ElWanderer

If you have a polar orbit around the Mun, this will rotate around slowly in terms of how aligned it is with the Mun's orbit around Kerbin. It is easier to transfer between Kerbin and a polar Mun orbit when the orbits are aligned. I realise a picture would probably help to explain this, but I'm on my phone... I would wait until the polar orbit is almost in line with the Mum's orbit then launch a rescue ship. I would do a standard Hohmann transfer to the Mun and aim to hit the middle of the planet at apoapsis around Kerbin. Once in the Mun's sphere of influence, I would check which way the target ship is going then burn normal or anti-normal as required to push the rescue ship's trajectory over the right pole so as to be going around in same direction as the target. Burn at periapsis to capture into orbit (an elliptical orbit at this point will let you do a plane change burn more cheaply to match the target - you'll probably be a fair few degrees out). Then rendezvous as normal.

No. That's not quite right. If you stage them but atmospheric pressure hasn't gone up enough to deploy them, they won't burn up. I regularly set my parachutes to deploy at 0.35 atmospheres and stage them whilst in orbit so I can't forget them on the way down. I've only lost parachutes when the deploy pressure was set to the default 0.01 atmosphere.

"Is it a bug or something changed." Something has changed. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/117181-Have-docking-controls-changed-Shift-throttles-up-while-in-docking-mode?p=1880993&viewfull=1#post1880993

They show up intentionally. It's useful to know what contracts are asking for before accepting them (just a pity that information is split across two separate buildings).

NaN happens when you divide by zero... yes it should be caught and displayed as zero but it doesn't seem to do any harm so I guess it's never been high on the list of things to do.

This doesn't answer your question about calculating an intercept (is this something MechJeb can do?), but are you aware that you can drag manoeuvre nodes along your flight-path? Or that if you right-click you can advance a manoeuvre node to the next orbit? Yes the location of my nodes are usually a guess at first, but it doesn't take long to drag them round and advance orbits until I get near an intercept. Helps if your orbit and that of the target are circular, of course.

For what it's worth, I just opened my vertical launch calculator and fiddled with some values to get a velocity of about 252m/s at 2000m and I agree with your calculated/expected results for gravity and drag. How accurate are your measured-in-flight values? If your prediction for max alt is only 1% off, I wouldn't expect observed drag to be ~10% away from your calculated value. I found my results for peak altitude were never quite right. I didn't take into account the rotation, which I always assumed was the culprit.

Does your craft consist entirely of parts with a drag coefficient of 0.2, or do you have some less draggy parts? I remember I could never get my 0.90 height record simulations to match reality (worse performance/more drag than I predicted) until I realised SRBs had a drag coefficient of 0.3.

Can you set manoeuvre nodes? I have a similar rescue on going (it came as a bit of a shock to find a stranded Kerbal so far out), though further out than the Mum's orbit in my case - I don't think I have a collision to worry about. My steps: Get into LKO. Target the stranded craft and find which ascending/descending node it'll pass through next. Set a manoeuvre on your orbit opposite that node and plot a burn out to it. You want the intercept marker to appear bang on the node and for the target craft not to have reached it at that point. If it has gone past, you'll have to aim for the other node. Right-click the node and advance the burn orbit by orbit until the nearest approach is closest to the intercept. Ideally they'd meet, but this is unlikely. Play with burn (e.g. add a bit of radial) to change the transit time so that the target craft catches up/is caught by you, until the intercept is within a few km. Plot a second burn at the intercept point and add a whole bunch of prograde, radial and normal until the orbit you'll go into matches the target pretty closely. I never actually execute this burn as plotted (I do the normal rendezvous of reducing relative velocity whilst pushing the retrograde marker towards the away-from-target marker), but it lets me know what to expect in terms of delta-v and burn time. The good news is that matching inclination out here is much cheaper than doing it in LKO, especially when combining it with the prograde (and radial, as you're unlikely to meet at an apsis) component. Going from a 100km by 100km orbit to 11.5Mm by 8.2Mm costs 1250m/s, not including any inclination change. It should then be about 400m/s to drop your periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere... if low on fuel by then in your case, just reduce the apoapsis to get out of the way of the Mum - you can send up a second rescue craft to meet the first one! But I would have thought that if you can orbit the Mum and return, you'd have enough fuel for this intercept and return, unless you're trying to match inclination in LKO. Your craft (guessing what you have based on the image) has about 3200m/s in the first stages (assuming the liquid engine is off until SRB jettison, which may be a bit hard to manoeuvre) and you have about 2800m/s in the upper stage. If it takes you 4000m/s to get.into orbit, the remaining 2000m/s should be enough. Doing this without manoeuvre nodes would be a lot trickier. You can burn out to meet at a node visually, but I don't know how you'd calculate when to do the burn so as to intercept the target.

There is a line in the change log saying they've unified the controls, which has probably changed how docking mode works. They had said previously that docking mode was counter-intuitive, hardly-used and likely to be brought into line with the staging mode controls.

There is a setting, not sure if it is stock or Kerbal Alarm Clock (the only mod I'm using currently), that lets you kill timewarp when you kill the throttle. This can be useful occasionally, but it does mean seeing the x1 message a lot. It also likes to complain when activated below the minimum altitude for timewarp.

I am very happy today. In my first Jool-5 project (which I never wrote up in the end) it took me seven attempts and a massive diversion of the mothership to land on Tylo. I was worried it would be as difficult, but this time around I managed it at the first attempt and my tug has plenty enough fuel to get the lander back to the mothership. Phew! To continue the Moho tangent, I've not made it there yet except for a fly-by. I sent a probe ship early in my previous career, but instead of hitting its intercept, it ended up miles away. I suspect that was from warping through SoI boundaries.

I just hit this (unexpected Pol contract completion) by visiting Ike's South Pole in 0.90. I completed both science from Pol and science from the space around Pol.

I live just Southwest of London and sadly the weather forecast of heavy cloud cover was accurate. Was interesting noting light levels dip, though hard to tell how much was astronomical and how much was meteorological...

The image in the OP seems to be an IndyCar design for this year. If I weren't on a phone I'd link to an article. From the front it looks fairly similar to an F1 car from this year or last, though other views of the design show it to be very different at the back (and so weird to my eyes - I know very little about IndyCar). Note that Honda don't have an F1 team, though they are supplying engines to McLaren this season. There seems to be a law of diminishing returns with the wing elements - losing a whole wing makes a race car very hard to control, but drivers have lost small parts in collisions (especially the end plates) without much of a noticeable effect on their lap times.

When I was working out my spreadsheet (which agrees with the formulae posted above, yay) the main surprise was finding that SRBs have a higher drag coefficient of 0.3. I couldn't work out why an RT-10 plus pod wouldn't go as high as I predicted until I spotted that. It was especially annoying as the whole point was to work out how to beat the altitude records one by one in a career game. Also, bear in mind that if you have massive (as in not massless) parts with a drag coefficient that isn't 0.2, the average coefficient of the craft may change as you burn fuel e.g. a mk1 command pod, parachute plus an RT-10 goes from about 0.28 when full to roughly 0.24 when empty. Another reason to be happy the model will change in v1.0!

I have a formula that seems pretty accurate, but it's buried deep within a spreadsheet I don't have easy access to on this tablet. As I understand it, KSP drag does go up with velocity squared (it's lift from wings that is currently proportional to velocity, at least until v1.0) but the atmospheric pressure is somewhat unrealistic. It can be worked out from information in the wiki. I can find the details next time I'm on my PC if that would help.

I had one of these where the orbit turned out to be very close to the sun - I had to zoom in a long way to see it on the tracking centre screen. I rejected it as I figured the delta-v requirements would be massive. Edit: hmmm, looking at the wiki, I think an orbit of 35-60 billion metres should be out near Dres.

I tend to write less and less in the plaque text box these days - can you read it again without landing next to it with another Kerbal? Conversely I write more and more in the title box. At first I used just the planet name and a number for the landing, but now I like to include the biome and altitude.

What type of average? These days I generally get just 30-45 minutes at a time, with the occasional much longer session. The mean could be in the 1-3 hour bracket, but I would be tempted to vote <1 hour as that's the most common.

I've managed to join The Retrograde Club even after checking the direction of the lights... not sure how I managed that. At least I had enough delta-v to reverse the direction. The higher the orbit, the slower the orbital velocity and the more easily you can correct it.

Hmmmm, you could build all bar the docking ports symmetrically, then manually place ports one by one, then place probe sub-assemblies on top of them one by one. That'd allow them to have different action groups. It would get very complicated, though, especially if you end up with all four spots filled. Interesting design, by the way!

You can set an action group that decouples/undocks the port (may need to be both ports) and turns on the probe's engines at the same time. Make sure the lander's engines are turned off and throttle-up appropriately before hitting it.

Yes, well there is this one famous example. Some people call it a Mangalyaan manoeuvre as a result.

I followed up "Next Mission" with "Next Next Mission" (and then "Next Next Mission II")... serious lack of imagination back then!