yaur

On a 2014ish iMac running ubuntu 14.0.4: Getting Ubuntu to boot at all was a PITA (You need to be doing a UEFI boot to get SMP to work, headphone jack still doesn't work). Once its running, 64 bit KSP has fewer issues on Linux than Windows and 32 bit are unstable for both with my preferred mods loaded.

How new is new? If you can't (at least) go to and come back from Duna in stock I would ditch all those mods except KER and definitely not install FAR. Career mode is mainly designed so that new players have achievable objectives and don't get overloaded with parts. IMO you should stick to that. Of course, as a sand box game there is no "wrong way" to play it, but trying too much to fast can be frustrating.

For the science lab the key number is the ratio between the dV required to reach LXO from the surface of Kerbin and the dV required to reach LXO from the surface of the body. If this ratio is 16 (8 landing) or higher it is possible to at least break even using the lab. At 22.9 Minmus qualifies and has enough biomes to get a little bit ahead on mass. If you are going to be doing multiple landings you are obviously better off leaving your extra fuel in orbit. This assumes constant ISP (fine for minmus, not fine if you are using an LV-N on your transfer stage) and that the cost of the rendezvous is reasonably close to the cost of a suborbital hop (player dependent). I haven't really looked at how Minums paying for lifting the CM/lander effects efficiency for other bodies, but leaving your old Minmus CM in LKO as a station would allow you to at least avoid the cost of sending your lander back into orbit. All that said funds in the current version flow freely enough that we don't really need to worry about the savings and missions that require docking take substantially more RL time that simpler mission plans.

One trick is to drop com bases on the poles. in general these won't need to worry about night time (perpetual twilight) and can hit satellites beyond a fairly reasonable distance.

Just keep in mind that you are sort of doing this for RP perspective. From a fuel and RL time efficiency you are better off building one time use landers that have multiple science modules that you can discard once they are used. With this set up you do suborbital hops rather than get back into munar orbit after each landing. I do sometimes setup a refueling and science return base in LKO. Its probably not strictly more efficient, but I like having a standard tanker that I know will deliver a certain amount of fuel, that I know will deorbit with out breaking up, and that I already know when/how much to burn to get it to KSC. It also provides some options from available missions... depending on how much time and how tired I am I can either go explore some celestial body, bring more fuel up, or bring a spaceplane/taxi up. edit: Strike that I finally got around to doing the math and it will save you some dV for minmus if you hit every biome.

The exact/only reason that I switched to steam is that updates work reliably even on release day.

Would be playing DF to keep my mind off it, but DF2014 is still a hot mess.

One persistant problem with these kinds of things is figuring out if career should be balanced for new players who struggle to get to orbit or for people like the typical forum user who has already been playing for a couple years, builds space stations, and participates in challenges. For experienced player a "game over" screen isn't likely to be an issue and isn't something that they are every likely to see, for a new player its likely to come quickly and be and lead to negative reviews. To me it seems like a reasonable compromise to have a limitless supply of boring (to us) contracts that help a new player attempt the basics while restricting an experienced player from doing fun missions after repeated failures. From my perspective having to follow up a failed Laythe mission with a bunch of Mun/Minmus landings to regenerate funds is practically equivalent to a bankruptcy screen without taking off the training wheels for new players. If its tuned that way or not is something we will see shortly.

My first attempt at replicating/outdooing the migration of octos thing didn't make it to orbit and without thinking it through I hit the chutes before reaching the ap. which was the point that I realized that there was a ~2k part debris field that was about to come zipping by. Watching a bunch of them come within a few meters of Jeb's capsule was pretty cool.

In the last screenshot he his, but the ship is accelerating. The small thrusters @ 5% have hardly any visible thrust. In order to get into that position though he had to outrun the ship slightly with his EVA pack, could capture that because it was a sub-second maneuver in order to minimize the impact speed and maximize the odds he would be able to stand up. This should work with real world physics, but flying being handled as a separate state messes it up. Centrifugal force was going to be the next test if this worked, since it would take little/no fuel and not mess up the "studio's" orbit. I'm not sure how 0 absolute motion would really help. 0 relative velocity is fairly close to a normal EVA in a high orbit. One last trick i tried today was to have Jeb ride up on the platform (no seat + added a lip). The game recognizes him as flying about a second after takeoff even with minimal acceleration. The best effect I've been able to get is sliding (but standing and sticking to the ship) with RCS on and low thrust.

So we all know that a Kerbal can walk on a body with gravity and I assume most KSPers know that the reason for that is because the Kerbal is accelerating towards the body. The purpose of this mission is to determine if a kerbal can walk on a platform that is accelerating due to thrust (i.e. artificial gravity) with a view toward moviesq interplanetary cinematic shots. so here is the test rig: The SRB will put it into a suborbital trajectory with an AP of around 122k. There are a pair of small engines and enough fuel for ~90 seconds of artificial gravity. A few moments later and we are ready to test and... nope Jeb has to outrun the ship with his EAV pack to even get out of the seat. If enabled his pack will thrust continuously and can't produce anything resembling walking. Unfortunate, but not really unexpected.

The "magic" of having a TWR of 2 is not that its going to keep you at terminal velocity. I believe TV should increase exponentially while TWR is going to increase linearly for most configurations, so any configuration that can maintain TV for most of the ascent has way to much engine mass. What a TWR of 2 or less (on the pad) gets you is the ability to leave the throttle wide open for the entire ascent. If its over that you are going to need to micromanage your throttle to stay near TV.

Engineer is the one "must have" mod IMO. Its the one that tells you if you built wrong or flew wrong. Alarm Clock is "must have" if you want to run more than one mission at once. ScanSAT is fun and doesn't unbalance the game beyond giving a little bonus science. MechJeb and Kethane are both game changers in the easier direction. If you want an easier game try one or both (though it takes self discipline to not have MJ ruin the game for you). Remote Tech and FAR are both game changers in the harder direction. If you want a harder game try these one at a time. Parts are relatively difficult to balance vs stock and I would suggest staying away from them until you are comfortable with the whole modding thing.

Nope. With a mun/minmus encounter it could happen with patched conics.

You could also set it up as a duna cycler... though i think the AP for that would be closer to dres.