cantab

I concluded my Minmus Kethane Expedition by docking the ship to my station in MKO. It was an absolute pig of a docking taking three attempts, and shamefully I was only able to do it with the Navball Docking Alignment Indicator. The docking connection is just between the reactors on the ship and the pair of monoprop tanks on the station. The ship had RCS only fore-and-aft, and main engines thrusting laterally. Add in the ship being 100 tons and pretty slow to respond to pitch and yaw, and the "target prograde" marker being incredibly unstable. With a tankful of kethane at the station and the ship ready for another mission, I then returned the four crewmembers and a load of science in one of my science return capsules: Full album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/52548818@N05/sets/72157644688356583/

The more "realistic" case would be a continuous 1 g acceleration, spending half the trip speeding up and the other half slowing down. Given unlimited delta-V, this is likely to be as fast as humans will want to travel over long distances, though for short trips or in the military higher accelerations might be accepted. If you want to try this in KSP, then of course the simplest approach is to use the infinite fuel cheat. Be prepared for some long burns though, since you'll be flying the whole trip in at most 4x real speed.

This looks interesting. Crew Manifest works but it felt a little klunky, having the transfers on the normal right-click menu is more straightforward.

What's the latest?

Bear in mind the capture burn only considers this part: with a low Moho periapsis already established, burn retrograde until you have an apoapsis *just* within Moho's SOI, so you're on a very elliptical orbit. To then get down to a low circular orbit requires another big slice of dV. If you don't have a low enough initial periapsis just capturing will need more than the maps say. And I think it also matters whether you hit Moho at its periapsis or apoapsis (or in between), but I can't remember which is better.

Beat Pokemon Red, Blue, or Yellow in less than zero minutes. (Those games are so buggy it might actually be possible!)

Amongst other things I sent my spare Duna lander-rover towards Eve. I thought of sending it uncrewed, but decided I'd want someone around to fix broken wheels. Matt Kerman will have plenty of alone time in that cupola.

You can read most of these out from the persistence file. Alternatively VOID's extended orbital information gives you most of it. And the time of any periapsis passage will do.I'm not sure exactly how I'd do this rendezvous, but I can think of a couple of methods: If you aren't in a hurry, wait until Kerbin's around the target's periapsis, then leave Kerbin's SOI. Put yourself in a phasing orbit, probably between Kerbin's and the target's but maybe wider than the target's, such that in a few orbits you'll have an intersect near your shared periapsis. If you are in a hurry, wait until Kerbin's "catching up" on the target, then leave, taking a short(ish) diagonal trajectory between the two orbits to an intersect. Or you could take a third option: don't send a rescue mission at all. I can't imagine it would take more than a small correction from it to get onto a Kerbin aerobrake trajectory. Monopropellant, residual fuel, or even Get Out And Push might be able to it, and EVAing the Kerbal back to low Kerbin orbit on his own would certainly be possible. (Challenging, but possible).

There aren't any Kerbodyne-size (3.75m) reaction wheels. The Rockomax-size (2.5m) ones are indeed not rigid enough. It is I believe a property of the part: when building in the VAB, you'll notice the 2.5m reaction wheel has a node size (the green blob) matching normal 1.25m parts, not normal 2.5m ones.As for wobbles, remember that the "Control from here" location (right-click any command module or docking port to set it) determines what parts SAS tries to hold orientation of. It may help to change this. My station started wobbling badly with SAS not helping until I switched to controlling the docking port at the far end of the heavily-loaded and full-of-torque parking lot.

I've done the releasing the rover without setting the parking brake thing. Ended up over 4 km away.

Similar to ELF. I'll go back to earlier saves if I'm hit by game bugs. I also will for dumb oversights like missing rendezvous because I'm texting. But if it's a "real" error on my part I'll accept the consequences. I don't tend to use quicksave proper much though. My online backup backs up the persistence hourly, and Kerbal Alarm Clock makes backups when I let it change ships. And if need be I will kill the game so I go back to my last autosave.

Indeed. Why would you try and land the whole thing when you can just park it in orbit for later refuelling and replacement of the capsule.

The Hohmann Transfer's the most fuel-efficient direct route. It's certainly possible to expend more delta-V for a faster transfer. If you're using Alexmoon's transfer calculator, you can cap the transfer time in the advanced options, or just click the spot you want on the chart. Even in stock, you can get loads of delta-V out of the nuclear engines if you're prepared to put up with some long burns. An LV-N and a Jumbo-64, propelling a 1.75 ton payload (I bet you can do a Duna lander in that), would get over 12 km/s of delta-V. During a launch window you could get from Duna to Kerbin in 10 (24-hour) days with that, and that's without aerobraking.

Beat Desert Bus

I noticed visible seams in the terrain when I was flying over Minmus the other day. Could see the stars through them. Didn't get close enough to show more than a couple of pixels wide though.

Simple-ish way to confirm your ships aren't faulty: Backup your persistence file. Find the ships and remove their fuel, making them much lighter. Try to dock. If this works, then your problem is just that the ships are too heavy for the docking ports to pull them together. Your solution then is to line things up more accurately, making sure you approach on a straight line towards the target, not obliquely or at an angle as the pictures above show.

You whine about game balance, then open admit to using the most imbalanced, least realistic thing of all: time warp. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I'd rather play ten excellent games than one "perfect" one.

Probably because it's percieved as a problem that young people will drive recklessly and have crashes. There's been campaigning in Britain, where the driving age is 17 I think, to impose extra restrictions on young drivers, things like no driving with a load of equally-young passengers or no night driving. The same problem is not percieved in relation to private pilots, most likely because flying isn't common.

When I had the same thing happen (but not with Jeb) when a Kerbal fell two inches, I didn't hesitate in using Crew Manifest to revive him. I'll accept "genuine" deaths, but not blatant game bugs.

Well, arguably, you know you're a noob when you attempt a Mun landing before you've done a Minmus one.

By death toll, I killed four Kerbals when their rocket collapsed on the pad due to lack of struts and I hadn't set the abort action up. By stupidity on my own part, when I launched my ship in the Jool collab I realised I'd stuck two antennae on with symmetry instead of just one. So I tried to shoot the unwanted one off with whack-a-kerbal. After a few misses and underpowered hits, I ramped up the projectile speed and proceeded to blast the capsule clean off the rest of the ship. The capsule and its occupants survived, but I felt like a right twit. By explosiveness, my early not-very-serious attempts at a heavy lifter resulted in some impressive firework shows.

Way back in the demo I pulled off a rescue mission that entailed making my first ever rendezvous (with a ship in an inclined Kerbin orbit) and inter-ship EVA. Then 500 metres above the ground the parachutes opened and tore off, leaving both Kerbals to slam into the ground in a fireball.

If that's the only problem I think it can be fixed, people had similar issues when the .23.5 update came out.

It turns into a wench in mid-flight. No objections from me. The wench lobs a beer barrel at the next poster.