cantab

The kethane mod lets you mine kethane and turn it to xenon, but the equipment's heavy so not really suited to light probes. Otherwise you can transfer from a refueller like others have said - but really, with ion engines it's relatively easy to pile on the dV, especially if you use drop tanks. As for when to release the probe, there's three main options. Release it in LKO, in which case it goes up on a standard launcher. Release it after the departure burn, in which case it needs either a Kerbin departure stage or just an overengineered launcher eg one that normally puts bigger things into LKO. Or release it when the stage before runs out of fuel, which may be most efficient overall but liable to litter Kerbin orbit.

Because you built the plane with zero angle of attack when the fuselage is level :-p 15 degrees is a reasonable AoA for maximum lift.Anyway, what annoys me that shouldn't: why can't I get a wide engine fairing around a narrower engine?

I investigated bouyancy a fair bit, and only really concluded that it's weird. Drag I think matters more, since water follows the same drag cx mass rule as air, but worse. That's why intakes work well. Wings are good too and might look more pleasing, but their fragility means they can break on entering or leaving the water. As for propulsion, well in stock it's basically jets. For mods Firespitter has plenty of props, they work fine above or below the waterline. My ugly-as-sin but quite functional yacht uses four Firespitter electric props powered by a nuclear reactor from Near Future and does about 30 knots.

OK, if you're in Kerbin time then yes, there's a transfer window on that date, and the other stuff you said in your first post matches what alexmoon's planner is telling me.Playing around with the advanced settings (set the longest value under time of flight to the time you want to take), you can get a 100 kday transfer for 1600 m/s if you leave a bit later. Of course you'll need to check the return window too, and that's where I think you might have a problem.

I've found it to be a nightmare however you do it. Tiny mouse movements end up causing massive swings in the angle of a part you're attaching, making for a frustrating time. Editor Extensions helps, you can switch between VAB and SPH style building and enable/disable vertical snapping amongst other things, but it's still a hassle.

You can just come off the gas and you keep right on going. That's stupid. It's probably a hack Squad put in to get round the fuel problems: you can put a huge tank on your ship and it'll be gone in minutes. The system's way too empty. It needs some nebulae to hide in and look cool, and a proper asteroid field where you can actually see more than one asteroid at a time. And everything's too far apart. Again Squad just hack round it with that silly timewarp thing instead of actually fixing the problem. And there's no beam weapons, it's all just missiles. I know, I know, it's in alpha, but I'd have thought it'd be pretty obvious to have. And flying the missiles is ridiculously hard, everything's just way too fast. Squad should have kept the speeds to a few hundred mph or something, something that'd actually give you a chance of seeing your target before it's flown past you.

I'm pretty sure the OP's working in Earth time though. The Hohmann transfer should take 75 Edays or thereabouts.One thing left is that maybe the OP's not actually in a transfer window, and Alarm Clock is being misleading. Shiv, can you post the current date of your save? (You should be able to get it from the tracking station).

Xeon. Just the one n. With Intel's current line-up you are unfortunately forced to choose between more cores and faster ones. Compare for instance the Xeon E5-2697 with the i7-4790K: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2009&cmp[]=2275 . If you're running lots of services and/or heavily multithreaded services the xeon wins, but with a single-threaded process - which according to Streetwind includes the current Minecraft server - the core i7 blows the vastly more expensive xeon away.

Agreed, double-check the case size. You don't want a mobo that won't fit! I think the high-end i5's the right choice given KSP demands fast single-threaded performance while some other games will benefit from the cores. If a saving is wanted, you could consider the top-end i3 rather than a slower i5, KSP will run better on it. As for the mobo, another that's well recieved and well-priced is the ASRock Z97 Pro3. It only supports one graphics card though, so if you think you'll ever want to run sli/crossfire you might want to pick another board. More generally I'd say don't get hung up on H vs Z, there's overlap in the price ranges anyway, but go for a 9 series rather than 8 series chipset so you don't have any worries about CPU support.

This. Or at least a multi-body mission in general. Since you've done Jool 5s, maybe a "Minus Jool 5" where you go everywhere *but* the Joolian moons.

The only other factor I can think of is that Duna's orbit is fairly elliptical. If you're meeting it when it's far from Kerbin you might take longer to get there. But I don't know if it's enough to explain the discrepancy.

(Star name) b. Yeah, boring I know.

Nice one OP. It's great to see it flying over and it's hard to miss when it does! As for viewing it with magnification, that's tricky. I suggest a scope on a high quality manual mount, that you can easily move to follow the ISS. Many motorised mounts can't keep up. Then use a low power, wide angle eyepiece to make things as easy as possible. The ISS has an apparent size about equal to Jupiter, so you only need 30x or so to make out the shape of the station. The final ingredient is to "lie in wait". Get a chart for your location showing exactly where the ISS will be, point your scope at a spot on it, and wait for the station to enter the view, rather than trying to chase it across the sky.

You have the game in Earth time, I hope. When you get that 160 day trip, is your Duna encounter the first or second time you cross its orbit? If the decond, try and tweak it a little so you instead encounter on the first crossing. If you're still stuck, try using Alexmoon's calculator.

Also, some basic piloting tips: Don't use SAS. Even in straight and level flight it's likely to put you in a "cross-control" situation, rolling one way and yawing the other. In an extreme case that's a great way to enter a spin. Do use trim to maintain level flight. Ctrl+WS, Ctrl+X resets it. Turn by banking, like a real plane.

Sure. Since it's the *first* rocket it's just going to be chute, pod, little fuel tank, engine, for a quick up-and-down hop. Only hazard is getting the staging wrong and opening the chute on launch, and that's why I've got a liquid engine not an SRB.

Disclaimer: going by wiki values here. For manned craft, you may well be right given the command pods have torque on the same order of magnitude, but for unmanned craft the reaction wheel gives 20 times the torque most probe cores have alone. That's clearly going to make a huge difference to the handling.

On the flipside, firing into the air (whether or not you're aiming at anything) is a very real danger to others. It may be illegal and it's reckless unless you live in the absolute middle of nowhere.

I believe the old school way of doing things was to know how fast you needed to be.

The reaction wheel is just a reaction wheel, while the advanced stabiliser provides SAS functionality, using things like RCS and control surfaces to keep the rocket on course. All command pods and probe cores, excepting the external seat, now have SAS anyway so this is usually moot, but in past releases they didn't. Both parts had to be kept around to avoid breaking old craft. EDIT: Oops, I was unaware .24 had rebalanced them. So now it's the inline wheel that's outclassed in aspects other than cost.

The Saturn V never used asparagus staging...Anyway, I haven't played KSP in the past week due to faffing around with my PC. But now I've got Windows 8.1 and Xubuntu 14.04 installed on my new SSD, so hopefully I'll get a bit done later tonight.

It seems a bit niche to me. Spacecraft that are going to move under their own power I and most players generally want to be symmetric, which is trivial with radially-attached docking ports but won't generally work with the inline port. Space stations I and most players generally want lots of docking ports on for expansion, and that's easier with radially-attached ports or ones stuck on a 6-way hub. There are good use cases for the inline port, but not so many. Though it did get me thinking, a 2.5 m version might be handy, you could dock larger spaceplanes or sleek interplanetary ships to stations with it.

Pretty much. Many of the easter eggs are large compared to Kerbals and typical ships. I think it's partly to make them possible to see from further away, and partly because big things are more impressive.

This is a bug I encountered. Windows 8 wants to put a "System Reserved" partition on whatever it thinks is drive 0, ie the first drive it sees. If that drive is already in use you get the error. The workaround I used was to disconnect all drives but the one I want Windows 8 on.

I'd say the actual coding's the small bit for making a game these days. The big bit is the artwork, so if it's to be a 3d game get to grips with 3d modelling software such as Blender.