bewing

Fortunately, reputation is asymptotic. So you can never run out of it, no matter how hard you try. On the other hand, if your reputation is low, then you will only get crummy "part test" and tourism contracts. I've never found the admin building strategies to be helpful in the game, myself. Theoretically, if you end up with lots of money and rep before you complete your tech tree then you can convert rep into a little bit of science. But it'll never be enough to make a serious dent in those last 1000 point tech tree nodes.

Each contract has a time until expiration or completion. That time is effectively random, but it's at least a day. Some have an infinite expiration. But the answer is: new contracts are offered when you either complete a current contract, or when an unaccepted contract expires, or when you decline a contract, or when you fail a contract.

There is no maximum. You can be 100% inefficient.

Aegolius' suggestion about vacuum engines is exactly on point. Either you want an all-LF design (with nukes for your rocket engines), or you want to use a low-mass, vacuum rated LFO engine. So reliants and swivels are out. I'd disagree with his point about fewer+larger rocket engines, though. Sticking with 1.25m engines gives you the opportunity to terminate each nacelle/stack with a rocket engine plus a displaced jet engine. The reduction in drag will pay for the extra jet engine. Even spark/juno combos on .625m stacks give you good enough performance for spaceplane work.

Yes. Not necessarily. The probe cores will still provide basic functionality even if they have no signal. So you can send a probe to Eeloo with a relay antenna, and even if the signal is blocked you can still use all the SAS modes and full/zero thrust. You can still stage, and you can enable/disable engines in their menus. This is enough to allow you to land, or to complete a satellite contract (if you have a low-thrust engine on your craft).

The 5k antenna will give you "control" if you have connectivity back to Kerbin, which will give you the ability to make maneuver nodes. However, you can't transmit science reports through it. So it depends on whether you want to wait to transmit science reports until you dock back to your mothership.

Sorry, but a DTS-M1 is not a relay antenna. The only relay antennas are the HG-5, and the antennas that start with the letters RA-xx. In the editor, when you are building your ship, the description of each antenna will say whether it's a relay antenna or not. One other thing to note is that relay antennas do not "combine" with the standard direct antennas. So having some of each type on your ship does you no good.

You are doing a slingshot past Duna to where? Dres? Jool? Eeloo?

Oh jeez, you're right. It's not on/off like I remembered. So yeah, slide the slider down some. And yeah, you only get to access the wheels' menus in pairs if you place them in pairs with symmetry.

You have to go into your settings and turn on "Advanced Tweakables". The game has it turned off by default to avoid confusing the newbies -- but once you have some practice, you need to turn it on. It's extremely useful. Once you turn that on, you go into the fairing's menu, and turn on "interstage nodes". It's a super useful (advanced) way to use a fairing. It's a little joke in the game. All you have to do is count the sides on the probe core. OKTO = 8. HECS = 6. OKTO2 = 8. QBE = 4. HECS2 = 6. So the one in the image is a HECS. A HECS is very nice because it has prograde and retrograde abilities, as compared to an OKTO. Which makes a HECS much easier to land, or to do satellite contracts with.

Then that sounds like a mod bug. I'm not seeing it in the stock game, and I've heard no reports of that in stock. Wrong, yup. Any crewmember can drive a rover. They just can't use SAS, unless they have a probe core. Traction control and friction are two different things. Look on the context menu for a pair of wheels. Read it very closely . You will see there is a button for Traction Control (on/off).

As far as question 1 goes, you can get the rover on a flat piece of ground and disable the motors on all but one pair of wheels. Then tell the rover to go forward. Repeat for all the other pairs of wheels. Also, if you feel that your wheels are "fighting" you as you drive around, then you may want to turn off the "traction control" feature on all the wheels. Traction control applies the brakes on a wheel if it thinks that wheel is slipping. It can really slow you down a lot on slightly uneven terrain, or on hillsides.

In general, as you are creating your close approach, you are burning prograde. You start out with a very high Munar Pe and a prograde capture. As you burn more, your Pe decreases, and decreases, and decreases, and goes below the surface of the Mun. If you burn some more, your Pe goes to zero, then pops out the other side of the Mun with a retrograde capture, then starts increasing. So that's usually the best way to control the direction of the captured orbit. If you are coming in from Minmus or someplace stranger, you may start out with a retrograde capture. At that point you have to fiddle around with all the handles on a maneuver node to find out what turns it into a prograde capture. Worst case, you actually enter the Mun's SOI, capture to a super high Ap, and then reverse your orbit at the Ap for a very low cost. It depends on what parts you are using in your craft, and how much drag you can deliberately create. High tech, extremely heat resistant parts have a wide window for a direct reentry with no retro burn in the Kerbin atmosphere. Low tech MK1 parts don't, and usually require a big retro burn. Even if you do a full retro burn to circularize back into LKO, you still may have to retro burn some more before you reenter. If all you have is a MK1 command pod, parachute, and a heatshield, then you can aim for a reentry Pe of 30km from the Mun. For anything else you need to experiment to find out a safe and effective reentry Pe.

It sounds like you are not completely zeroing out your relative velocity before you go for the docking. If you have residual tangential velocity, you will get that "circling" effect. As far as the magnetism goes -- if you have SAS turned on, it will fight the magnetism. If they are fighting each other, you will get this "repulsion" effect. You can also get it if your approach is too far off from a right angle to the docking port. In general, it works best to have SAS turned off for at least one ship when the magnetism kicks in.

OK, you have it turned off. So that's good the way it is. You can still partially control your crafts even when you have no commnet signal. That means you don't need relays or pilots if you don't want them.