EndOfTheEarth

Yes and no. Mechjeb, particularly if you're a newer player, is always going to give you a more accurate and efficient landing, and a perfectly accurate orbital situation. The thing about Mechjeb though (and the reason why I stopped using it) is that while it understands the mass and direction and fuel situation on your ship, it doesn't really understand the shape, and it doesn't get the idea of being 'generally' correct. I've found this to result in problems during ascent and descent, where the autopilot would either try to turn while staging, or be unable to see that the landing site, on closer inspection, is no good in relation to the mass distribution of the ship. I've also found this to result in problems as it nears the destination location, as it begins firing all the RCS motors in an attempt to be 100% correct down to the last decimal, while a human player will eyeball it and decide that their end-location is 'close enough' to where they want to go. However, I will repeat the point that landing manually is way more exciting than MechJeb, and feels more rewarding.

Aerobreaking over Eve at Dusk during my Gilly Mission Seconded by my return aerobreak from Gilly before my trans-Kerbin injection burn.

For the majority of the US space program the rank hierarchy has been the Commander, followed by everyone else. As for specific jobs and positions, wikipedia has a whole list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_ranks_and_positions So if it's a Mun lander, I could see Commander Jeb, LM Pilot Bill, and Mission Specialist Bob. The only way to tell them apart at a glance it to look at what seat they're sitting in.

If you need help learning how to dock, the two best things you can do are run one-way interplanetary probe missions, and learn to dock with something that's already attached to your rocket--like bringing a fuel tank into orbit with you that's covered in docking rings, decoupling it, then docking with as many of the rings as possible. Master both, and you have 70% of the skills needed for docking. The other 30% is that rendezvous burn that takes you from a close pass to staying close long enough to dock.

Eve was the first place I sent an interplanetary probe for a landing, because I knew that getting down safely was a question of adding a few parachutes and hitting the spacebar. Returning though...I consider that to be an endgame-level task. That and Tylo. Neither will happen for me for some time, I think.

Because of the kind of docking port. Really, that's usually the only deciding factor for what kind of capsule I use. Jr docking port means a small capsule, normal docking port means the 3-man, and large docking port is the 2-man lander can. Maybe this will change as I try to conquer higher-gravity locations, but, for now, it's just a matter of structure.

Completed my first manned Dres mission! Leaving Kerbin Orbit. Additional fuel tank in the back was inspired by its usefulness during the Gilly voyage, and the orange tug is new. The lander is also a departure from my usual design, with legs that are designed to come off after Dres launch, but with the content arranged so that it can still do a lot without them, based on my horrific Bop experience a few months ago. After dropping the other orange tank, I reached Dres orbit with plenty of fuel to spare. After shifting as much fuel as possible back into the lander, I undocked and made my descent. Successful landing, and both Hudgun and Kerdrin are having a blast! Returned to orbit, ditched the legs, and rendezvoused with the tug, bringing a full central tank back up with me. At first I was worried that I hadn't brought enough fuel to get home, but the fuel spent during the initial burn proved me wrong. Once back on a collision course with Kerbin, my path suggested that I might land at night, so I once again transfered all fuel to the lander and ditched the tug. By the time my burn was complete, I was sure that I would land on the lit side. Chutes deployed: Returned safely!

Some time between .13 and .14. I still remember when getting to Mun orbit was a seat-of-your-pants guesswork thing and a return to Kerbin was never guaranteed. Now I do it in fifteen minutes with a 100% success rate. Here's a picture of my first lander in .15 to make it to the Mun. Unfortunately, it froze in orbit due to a part glitch. Fortunately, I had two other landers also sitting in orbit since I was expecting the first one to fail, so I was able to duplicate the attempt the next day, along with a successful return to Kerbin.

Admittedly, I tried Orbiter about three years before KSP and never got into it, mostly because I found the flight interface to be a huge pain to deal with. I plan on going back at some point and trying again, but at the moment I'm still more interested in the challenges available at my stage of KSP gameplay. In short, I'm currently playing KSP to practice for Orbiter.

I'm an intermediate KSP player, but I'm always looking for things to make my gameplay more efficient. One of the things I've been struggling with is setting maneuver nodes after my ship is on an interplanetary intercept course, namely because the current orbit (blue) and the next orbit (purple) are so close together, and the game at times refuses to let me select a node for the blue orbit. Are there any tricks with the screen/controls for the sake of guaranteeing a node on the blue orbit?

I've always called it 'The Mun', which is weird because I use the same syntax for it as The Moon IRL, and yet Minmus is always 'Minmus', never 'the Minmus', despite both functionally having the same definition and orbital situation.

First manned Dres landing! (Still all stock, and going nicely so far!)

Never actually had a drifting-into-space scenario. As for crashing on another planet/moon, these have been my top five, from most common to least common: 1) Incorrectly estimated surface altitude and came in too fast. 2) Incorrectly gauged landing site inclination and attempted to touch down on a steep slope. 3) Attempted to land a craft with too high of a center of mass, and not wide enough of a base. 4) Parachute failure, either due to staging error or faulty connection to main ship. 5) Ran out of fuel to successfully enter orbit instead of a direct crash landing.

On a continuation of my quest to send a manned mission to all the mun-gravity or less moons of KSP, I just made orbit at Dres. Not sure if I'll have the fuel to get home though. We'll see.

Find new ways to land. I recently flew a mission to Gilly that had a whole RCS subsystem so that I could land the vehicle horizonally instead of vertically. Alternately, take up the old game of seeing the heaviest thing you can land in a particular place in one package.

The very end of my mission back from Gilly, I kept noticing that the location I had stored the parachute in relation to the capsule kept ripping the chute off during my return. Due to my fuel level I didn't have enough time to slow down for orbit, so I was coming in with interplanetary reentry speed. My solution was to wait until 7000m, kick in all engines at full throttle (and these are nukes with still a massive load in-atmosphere, so there was an overheat danger as well, and then simultaneously decoubled and activated the chute at something like 900m. It snapped anyway, but the crew compartment survived, so mission success! In fact, the whole mission was pretty nuts. It was the first time in nearly a year that I'd landed a spacecraft horizontally somewhere, the first time I'd ever landed on Gilly, the first time I'd ever sent a manned crew to Eve SOI, the first time I'd used this design beyond Kerbin orbit...heck, I didn't even know if my RCS thruster system would actually let the ship take off once it reached Gilly. Full album of the journey here: http://imgur.com/a/U7CBc

Strange as it may sound, Ike. So far, it has swallowed more of my landers per mission than any other thing I've landed on, not counting learning to perform Mun landings back in .15 or whenever landing legs were introduced. A list, with attempted manned landings before success: Ike--6:1 Mun--5:1 Duna--3:1 Minmus--1:1 Bop--1:1 Gilly--1:1 This list doesn't count Kerbin. My ratio of crashes to zero-complaint flights is something like 10:1, with the numbers heavily skewed due to experimental launches.

If Squad had an infinate number of these things generating, or provides the ability to mod more in, I could see tomorrow's threads already: "Youtubers constructing ring around Kerbin" "3000 rocks being herded to form a new Mun" "Look, I built a bridge from KSC to the island runway!" "Impatient for a ringed gas giant? Look what we did to Jool!" "Developing a new continent on Laythe..." "Portrait of Jeb using constellation of asteroids" "Playing Asteroid soccer with MechJeb" "Getting bored of all these asteroids...how soon until comets?"

If you brought enough fuel with you, it's always a transfer window! Honestly though, if we're going for a maximum-efficiency flight, then there is only one period of time where everything lines up in a convenient way, and you can determine that with Olex's web calculator.

It's a question of finding the right group of people in the right place. Kerbal Space Program's emphasis on science and engineering makes it a very slow paced game; even the most violent things you can do to your kerbals require several minutes of planning. As a result, it generates a large population of low-key people. You can find this in other games if you can find a low-key application. I've spent a year or so on a Minecraft server where the people are working on a 1:1 scale of Disney World, and the emphasis on thought and construction tends to breed a calmer community there too. The overall Minecraft community, on the other hand, is still heavily fast-paced PvP, and this results in a lot of negativity. I think the key is to look for groups in games who are CONstructive rather than DEstructive, as construction requires that low-key mindset to plan, while just about anyone can be destructive.

Sometimes, yes, but not for any particular function. Usually they're just for looks. When it comes to refueling rockets I tend to just send up a new refueler to dock in LKO instead of having a massive fuel base up there and waiting. Maybe if I was more into mods I would see the point of using them for on-orbit kethane storage above Ike or one of the Joolian moons, but above Kerbin? Not really. That said, when I DO work on a station for fun, it is usually segmented around an unmanned central core with a lot of docking ports. Next comes something to provide additional power, followed by some kind of habitation module and a dedicated visiting vehicle docking structure. From there, it becomes cosmetic: Antenna booms, science pallets, more habitation and power components, and so on. Here's one that I built quite a while back that shows of most of these principles:

Personally, I NEVER send Kerbals first. I always get at least one probe into orbit. Knowing that I have the know-how to get there is comforting, because it means that I can also pilot a manned vehicle and emergency refueling missions to the same place. That, and once my escape burn is done, I spend most of my time in map view until I'm ready for a tweaking or inclination burn, so I haven't actually seen Kerbin fade away in quite a while now. A good way to practice this mentality is to do missions to Minmus orbits mostly in map view.

Minmus, because it's nearby and yet so alien in comparison to anything we have locally IRL. A large percentage of my missions wind up being to here. However, I do have end-hopes of getting to Vall eventually, but at the moment I'm at sort of an intermediate point in my KSP career; I went to Bop once, and it took a rescue ship to save the rescue ship before I got the crew home. I need to develop a better Jool tug and higher gravity lander before I attempt it.

If you like single launch-missions, I'd reccomend small lander probes to all the atmosphereless bodies in the Kerbol system, or at least getting something into orbit around everything. If you can land on the Mun, and have made it to Duna, then Ike shouldn't be that big of a problem. Also, keep working on docking by building a space station in Low Kerbin Orbit. I know that it's hard; it takes about a dozen dockings before you become fluent at it, but it's well worth the effort.

I think I used them once in my Duna lander, but haven't used them since (then again, I haven't run a mission that needed them since). For returning to Kerbin, I let the atmosphere do most of the work, aim for an ocean, and pop chutes at 600m.