of rocket designs, with a common name and then a number. If I launch multiple missions with the same design, they all keep the same name; so far things haven't got complicated enough for that to be a problem. It's somewhat arbitrary when I feel I've changed the design enough to warrant a new number rather than just considering it a tweak of the same design. Specifically, in career mode I have the Grey Smudge series, numbers 1 through 22. In that I'll start a new series when I unlock new tech. In Sandbox I have the TMIARS series (Trust Me, I'm a Rocket Scientist) for my "joke" rockets, and the AbR 1 (Ambitious, but rubbish) was my aptly named first attempt at a heavy lifter.

They'll succeed. It's just a question of how fast the landing is. Even with KSP's loldensity, it'd still be too small to have appreciable gravity.

Being so small, Kerbin lost its internal heat ages ago, so has no plate tectonics. /fridgelogic

And I pulled off the Minmus landing on the second go

Probably in the demo version, recovering the Kerbal aboard my stranded SSTO rocket. Had to learn how to aim for an inclination on launch, plane change in orbit, and made a rendezvous. Then did it again because I accidentally terminated the rescue flight SSTO in foreground, rescue ship beyond. Do you think I've got enough ladders? And of course the mission failed 500 m above the ground when the parachute tore off Right now I'm trying an EVA Minmus landing. I'm down, but it's only an achievement when I get back to the orbiter.