Snark

Really? I never noticed a problem with it. KSP doesn't appear to me to model "bendiness" all that well-- the reason why sudden diameter changes make a difference in real life is that real-life objects can bend all along their length. KSP appears (as far as I can tell) to have rigid parts (they squash under stress, but don't bend), and the bending happens only at the joints, which I think is just a function of what the node size is. The more joints you have, the more opportunities to bend. I would say that adding an adapter makes bending worse because now there are two joints instead of one (though not a lot worse, since one of the joints is a larger-size node and is stiffer). In any case, in pre-1.0 I never bothered with adapters and never had any structural problems from it. (And even if there were, could just use struts, which were massless, which not all adapters were.) The only time I ever used adapters was either cosmetic, or if I needed to physically space things out to make room for radially attached parts and what-not. In any case... there's a lot more reason for them now. Flat surfaces perpendicular to the airflow = major bad.

Certainly it takes some re-learning, but I've found it not too hard to make the adjustment and can launch orbital, Mun missions, Minmus, etc. Am just now working up to interplanetary, but my first Duna probe is already on its way. Do you have any specifics of exactly what sort of problem you're having with "can barely get into orbit"? Is it because your rocket is flipping? Or you just run out of fuel, or what? I find that the rocket experience isn't too different from what it was before, but there are really just three big things to watch out for: 1. Rocket design & ascent profile need to be done "right" to avoid flipping. 2. Rockets need to be aerodynamic or they waste their fuel on drag. 3. There are several engines that have been tweaked to be "orbital" engines-- they used to be OK for launching, but now aren't anymore. Their surface Isp has gone to hell and you really don't want to use them in lower atmosphere. This includes the "Terrier" and the "Rhino". So I guess the first question is: is your problem with rockets flipping, or something else? And if it's not flipping, is it insufficient delta vee?

The Mk1 memorial is still there, I just checked. Is it possible that it only shows up if you've upgraded the VAB? Not sure if it's part of the level-specific VAB model.

Yes, they actually have a point now. It's a pretty simple experiment to do... just launch a little rocket with/without the adapter and see which goes higher.

By the way, another thing that makes such contracts easier (not for SRBs but for pretty much everything else): you can use the engine itself to get up to where you test it. You just have to be a little sneaky how you activate it. Here's the key: The contract only cares whether you activate WITH STAGING at the desired height/speed. It doesn't care whether the engine ever was previously activated via another method. So for example, let's say I have a contract to test an engine at 21K to 25K altitude, and it's one that would actually be useful to get up there. I go to the launchpad, and activate the engine by right clicking on it, NOT by staging. I use it to fly up to 21K, then I right click it to deactivate. NOW I activate it via staging. Presto, contract is fulfilled. (You can also use an action group for toggling the engine on off, saves hassle.)

Of course, this technique doesn't work so good when the thing they want you to test is an SRB...

Depends what you mean by "most efficient" and what your constraints are. If the goal is "get into a circular orbit using the least amount of dV", then the optimal approach is this: Come in from interplanetary so that your periapsis is as surface-grazingly low as possible. Right at periapsis, burn retrograde until your apoapsis is at the desired height. Coast to apoapsis, then burn prograde to circularize. The bigger your final circular radius, the less dV you need. - - - Updated - - - Actually, you can have your cake and eat it too. Do two burns: the first one with a really low periapsis to take advantage of the Oberth effect as you described, but don't circularize-- leave your apoapsis at the desired circular radius. Then coast up to apoapsis and circularize there. The goal being "do as much of your burn at as low an altitude as possible," as you say.

Another option is to activate the engine manually (i.e. by clicking on it, or by using an action group) rather than using staging per se. Doesn't count, you can use it as much as you want. Then when you get to where you need to be, throttle down and hit the space bar to stage it.

My biggest cash cow has been "build a new station in orbit around the Sun." Sometimes it wants lotsa kerbal capacity, sometimes it wants a science lab, but usually it's pretty doable with a simple thing I can slap together in a couple of minutes in the VAB. No special babysitting needed to get to the right place. Just make sure it has plenty of dV, point the correct end towards space, and floor it. Once the burn is done and it's on an escape trajectory, it's just a matter of waiting for it to leave Kerbin's SOI. These contracts are curiously lucrative, given the minimal amount of elbow grease required-- they usually pay out in the $370K range, sometimes more. Most hilarious fail: I was impatient and didn't want to wait for days of coasting (yes, I know about timewarp, I'm just stingy about calendar time for no rational reason) and piled on the delta vee to the craft. Launched, waited until it left SOI at a blisteringly fast clip ... hmm, that's odd, doesn't seem to be completing the contract. What gives? Took me a minute to realize that I had so vastly overkilled the velocity that I was on an escape trajectory out of the Sun, and therefore not in "orbit." Oops.

Still EVA.

Yeah, it's been that way for as long as I can remember. Not sure if it's by design, seems like more of a bug to me.

A note on torque and reaction wheels: Actually, it doesn't matter where you put them. They work equally well anywhere on your vessel, they don't have to be near CoM. That's what physics says, and that's what the game does. It's a common misconception that it matters. The reason it doesn't matter is that for a free-floating body, the center of rotation (which determines the moment of angular inertia) is going to be the center of mass regardless of where the torque is applied. That is, if you have a long skinny rocket, and you put a reaction wheel on it and use that to, say, flip the rocket end for end, it's going to rotate around the middle of the rocket, regardless of whether the reaction wheel is in the center of the rocket or out at one of the ends. That's because a given amount of torque will create a given amount of angular acceleration. By the way, that's not just what the physics equations say. It's also what happens in-game: I just now tried a test to verify. Built two otherwise-identical rockets, put them floating next to each other, one has a reaction wheel in the middle and the other one out at one end, try to rotate both. Result: same performance. So the game is modeling the physics correctly in this case. (That said: The general mass distribution of your rocket does make a difference how fast the reaction wheels can turn it, and reaction wheels have mass, so moving them can affect the moment of inertia of your ship. But assuming that the mass of your reaction wheels is only a very tiny fraction of your ship mass, this ought to be negligible. And of course, Kerbal ships aren't perfectly rigid, so if you have a ship that's ....e to flexing under torque, then reaction wheel placement can matter for that.) [Edit: LOL. The forum software thinks that the word I used meaning 'having a tendency to', spelled "p" followed by "rone", is a swear word followed by an e. Sheesh.] The fact that reaction wheel placement doesn't matter goes against most folks' "common sense," thus the misconception. After all, say you have a golf club, and try waggling it back and forth if you hold it in the middle versus holding it at one end. Lots easier from the middle, right? But that's a false comparison with the KSP case, since in this case the center of rotation is where you're applying the torque. When you waggle the golf club from one end, you're applying the forces externally and you're making it pivot about that end. A long rod rotating about its center has a much lower moment of inertia than the same rod rotating around one end. Moral of the story: Put your reaction wheels wherever is most convenient for your design. If you don't believe me, try it out for yourself in-game.

Dres has a big canyon with some impressively high, steep sides.

I do this all the time (I'm a glutton for Kerbin rescue contracts). I generally do this by flipping to map view and rotating so that it's looking due north (gives a nice side view). The ideal target position for launch is generally when it has climbed about 5 degrees or so above KSC's western horizon. I find that my craft's TWR doesn't make much difference here, since the lion's share of time from launch to intercept is either climbing through the first 20 km (where speed is limited by atmosphere) or coasting after the initial burn. All of the above applies to vertical rocket launches only; spaceplanes have a much more gradual ascent profile and would need a bigger phase angle. I can't offer any advice there, I'm not a spaceplane guy and never fly 'em.

Also, kerbals can have trouble with sudden sharp angles in ladders, particularly "concave" ones (i.e. where the next segment is bending towards the kerbal). One way to handle this is to adjust the angles so that they don't get too sharp. 45 degrees is probably OK, 90 is problematic. For example, if the height of the overhead ceiling with the hatch isn't too high, you could probably do this with a single extendible ladder-- just don't make it go straight down to the ground, but instead at a 45 degree angle (so the kerbal is hanging from its underside while climbing. My guess is that this would work, as long as the ladder can reach the ground. Another approach would be to send the ladder straight down (like you're doing), but at the right-angle join, add another short ladder segment at a 45 degree angle to the horizontal & vertical parts (i.e. so your kerbal makes two 45 degree turns instead of a single 90 degree turn while climbing). If 45 degrees turns out to be too sharp, use two ladder segments so there can be three 30-degree turns, you get the idea. Gradual rather than sharp turns.

I can think of three reasons why a particular behavior (about anything) would be implemented in-game: 1. Because it's realistic, and realistic is good. 2. Because it's a conscious design decision for gameplay reasons. 3. Because... um... it just kinda happened because we forgot about this edge case and this is what it ended up doing. I see folks here making #1 comments and #2 comments, but I suspect that what's actually going on is #3. Pre-1.0, the instruments were at least consistent with each other, so I'd guess it was a conscious game-design choice to make a gameplay decision that trumps realism. Now the instruments are inconsistent, which is bad, and seems likely to be an oversight by Squad rather than a deliberate choice. The only question is whether they should all say "atmosphere" or all say "space" when you're physically in-atmosphere but on an escape trajectory. Personally, my own preference would be to just say things act like they're in atmosphere if they're in atmosphere, regardless of trajectory. It's what a player would expect. If for gameplay reasons you want to put some sort of limitation (e.g. "this instrument only works at speeds under X", then say that in the part description and give a "speed is too high" error message when someone tries it.

My own approach is typically to go for LKO initially. 4 satellites can easily handle it, as long as they're synchronous to each other. Regarding Geschosskopf's future-proofing suggestion: As long as the LKO satellites have DTS-M1 on them, it's easy to add interplanetary capability later. Just add a single "big relay" satellite in a polar orbit at big radius (say, 30,000 km). It points its DTS-M1 at Kerbin; the LKO's each point a DTS-M1 at the relay. Then the relay does the interplanetary communication. In a polar 30,000km orbit, there's no significant problem with Kerbin occluding the signal; one relay sat is sufficient. One pragmatic reason why I like this all-the-eggs-in-one-basket approach to interplanetary networks: I find that RemoteTech is crash-prone when there are a whole lot of links present; the game will just suddenly crash when switching between ships, or between a ship and KSC, or even at KSC when switching between the overview and a building. The problem seems to get much worse as the number of links goes up. By sticking to just one big relay per planet, it turns the network into an O(N) system instead of an O(N^2) system and there are a lot fewer links around-- I get fewer crashes.

Yeah, looks like they missed a spot when they updated which science instruments work where. Try letting your aerobrake continue until you've slowed to a closed orbit and see if it works then.

I think it boils down to the distinction between fun-hard and not-fun-hard. It's fun when the difficulty is a natural outgrowth of the physics. Why does this rocket flip? Why can't this spaceplane get to orbit? It's hard but fair, there's no feeling of arbitrariness to it. It's what people play KSP for. What's not fun is when the game wants something and you don't know what it wants. That's the trick to good UI design. I think KSP does pretty well in general, but it does have some rough edges. The issue with orbit direction in contracts is one such, IMHO. To Squad's credit, though, they have a pretty good track record of incremental improvements. Remember when the navball only had prograde / retrograde markers?

Can you be a little more specific about the layout? Is the hatch over your head on a ceiling, or just high up a wall out of reach? Also, where (i.e. what sort of gravity) is it-- Kerbin, or somewhere lighter?

Did you try that before or after your velocity dropped enough that you're no longer in an escape trajectory? I've noticed this behavior around for a long time: if you're still going so fast that you're on an escape trajectory, it doesn't matter whether you're physically in atmosphere or not, the instruments think you're in space. Once you drop below escape velocity, then suddenly it counts as atmosphere. For example, prior to 1.0 you couldn't use a pressure meter in vacuum. It wouldn't let me take a measurement until my speed dropped below escape. Now that they've relaxed that requirement, I'm not surprised that they'd give a reading of "space." It's not clear to me that this is a bug-- may be by design. The point of having different science results for different situations is to add a level of challenge/difficulty to the game (e.g. you don't get science for landing until you are up to the challenge of landing without going splat). High-speed flybys are easy, and making them so that they just happen to graze the atmosphere isn't any harder than going by in a vacuum. Being able to brake until you're captured is more of a challenge, so it makes sense to me that they'd want to say "you don't get credit for being in atmosphere unless you've successfully managed capture." Whether it's a bug or by design, though, it certainly has potential for confusion-- i.e. isn't clear to the player why it's saying space. Seems like there should be some sort of custom error message displayed, for cases where you're physically in atmosphere but on an escape trajectory, to let the player know what the deal is.

Hm. That's a puzzle. (Though I don't quite understand your comment about "5,750 charge"... solar panels are generators, they don't store charge. Did you mean "I have a lot of solar panels and also a lot of batteries?") Definitely not. I've done oodles of this kind of contract and it doesn't matter where the antenna is, as long as it's somewhere on the craft. That's the only thing I could think of. I've never had any problem anything like what you're describing, but then I tend to launch things in one piece so the various components aren't connected via docking port. I've never tried completing a contract by docking together separate pieces that individually wouldn't qualify. I can imagine that solving that one could be a complicated bit of code, wouldn't be surprised if maybe there's a bug (or confusing feature) there. Maybe someone who has successfully done such an operation could comment?

^^^ This. Plus the added bonus that they immediately get promoted to level 1 as soon as they arrive at KSC, since they were in orbit.

Different folks have different takes on things-- for example, I don't find the science to be grindy (for me the funds to upgrade buildings are more of a grind). YMMV. I hated the old science-spamming contracts, and love what they've done in 1.0.x. If you don't like the science grind mid-game, you can always use the administration building strategy that trades funds for science. In the early game, I generally don't bother trying to milk every Kerbin surface biome-- the science points are just too low. Rather, make sure to milk each part of your trajectory. Launchpad. Flying. Upper atmosphere. Low space. High space. Do that, and it adds up pretty quick to power through the first few science nodes. Once you unlock EVA, a single orbit can net you a ton of "space over ___" science points.

Also, watch out for what you have on the front end of the rocket-- make sure that it's as aerodynamic as possible. Smooth, round, narrow, and pointy. If it's not, that can really contribute to instability. Nosecones, fairings, and service bays can help with this.