Kesa

Assuming you can target something, during your final approch, chase your retrograde vector to stay on top of the target away vector, you can land litterally land on top of your target, as shown in the video linked earlier in this thread.

SSTO means single stage to orbit, and indicates nothing about how it flies. There are rocket SSTOs, spaceplane SSTOs, and potentially railgunned SSTO, Sky hooked SSTO, Rotary rockets SSTO, Balloon-Rocket SSTO. I guess you meant "as a spaceplane", and yes, at 0.8 TWR, a rocket won't lift up the ground (though it may make a lot of sense to have low TWR on the later stages of a multistage rocket), and plane might. It will need more wings than a more powerfull spaceplane or than a shuttle. Also, it does not need to be single stage. You can have a plane carrying a smaller plane or a rocket. On small moon with low orbital velocity, it is also possible to ascend with a TWR lower than 1 if you find a flat place (ground resistaance on your wheels replaces lift). It can still be usefull on not so small moons and with TWR a bit over 1.

You can't optimize time and Dv simultaneously, and if you want to go back home, there is no point in minimizing Dv. The more Dv you spend, the sooner you'll arrive, and spared Dv is useless if your destination is home. The question you should ask yourself is "how soon can I go home using no more than X Dv, and how?" where X is your total Dv available. And likely, you'll burn all your remaining fuel minus margin. Maybe try using this tool https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ to figure out when and how to leave (I would try with manoeuver nodes alone first though). Using this tool and assuming some informations, I found that if you have about 2000 m/s (instead of the minimal 650) you can leave right away and save 170 days. If you have about 1000 m/s Dv, you can wait about (a bit more) the same time you would have waited for an ideal transfer, but take a route 60 days shorter.

Problem is, such a protocol is not possible for a Mars mission. The Moon is only a few days away, the "abort protocol" was barely different than "proceed as planned". Moon landing can be cancelled because a stage malfunction would lead to the crew being stranded, but the overall time to return is barely shortened, but is not an issue because it is already short in the first place. In real life, I don't know if there's even any meaningful treatement to severe irradiation. The most we can do, be it down on Earth or millions of miles into deep space, is prevent it. So probably kerbalism allows crew to be automatically healed upon recovery, but realistically, the crew is already doomed, even if rapid recovery were possible. And if rapid recovery was possible, I think the abort plan shoud have been triggerd from the first or second coronal blast (evaluating their frequency and your resistance to it probably could have indicated they would not make it). I think our (RL) take on this will be to test each subsystem extensively before heading to Mars, precisely because there is no abort plan. Before your second mission to Mars, I advise you to do the same, and send your Mars vessel say, on a mission over an extended period of time around the Moon, where an abort is possible. Also pointing the engines toward the Sun (assuming crew compartiment are at the other end) should reduce radiation, if kerbalism is well coded, and this strategy is what spaceX intends to do IRL. As for as salvaging your current mission, well if your kerbals can attempt to go home any faster than following the mission plan, it may be worth trying. If you have a very powerfull rescue craft, you don't necessarrily have to plan for a braking plan, any Earth flyby is good and the rescue craft can do most of the work (it would need a rescue craft with as much or maybe more Dv than the Mars mission itself, but due to the length of the mission, mass can probably be save on life support and Mars playload). Personnally, I think I would carry the mission as far as possible. The kerbals on board were aware it was a dangerous mission. If you got remote control system, the craft can be put in orbit around Mars and be used for its materials by future missions. Without remote control system, you should be able to put the craft in a resonant orbit to possibly retrieve it later, sending a small probe to hack the control system and using the fuel onboard, assuming it won't disappear.

What you describe amounts to computing the result of the rocket equation doing a step by step integral, while doing calculus, you got it in closed form and can compute it efficiently. Anyway, the rocket equation is easily googlable, and litterally one line long. I highly doubt no one in squad knows what a logarithm is, I agree math is definitely not the issue.

Yes, they can be more than spacewalk tether, they can link any object to the part holding the tether (not sure tether is the name used in the mod, but that's basically a retractable tether). What functionality a spacewalk tether has that KAS tether has not?

Welcome aboard! Some general things you should be automatically thinking of when failing to launch an unstable playload : Where is the fairing? Where is it? Use ailerons. They are barely visible. If the craft is not stable, use bigger ailerons Use engines with vectoring abilities. Skipper has a decent gimballing for stable rockets, but for unstable rocket, you probably want to complement it with thud or vector engines. Check the torque. It's good that you checked it, but thrust offset is usually the smallest issue. I see you still got some thrust offset in the tens of Nm but I think it should be well within skipper gimballing capacity. Some advanced tips to launch stuff into space Empty the fuel tanks of your playload. You got way too much Dv, 4,000 m/s should be more than enough to go to LKO. You can half the weight of your playload by just emptying the three LF tanks and the big monoprop one. You don't seem to even use the Nerva as our upper stage, which would increase the playload mass but reduce the overall weight of the craft. Think BFR. Refueling the empty playload/the station with an aerodynamic tankers should be a trivial task, especially compared to launching a heavy unstable playload. If all else fails you can launch a very unstable playload between two rocket rather than on top of one. TL;DR use fairing, empty fuel tanks which do not contribute to orbit.

Welcome to the forum. KAS has thethers, but to be honest, I expect thether+ladders to be fun but much harder than EVA jetpack, on both piloting skill and designing skills.

As you can see in the caveman tech SSTO link given by ManEatingApe, LVT-45 and LVT-30 can both singlehadledy launch a crewed capsule in a single stage rocket. I remember once trying to do a spaceplan SSTO using a single LVT-30. It had no wings, only two pairs of winglets.It was heavier than its rocket counter part, much harder to fly and land, very long to design, and not more useful. So if you go rocket engine only, save probably for the aero spike, you're better off with a rocket SSTO than with a spaceplan SSTO. If you want to use the basic jet engines (juno ad wheasle), I think they changed a lot. You used to be able to go up to 10 km and still have decent performance. I think they start to flame out at 10km now. Now with them you want to accelerate as most as you can barely above sea level before pitching up (going fast also increase air intake and make them flameout later).

Well, they started as such, so it should not be too hard to make someone that paranoid believe they still are dangerous. Especially considering this is what you get when you google "indie games" : http://prntscr.com/jxau2g

You should be able to custumize KER display, and have the 2 numbers interesting you right next to each other.

Does your brother know Minecraft and KSP are Indie games?

It's sure you won't heard of runge kutta and whatnot in fancy videos, but I would not dismiss using neural network so easily. The numerical integration methods are only accurate relative to the model you use, not necessarilly to reality. If we don't know precisely the gravitational field of Earth, including its anomalies, or the effect of Sun pressure over a small poorly identified debris, the integration will only make accurate prediction relative to an innacurate model. Neural network can be a way automatically fill our ignorances about small and hardly predictible factors which weight heavily over time. (I would expect the most efficient solution to be asking NN to predict deviations from current prediction rather than asking them for the whole prediction though)

1.4.3 I think.

As the contract is worded, only the probe itself should be unmanned IMO, so in addition to making a suggestion, I would also report the current behaviour as a bug, in the technical support subsection. I'm curious, does docking only help with the "new" part, or also with the "unmanned one"?