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I prefer the mythos I came up with, wherein the various planets were named for (mostly) ancient Kerbal "scientific" instruments, and the moons for various forms of snack food. It's delightfully silly.

That would be wise, given how overpowered an ion drive is once it's in orbit.

There's just one small problem to this challenge... Ion engines. This little bugger has enough dV and thrust to reach, circularize, land on, return to orbit around, and leave the Mun, easily. It could then do the whole routine again and stop by Minmus as well just for kicks. You're looking at ~7000dV in that tiny package, and even if it does top out at 50% thrust under ideal sunlight, that's still 1.5 TWR on the Mun (meaning a midday landing there would be entirely doable). Here's how it looks at launch. FAR is installed, because FAR.

Contracts sometimes show up kinda weirdly. And sometimes rather unfortunately as well; if you make a point of visiting Minmus before the Mun (it is an easier target, after all), you will never see the Explore Minmus contract show up.

The only time it makes sense to burn "straight" for a target instead of stopping to go to orbit is if the target trajectory just happens to coincide fairly closely with where you would be if you went into an orbit first anyway. Anything you can do to reduce the amount of effort you're putting into fighting gravity during a maneuver, the better.

It's merely conjecture, of course, but given that most of the devnotes involved the Administrative Facility for the programming team, Harv was probably working on that this week. They're really keeping a tight lid on what that building does, to the point that not even the planned features list has a clear indicator of what it might be for. Very mysterious indeed.

Eve: aerocapture became aerobraking, then lithobraking.

I've been everywhere, I'm afraid. Granted, I haven't sent manned expeditions to a few bodies, but that's about the extent of my having not gone somewhere.

Long ago, lost to the mists of time, Maxwell Adams of the Freelance Astronauts (an LPing group from the late 2000s which has since dropped off the map) played KSP 0.8.4. He was terrible at it, but the game was clearly pretty interesting, so I took a look. By the time I got there, KSP was up to 0.11, and 0.12 gave us the Mun shortly after that. It didn't take me long to decide that I was all in with this game, and I paid my $7 to be a part of it. Best $7 I've spent on a video game.

My own suggestions for a more interesting experience: volumetric clouds (they really do add a ton to the aesthetic feel), Kethane (off-world fuel mining, need I say more?), Kerbal Engineer Redux (for all sorts of vital information that's either hard or impossible to access right now in stock), Ferram Aerospace Research (makes flying aerodynamic craft in-atmosphere much more sensible, though it also makes non-aerodynamic builds far less useful), procedural fairings (pretty much a necessity when using FAR, since aerodynamic payloads are generally boring payloads), and Kerbal Attachment System (which just opens up a world of possibilities via winches, magnets, grappling hooks, and on-the-spot in-EVA construction options for smaller parts on spacecraft).

FAR is kind of an air-hogging simulator, I find. Though it is made up for considerably by the fact that you have to build properly aerodynamic craft to fly them, whereas in stock a flying brick will get to space just fine.

Go right ahead! A link-back to this topic would be appreciated, of course, if only so that readers can get the full context if they're not familiar with it.

Pretty much any quantity of intakes that lets you manage sustained horizontal flight with a jet engine at 22,000m is borderline air-hogging, and anything above that elevation is ever more blatantly so.

Also useful: RAPIER engines are currently severely buffed. They already simplify spaceplane design significantly, but with their weight drop, you can pull off absurdities like this:

Install RemoteTech and set up a satellite network. Install Figaro and establish a GPS network. Just a pair of ideas.

It's so hard to find good help for under 10 Altairian dollars a day... However, we did finally get a new Kerbologist, and a new article written too. History of Spacecraft Manufacturing on Kerbin It has come to the attention of the Guide that, in spite of previous beliefs that Kerbals simply slap explosives together haphazardly, call it a rocket, and blow it up on the launchpad, Kerbals do in fact put slightly more effort than this in their exploration of space. Our newest Kerbologist has made the groundbreaking discovery that Kerbals in fact have corporations which produce the extremely unstable products which Kerbals use in their space program. And to our utter astonishment, it has also been uncovered that they put out contracts to run experiments on these parts with the Kerbal Space Program, paying them ofttimes-absurd quantities in the process. We have sent our newest Kerbologist back to Kerbin to learn more. This article will be updated as soon as he's uncovered more details. UPDATE: Our newest Kerbologist has returned (or at least, most of him has). Here is his report: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA We were forced to scrap the rest of the report, and wish him well in his efforts to regrow his missing appendages. Once we have hired a replacement for him and get the information we need, we will update this entry again. UPDATE 2: Our fifth newest Kerbologist has returned and given us a coherent report that does not involve screams of agony! What follows will be a very professionally written piece on the nature of corporations who manufacture parts for the Kerbal Space Program. As it turns out, the Kerbal Space Program originally contracted out solely to a junkyard owned by Jebediah Kerman (see entry: Jebediah Kerman for additional information and warnings regarding proximity). In fact, the initial goal was simply to construct more elaborate fireworks, until Bill Kerman jokingly suggested that they should try strapping a few Kerbals to them for kicks. Thus was the Kerbal Space Program born (albeit at the time under the name of Kerbal Fireworks Program), and the original Kerbal I rocket took to the skies with its payload of 3 Kerbals. It was swiftly followed by the Kerbal II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, and XV, all of which ended in spectacular fireworks displays which upped the body count of the space program considerably. The launch of the Kerbal XVI changed everything, however, as this extra-large firework failed to explode horribly when it reached altitude, and instead flew up out of the atmosphere. It then proceeded to land an awful lot. The spark of curiosity had lit the flames of passion in Jebediah Kerman's heart at the sight of this, and he renamed his fledgling fireworks operation to Kerbal Space Program. He then immediately contacted a number of his friends, and blackmailed them all into manufacturing parts for spacecraft. Within a week, the more competent Wernher von Kerman and Gene Kerman had taken over operation of the organization, and Jebediah Kerman had strong-armed both of his brothers into joining him as the first pilots of the program. The end result of all of this is that all spacecraft manufacturing on Kerbin is actually done by organizations which previously did not actually manufacture spacecraft parts. This may go a long ways towards explaining why so many of them are prone to violently exploding upon contact with anything at all. It would also explain why they are so willing to pay such large sums for the Kerbal Space Program to test their parts out, as it is our understanding that Jebediah Kerman's blackmail material hangs over their heads to this day. Unfortunately, many of their contract proposals are written up by smacking themselves in the heads repeatedly with eeloos long enough for continued self-abuse with rocks on strings to sound like a good idea. Usually they have a contract proposal written up a few hours after that point, and also rather nasty concussions.

You can dynamically alter staging at any time, including adding new stages, so that's not a problem. There's also action groups, which are effectively specialized staging that can be triggered on command.

It's not exactly rocket surgery? To the uninformed mind, any knowledge above and beyond what they possess is akin to genius, and any technology beyond their ken is indistinguishable from magic. Sadly, these facts have been exploited since time immemorial to manipulate the masses. We who know more than the average person have a responsibility to share that knowledge freely, and to demystify complex processes for those less informed.

The lonely life of a GPS satellite, slowly crossing the terminator twice a day...

I spent a somewhat embarrassing amount of time back when 0.22 first came out figuring out what the optimal tech tree progression route was. It pretty much boils down out to "get all of the experiments you can perform on the Mun first, then get fuel lines, docking ports, and the Skipper engine". That strategy is what allowed me to max the tech tree in three (and later, two) missions without having to leave the Kerbin system.

Well seeing as science currently has no real value once the tech tree is filled out, I don't tend to worry about it.

Water lag is caused by the game rendering the water on Kerbin (or Eve, or Laythe). The extra processing power required is pretty noteworthy, especially on high-quality settings, and it can really put a damper on performance as a result. If you have a high-end machine, are using an NVIDIA graphics card, or have graphics settings at a more modest level, you'll probably never notice water lag.

267,200m. That places the station in a perfect octave-synchronous orbit, is low enough to the surface as to require little extra dV to reach, and allows for up to 1000x time warp.

Ever wanted to set up a craft in an interesting synchronization with a planet or moon, but didn't want to do all that annoying math to figure it out? Want to know how to get your multi-satellite array into a perfect spacing pattern in that orbit without having to hand-calculate everything? Then I have the tool for you! It's a simple JavaScript application that should work in most web browsers, and it lets you calculate literally any resonance you could possibly desire with a planet. Geosynchronous? No problem! Half-synchronous? Easy! 15:3 resonance? Crazy, but 100% doable! And it'll even tell you how to space your multi-satellite array when launching it into orbit so they'll all align equidistant from one another when you finish up putting them in place. You can find it here! Want to see more functionality for this calculation tool? See something I missed? Let me know and I'll see what I can do to improve upon it!

Well, there is one definite factor that's hard to argue: there has to be a sufficient quantity of elements that can take a gaseous form. I mean really, that's kind of a no-brainer, but still.