Reactordrone

I've tried to see it a couple of times and couldn't see anything either. I think the faceting actually makes it less likely to be visible since any light hitting it will mostly be reflected away from you (much like the radar returns from a stealth aircraft). You have to be lucky to catch a panel that's angled correctly to reflect the sunlight onto your position.

Do you have any sort of autopilot mods installed?

Assuming you have the navball in target mode, firing retrograde should let you cancel your velocity relative to the target. using the caps lock key to switch to fine control might help when you're close to zero velocity.

Free return does cost more (only about 15m/s for the Mun). You first have to boost to a slightly higher apoapsis which costs more delta-v and the when you're at apoapsis you're travelling slightly slower relative to the Mun so you need to speed up more (retrograde relative to the Mun) in order to catch up to the Mun.

For close range defence of ICBM silos they did look at swarmjet that threw unguided rockets into the face of incoming warheads, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarmjet

Powered descents are also a possibility. Low orbit speed at Eve is quite high and reducing your velocity by 2000-3000m/s will allow an unshielded entry and landing. This can be a useful method to land unwieldy ascent vehicles that will refuel after landing since you've already got high thrust engines and fuel onboard.

Even something simple like sharpening up the top of the fairing will reduce drag at the top of the rocket and improve controllability.

The usual quick and dirty way to estimate your landing burn time is to set a manoeuvre node where your trajectory touches the surface and pull the retrograde handle until you get to a vertical trajectory. You can afford to delay the burn a little from the predicted time since your TWR will increase as you burn fuel.

You can pretty much much make any liquid fuel you want starting with methane stock, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process

The boosters did a 1-3-1 burn for this landing (Lighting the centre engine, briefly firing up two more engines for a fast slowdown, then landing on just one) I assume the core was trying to do the same.

I think it only had 12 hours of electrical power so it's probably dead by now.

Probably removed moveable suspension parts. You don't want mass shifting around under acceleration.

I wonder how long the plastics on that car will survive in that kind of UV environment?

This will be more like grasshopper style hover testing.

Elon is officially tripping balls.

Some nice reflections.

The core must have been close to landing with the amount of smoke/steam over the deck of OCISLY.

I would think that "no antenna within reach" means that you're not in range/line of sight of a ground station. You should be able to transmit science no matter where it is located within the station.

If you apoapsis is still high from the reversal manoeuvre you'll be orbiting much slower than the other ship. Get your periapsis to touch the target orbit at one point and once you've passed the closest approach intercept marker at that point you can burn retrograde to wind the target position marker around until it gets you a close intercept.

Burn retrograde until periapsis is touching the green orbit then orbit around to that point and burn retrograde again until apoapsis is touching the green orbit.

If I'm still firing my engines I try to pop them off at about 50-55km to drop some mass. If I've cut my engines I'll let them ride into space.

EVA reports above all of the Mun's biomes (and Minmus if you like) should get you plenty of science without having to land.

"n" is the keyboard shortcut for ln in the windows scientific calculator if you don't have a handheld calculator handy.

If you're 200m away with a low relative velocity, point your ship at the target marker and use the IJKL keys with the RCS to keep the prograde marker aligned with the target marker on the navball. As long as they're lined up you'll fly straight at the target.

I think that distance only counts inside the atmosphere. Space debris will stay flying until it re-enters and gets below about 22km.