The Grand Baboon

Much response. Very helpful. Wow. So...IPT is just a large scale transfer with specific time windows? That's not too bad. For some reason I was thinking it'd be a lot more difficult than that. Good news. Anyway, I've got my IPV in what seems to be a good orbit around Kerbin and have my lander ready to launch. Both have docking ports, plenty of monoprop, and RCS thrusters. I should have mentioned it earlier, but I installed Mechjeb to assist with the rendevous/docking for my first (failed) IPV attempt. I've read enough here to learn the communities general consensus towards it. To belay any concern, let me say this: I love stickshifts and despise automatics. My objective was to see exactly what MJ was doing to accomplish the two previously listed tasks. I only understood the first thing MJ did, which was to match the inclination of the current orbit with the target. After that, it was all a foreign language. I find great satisfaction in doing things manually, so I really want to figure out how to do it myself. Off to the forums. Thanks, y'all.

Howdy folks. At the behest of a good friend of mine, I picked up KSP on Monday of this week. I've pretty much been playing it non-stop since then. I just finished up my second manned mission to Minimus (shown below) and have completed ~5 manned missions to Mun. I have yet to lose a Kerbal. I'd like to start going to other planets, but I'm a "fly by the seat of the pants" kinda guy. Thus far this has worked out pretty well. Maneuver nodes have been my lifesaver. However, even after much trouble my first attempt at an IPV ended in failure (I forgot antennas and only realized this a few hundred thousand clicks away from Kerbal). Thankfully I made an Alt+F5 save prior to my burn, but still.... Where should I go from here? What would be good things to practice to become proficient at IPT? I still can't quite grasp docking, or even getting close enough to dock. My last attempt at docking resulted in two ships endlessly chasing each other around in orbit.

I FINALLY got an intercept vector with Duna and completed a ~10 minute burn. 100+ million meters away from Kerbin I realized that I failed to install antennas anywhere on either my IPV, or my lander.