Reactordrone

I know it's not technically part of the challenge but, fourth attempt at a landing and success. The parts have a low impact tolerance and ships do tend to dismantle themselves if you set down a little hard. Broke off engines on the second and third attempt.

That worked surprisingly well considering I had no idea what the parts stats were. First attempt got a flyby of the Mun, second had a decoupling crash which took out my engine and forced an abort but the third shot was good and got into an Munar orbit. Initially had a collision course with the Mun so had to do a radial burn to correct but seemed to have plenty of fuel left when I got back to Kerbin. Might try for a landing next time.

Should probably also ask the obvious question. Do both parts of the craft have control, either a pilot or a probe core, because SAS won't work without one or the other so you need either 2 pilots, 2 probe cores or a pilot and a probe core.

The stayputnik has no reaction wheels or SAS so you won't get any control from there even if you have mechjeb or sandbox SAS. As others have said above you're going to need stabiliser fins on the second stage and on that rocket, with all the drag from the goo canisters, you'll need quite large fins for stability. In general rockets that have low natural stability tend to flip in the transonic region if they wander too far from the prograde heading so go easy on the steering.

When the navball is in target mode, burning retrograde to kill your velocity relative to the target will adjust your orbit to match the target and the closer the intersection with the target the better the two orbits will be aligned after the burn.

Don't use the test chute for landing. Have a couple of radial chutes on to bring the ship down safely after you've performed the destructive test on the Mk 16. Make sure they're in a separate stage.

Usually around 500m/s but like the parachutes it varies a little with altitude/pressure.

There are a few issues with the "to the Mun" tutorials. In pt1 the ship has enough delta-v to make Munar orbit and then return to Kerbin but not really enough to land safely on the Mun unless you use up the vast amount of RCS propellant for propulsion so if you can't land on the Mun that's perfectly normal. In pt2, the instructions for the return burn to Kerbin put you into the wrong direction but you have plenty of delta-v to get back to Kerbin. In both cases the parachutes are set for a 500m AGL opening which needs to be adjusted to 1000m for 1.0.4 aero.

Assuming you don't use any fuel docking with the new station you'll need 1463 units of fuel onboard for the combined stack to have 2000m/s so pretty much what you've already got in there. Of course your delta-v will go up once you drop off the station. ETA-For how to do it, you need to know the empty mass of your ship with each unit of fuel weighing 5kg, 1462 units weighs 7.31 tonnes so your empty mass is 13.945t. Add the weight of your station to that to get a combined mass of 25.245t. Rearranging the rocket equation ,2000=9.82x800xln(mass with fuel/empty mass) your mass ratio needs to be 1.29 so 32.56t / 25.245t which is 7.32 tonnes of fuel.

They went for a mechanical counter pressure suit rather than a regular pressure suit to give the surface astronauts increased mobility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit

Sounds like your second stage gets aerodynamically unstable without thrust so you can add the very small fins to the rear of that stage so keep it flying like a dart until you fire the engine or move the engine into the same stage as the decoupler and hot fire to avoid the pause.

In early career you can push debris into sub-orbit using engine exhaust. When I pick up rescues I usually manoeuvre my ship in front of the empty pods pointing to 90° and give them a blast at full throttle. It's usually enough to put their periapsis deep into atmosphere so the same could be done for random debris, just make sure you're doing the de-orbit kick close to apoapsis.

I haven't had any problems recovering parts on land or water using the claw and parachutes. Some parts have very low impact tolerance so the issue might have been part specific so I'd probably try recovering the next one but make sure you F5 before re entry just in case.

If you go into map mode and click on the target ship once you're on EVA you can select it as the target and the distance markers will stay on. Don't go too fast on EVA, you just need to tap the keys to adjust your velocity.It's been said that if you think you're moving on EVA you probably are, if you know you're moving you're going too fast. Helmet lights are fairly short ranged, you'll start to illuminate an object at about 15m with good lighting at about 10m.

I usually place a manoeuvre node in roughly the right area on the orbit and pull the prograde handle until there's about 270m/s (170m/s for Minmus) on it and then move the node around until I have a tangential escape vector before fine tuning the periapsis for an aerocapture.

Saw the Moon but I'm on the wrong side of the planet to see the eclipse.

Hard to say without seeing the vehicle but it could be a fuel line issue. Jet engines will draw fuel from anywhere but the rockets need any LFO tanks that aren't directly attached in line with them to be plumbed in with fuel lines. Also make sure that you're using the LFO tanks with the black stripes and not just the liquid fuel fuselages or you'll run out of oxidizer.

I believe those are all parts that will be in the 1.1 release.

The size transition will make it a little bendy in the middle. If you have the rockomax adaptor you could consider consider attaching the station upside down with the LV-909 pointing upwards and just flip the ship around for orbital insertion. That will give you a much stronger stack that will be less inclined to bend resulting in less control oscillations.

Generally a high speed pass through the atmosphere during an aerobrake/aerocapture won't allow atmosphere science. you have to be established in orbit/sub-orbit before the dips into atmosphere allow readings.

Is this a stock contract or a mod? Having the specified scientific instruments on board and getting into the specified orbit should complete any contract though.

Since I don't think it's been mentioned yet, you can transfer tourists and crew through the claw the same as a docking port so you could send up a new ship with solar panels and transfer the crew into it before discarding the old ship.

Bingo. Just ran the test, and saved states are, 0-up 1-being retracted 2- being deployed 3-down 4-broken Starting conditions are, 0-gear starting deployed 1-gear starting retrated

0 is up, 3 is down and saved state 4 appears to be when the legs are broken. No idea what 1 and 2 are.

Yep, unless you're playing sandbox any Kerbal that isn't a pilot won't have any SAS functions available.