cantab

Low orbit maybe? You'll go faster. Or a "hopper" lander that can fly about.

The Apollo program used a craft where 5/6 of the weight was held up by jets, to simulate lunar gravity. You could try something similar, if there's a way to disconnect an engine from the throttle, or else use solid boosters tweaked to the right thrust and infinite fuel so they don't run out.

Small asteroids will be treated like spacecraft, so movable but without their own gravity. Said gravity would be negligible anyway. Big asteroids will be on rails, such big ones wouldn't be feasible to move anyway, not even for Whackjob.

Been practising rocket landings on Kerbin before I go for a Munshot. Quite a lot of explosions. One time when I set down on a slope and the lander started sliding fast, I had my Kerbal bail but he was still moving with the lander. The blast threw him 400 metres. And then there's this landing. Hey, any you walk away from right?

There's a few of them around the hangars. I assume they're meant to be ruins of smaller buildings, yes.

Everything floats in KSP at present. I imagine if they ever fix the ocean behaviour, then the asteroids will sink.

Minmus mission: Returned from the second EVA landing with a razor-thin margin of fuel, largely thanks to sloppy rendezvousing. Decided not to push my luck further, and made a small inclination change to fly over one of the Flats. (Ie not the Greater, Great, or Lesser Flats, but the ones that are even smaller.) After getting that EVA report, return to Kerbin. Mun polar orbiter: Waited around to get EVA reports from over the Polar Crater and Twin Craters, then returned to Kerbin. Sun mission (ie Kerbin escape): I nearly messed this up. Escaped Kerbin, grabbed the Crew and EVA reports, then burnt for return to Kerbin. Even lined up a neat, though needless, Mun gravity desist. Then went to do Minmus stuff. Then checked back on the Sun mission to find the encounter with Kerbin I'd set up was nearly a full solar orbit away! So had to burn the right way this time to get back into Kerbin's SOI on a more reasonable timescale. Good thing I had enough fuel. All told, just over 1000 science points earnt from the three missions. While I could do more science with the starting tech, there's 1330 points to be had just from EVA landings on the rest of the Minmus biomes, I think it's about time to unlock some tech. I might also grab Engineer Redux, save me hand-calculating any more delta-vs.

Agreed, in the first pic that looks like the Moon not the Mun, and the spacecraft is definitely the Orion CSM. And in the second I think the darkness is just because it's a photo of a screen.

Sounds like you've covered all your bases. Pics?

Pick any real or fictional thing you think is cool, recreate it in KSP.

How much fuel do you have left? If it's more than 2 units, you should be able to make orbit, though you won't have much for the rendezvous. Keep swapping between map view and EVA view (with M) to help align orbits and get an intersect.

Depends on the size of the asteroid. A biggish one you can "land" on, though it's still pretty "loose". A small one you more rendezvous with. Deimos (not an asteroid, I know) is just big enough that if you jump you won't escape it.

I've not stranded any in career yet. Once my ships reach orbit they work great. It's the reaching orbit bit that doesn't always go to plan.

How do the craft files handle symmetry? Do they actually list a part once with a flag to say #x symmetry, or do they list each time and the symmetry is just handled by the UI.

I think spoilers

Even tuning everything down in the game doesn't set the graphics as "low" as they can go. There's more room for tweaking in the config file, so keep that in mind. There are also "welding" mods, that let you combine multiple parts into one or have ready-made combinations, and thus reduce part counts on bigger ships.

The Kerbol system is about 1/10 the size of the real solar system, for both planet and orbit sizes. Surface gravity on Kerbin, however, is the same as Earth, meaning it would still hold onto its atmosphere. It also implies either that Kerbin, and the other bodies in the system, are unphysically dense, or that the gravitational constant is stronger. And, of course, the smaller scale lowers delta-V requirements making everything "easier".

Left Shift being throttle up has caught me out so many times when trying to cycle through objects in map view. Typically by the time I realise my periapsis is below the ground. And I can't use Right Shift instead, because that's the Mod key on Linux since Alt-click gets intercepted by the OS to move the window around.

That's one impressive mission. Great use of gravity assists.

You'll need a mission to recover the old data. Rendezvous with the old craft, EVA over, take the data out of the old capsule and any experiments, and EVA back to the new mission. Then if you like you could land the new mission in a different biome for more science, or just head back to Kerbin. I'd say go for the recovery, it'll give you some good rendezvous and EVA practice.

This near-perfectly sums up KSP as well as it does Mythbusters. http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/mythbusters-remixed.htm

Indeed. An actual asteroid belt in KSP would teach people that they're really empty. I'll second a telescope part or two being nice. I'm thinking it could be a science experiment. You'll get a bit if you just plonk one down at KSC. You'll get more if you take it away to a nice dark mountaintop. And you'll get lots more if you put it in space.

Caps Lock switches between coarse and fine controls in a craft, I've no idea if it works for a Kerbal. Possibly not, since there's no indication of it. I think if it were changed it would have to be a fine/coarse switch like that, just weakening the jetpack would stop you doing things, and an automatic surface/orbit switch would switch when you want it least, like when you're killing your horizontal speed for an EVA landing.

Not built one myself, but I'd suggest batteries and/or an RTG. You don't really want the thing going dead when it passes into Kerbin's shadow. And some RCS, just in case you've got a tricky bit of docking and want to dock the station to the ship rather than the other way round, or if you need to avoid a crash with debris.

At least on Linux KSP doesn't insist on being launched from steam. So a copy made of the game will play just fine whatever Steam do.