SkyRender

This one was discovered by a few forum members, but really should be mentioned here: if you place a probe core in low orbit with the bare minimum of power generation, antenna, and a thermometer, you can spam "collect science from space around (body)" contracts to your heart's content by beaming back temperature readings over and over again. Contracts for science from space around Kerbin are worth ~30,000 Funds each, Mun ones 60,000 each, and Minmus ones 72,000 each, and all of them give absurdly good reputation, so it's worth it to set one of those up at least in Kerbin orbit as an easy way of generating Funds as needed.

There are a few pressing issues with 0.24 (particularly with the 64-bit build), so that's not surprising.

Run a space tourism company! Send a tourbus of a hundred Kerbals out to the Mun for a six-night-seven-day vacation, and be sure they have nice accommodations and rental cars to drive around with.

The biggest problem with the stock rover wheels (and this has been an issue since they were added) is that their code is just a bit of a mess. When you switch to a new polygon in the terrain, the suspension spontaneously switches to stiff-as-a-board for a few seconds, and the vehicle will start shaking over the ground like it has no shocks at all. As well, handling on hills is inverted: super-steep slopes propel you upwards at absurd speed with perfect lateral handling (once you get out of stiff-as-a-board mode), while slopes with almost no inclination will slow your progress severely and cut your lateral handling to "turn and you flip" even when stiff-as-a-board mode ends. Fixing the handling on the rover wheels has been something of a long-time request, at least as far back as 0.20.

My Funds are generally spent for the first two missions to max out the tech tree, and then for whatever I feel like doing for the rest of my flights since I have a maxed tech tree and made a solid 1.5mil Funds at that point. Getting an easy contract with a huge payout isn't really that challenging; just wait for an LV-N, Skipper, or Mainsail contract to come up.

Well, just doing my two-mission tech tree max strategy (yes, it works even with funds; I had a generous amount left to boot), I ended up with about a million Funds sitting around. But I understand why: I'm a long-time player who doesn't really make the kind of mess-ups that a lot of newer players do. And even though I rarely need it, I do in fact use quicksave and quickload (meaning that I don't even HAVE any potential for failure on my missions short of poor planning at the launch level, which basically does not happen). I'm okay with Career mode's Funds and Reputation being borderline-pointless for a player like me. Because I know they're currently engineered for a very different skill level and gameplay style than I work with.

I should note that the real-time Mission Control updating applies with first landings too. Before you have one of your Kerbals plant the first flag on the surface of a body, return to the Space Center and get the flag-planting mission for that body. Spares you a second trip out, and gets you an instant influx of funds and reputation too!

Another useful tip: Mission Control updates missions available in real-time. If you complete a milestone (ie. enter the SoI of the Mun or Minmus) before it would normally be unlocked, go back to the Space Center and check Mission Control again to get a slew of new contracts relating to that newly-reached body. No need to end your current flight or launch a new one!

They might also have planned to have it so that you can only use a limited quantity per flight of whatever parts are on an unlocked tech tree node until you invest in that part so as to have infinite quantities of them to work with per launch. Just a possibility. The other, more likely possibility is that that was implemented as a placeholder for the "science/funds/reputation exchange" system, as morph113 more or less suggested.

Here's a better strategy for the skilled player: just ignore the procedural contracts entirely. The contracts outside of the non-procedural ones are generous, and you can return to the space center mid-mission to get more of them (so if your first launch sends you out towards the Mun, Minmus, or the sun, you can get the relevant missions for them without having to finish your current flight). You could also opt to troll the procedural contracts and only pick out ones that your currently-in-flight mission can easily complete as-is.

Just take the map from kerbalmaps.com and open it in an art program like GIMP. Select the ocean with the Magic Wand tool, choose Select Similar, then choose Invert Selection and delete. Flood-fill the newly-liberated areas with green. I'd do it myself for you, but I'm not at my PC and GIMP would take quite a bit to install on this.

Now we just have to wait for a stranded Kerbal to accidentally be labeled as something bigger than Class A...

Currently checking the feasibility of my two-mission tech tree maximization strategy when confined by a budget. Thus far the answer seems to be "are you kidding, of course it can still be done". I'll have to see what contracts and advanced I've unlocked from my mission-one Minmus jaunt to be sure, but I think doing so will unlock contracts for the Mun, Minmus, Duna, and Ike, giving me more than enough advance funds to complete my crazy plan.

Other than probably not being able to max the tech tree in two launches quite as easily, I doubt my strategy will change at all from the addition of funds and reputation. Though it should be amusing to see how the game handles mission 1 being a trip out to Minmus and a flyby of the Mun...

If you've ever seen the average player starting out, they're far from perfect at getting to orbit after attaining it just once. Failure would be entirely possible there. And really, this is another piece of why I was wondering if starting funds and contract payouts would be player-adjustable too. Like it or not, KSP's audience spans all skill levels, and difficulty options are one of the easiest ways to accommodate a large span of potential players.

I'm still of the opinion that Career mode should have a "training wheels" mode by default, wherein you won't have to actually worry about your funds until you've successfully reached orbit. As long as that's in place, you don't need excessively forgiving contracts with absurd advances to protect against dead-ending; if they can reach orbit, odds are good that they're not going to have nearly as many catastrophic failures as your typical first-timer.

I intend to max out that Funds counter so fast the game's virtual head will spin. That does not happen by playing it safe.

You could see if you can recruit Bilbo, Samwise, and Merry Kerman. They're very keen on testing out the effects of solar impact on stack decouplers, for some reason.

I suspect that message was intended to show up if the rather peculiar occurrence happened of the player choosing to grab data from the Mystery Goo or Science Jr. and then had their Kerbal die before they confirmed the removal of the data. In a situation like that, that message makes perfect sense. Since it's just checking to see if the Kerbal who took the data is present in EVA, it (quite clearly) also prints when the Kerbal enters a capsule before taking the data.

Even if you could deorbit the planets and moons, you'd find that it's a pointless gesture. They have no collision with one another, and the current SoI code gets really strange when you put two planets/moons too close to one another via HyperEdit. Even with that N-Body mod, I'm not sure it would accurately model just how strange a collision of gravitationally-significant bodies would be.

Your video there is set to private, so it's not really possible for anyone to view it right now...

Usually I deprive myself of KSP just prior to a release by playing other games, so I'll be fresh for the latest version when it's out.

"And besides, it worked for NASA!" Hey, someone had to reverse the joke.

I have three major naming schemes: descriptive, bad puns, and obscure references. On my 2-mission and 3-mission tech tree mastery Career mode files, the vessels are usually called One, Two, and (if applicable) Three. One time I called them Nicolas Marty, Antonio Stella Bottom Tile, and Ji Plug Pu Melon Nai in an obscure reference to a video posted by Stewart Ashen. And often my interplanetary missions have punnish names like Dunaverse and Eeloosive.

Of course it was from a month ago, but there's a screenshot in the second 0.24 update blog post showing a budget of around 165,000 whatever-the-currency-will-be-called with only 28 minutes of game time clocked. Odds are decent that starting budgets are pretty generous (my guess is that initial funds were set to 150,000 at the time of that shot), to account for the fact that a lot of players are rather overkill in their rocket design. Excessive struts are a lot less of a problem than players who build rockets that could get to Eeloo in order to go to the Mun.