cantab

Send your usual replacement rover transport empty, have it pick up the current rover and driver, and fly them across the water.

I'd bet money Whackjob's broken a thousand tons to orbit. The same rocket would land it.(Of course, then you've got to get that thousand ton rocket up to start with. But there's always sending it up empty and fuelling in orbit. Or just building a rocket capable of launching a rocket capable of launching a thousand tons to orbit to orbit.)

I've tended to just name series of rocket designs, with a common name and then a number. If I launch multiple missions with the same design, they all keep the same name; so far things haven't got complicated enough for that to be a problem. It's somewhat arbitrary when I feel I've changed the design enough to warrant a new number rather than just considering it a tweak of the same design. Specifically, in career mode I have the Grey Smudge series, numbers 1 through 22. In that I'll start a new series when I unlock new tech. In Sandbox I have the TMIARS series (Trust Me, I'm a Rocket Scientist) for my "joke" rockets, and the AbR 1 (Ambitious, but rubbish) was my aptly named first attempt at a heavy lifter.

They'll succeed. It's just a question of how fast the landing is. Even with KSP's loldensity, it'd still be too small to have appreciable gravity.

Being so small, Kerbin lost its internal heat ages ago, so has no plate tectonics. /fridgelogic

And I pulled off the Minmus landing on the second go

Probably in the demo version, recovering the Kerbal aboard my stranded SSTO rocket. Had to learn how to aim for an inclination on launch, plane change in orbit, and made a rendezvous. Then did it again because I accidentally terminated the rescue flight SSTO in foreground, rescue ship beyond. Do you think I've got enough ladders? And of course the mission failed 500 m above the ground when the parachute tore off Right now I'm trying an EVA Minmus landing. I'm down, but it's only an achievement when I get back to the orbiter.

Once you're in orbit low TWR has two drawbacks, but neither are dealbreakers. One is that your burns take longer and thus you need more delta-v for the manouver. How much more depends on the transfer. For an idealised low thrust transfer, where you're burning slowly all the way, the delta-v requirement is simply the difference in starting and ending velocities. The other is that your burns take, well, longer so get an autopilot.

150 m/s isn't much. An asteroid or comet encounter is the obvious thing. But personally, I'd like a daringly low lunar flyby. Like low enough that the mountaintops are above it low.

If it is redone I think it would want splitting into three categories: Gliders, impactors, and "other".

Thanks, checking the save file does the trick, along with the reference for the codes here: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Orbit#Orbits_in_the_save_file Pretty easily found my Minmus orbiter has an inclination of 175.7°.

If you're having performance trouble, try this for a "drop-in" fix: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/fps-fix-performance-tweak-guide/ Before that, I got horrible lag especially when looking at Kerbin. After, the game still runs at 10-15 FPS, but it doesn't feel so badly laggy.

My first thought for making polar Munar orbit was to go from polar Kerbin orbit, but it quickly became clear that's not the way to go. You'll be waiting ages for an encounter, for one. Now I think the way to go is with a mid-course correction after you've set up the encounter. Earlier needs less delta-v I believe, but later demands less precision. Tab through to focus on the Mun, set the manouver node, then zoom in and angle the camera so you can play around with the node, including the radials, while getting a close-up view of the Mun encounter and periapsis. Keep that same camera position when you make the manouver itself.

The single most important page on the Wiki: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Basic_Maneuvers EVAing: The coastline is further away than it looks. Don't swim for it unless you want a long wait. Don't go on long walks on Kerbin, especially at timewarp, you'll probably explode. If you must, quicksave early and quicksave often. R turns on your jetpack. Flying: Check your staging before you launch. In particular make sure you release all the launch clamps and fire the first stage engines together. Hit T before launch to turn SAS - automatic stabilisation - on. Helps keep the rocket pointing up. Parachutes tear off if you're in timewarp. And they open 500m above the ground, your altimeter shows altitude above sea level, so if you're over mountains they can open earlier than you expected. You've got a throttle. Use it. See the Basic Maneuvers page for how fast you want to go when launching. Rocket design: Fins go at the bottom of the rocket. It's not a plane. If you're not making orbit, you don't only need more thrust, you need it for more time. Just adding boosters at the bottom isn't very effective. Struts come off by themselves when you separate stages. You don't need to run them to decouplers of their own. Set up an abort action group. I suggest separating your uppermost stage, igniting its engine, and shutting down all other engines. Then when your launch goes wrong you can hit backspace and save your Kerbals. There's an undo. Ctrl and Z like any other program. It may seem to freeze but give it a few seconds and it'll work. PS: Regarding autopilots, ie MechJeb. KSP lets you build rockets and fly them. You want to just build and let the autopilot fly? Cool. You want to just fly stock and downloaded craft and never bother building? Also cool.

How, without mods, can I find the inclination of my orbit around Minmus? Or any other moon for that matter. Mainly I just want to know if it's close enough to equatorial for the ribbon, so it's not critical, but I'd like to have the figure.

Fair point. Although the Mun appears 1.9 degrees across from Kerbin, making Minmus comparatively smaller, Minmus would still be definitely non-stellar. Jool, by contrast, would be 47 arc seconds across max, compartable to Jupiter from Earth.Making me wonder why Minmus just a dot in the game when you're on Kerbin. Is it the "real" Minmus being rendered, or is it "faked". (On a sidenote, the Mun from Kerbin appears the same size as the Earth from the Moon.)

I just noticed this is incorrect. The Tracking Station lists my ship as "Orbiting the Mun". In other situations, such as when you tab through the objects or check the Sphere of Influence in the Vessel info panel, it does just use "Mun", and of course the title screen features "Mün or bust" on the rocket. I'd interpret this as meaning that at the moment, "the Mun" is grammatically correct in normal writing, with "Mun" used for brevity or colloquial speech.

In career put capsules in polar orbits round Kerbin (now returned) and the Mun (still there), to get the EVA reports from the remaining biomes. Redirected my previous planned Minmus mission to interplanetary space and sent up a new one that looks set to enter a nice equatorial orbit. All took a fair few launch attempts, having control issues on the rockets. One in particular wants to wander during the orbital insertion burn, so I have to turn off SAS and set it spinning to keep it stable. Works OK but not so accurate as having proper control.

If they were like the Mun and Minmus, I think we would. The Moon from Earth, and the Mun from Kerbin, both look unique in the pre-telescopic era. They get the definite article because there seems to only be one of them. Minmus, on the other hand, looks like a planet - a bright point of light that moves around compared to the stars.If there was only one naked-eye star in the night sky, I expect we'd call it "the Star", even when we discovered other stars through our telescopes. As for KSP, I say "the Mun" largely to be understandable by people who aren't familiar with the game. If I mention Minmus, I'll just say it's Kerbin's second moon.

To be honest, spending time futzing around to make things work or work well rather than actually playing is why I rarely PC game, period. KSP's been the first exception in years, and I did have to futz with it. The game, stock, to me seems stable enough. 20 hours on the demo and 45 in .23 and no crashes yet. If you add mods and the game breaks somehow, well that should be no surprise for any game, and the fault is mainly with the mods. If you feel you've done everything you want to in stock, then you can fairly say you've "finished". But to have problems with mods breaking the game, then complain that you want more moddability, well I'm sorry but that just seems silly.

I don't think that actually saves anything. It lets you use smaller and more manageable individual launches, but if you want the same interplanetary ship you've got to get the same total mass into orbit. Maybe more, considering the weight of docking ports and the dV you'll need to rendezvous.

In my career save everyone's at Kerbin atm. Jeb's alive IIRC, though he was "Missing in action" before. (Is there some option that turns on/off permadeath?)

In this case, IMHO what's needed is simply smaller liquid fuel tanks. While it might be realistic, I feel this would actually distort the design process. Let's say you want your stage to have four stacks, each with one 800 and one 400 tank. If the 800 tank has a significantly better wet/dry mass ratio, suddenly that's not an efficient design and you're better off fuelling the four engines off 6 800 tanks, however ugly and daft that looks. (Of course it's not like ugly and daft rockets aren't already a thing, but still.) Why would you ever need an oxidizer-only tank? The only use case I can see is on a planet with an atmosphere made of fuel, and an engine that can burn it with stored oxidizer. No such planet or engine exists yet.

Wait and see what Dawn teaches us about Ceres. If we do get other asteroids, maybe there could be one made of a shiny, slightly yellow, metal

For question 1, you have to repeat the experiment! For most experiments four or five runs should be enough to get it all. Also, I think it's been mentioned that transmitting can never permanently "lose" science, you can always get the rest of the points by returning the results.