ElWanderer

Will a science junior fit inside a 2.5m service bay? Or fit two (or more) FLTx00 tanks on the side and stick a science junior plus a nose cone on top of each one. If you want to land, this gives you wider places to stick on legs.

LKO to Jool, I'd allow 2.5km/s (plotted burn of about 2km/s, plus corrections and an inclination change). Getting into medium Jool orbit without any gravity assists cost me 1.5km/s last time I did it, but by slinging around Laythe or Tylo you should be able to get a Jool orbit for much less. Still, that doesn't leave your shuttle much if any fuel to do anything further. Is your final destination just any Jool orbit or are you hoping to visit the moons with the shuttle? Are you intending to come back to Kerbin?

The square indicates that vessel is the target of a contract e.g. to move it to a different orbit.

Your screenshot is hosted on mail.Google.com, so we can't see it. Do you get any signs of magnetic attraction when the ports get close? If no: it's most likely one or both of the docking ports are mounted the wrong way around as already suggested. It's easily done and a common error. If yes: you should be able to dock. If you have SAS on, turn it off (both vessels) as it'll fight against the docking magnets and make things much harder.

>>my LAN node is 180 degrees, while the contract states it should be 277 deg There are two different things and I think you are conflating them. The Longitude of the Ascending Node (LAN) in the contract tells you where the contract orbit crosses the equator relative to an arbitrary fixed point in the sky box... that you can't see. Unless you're using a mod that needs to know this value, it is best ignored. Just eyeball when the orbit is in the right place. When you look at the Ascending Node (An) in map mode, the number tells you your current orbit's relative inclination to the contract orbit. The aim is to reduce this to 0 if possible. Sadly, a value of 180 indicates you are travelling in precisely the opposite direction to that which is required.

I have a vague memory of a recent support thread where the game was genuinely generating contracts with the conditions blank, but I can't find it. There may be some weird bug you've run into - all the contract conditions should be spelt out clearly.

You're probably best taking one of the "close" passes. Minmus orbits are fairly slow so a small inclination change will be quite cheap. A precise overpass could be a long wait. I wrote a script to tell me when an orbiting polar satellite would pass over (within 2km) various contract waypoints on the Mun (which rotates very slowly, not sure about Minmus in comparison) and there was a 40 day wait in some cases.

The best place for kOS advice is Reddit. (meanwhile, autocorrect reckons for iOS advice, go to Redditch) https://www.reddit.com/r/Kos/ I see you have a variable called normal that you set to a normalized vector. Are you aware these can have very different meanings? Normal is usually used to mean at 90° to the plane of the orbit. Using :normalized returns a vector in the same direction, just reduced to a length of one unit. Edit 2: wish I could help, but I've not got my head around vector exclusion yet!

I'm not convinced Kerbal Alarm Clock's transfer window alerts are fuel-optimal. In the past I've had it tell me there's a window to Eve, only to find I needed a lot more delta-v than I'd expected. I went back to using an online planner after that. I second Alexmoon's website. It'll tell you when the cheapest window is, but will also tell you what to expect to spend for any given transfer date. So you can double check KAC's window alerts and plan accordingly.

Until recently, the UK government didn't contribute funds to ESA's manned programme. So Brits have previously only got into space through commercial ventures (Helen Sharman) or via American nationality (e.g. Michael Foale was born a dual national and flew with NASA but there are others who emigrated to the US and changed nationality to be eligible for NASA).

I'll admit I was annoyed there wasn't a Mission Elapsed Time clock. Guess that's what happens when you have no experience of covering such things. We also had the volume down low so it was hard to tell when to expect staging events. YouTube isn't an option in our office, but we do have a TV in the kitchen...

Woo, I think that's the first launch I've watched live on TV since 1986 - we don't get that kind of coverage in the UK very often. Cdr Chris Hadfield was great, though he did keep referring to solid boosters, then correcting himself. I could've sworn I heard him use an xkcd-style line, something like "[the boosters have ignited, but] they need to fire the central engine if they want to go to space today".

The node shows which way to apply thrust. If your thrust is offset from the orientation of your "control from here" part, it'll get very confusing. Either angle the OMS engines to fire ahead and add some RCS thrusters or verniers to counter the torque (assuming they don't fire through the centre of mass), or add a small docking port or probe that you can "control from here" and rotate it to match the OMS engines.

You have no periapsis, so are on a collision course. You can fix this by plotting a radial (the blue circles) manoeuvre as soon as possible. You should only need a small burn to raise your periapsis from under the Munar surface. I don't know about MechJeb. But in Kerbin orbit very minor changes to your escape burn can have a very big impact on where your course ends up. Burning a manoeuvre node never works out exactly as plotted. If burning manually, switch to the map and watch how your course plot changes during the burn. When you get near to the end of the burn, throttle right back and be ready to kill the engines when your predicted path is in the right place, not necessarily when you've burnt exactly as per the manoeuvre node. If you end up slightly off-course, you'll only need a small correction.

From a 30km x 30km orbit my first successful landing (at 4km altitude) took 3150m/s and ascent cost 2700m/s. My follow-up attempt required a bit less to land (I don't seem to have recorded the figures) as I had a better idea of what I was doing. Even so, I took a multi-stage lander with 7km/s of delta-v just in case. Tylo is a harsh mistress.

Link to a real-life example of a high-inclination solar probe that used a Jupiter slingshot. Without using a Jool assist: I use the formula sqrt( 2 x v^2 x (1 - Cos(delta_inc)) ) to work out the delta-v of an inclination change that leaves your apoapsis and periapsis untouched. The hard part then is working out what your orbital velocity will be at the time of the burn. It's relatively easy to calculate the velocity at apoapsis periapsis, much harder for any arbitrary point. Your orbital velocity is much lower when far from the object you're orbiting, which is why any inclination burn is best performed far from the sun. Note that there are some easy-to-remember results: A 180 degree inclination change requires double your velocity. A 90 degree change requires 1.4 (sqrt(2)) times your velocity. Note that doing this as two separate burns to kill your orbital velocity and add it in the new direction will cost double your v - it's a massive saving to burn once at 45 degrees. Combining burns saves fuel! A 60 degree change requires 1 times your velocity. Your 62.9 degree requirement is close to this. A 30 degree change requires a little over 0.5 times your velocity. If you can combine your inclination change with your circularisation burn at Apoapsis, that would save you delta-v. That means leaving Kerbin when it's at (or close to) one of the descending/ascending nodes of the target orbit.

I did a quick manual calculation of the delta-v you had from your screenshot before the forums went down for maintenance and came up with 329m/s though I didn't include the mass of the solar panels (and I may have forgotten to include one of the parachutes). The delta-v maps I've looked at suggest 180m/s to get into Minmus orbit and 160m/s to escape back to Kerbin orbit, for a total of 340m/s. So it was always going to be difficult to get back. One additional trick to try would be a gravity assist - plot an escape burn from Minmus that flies past the Mun (may be many days wait until it's in the right place) and fiddle with it until the resultant orbit drops you into Kerbin's atmosphere. A rescue mission may be quicker. On rescue missions: to transfer fuel requires docking the old and new craft together (plus an upgrade to the R&D lab?) Pretty difficult if you don't have a docking port. Your best bet is to rendezvous in Minmus orbit and EVA the pilot (with the science data) over to the new ship.

The easiest way to make an orbit circular is to burn prograde at apoapsis (bringing the periapsis up until it's equal) or retrograde at periapsis (pushing the apoapsis down). Circularising elsewhere in the orbit would mean adding a radial in or radial out component to the burn, usually means lots of fiddling with the manoeuvre node. From the sounds of it, you may benefit from practising that, so you have more of a feel of how burns change orbits. Rendezvous will not be easy without that knowledge, unless you are prepared to spend more delta-v to work with perfectly circular orbits only. For rendezvous, I would always try to match inclination first. Then get the orbits to intersect. Then plot a node at one of the intersects (you usually end up with two) and see how the closest approach markers change. The aim is to get a phasing orbit, whereby the difference in orbital periods is equal to the difference in arrival times at the intersect. As it is usually put: if you are ahead of the target you want a larger orbit so that you go slower and the target catches up. If you are behind the target, you want a smaller orbit (though avoid dipping into the atmosphere) so that your orbit is quicker and you catch up.

Clustered engines can work out cheaper (three Reliants cost 3300 compared to 5300 for a Skipper, though you may need to pay for adaptors. Their thrust is similar, though the Reliants have an edge at sea-level) at the cost of being more massive (3.75t plus adaptor versus 3t). For an expendable first stage this is an acceptable trade. Upper stages, you generally want to keep as light as possible. Clustering is also helpful if, say, you want more thrust than one Reliant but less than a Skipper - why not take two Reliants? Pity most of the adaptors are way up the tech tree.

What are you trying to re-enter with? From what orbit? The usual advice for a pod returning from low Kerbin orbit is to set a periapsis of about 30km. You need the velocity to drop to around 250-260m/s before it's safe to pop the chutes. The early game is quite dangerous because it can be hard to get things to slow down. It's been reported that a mk1 pod with a heatshield is too heavy and aerodynamic to slow down effectively unless you reduce the amount of ablator during ship design. My current design carries about 30 instead of 200.

EVA the scientist, Right-click on the science junior or goo pod and choose "take data". There will be a warning to click through that this expends the experiment (i.e. it can't be used again). That's okay as the scientist lets you clean-out/replenish the experiment - another Right-click option. Then you can use the experiment again. The EVAing scientist can then place the data they've taken into a command pod to be recovered later. The scientist can also refresh experiments whose science data has been transmitted. If you don't "take data" you can still reset the experiments, but that throws away the data they contain. On that rocket: it's a pity I'm not at my computer with the delta-v calculator. In v1.0 they made everything less efficient (lower ISP) to make up for changes in the atmosphere. Craft designs from before then can usually get to orbit fairly similarly, but tend to have less fuel range once in space.

Is the tank enabled? Right-click on the tank, if the pop-up window has a small red circle icon click on it to toggle the tank on. Alternatively, the game takes staging into account and tries to use up monoprop tanks that will be discarded next before draining tanks that will be kept longer. I think. Could that be it?

I don't think it's right to scale "sub-surface" resources by volume. Our mines don't go all the way down to the core; they hardly scratch the surface. The deepest mine in the world is just under 4km according to Wikipedia. That implies the resources we can dig up scale according to area, unless we go for truly gigantic mines in future or you're suggesting Kerbal mines go 1/10th as deep as the Earth equivalent. Admittedly I'm not a geologist so I don't know how resource availability scales with depth into Earth's crust, let alone how it would compare to Kerbin. Edit: another way to think about fossil fuels is that the amount available in total will be proportional to the number of living organisms that have ever lived, died then turned into coal/oil etc. That would be proportional to surface area if everything else is the same.

Bigger fins (those basic ones are very small) on the bottom might help too.

2869km (circular and Equitorial) will get you a period of 6 hours (edit: getting the time difference between periapsis and apoapsis to be three hours is more important than getting the altitude perfectly right), so the orbit will be stationary. The wiki has this information: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin#Orbits