shadowfax

Pretty tolerant. Once you accept the mission and get to the launchpad/runway, go into the map screen, click on the area you're going to, and set it as navigation target. Now a little rectangular icon will show up in the navball. Fly toward it. When it starts blinking, you're where you need to be to perform your task.

Go into the tracking building. The missions will be marked with little teardrop markers. Hover over them to see which one is which.

Yes, when you undock the struts will unlink as well.

Engineers are going to be valuable as you get farther into the game. You can land your rover as carefully as you want - eventually you're gonna blow a tire driving it around. Better to have the engineer fix it than launch a whole new rover. Also, if your mission to Duna includes a lander that uses 'chutes, you're going to want to repack them so they can be used again when you return to Kerbin. I'm not entirely sold on the 100% specialization idea, though. Especially in the early days of NASA, everybody had to be crosstrained to do everything. The guy who piloted the lunar lander also had to be trained in geological sample collection, and had to be able to fix things when they broke. The mission specialist concept works fine when you have a 6 person shuttle or the ISS, but in the steps leading up to such things, your astronauts really need to be able to do it all. I think I'd prefer a system where you have training missions so that you can direct what skills your Kerbals learn. Spend enough time and/or money training him and Jeb can be expert in all 3 branches.

You're going with the bandwagoning fallacy? Might want to pick something else if you're trying to be persuasive. Especially since every forum on the planet has "some users" who "think (insert moderator policy here) is a harsh solution."

New releases always make me really appreciate the modders. I'm feeling utterly lost right now without KAS - my stations are wiggly! It's pretty amazing the depth that the modders bring to a game that's already incredibly deep. There's some real genius going on out there.

go into your starting options and set your starting money to a lot. Then use the starting money to upgrade the buildings before you do anything else. If you can't start with enough money to do it, take some throwaway contracts and "complete" them in the debug menu until you have enough to fully upgrade everything. I can't remember if it was here or on Reddit, but some guy was just griping that he couldn't play the game anymore because his 3gb of system ram and 1gb of shared system/Vram wasn't enough. The guy's trying to play the game on a relic of a computer - hell, I haven't had that little ram in a computer since probably before the turn of the century, and he's angry that his system can't handle it. The unfortunate fact is that not everyone can afford a great gaming machine, and not everyone has a 64 bit OS. I think it's nice that Squad is trying to let the people who don't have up-to-the-minute current machines have a chance to play.

B9. They have miniscule little omni lights - you can hardly see the part when you put it in a cargo bay. And they have "large" omni lights that are smaller than a 100 battery but put out plenty of light for docking operations. They also have what looks like miniaturized stadium lighting which is great for bases.

If anything, the first tier buildings should look more ghetto than they do now. That level 1 VAB looks very nice, sleek, and professional. By contrast, here's the NACA high energy propellant facility, built about a decade before the VAB went live: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4404/p86.jpg It looks like a crappy collection of tin sheds, and still looks better than I would imagine a Kerbal early rocketry building would look.

Same happened to me. 64 bit is bugged. The 32 bit version starts you with the normal starter buildings.

And when that marker starts flashing, you're where you need to be to do whatever you're supposed to do.

I'm doing career mode, so I haven't built much. Turns out making the buildings upgradeable was a great way to slow your early game down. On .25 I was in orbit by my second rocket. Now that I was limited to 30 parts until I got the VAB upgraded, and 18T until I got the launch pad upgraded, it took me many more flights than that before I could get into orbit. That feels limiting to a KSP veteran, but for a new player that's figuring out how to build and fly basic rockets, it's a really good mechanic that will force them to learn how to build efficiently before they blow hundreds of thousands on a moar boosters inefficient rocket. Thus far I've managed to orbit the mun and return before I had to go to bed - itself a really good accomplishment considering I haven't upgraded tracking yet and am used to the map showing me intercepts, which it doesn't on the base building. This update has added quite a bit of challenge to the early game!

I agree. I'd grab B9 just for the Sabres, the lights, and the landing gear. Oh and the slim RCS tanks. Without them my spaceplane's primary use would be impossible.

We can just wait. Unless Squad releases by Thursday morning at the very latest, he'll have to simultaneously kill so many Kerbals that his computer will probably die first trying to process it all. ... I mean, how many parts would a vessel have to have to carry more than 500 Kerbals?

Mechjeb will do this as long as you stay within physics range of the station. Just set it to point toward surface velocity + and control it from a part that will face forward when the station is oriented the way you want it. Once you go outside of physics range, the station will be put "on rails" and won't change anything about its orbit or orientation until you get back in range, at which point physics restarts for it and it will re-orient itself. Where you can get in trouble with this is if your station's rotational capabilities are fairly powerful and you don't have it braced well enough - it'll start flopping around like an electrocuted octopus and might blow things up or tear itself completely apart. When I do this trick, I always attach a bunch of struts to the station first (Kerbal Attachment System lets you do it on EVA) to be sure it's braced really well and can't flail around.