Reactordrone

Duna atmosphere goes up to 50km so are you shooting for a 75km orbit i.e 25km above the atmosphere?

With a couple of airbrakes and a few parachutes added I flew the ship I made for your Mun rescue to Duna the other day. You should probably start with unmanned probes first though. It did use aerocapture at Duna to save fuel. Once you know what you're doing it should take about the same Delta-v as a Mun mission. Edit- Just realised you've gone back to 1.0.5. The parachutes have a much lower opening speed in that version so that lander won't work as well since you'll have to burn the motor to slow down enough to open the drogue chutes leaving little safety margin for return to orbit.

Odd, where are the planets relative to each other? Looking down on the system, if Duna's in the 6 o'clock position Kerbin should be just past the 8 o'clock position.

A retrograde orbit around Duna really shouldn't make much difference to a Kerbin return burn. As long as your ejection burn away from Duna is retrograde to Duna's orbital direction it doesn't matter whether you're coming off the inside or the outside of the planet.

By drop tanks I mean fuel tanks that can be dropped. By moving the 8 tonnes of fuel in the transfer stage up to the top of the vehicle mounted on a large docking port and discarding the 4 tonne vector engine as I did, the fuel in those tanks will give you enough delta-v to do the transfer burn to the Mun. The empty tanks can then be discarded bringing the lander weight back to about where you had it. As it is now, the extra mass of the Vector engine and its terrible vacuum Isp (worse than the LV-T45) means that that 8 tonnes of fuel won't be enough to complete a Munar transfer burn. The step down from 2.5m to 1.25m tanks also reduces the stability of the rocket. Without crew transfer you'll have to add a means to detach the crew module and stick a few parachutes on it (a heat shield might also be useful).

Not sure what power generation you have other than the engine alternators but a few solar panels wouldn't go astray. I'd also be inclined to remove the LV-T45 from the transfer stage and move the fuel into drop tanks for the lander engine, it saves weight and uses a much more efficient engine (using landing legs instead of fins will also save some weight). I've no idea how you intend to land the Kerbals back on Kerbin but if you aren't planning on doing a crew transfer you'll obviously need a decoupler,heat shield and parachutes Edit-and for ascent stage, the one I used on my earlier contribution gets over 35tonnes into LKO.

I think the simplest thing would be to save something as a subassembly to automatically create the subassembly folder in that save. You can then drop the downloaded object into it.

Well I just landed this on Duna in 1.1.2 A similar lander in 1.0.5 had to use so much fuel to slow down in order to open the chutes that it couldn't get back into orbit, so you might be stuck with having to take more fuel for the lander or move to 1.1.2.

F4 toggles ship labels.

I thought someone had emailed you a craft already. Have you tried something like this? A probe controlled 2 seater lander to pick up your stranded kerbals and a 3 seat command module to return them to Kerbin with a Munar orbit rendezvous mission. Has plenty of Delta v, enough to land the lander twice in case the Kerbals are too separated to pick up on a single landing and you get a nice lander that you can leave in orbit for future use.

The landing gear can be a bit buggy at the moment so now isn't the best time to be building aircraft and spaceplanes but putting up pictures of your current craft will let people see potential problems and offer solutions which should help you with design issues.

Second option for me. 1.1.2 at fixed a lot of the landing gear/strut issues making the game more playable. Leaving those bugs for another three weeks would have been bad and I probably would have reverted to my 1.0.5 game.

Try adding more engines. I got a 4 engined Juno powered plane up to 323m/s at 1000m yesterday. You could also try adding a flea solid booster for that extra kick (just watch out for CG changes when the fuel is expended).

They're in general construction, just above your fourth tier aircraft node.

The aircraft parts in the tech tree have been moved around in recent versions (especially with the introduction of the juno) but it should still be possible to make an early tech aircraft, you just won't be able to use the same parts from an old video.

Well unless someone's had an issue with this type of contract since they were revised for 1.1 it's something of a moot point.

I assume this is for cloning parts in the VAB?

All crewed pods should have hatches, even the Mk1 crew compartment has end hatches so you should just be able to hit EVA on the crew portrait, but if that doesn't work for whatever reason you could claw on and do a crew transfer.

In that case all you need to know is the relative position of the ships on the surface. If they're directly east tilt towards the 90° mark on the navball. North, go towards 0/360°, south 180°, west 270° etc. You should never need to have a visual reference off the ship, only the navball and map view matter. ETA- from the position of the galactic disc the other ships are either east or west of you so to head east you'd hit "S" with a little bit of "D" to hit 90°. West would be Mostly "W" with a little bit of "A".

You'll probably need to add tail planes or canards for pitch control since you have none at the moment. They should also give you roll control but the elevons/ailerons will also work for that.

Blue side up, brown side down will give you the normal up and down tilt control (useful for controlling rate of descent) but as Plusk says that does reverse your left and right controls since you're flying backwards.

You could try a space station or space debris clean up with the klaw. Docking is one of the harder parts of the game to learn and practice will make it much easier. To undock and return the crew in the training mission right click on one of the docking ports and select undock. Only one of the ports will have that option so you may need to try both, (also if you're undocking a part that's never been docked before it will say decouple node rather than undock.)

I'd say no further than about 10-15km from the target in most cases. Any further away and you may be correcting in the wrong direction since the marker positions will move around relative to each other as you orbit.

I had one of those contracts. i thought the lack of orbit information might have been because I hadn't upgraded my tracking station (I was doing a caveman start) so I just matched the periapsis and apoapsis listed in the contract parameters and it completed.

Once you're within 100m kill all of your velocity relative to the target by burning retrograde in target mode. You can then point at target prograde and slowly thrust towards it with the RCS at less than 1m/s.You want the prograde and target prograde markers on top of each other. Use RCS translation controls to push the prograde marker around. If you aren't lined up on the other port select target prograde hold with the SAS and translate to move your ship in front of the other ship's docking port. The extra writing is just a few notes I put on to help explain the process.