cantab

The real question is why you bought land in the equator for a SKI resort

Only if you massively overdo it. It really won't be a problem in Kerbin orbit, just set up manoeuvre nodes and make sure your projected orbit isn't hitting the planet except when you want to land.And I concur with others. Rendezvous takes a little bit of learning and practice then it's second nature, and it's an immensely valuable skill. If you can rendezvous you can do "Apollo-style" missions where you have a separate lander and orbiter, you can do rescue and recovery missions like your current task, you can go after asteroids, and once you also learn to dock you can assemble ships in orbit and do refuelling.

Hmmm...speculation time. Of your mods, I'd point at KAS and Orbital Construction as the main suspects. Both let you change craft around in flight (beyond the usual docking mechanics); if those changes somehow corrupted the craft I can see why it might not get properly saved or might get deleted.

Well, of the selection I favoured Rocket Industry, but as for write-ins, Milliun or Bust.

If you have persistent debris set to anything other than "unlimited", then anything that gets marked as debris risks being automatically cleaned up. I've had issues with debris vanishing when I had a non-zero but finite limit set. Also, if any ship has a part and that part becomes unavailable, the ship will be permanently removed upon loading the savefile without notice. This can occur if you uninstall or update mods after having created it. I wonder if it couldn't also arise from character encoding issues.

Well, let's guesstimate delta-V for Ike capture from an Ike Transfer Orbit, for the prograde and retrograde cases. Ike's orbital speed: ~300-320 m/s (as per Wiki) Orbital speed at apopasis of an Ike Transfer Orbit, with Pe = 370 km (Duna's radius included) and Ap = 3200 km, can be found by the equation here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_orbit#Velocity and is 140 m/s So if you're in a retrograde transfer orbit you'll have around 280 m/s extra speed relative to Ike on entering its SOI. How exactly that affects your capture burn I'm less sure on, but a "penalty" of 280 m/s is the obvious guess. Now compare this to my previously suggested approach. Extra delta-V to escape Duna compared to establishing an Ike transfer: 60 m/s as per the Reddit delta-V charts. Orbital speed at apoapsis of a near-Duna-escape orbit with Pe = 370 km and Ap = 47000 km: 10 m/s The extra cost to reverse your orbit is then just 80 m/s if you aerobrake back down, or 140 m/s is you don't. Either way, to be honest it's pretty small. Duna's low mass, compared to say Jool or Eve, helps us by making all our orbital speeds in its SOI lower.

You have a probe core and solar panels. So I'd just tweak your current design a bit. Ditch the science gear to save weight, swap the nose-mounted chute for a Stayputnik, add radial chutes for your landing back at Kerbin, and optionally put more fuel on so you don't run out again. Don't forget to leave the pod empty! Sending a robotic rescue mission has the advantage that if the rescue mission goes wrong you don't end up with MORE stranded Kerbals!

In KSP, most players do because it's easier. Once you're in a stable circular orbit you can play with manoeuvre nodes until you get what you need. Also, with good flying there's very little difference in fuel usage between launch-to-escape with a pitchover and launch-to-orbit then escape, with both options being somewhat better than launch-to-escape straight up. And even that, if you get the timing right, is still much better than making big burns in solar orbit.In real life, the parking orbit is an opportunity to check over the spacecraft before making the transfer burn. Heck, you can do that in KSP too. Remembered the science gear? Extended your solar panels? Kept a free seat for the guy you're planning to rescue?

Most efficient is lithobraking on Ike. But your ship probably isn't built for it. Next best is as LethalDose says, raise apopasis until it's nearly escape, then reverse your orbit at apoapsis, then aerobrake to put your apoapsis level with Ike's orbit.

Most annoying would I think be any control screws. Switching focus in map view by Shift+Tab - and throttling up my engines. Pressing W to go up - when I'm EVAing and that means go forward. Even trying to bring up the debug menu and getting the Steam overlay instead (before I disabled the Steam overlay because of this). Then there's Kerbodyne decoupler bug, and the extents I went through testing that only to find it was already a solved problem. And, of course, the propensity of Kerbals to suffer fatal trips when walking.

I believe SpaceX are hoping on the "If you build it they will come" argument, and SLS could benefit from that too.And while the SLS will be heavier per kilo, there may be cases where the increased launch cost is less than the cost of "dieting down" a design to go on Falcon Heavy.The SLS taking crew to the space station is more of a last resort, if NASA fall out with the Russians and the private sector fails to deliver. The SLS delivering station modules, on the other hand, is pretty sensible.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/48086-0-21-1-Docking-Strut-1-0-1-0/page7

This mod, right? Dropbox link looks like it still works though I've no idea if they're compatible with .23.5. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/31286-0-22-Ion-Hybrid-Electric-Pack-30-08-13-Soon-FKSP!!!-See-Development-Monitor The engines certainly look dead cool, all sleek sci-fi stuff in contrast to the more "open" engineering of the Near Future stuff.

I encountered this once before. The change was on the periapsis for a Mun flyby, and the "decay" was very consistent regardless of how the craft was oriented, totally different to the wobble that results from flexible ships. (It was a tiny probe so pretty rigid anyway).

Yes, I did look at the link. I pretty quickly recognised it as a hardware appliance doing distributed storage, an approach tried by Wuala several years ago and later abandoned by them.

50% of time at KSC cuts out what I'd say is the "obvious" thing - sending the ball on some loopy space trajectory before it flies through a goal somewhere.

I think it's right to not trust cloud services. However that doesn't mean you can't make good use of them. Don't trust them to not read your stuff and use it, even in ways that are unlawful. They may use it for their own business or advertising, they may pass it on to your competitors, and they will almost certainly allow the government they operate under to read it at will. And even if they are upstanding, they could still get hacked. If you don't want your stuff read like this, encrypt your data before it leaves your machine, and be sure that encryption is strong. Don't trust them to not take your stuff offline, either accidentally or deliberately. Ergo, if you have files you care about losing, do not store the only copy on a cloud service. Cloud storage is good for backing files up and synchronising them between devices, where you keep the primary copy on your local hard drive. It is risky for archiving, when you move the files somewhere else to free up space on your main storage, or for keeping the primary copy of your file (for example using Office Web Apps or Google Docs without auto-syncing them to your PC). On the flipside, your own NAS is only a resilient backup if you can put it in a different building. If it's in the same house as your main PC a disaster like a fire can take them both out. And the aftermath of such a disaster is when you'll most need things like saved passwords or electronic copies of important documents.

I'm not so sure. Competition is a great driver of innovation: look at the first space race, look at developments during wartime, look at tech-oriented industries today. International cooperation conversely is liable to create bureaucracy and slow things down, and increase costs when decisions are taken to give companies work rather than to make a cost-effective mission.And ultimately I feel a manned Mars landing is too prestigious for any superpower or aspiring superpower to be willing to share.

That's some neat work then. I, and I suspect many others, honestly thought it was a custom mod.

Flew to the pyramids on Kerbin. In "easy mode" mind, with a stock plane (the Aeris 3A) and kerbalmaps to guide me. Spotted them rather close and high so had to kill the throttle and turn and descend steeply for a deadstick landing. Was sloppy, but came down intact. Now I'm torn between heading for the inland space centre, or trying to get back to the regular KSC with my fuel left.

I never played the space edition, but remember that Angry Birds is, behind the cartoony graphics, a physics-based game. You fling the birds on ballistic trajectories (the yellow one notwithstanding) and make structures fall over.

For me a "stage" implies that both engines and tanks are dropped. If you just drop tanks, they're drop tanks, though the dropping itself might be called a "staging event". If you just drop engines, well I guess that's the stage-and-a-half kind of stuff that's been mentioned. So I suppose the Space Shuttle would be two stages: SRBs and Orbiter, with the orbiter dropping its drop tank just before circularising. (Though I don't think it was ever done, the Shuttle could have taken the ET into orbit if desired.)

Fly my own ships. Instead, after relaxing by letting off a few fireworks, I took the Aeris 3A for a spin. First flight I did a turn over the ocean and tried to land back at the runway. Missed, but set her down safely on the grass. Then my second flight took me over the mountains - rather closely over them at one point - and now I'm cruising west towards the deserts, which have just appeared on the horizon. Actually my first time "seriously" flying planes in KSP.

In my current main save, Neilgee. Seems an appropriate name. His mission was a bit of a fiasco but in the end he got back safely. Sadly he was subsequently killed.

Selection bias much. But yeah, I'm used to web forums. Reddit I wasn't able to get into so much. I see the motivation behind their efforts to order topics based on popularity but I distrust algorithms like that somewhat, and I don't think their KSP community's as big as ours. Though the (now-retired) weekly challenges are nice, I might try working through them once I'm done with my current projects. Curse I've not looked at as much, but I don't think it