cantab

I duck. The next poster doesn't.

Or a precooled jet engine, which is what Reaction Engines are working on. We already have the RAPIER based on the Reaction Engines SABRE. Arguably that pre-cooling is a function of the intake more than the engine proper.

A retrograde orbit isn't any harder to get into, but it makes landing on the primary (eg Duna) and orbiting any moons need more delta-V. To make sure you don't enter such an orbit, set a capture burn at your periapsis then target a moon. If the AN/DN are near 0 that's prograde, if they're near 180 that's retrograde.

That would be a neat idea. The game could have Mechjeb-like features but with the twist that they're from the Kerbals rather than just an autopilot part. Not sure where that would leave probes - maybe you could assign a Kerbal as "Mission Controller" for the probe core to get the same benefits.As for the admin building, it could simply be a place to expose the progress tracking that already exists in the savefile.

Agreed. Knowing the exact hardware would help. But just having a separate GPU is a good suggestion it's a higher end or gaming-oriented laptop.

I've experienced an unexplained orbit shift like this before, when my Mun periapsis was gradually changing with no engine thrust and the same change regardless of orientation. It seems to be some sort of bug. You can work around it by (non-physical) timewarping whenever possible, though that's no help if you're trying to aerobrake.

The progress tracking section in the save file records, for various events in each SOI, just the time, vessel name, flag, and crewmembers. No exact co-ordinates unfortunately. The science system records biomes you've returned science from but again no precise locations.

Make a correction on entering Duna's SOI, using a combination of normal and radial components to get your periapsis at the right latitude and altitude. Duna is less massive than Kerbin, your orbital speeds will be lower. If you're in a high orbit you really won't be moving very quickly. 120 m/s at 20,000 km sounds reasonable, considering Ike does about 300 m/s at 3,200 km.

Do it the other way round. Set a node with about the right amount of delta-V, then drag it round the parking orbit and look for the close approach or encounter with the destination. Refine as needed.

Put a rock into orbit round Ike. Then after switching between the ship and the space centre a couple of times, found the ship surrounded by a few pieces of debris - but nothing missing from the ship itself! Mysterious...

If there's nothing left at the landing site there's no way of knowing precisely where to go. If there is stuff left, eg descent stages, then you could just hyperedit a kerbal about the place to flagplant. Though I think you'll still need to savefile edit if you want to backdate the planting.

That's why I put an RTG on anything heavy enough to not mind the mass.

The ejection angle is a consequence of when in your orbit you burn. So to change it you change the time of the manouevre.

Also in the obvious things to check department: Right-click your fuel tank in the VAB. Check it's full, enabled (there should be green arrows, if there are red no signs that means it's disabled, click to switch), and isn't a jet fuel tank.

Wouldn't Orbiter be better for this kind of stuff?

And I got my comeuppance. The lander came in fast, with periapsis below the surface to start with, and no choice of landing zone meaning the terrain was over 3 km high. The result: Bob Kerman did not survive. And this one I will not be reverting.

I'm pretty sure it's like a linear port. So if you mount them on the sides of the tank you can thrust up and down, left and right, but not forward and backwards. If you want to use them for a main engine you'll need to stick them on the base of the tank, using symmetry to get balanced thrust.

Shamelessly savescummed. I had set up a small correction for aerobraking on my Duna mission, bringing apoapsis down to about level with Ike, but decided to first undock my Duna lander and have that make its own correction for an approach for landing. After making both corrections, I realised that of course both craft would be hitting Duna's atmosphere at the same time. Derp. Retry, and this time I'll have the lander separate much earlier and make a small retrograde burn, thus ensuring it will come down plenty before the main ship does its aerobrake.

The badlands were the last biome I hit IIRC. They're not the biggest of areas or the most visually obvious, and they're the only non-polar Kerbin biome to not be present on the equator, so you need to launch to a suitable inclination or put a normal component on the deorbit burn.

Alternatively, disable the fuel tanks you don't want fuel draining from. A little more work to re-enable but saves you littering space.

The potential benefit of wings comes from requiring less engine thrust, and thus less mass and drag from those engines. If you can replace a ton of engine with less than a ton of wing that's where your gains can come from. Whether that's enough to overcome the impact of staying lower for longer is another matter.Am I right in recalling that in stock wings also have less regular drag for their mass, but have an additional drag component associated with their lift generation?

On the other hand there are similar proposals but using other metals, such as aluminium. It's probably just one of those things that's interesting on paper and small-scale but not worth it economically.

Re Kerbin's atmosphere, it's effectively very dense (because of the screwy drag model) but it does drop off quickly with altitude. At 5 km the pressue and thus drag is down to 37% sea level. By 10 km it's 14%.

"Ike'll be easy. It's just like the Mun, all we need is to add a few boosters to our orbiter and job done."

I'd never thought of it the OP's way. Maybe there's some truth there. Moho's been covered. Eve could be after it being the evening star, or because it's evil, or both. Gilly I'm not sure about, it just seems a frivolous jokey name. Mun, Duna, and Jool are obvious. Minmus is probably as in mini, ie small, and Dres is in analogy to Ceres. Laythe and Tylo I've no idea about. Vall is presumably from Valhalla, the Viking heaven, though I'm not sure why. Bop is a frivolous jokey name, and Pol is obvious. Eeloo is so named because it's elusive.