Superfluous J

If it'll affect your opinion (in the positive direction), Majiir, I would appreciate such a thing.

I forgot no such thing when I did this exact mission with the parts you can get with 5 total science points, and then posted the Imgur album to show how easy it is to do a couple hours ago:

It's surprisingly easy. I did this shortly after 0.22 came out: Granted, you'd need a little more to get crew reports in multiple biomes, but just what you'd get for this single trip would be worth maybe 1000 points I think, if you get all the science you can from high over Kerbin, High over Minmus, that biome, above that biome, low over minmus (on takeoff! On landing you'd risk dying getting out of the pod). If you EVA to the nearby biomes you can add a few more EVA reports and soil samples.

If it had a navball I'd be in heaven.

There are set, necessary time sinks when releasing an update. It takes about 2 weeks of non-development time to do that. Right now, they do (say) 3 months of development, 2 weeks of testing and finalizing. If they released every month it'd be 2 weeks of dev, 2 weeks of testing and overhead. You'd almost cut the progress by half! No I think they're doing it right currently.

Price out a modest train set. Print the invoice for what it would cost to get started. Next time she mentions KSP give her that and tell her it could be worse.

The charts are guides, not lists of exact rules. You must understand what every number means and when and why it applies (and more importantly when and why it does NOT apply) in order to use them. If you're flying by Tylo, you don't need to orbit Jool first. You don't need to orbit Tylo. You need to enter Jool's SOI and that's IT. You can aim a Tylo encounter from Kerbin's SOI with drops of fuel (If you have it, RCS works wonders). You can do it midway to Jool for a dozen Delta V. For all intents and purposes, it's the same cost as the cost to just get to Jool in the first place. If you want to orbit Tylo, however, you need to basically get into orbit around Jool (Aerobraking can save dV but the good charts show you that) and then set your orbit to Tylo's and then finally circularlize. If you aim it right, you can do ALL of that in one huge burn, but that one huge burn will be roughly equivalent to the 3 or 4 burns you'd have to do to reach Jool orbit, encounter Tylo, and then enter Tylo orbit. Except of course for the Aerobraking. It takes more dV to get to Mun than it does to come back not because it's inherently cheaper to return than it is to get somewhere. It's lower because you don't have to spend any fuel while landing thanks to Aerobraking at Kerbin. That dV still happens (else you'd hit the ground at 4km/s), it's just not because of fuel.

In my main, extremely modded install: YouTube, for my LP series. Default, for futzing around in sandbox mode. And then in a different install instance: Default, for testing bugs I find in either of the above saves. I'm super creative with my names.

You should also use 1 engine instead of 4 (or 3).

I gave this a few tries. Got below 100m/s before crashing. May try it again but it's a bit of a time sink having to slow down for 8 minutes. Even on 4x speed that's 2 minutes per failed try. It doesn't seem like much but it adds up when all I'm doing is watching the thing slow down.

I'd personally drop the RCS entirely and use the dV you saved using the main engine to slow down my horizontal speed in tandem with my vertical speed on descent.

All you really need to get to Minmus is the decoupler you get for 5 science, then you can build a moderately sized rocket to take a ship there and land it. Take a crew report and EVA report high above it, low above it, landed on it, and then an EVA and surface sample from the surface. That should get you several hundred science. If you aim your landing for a lake near sloped ground that goes up to a plateau, you can store your EVA and surface samples in the pod and jet your guy over there with his jetpack fuel. Get EVA reports above and landed on the sloped ground and the plateau, and get a surface sample from each. That's another couple hundred science. Career mode isn't about doing stuff you could just do in sandbox. It's about achieving science with limited parts.

Pong /old.

I know, you'd think a finished product like this would be better documented...

The only mods that are cheaty are those that are banned by whatever challenge you are doing at that time, and that's only because you're breaking a rule of the current challenge you are doing. Those modes are, in that case, just as cheaty as using stock SRBs if the challenge says "no SRBs." No more, no less. I second the idea of a second stock game. I have about 5 installs of KSP lying around for various reasons. (The one I play, a stock install, one I use to test certain things, a 0.22 game, and a 0.21 game).

I have found a bug with Action Group Manager 1.3.1.0. I have tested this in the stock game (bug does not occur), with Action Group Manager as the ONLY mod installed (bug occurs) and with all the other mods I normally run EXCEPT Action Group Manager (bug does not occur), so I am confident that this is the mod causing the bug. When I have a command pod filled with experiments and I leave that pod behind with a Kerbal on EVA, and take that Kerbal far enough away that the pod unloads (2.5km or more. In my testing I went 3km away each time to be sure) and come back, ALL stored experiments vanish. This does not occur on short EVAs or when switching ships, only when an EVA'd Kerbal traveling causes the pod to unload from the current physics sphere. If this happens to anybody else, you CAN recover your science by reloading a quicksave, though you'll of course lose anything from after your quicksave. I saved about 25 experiments (maybe 30 minutes of play time) that I'd lost due to this bug by restoring a before-the-last-landing quicksave and then just redoing the landing.

EDIT: I just found that there is a newer thread for this. You may want to update the first post here with a large text notice that there is a new thread Action Group Manager's actual post. I have found a bug with Action Group Manager. I have tested this in the stock game (bug does not occur), with ActionGroupManager as the ONLY mod installed (bug occurs) and with all the other mods I normally run EXCEPT Action Group Manager (bug does not occur), so I am confident that this is the mod causing the bug. When I have a command pod filled with experiments and I leave that pod behind with a Kerbal on EVA, and take that Kerbal far enough away that the pod unloads (2.5km or more. In my testing I went 3km away each time to be sure) and come back, ALL stored experiments vanish. This does not occur on short EVAs or when switching ships, only when an EVA'd Kerbal traveling causes the pod to unload from the current physics sphere. If this happens to anybody else, you CAN recover your science by reloading a quicksave, though you'll of course lose anything from after your quicksave. I saved about 25 experiments (maybe 30 minutes of play time) that I'd lost due to this bug by restoring a before-the-last-landing quicksave and then just redoing the landing.

Right now I'm unnecessarily mad at the Mojang bug report system, and its moderators and programmers. Every new version that comes out they ask if the bug has been fixed. If nobody confirms the bug is still outstanding, they close the issue. Not ONCE on some of these reports that have been out for YEARS has a programmer come in and said "hey, I'm looking at this now." Bugs don't magically fix themselves. If a programmer has not fixed this 2-year-old bug, it's STILL AROUND. It's not MY job to confirm it's still around. It's a programmer's job to FIX IT and then REPORT THAT IT'S FIXED. Also, I get emails for all of these bug reports that I was concerned about back when I cared about Minecraft (i.e., before I discovered KSP) whenever they're updated, and all I see over and over is "Is this still a problem in version x.x.xx?" "Yup. Still a problem." "Okay, thanks. Better luck next time." It's been so long, I don't know my password and they won't send me an email when I try to reset it, so I think I'll be getting these emails forever. There. I feel better. Thank you.

The link is to about 5 seconds before the near miss. If you watch to the end (which is only a few more seconds), I show it again http://youtu.be/w8S1CwQ1Nv8?t=20m39s

I took all the videos out so the page loads quicker.

It's not so bad if you don't have FAR installed. You could make a mesh of girders too which will "feel" more aerodynamic

Today I got 3,000 science from a single mission to Minmus with one guy, a thermometer, gravioli detector and seismic detector. I didn't even get all the biomes. I think I hit 6 of them and got a crew report, eva report above, eva report on the surface, surface sample, and the 3 instruments in each place. And a couple flying overhead. I also discovered a bug that I'm off to report now. And by now I mean when I am done compressing my video and I can run a test in an unmodded game.

I have a similar rule: If it's in an atmosphere OR landed on a surface, I can delete it. That is a good mix of reality and active flight counts. The only purpose of debris is flight hazards (and really that's not all that big a deal) and if it's laying in some forgotten Mun crater, NASA would forget about it so I do too. The problem is, the game doesn't forget about it and eventually all that debris would bog down the game.

Any plans on integrating with the toolbar? The only thing I don't like about this plugin is that it's always there... watching me.

What's your apoapsis and periapsis? Your best bet is to send up a ship to push your ship into a lower orbit. Make a ship with structural panels and/or girders in a bit of a bowl shape on the front, big enough to hold your other ship (Just 4-8 of them should be enough. All you want to do is keep it from falling off while you're pushing it) and then get on the prograde side of the ship at apoapsis, and then burn retrograde (using Orbit mode, not Target mode!) Once your ship is on the ground you can recover it.