cantab

The most fuel-efficient transfer is a Hohmann transfer. That has one apsis level with your starting orbit and the other level with your ending orbit. The average of those is the semi-major axis, and from that you can calculate the orbital period, which is two times the transfer length. For visiting the Mun or Minmus, your starting orbit is typically LKO. For visiting other planets, your starting orbit is effectively Kerbin's orbit round the Sun.

Presses. Press the button and you have a 100% chance of never seeing a pie again. Don't press it and you'll get pied in the face when you get your 15 minutes of fame.

Press. Both will probably be yummy. Press the button and you will be rickrolled within the next week when you're least expecting it.

*Presses* Press the button and a robot will flip a coin. If it's heads you get £1000, if it's tails you get £1000 in Monopoly money, if it's edge you die in excruciating agony.

500 sci-fi space warships. My win, I think. Next poster is conscripted into the infantry that is being bombarded from orbit by my sci-fi space warships.

Another factor to consider is how the engine Isp changes with atmosphere. All engines lose efficiency in atmosphere, but some are worse than others. Generally speaking the most efficient engines in vacuum, like the LV-N nuclear engine, LV-909, or KR-2L suffer the biggest performance hit at sea level. And another is your flying. Inefficient ascents can cost you a fair bit of delta-V. Inefficient transfers can too; did your two missions use about the same size burn to leave Kerbin orbit?

I'll admit, this ship is pretty ordinary. Where Jeb is riding it, on the other hand... Standing by for launch. by cantab314, on Flickr

Can't wait to see the entries. And then the next challenge, I'm hoping it'll have some real meat for the teams to bite into

The short answer is: By changing your orbit! Drop into a lower orbit and you'll have a shorter orbital period, boost into a higher orbit and you'll have a longer orbital period. The longer answer is given above.

But how will the online multiplayer have timewarp?

I use flickr. I'll acknowledge it's not as convenient as imgur for posting on the forums here, but they offer lolloads of storage.

Oh no! Yes, this means you're going in exactly the opposite orbit to what you want. In other words, you've put your rescue ship in the single WORST position!I do think that at this point your best option is to relaunch the rescue ship. Launch normally into Kerbin orbit then transfer to the Mun, then arrange a mid-course correction about halfway to the Mun so your Mun periapsis is on the correct side of the Mun and near the equator. You can make another course correction upon entering the Mun's SOI, using radial and normal components, if you need or want. But if you do want to reverse your orbit, or generally make a big inclination chance, the most fuel-efficient approach is to: * Burn at the ascending or descending node to raise your apoapsis as high as you can without escaping. * Fix your inclination at apoapsis. * Burn retrograde at periapsis (or aerobrake when possible) to bring your orbit back down. Bear in mind this is time-consuming, so may not be an option for those running life-support mods.

I cut the air hose and deflate. The next poster instead cut an electric cable.

Kerbals have their little jetpacks. When you're on EVA and *not* on a ladder, press R to activate it, then W/S go forward and back, A/D left and right, and Shift/Control up and down. Be patient and make little taps, don't overdo it or you'll fly off at speed. And know that if a target ship or its marker doesn't appear to be moving sideways, that means you're heading straight at or straight away from it.

Agreed. You can eyeball the angles reasonably well. Or hold an actual protractor against the screen.

Did not need to Google, and not pressing. Press the button and your flight on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is half paid for. But if you can't raise the other half yourself by the end of 2015, the legal wrangling will bankrupt you.

"The Financial Frontier" I like, along with "No Free Launch" (keep it short and simple).

It seems like rather a big change to get from SOI shift bugs though. I'd be more inclined to point the finger at an unexpected gravity assist, but I'm not sure if any of Mercury, Venus, or Earth would have the "ooomph" to boot a probe out of the system at such an angle.

Horizontal takeoff rocket.

I'll pretend to press the button and claim it doesn't work, then leave it as schmuck bait. Press the button to get a .craft that can land three kerbals, a rover, and an ion glider on any planet, and return the kerbals. But all the craft you've built previously get corrupted, and your backup copies of them too.

I do recall people finding that faster drives (such as SSDs) don't help the KSP load time and that it seems to be CPU-limited. Inefficient parsing of the files would explain that. I expect there's considerable room for improvement if whoever's responsible for the applicable bit of coding works on it though.

The majority of games on Steam are complete. The developers spent the money ages ago, and if it's a big name title that's not super-recent then they've probably long since recouped that cost. KSP is not complete, Squad are still developing it and incurring the costs of doing so.

By default dead Kerbals show as "Missing in Action". If you change your savefile to set MissingCrewsRespawn = False, they will instead show as "Dead". In my permadeath save though I did still get one Kerbal showing as MIA at one point. I don't recall the details but I think either they or their ship mysteriously vanished.

Agreed. Even if the answer had been "yes" to including the out-of-game material, it would now have to be "no" since including it would giveaway the author. And just by asking, you indicate that your team's plans are such that said out-of-game material would be plausibly created for your entry, when there may be other entries that wouldn't be likely to have such material made in relation to them.

I redirect sufficient asteroids into the Sun to adjust the Sun's trajectory to miss me and everyone else. The asteroids likewise miss me and everyone else. Unfortunately for the next poster, my ship used a nuclear salt water rocket engine, and the lethally radioactive exhaust plume spreads around them.