SkyRender

Another minor thing to consider: rotate the rocket 90 degrees if you're planning to go east (or west, I guess). It's not a good idea to have bilateral symmetry solely along the axis you're turning into, and the problems that causes only amplify as you add more weight to the equation.

Challenging. Back then, there were no landing legs, and any speed faster than about 1m/s would knock the engine bell off when landing on it. Obviously there was no return from that trip either, though it was before persistence existed, so that wasn't such a big deal.

FAR is fantastic if you like to have your planes and rockets flip out of control and become impossible to regain control of the second their aerodynamic profile deviates more than about 5% from perfect. Stock is considerably more forgiving, both in terms of recovery potential and threshold for flipping out of control.

Not even that. As I said, it was a brief but glorious period when CD-ROMs were larger-capacity than hard drives. Many games released on CD-ROM between 1991 and 1993 have no DRM whatsoever. One game in particular in my collection (Jones in the Fast Lane) even has a comment on it in the manual, begging users not to take advantage of its lack of DRM.

The fast transmission rate is very useful in certain situations. Most notably, if you have a probe on a suicide drop into Jool's atmosphere or on a super-fast fly-by of a celestial body, being able to transmit faster can make a huge difference.

There was a brief, glorious time during the early days of CD-ROMs when games had no DRM (and indeed, had their DRM stripped when converting them to CD "talkie" versions in some cases). This was because CD-ROMs at the time had a capacity of ~640MB, while hard drives topped out at 500MB. Meaning that being on a CD-ROM was basically a form of DRM in and of itself. That era was short-lived...

Demos and DRM-free content are making a comeback via the indie game scene, actually. Even a few big-name studios are releasing DRM-free content on GoG and the like. Really, the main reason why most studios don't do demos any longer is because demos actually are very hard to justify. A good demo for a good game helps, but any other scenario (good demo/bad game, bad demo/good game, bad demo/bad game) does not to varying degrees.

I find it extremely enjoyable myself. It's given me all sorts of new and interesting challenges to take on.

The ceiling for jet engines is much more strict in 1.0 and beyond. You can't stick a billion intakes on and expect to be thrusting at full throttle while at the 50km mark any longer. Similarly, you can't reasonably expect to coast at 20km for 2 minutes straight and build up massive speed. Now it's a game of building up as much speed as you can before you start getting into the ultra-thin part of the atmosphere. Specifically, I find that aiming at around 25 degrees above the horizon once you're over about 12km and thrusting at max speed will get the best results. By the time the air thins out too much for the engines to do much, you will have gotten a solid 1000 to 12000m/s speed. As an added bonus, you'll be pointing almost perfectly for the rocket mode change-over as well.

Actually, HarvesteR recently commented on why there isn't axial tilt in KSP right now. That reason being that it causes Bad Things to happen with the PQS terrain generation as it stands now.

Ever wanted an ultralight SSTO that can be used for more than just trips out to orbit? Then the Tourjet is your craft! This inconspicuous little number packs quite a punch in reality. It gets up to orbit with superlative ease, and doesn't even need a Pilot to fly it! It also reaches orbit with a goodly amount of dV available, but the best part is that it has docking ports on board. Meaning you can refuel it up in orbit and take it anywhere in the Kerbin system with its healthy ~1900dV when fully fueled! All that for only 360/440 LF/O per full tank. Not too shabby, eh? Pick one up today!

Most of the "put an asteroid in orbit around (body)" or "eject an asteroid from the solar system" contracts are pretty absurd. Especially when it asks this of a class E asteroid. I mean it's more doable now since you can mine the asteroids down to hollow husks, but even so.

Once you're in a system, distance is by and large irrelevant. It's only if you're in a hurry that you have to consider distance, and I doubt you are if you're doing a Joolian mission. Bop and Pol are roughly equivalent in trouble for getting anything from them down to the inner moons, so it would be best to use Pol as your mining base.

From a purely time-centric perspective, it's better to have the ore converted in orbit, especially for bodies that have long day/night cycles on the surface. Otherwise you're getting decidedly less than peak performance for your converters since they'll be without solar power for half the time (Well, except for if you mine at the poles, I guess). I suppose you could use RTGs exclusively, but that would be an awful lot of extra mass... Though if the refinery's never leaving the surface, who cares, right?

Rockets are still not that hard in 1.0, actually! The main things to remember are that it should have a fairly sleek form (ie. no sudden flat or jutting bits hitting the airstream on your way up), and that you have to perform the gravity turn procedure gradually starting at launch now if you want it to go smoothly. Having an engine with good gimbal capabilities can help a bit with the trip up, and having fins can help even more (though be careful with that if you're using strap-on boosters: if you have a non-symmetrical distribution of boosters around your fins, it will make you start to turn in usually unwanted directions!). Planes... well, they have a few basic rules. The first is, center of lift behind center of mass. (You can check it with the CoM/CoL indicators in the vehicle construction scene.) That's always been true, though, so you may well have known that. The next big point with planes is: have enough lift and control with your wings for the plane you've built. You can kind of cheese that right now by having absurdly high thrust for the size of your vehicle, but that's a bit cheat-y. Just like with rockets, keep the design so the part that's hitting the airstream (the front of the plane) has a needle-like profile for any and all surfaces. Or a ram air intake, which aren't particularly aerodynamic but are great for making jet engines actually work.

It sounds to me like your problem is not so much what you know, but rather how you present it. It doesn't really matter how right or wrong you are if your attitude stinks; people aren't going to listen to you if you treat them poorly. Your description of how interacting with other people tends to work for you is completely symptomatic of someone who does not exercise appropriate tactfulness. It's an annoying aspect of the social dance that's nonetheless necessary if you want to be taken seriously. Best to either accept it and learn the dance, or find someone who can tolerate your inability to do the social two-step and who is willing to do it for you.

You got a pretty easy set of tourists there. Sometimes their itineraries aren't even in the same ballpark as each other. I've seen tourists wanting to go to the outer planets grouped in with ones who want to see the inner planets before.

That's nothing. I once time-warped a vessel through an SoI change and found that it had no power despite the solar panels being deployed. Why? They were pointed exactly away from the sun during the time warp. Luckily that flight had Kerbals on board, and I was able to reorient the ship by the old get-out-and-push method.

I only wish it were possible to list Dandy Kerman (he's a dandy Kerman... in space), but alas. Though I do have one brave pioneer of note on my team: Zellian Kerman Female Scientist Courage: 7 Stupidity: 3 BadS: False She is single-handedly responsible for gathering all of the scientific data known to Kerbalkind about Minmus AND the Mun. Though Valentina accompanied her to Minmus, Zellian did the entire Mun science run solo.

Of course, theoretically you could have a trip return with over 200,000 science. But that would be quite a trip: you would have to visit every single biome on every single planet and moon in the game and run every possible experiment (some of them multiple times). You'd also probably need to get some science from asteroids in various situations as well. Not that you'd necessarily have to do all of that in one massive super-mission with a Whackjob-esque monstrosity to cart you around, mind. The return vessel's contents are the only important thing, after all...

I made a brief stop to the SoI of every one of Jool's moons on that little expedition. And that mission was done in a much earlier version (0.23 from the looks of it), so re-entry wasn't an issue. Back then, even 8km/sec was entirely survivable since there was no re-entry heat to deal with.

I don't know if I ever got a shot of it, but my classic 15-landings-in-one-mission Mun science expedition usually brings back around 7,000 to 10,000 science. I'll have to peruse the archives of images to see if I have a good shot of that. EDIT: Apparently I never took a shot of it! But I did get a shot of one of my on-a-whim Jool tour results at one point:

I went to make some updates to the KSP Wiki tonight and discovered a pair of issues that the common user cannot fix. The first issue is that the main page is completely impossible for anyone but those registered as moderators of the Wiki to edit. This is mainly an issue because it is literally 2 years out of date and does not mention anything about Science Mode, Career Mode, or anything pertaining to them. As we common users cannot fix it, we must petition to the moderators of the Wiki to do so. The second issue is a bit more pressing: it's currently impossible to upload anything, either for new files or updates. The Wiki throws up a Fatal exception of type MWException error every single time a file upload is attempted. Again, common users cannot fix this, so we must petition moderators of the Wiki for help. Thank you!

Perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide to Kerbals can shed some light on this mystery! ...Hmm... Apparently that's not actually a tongue that male Kerbals have. It's not even part of their bodies, in fact. Male Kerbals like to stick ping-pong-paddle-like devices in their mouths during launches so they have something cool to rattle around while screaming. Female Kerbals are generally more mature than that. Well then!

The main page of the Wiki, as I've mentioned before, cannot be edited by just anyone. And that's the page that needs the most updates at the moment, as it's so outdated that it doesn't even acknowledge the existence of Science or Career modes. The rest the community can update easily enough, but that one page is going to make the whole process a bit gimped. EDIT: For anyone wanting to update the tech tree page, I have composed a full record of the new tech tree and taken a screenshot of the completed tech tree as well: EDIT 2: And here are the new tech tree node icons: Adv. Fuel Systems Aerospace Tech Automation Aviation Command Modules Engineering 101 Experimental Electrics Experimental Science Heavy Aerodynamics Heavy Landing High-Performance Fuel Systems Large Probes Large Volume Containment Miniaturization Precision Propulsion Propulsion Systems Science Tech Specialized Construction EDIT 3: I was going to update it myself, but I keep getting Internal errors when I try to upload the new images. That's kind of important... EDIT 4: Possibly helpful to any Wiki experts, the error is [e2d4b54a] 2015-05-08 02:42:40: Fatal exception of type MWException