Reactordrone

Isn't always a guarantee though. I recently sent a rover to the Mun, gave it an unmanned test run around the base and it was fine, got to the Mun and it would only spin around on the spot unless there was a Kerbal in the driving seat.

It'll certainly be a one way trip but you should be able to knock off a couple of thousand m/s and get down without burning up but you'd probably be better off flying that around elsewhere and using a heat shielded habitat module for future one way crew drops.

Not sure if it's what you're asking but you can switch focus between close vessels and parts using the square brackets keys, [ and ] .

A few tries using the vehicle "as is" I was getting 30-40 units of liquid fuel left. After upping the thrust on the solid boosters and lowering the main engine thrust at take off I was able to get 73 units of fuel left using some of the RCS fuel for circularization. The game crashed to desktop while I was preparing the screenshots, but from memory I had the boosters tweaked up to 63.5% thrust and got the ship up to 2200m/s at 64km using the LV-909 before switching to RCS.

You need to head to different biomes. Science from the surface of Kerbin tends to be low value but you can land in different locations to recover crew reports, EVA reports and data from scientific instruments after a mission but you're going to have to start hitting biomes from the Mun and Minmus. Once in low orbit you can rack up a reasonable amount of science doing EVA reports over different biomes (polar orbits are very good for this). It's a good idea to prioritise acquisition of more science instruments in the tech tree.

Scientists still have their unique attributes in sandbox as well as engineers, it's just that science serves no purpose in sandbox. I suppose universal piloting ability is desirable in sandbox so you can just throw anyone into the pilot's seat for test flights.

Was that a 1.1.3 thing. All of my hires in 1.1.2 have full piloting ability regardless of speciality.

You have to be in command of the landing part until it touches down and then switch back to the orbital section. You can usually manage to control the apoapsis of the orbital section by locking off fuel tanks but you're never going to get a particularly low apoapsis due to the time it takes to land the first stage.

I tend to find it happens more on small vehicles when using SAS settings other then stability hold. You can select the RCS units and adjust then to only fire for translation manoeuvres. That eliminates the problem since it tends to be a rotational oscillation caused by the reaction wheels.r

If the locations are on another planet or moon you'll have to click on the planet to switch focus to it in order to see the markers (this is the same for contract satellite orbits as well). Once you're focused on the Mun you should be able to see the location pins in the tracking station before you've accepted the contract.

I'd say I spend the majority of my time flying. Just the transfer burn to the Mun frequently takes longer than it takes me to knock together a ship to do that mission. Even when I'm calculating delta-v for a new design that's still only another couple of minutes added to the design time.

If you can set a node in a sandbox game then it's just the early career restriction mentioned above.

Plane parts have more structure since they're required to survive high forces acting on them in flight whereas a rocket fuel tank is a can of fuel that's only meant to handle force acting through its length. If you actually tried to make an aircraft out of rocket fuel tanks the wings would rip off and the tank would buckle if you pulled any kind of Gs. You could make the rocket fuel tanks unusable for aircraft and drop the jet fuel tank back to 150 fuel if you wanted more realism

If it just has to move things around a space station at close range you can have a fairly simple monoprop powered vehicle, especially of you've placed thruster quads on the modules (regardless of whether the module has any monopropellant itself). It can be useful to have the RCS system set up so that it only does translation manoeuvres and keep the rotation to reaction wheels. that tends to save the SAS blowing through all of your fuel when it's pointing at the target. You may also want to mark the top of the vehicle with an antenna or something to make it easy to align the vehicle to match the IJKL keys.

Ion engines have very high exhaust velocities, that's why they're so efficient. Chemical rockets have around the 4km/s exhaust velocity while Ions have 25-50km/s.

Payload size seems pretty normal so I'm assuming the rockets are very small. http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810/news/story193.html

If you've got any image processing software save the image as a jpeg and increase compression before uploading. Aim for about 200-300kB per image.

Assuming you're on a PC, not a console, When the fairing is placed, move your mouse away from the part to increase the diameter. The "LMB-place cross section" type will turn green when it's able to be placed. Click left mouse button and move your mouse up to extend the fairing vertically, there will be a height limit so you click on left mouse button again to place the cross section and repeat. Move the cursor back inwards to touch the fairing onto the part you want to close on and the "LMB-close fairing" type will turn pale blue to indicate that you can click to close the fairing. When closing a regular fairing just bring the mouse in to form a point and the "LMB- Close fairing" will turn green. Edit-Right mouse button removes what you've just done.

It might not like clipping through the lower separator so you may have to expand the diameter a little before going up and connecting to the upper one.

It's sized so that you can get it back through the hatch for return to Earth. The long duration experiment facility was sized to fit back into the shuttle's cargo bay for return to Earth. If parts were detachable they could be sized to fit into hatches or through docking systems but since that's not a standard game mechanic you're stuck with external mounts for the materials and biology exposure experiments. As an early science experiment it fits nicely into the 1.25m parts available early but I wouldn't have a problem with it being made smaller (as the mystery goo containers were) or a radial mounted part.

Materials study experiments can be quite large in real life, http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/index.cfm

I usually budget about 2000/2000m/s based on vacuum delta-v for first and second stages. However, if I've made an upper stage with extra delta-v I'll sometimes just make a single stage with about 3000m/s and finish off with the upper stage/payload engines.

It's in a screenshots folder in the Kerbal space program folder so it'll usually look like, This PC> Local disc (C:)> Kerbal space program> screenshots The 1.25m ISRU converter is very inefficient. It's only real use is for refueling small vessels on the surface where you can afford to throw away 90% of what you mine. Never haul ore into orbit and use that one to convert it except in emergency situations.

Unfortunately tourists won't be able to use them since they can't EVA. Should be fine for the crew though.

Yes, that is incredible,