Greenspan

I admit it would kinda be fun as an abort mode, hit backspace the sepatrons pull away your kerbals then as the RSO hit backspace again to terminate the flight.

No such thing as Geostationary orbit over North Pole, Geostationary is only possible over the equator.

Yeah, I don't see why this is considered weird. How many successful Shuttle launches did they have before the Challenger disaster? There's random noise in every launch that might cause your weakest components to fail. If you have a good design you will have many successful launches and few unlucky failures, if you have a poor design you will have few lucky sucessful launches and many failures.

I was just about to ask the same thing! Does the Mun even have enough gravity to perform a free return?

What if you took the same knowlege and calculated what it would take to perform a Earth-Mars mission? The equations would be the same, just some of the fundamental parameters would change (people down in the Science Lab forum could probably help). I think that would be much more impressive to an outsider who knows nothing about KSP; that you took this knowlege from a game and applied it to a real world problem.

Why are people against diversifying the ways to gather science? I don't understand the argument against time based experiments. People will timewarp through the experiment so it will take 0 time, so our solution is to make experiments that take 0 time... Does everyone only play with one ship at a time or something? I know I have several ships performing planetary transfers, returning to Kerbal, etc, I can't just timewarp through one thing because I have many things going on, but maybe that's just me. Instead of just "waiting" some people will use the time to launch/focus on other missions, some people might choose to just warp through it; is that really the end of the world? If you don't want to do time based experiments, then don't! Play the game how you want. Time based experiments would diversify the career mode and make it more intersting.

It would be nice if KSP (stock and/or EDU) more closely mirrored our real solar system. Everyone is memorizing the delta-v to get from Kerbin-to-Mun, the phase angles to transfer from Kerbin to Duna, LKO starts at 70km, etc which is all a bunch of useless information in the real world. That's one of the things I liked when I played Orbiter, I ended up memorizing the height/velocity of the ISS and real facts about the real space program.

I would avoid putting it on your application especially since it is for undergrad they are more interested in well rounded people who work hard, have a drive to succeed, and have diverse experiences. They might look at it as "Look how much time/effort this guy wasted on a game" even though we all know that's wrong. I think it might be possible to carefully word it in a way that it could work, but it would be challenging. If you do I'd suggest you take your app to a college counselor or science teacher and get their feedback, they will be very similar to the people reviewing your application. As far as the stigma of videogames, I lived through playing gobs of games in high school and college so I know whats up. Yes, you can learn a lot from playing video games but at the same time if you spent the same amount of time studying you'd be Einstein. There's a difference between playing in KSP and grinding through Fundamentals of Astrodynamics.