cantab

For Laythe, a 55.5 km orbit will suffice, in case you were trying for higher. Of course this assumes you have control of the transfer stage to rendezvous. In fact, if you do have control of the transfer stage, you could put the lander on a suborbital trajectory and rendezvous with it from there. It won't be easy, you'll need your timing to be just so, but it's possible. If it then leaves you short of delta-V to get home, use gravity assists to help - Tylo or Laythe can boost you out of the Jool system, or else look for a Duna encounter or another Jool encounter to help drop your solar orbit periapsis for the Kerbin intersect.

How do you guys feel about part clipping? Specifically I'm thinking of hiding some xenon tanks to make my ship look sleeker, but of course it makes it that bit harder to see how the craft's built and to get to the tanks to disable flow or transfer fuel. (And a few other minor clips to make the ship look good, but that's the only thing that'll completely hide parts). Thoughts?

Circularise with the jet pack.

Have you tried simply throwing rocks at it?

Aero. Aero aero aero. Kerbal Space Program is a game that's fundamentally about having fun with accurate physics, and the aerodynamic model sticks out in its massive unrealism. To the point that knowing the stock aero is so unrealistic has discouraged me from making planes; it's put me off an entire segment of the game. (And yes, I know, FAR. I'll look into it sometime, probably after I've done my Jool collab session). As for the other options: Biomes I don't really care for. The current implementation makes science feel grindy, that wants fixing before they're added to more worlds I feel. Ultimately though drawing lines on a map isn't the way to make the worlds more interesting, actually making the surfaces interesting is. The LV-N is currently an acceptable abstraction. It's only one engine after all. Were it to be made more realistic, it needs two things: Nuclear fuel and liquid hydrogen. But the expected lifespan of the reactor is probably long enough to not worry about needing to replenish the fuel, so unless we get more conventional nuclear reactors (a la Near Future Propulsion) it can probably be forgotten about, leaving the engine to just use liquid hydrogen. In that case, I think it would want tying in with a wider separation of the fuels. Two fuels - kerosene and LH - and a single oxidizer would suffice I reckon, with the LH engines being more efficient but the LH tanks having a worse mass ratio. The infinite EVA fuel is a unrealistic, but ultimately I'd say it's not that exploitable. You're per-trip limited, and pushing a command pod around for refills is tedious enough that it won't be the chosen approach for many players. This makes me think that an interesting idea would be a fuel-breathing engine, that combines atmospheric gases with onboard oxidizer. It could work on Jool and on a newly added planet or moon. IIRC such an engine would be less efficient than regular jets because the oxidizer masses more than the fuel, but more efficient than rockets.

Enough is enough! I have had it with these mother-f9ing explosions on this mother-f9ing rocket! Everybody strap in, I'm about to open some f9-ing quicksaves.

My counterargument to this approach, as opposed to the less-specific approach of permitting "non-overpowered" (or similar) mods, is that it will limit challenges to stock plus the popular mods, and deny entries from interesting less-known mods, reducing the diversity of what we see and having a wider negative effect on mod development.Restrictions on the types of mod parts are workable for some challenges. To give an example, suppose your challenge is to build a plane with the best glide ratio. You've reason to restrict aerodynamic parts, you've reason to put stock and FAR entries in separate categories, but you don't need to ban mod engines and structural parts since they'll have little or no effect on the performance of entries. Only in a few challenges - typically those focussed on building a lightweight ship or completing a task with the minimum delta-V or fuel used - will the difference made by MechJeb be at all important.

Ah yes, I'd seen the link before but didn't realise it was a custom version, assumed it was just the latest upstream. Ooops.

I get the feeling that rocket's pretty "forgiving" in terms of ease of reaching orbit, maybe because you've got so much TWR for the circularisation burn. The profile I've been trying, no idea how good it is: Ascend vertically to 10 km, keeping an eye on speed and altitude. If I reach one of the "checkpoint" speeds here, http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Basic_maneuvers#Ascend_to_Orbit, before I've reached the relevant altitude, I throttle back to nearly maintain that speed until I get to the altitude. At 10 km bean it over 45 degrees and floor the throttle. Switch the navball to orbit mode, and at some altitude pitch to follow orbit prograde. Keep tracking orbit prograde until the desired apoapsis is reached. Said "some altitude" is where I'm unsure, I've tried anywhere from 25 to 32 km. Cut throttle and set up a manouvre node to circularise. For the test rocket here, this ended up very similar to just "straight to 10, 45 degrees to establish apoapsis, circularise" profile, and I got a 70x80 km orbit with 75 m/s dV left, but for rockets with lower thrust upper stages it can be quite different. Of course any of these are a vast improvement on how I was when I started out. My first SSTO barely made orbit, without enough fuel left to deorbit. It was the same as the test rocket here, except that it used an LV-T45 not a 30, and had four of the long fuel tanks. Which gives it something like 5550-5600 m/s of dV (depending on whether I added a parachute, I can't tell in my screenshot), but a liftoff TWR of about 1.

EVA between two ships in space separated by at least a kilometre, entirely visually. That means hitting F2 to hide the interface, and no going into the map screen, from when you leave one ship until you enter the other. You can't pause, because that will show the interface (annoying I know), and no using a line of other ships to help show you the way! Score is the separation of the ships at the start squared, divided by the time it takes you. Hard mode: Target ship is smaller than a Jumbo-64 tank. Manley Mode: Target ship is nothing but an external seat on a small structural panel, and you make a round trip. I did something like this not long ago, crossing about 2 km. I was heading for a whacking great space station but STILL managed to lose sight of it for a while.

So I've found a problem with NFP in .23.5, which is causing all the xenon tanks and thrusters, barring the octo-girder xenon tank, the mod provides to be unavailable in career mode. A bummer, considering xenon - unlike argon and hydrogen - can be produced from Kethane. I reported the issue in the mod's thread, http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/52042-0-23-Near-Future-Propulsion-0-42-%28updated-08-03-14-fixes-new-reactor%29?p=1144004&viewfull=1#post1144004 I'm hoping Nertea (NFP's dev) is about and can put out an update in the next couple of days. Failing that I'll have to look for a workaround.

Big SlS?10char

Space Engine certainly looks gorgeous - but I wonder if it would still look so gorgeous on my underpowered graphics card. (Since I don't have a current Windows install because I needed the disk space, I shan't be finding out any time soon.) However while KSP might learn something from SE regarding the detail and interest on individual celestials, it can't try and copy SE's scale. Not if we want to stick to realistic modern technology and sensible mission lengths. (A space probe capable of running for a zillion years is in any case not "realistic modern technology"). At most we could explore Kerbol's neighbourhood with plausible technologies like nuclear pulse propulsion, but even then there's a game balance issue - it's quite hard to make a drive that makes interstellar travel reasonable without making interplanetary travel trivial, with the only real option being something with miniscule thrust and extreme specific impulse, and attendant overhauls to the timewarp system (which want doing anyway mind, the current system is a mess IMHO). And as mentioned by others, Space Engine does not attempt to simulate a rocket comprised of dozens or hundreds of separate components all of which have their own mechanical properties and some of which exert forces on the whole thing. It's that physics simulation that typically limits KSP's performance. This could be handled with an automatic stationkeeping system, that keeps your ships on their Keplerian orbits at the cost of a slow draw of fuel.Overall, perhaps the best result would be if Space Engine, or its procedural generation system, could be used as a planet creation tool to help make new worlds for KSP. Squad would have to come to an agreement with Vladimir (Space Engine's developer) to do that though, and balancing detail between the current handcrafted worlds and the new generated ones may be difficult - even SE doesn't really do that with the real planets VS the generated ones.

Wow, that's a sweet looking station. Regarding MechJeb, no problems here with it. You'll probably want to use the ModuleManager config that puts the function on all pods, so you don't have to worry about the part being present or not. Alternatively, I don't know how well it works, but http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/75170-WIP-Plugin-%280-23-5%29-Burn-Together!-Alpha-v4-%284-21-14%29 might be fun. In any case, the required mods are still just Kethane and Near Future Propulsion, right? And certainly no problems here with someone else taking Laythe, since I can't make planes for poop and hate the SPH anyway.

Yeah, launching into a retrograde orbit simply means launching west (or northwest or southwest etc)

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Basic_maneuvers Check the ascent to orbit guide there, and keep your speed around what it says, at least below 10 km. Trying to bean it up is inefficient and the error I made when I started out.

Is there any magnetic pull as you come in at all? If so, have you accidentally git anything attached to the outward side of the docking port, like a decoupler or an octagonal strut?

Someone mentioned Kerbin's ice caps are good for making land speed record runs, so a base to support that could be useful. As for a base over a Mohole, I recall someone using mod parts (KAS?) to hang a platform on the side of a Munar cliff. In stock you could do something similar with a cantilevered platform and a big counterweight. Might be worth doing if the Mohole is too wide to cross.

"My space program" or "My .23.5 save"

Launch when either KSC or its antipode is directly under the asteroid's projected path. A marker such as a flag at KSC helps you see it on the map, and adjusting the camera so the asteroid's path appears directly behind the centre of Kerbin helps you line things up. When you do your gravity turn, aim slightly west of the desired inclination (to compensate for Kerbin's rotation), and make sure you're not heading retrograde compared to the asteroid! During your ascent switch to map view, open the navball, and aim slightly west or east of your prograde vectore to fine-tune your inclination as you build up speed. Just watch your resources panel if you do this before you're on your final stage.

Unless you have something exceptionally unwieldy or specifically want to eschew them, use reaction wheels for orientation. RCS is invaluable for docking, useful for fine course corrections (though a good alternative is to drop the thrust limiter on the main engine), and serviceable for orbital manouvering and as a sort of emergency fuel reserve.

Yes, the navball marker will shoot off sideways when you near zero speed. That's to be expected, since you'll always have some small lateral component to your velocity. The Mun does rotate, but only slowly, slower than Kerbin.

Due to the lack of inclination of the Mun's orbit, they'll happen every Munth. IIRC they don't change the lighting on the landscape, at least not in stock, so you might not notice one if you aren't looking at the Sun and aren't monitoring solar panel performance. They're good for spoiling ion glider flights though. I wonder if the game renders transits? They wouldn't block solar panels, but it'd be neat to see a little black speck against the Sun.

If you use the regular WASD controls, you'll simultaneously be driving the rover wheels and trying to rotate the craft with any probe core or reaction wheel torque it has. On a low gravity world that can easily flip it. Some people use docking controls for driving to avoid this issue, others remap the wheel control keys. Even without that issue, the low gravity and I believe the low grip of Minmus's surface makes rovers not work so well.

Drop tanks are a viable alternative to full staging. You won't gain quite so much since you're not ditching engine mass, only tank mass, but it's still enough to go beyond what a single stage can do, and it makes it practical to use again by simply docking another set of drop tanks.