Lelitu

Nothing really good. About the best option is to launch into a *very* eccentric orbit, with the apoapsis almost on the soi, and at an/dn. Then a small burn will complete the plane change. But that leaves you in a very eccentric equatorial orbit, and it's usually quite expensive to get that extreme eccentricity, since it takes nearly enough deltav to escape. Your best plan was scuppered before you landed. If you absolutely have to launch into an equatorial orbit, for cheap. Land on the equator, it's the only good option.

Oh, that's absolutely true in RL. Not so much in KSP with it's much more limited science system. With Life support mods, it's also actually easier to do a kerballed mission to Moho than Duna, let alone Dres. A Kerballed mission with IRSU is much more able to really science mine effectively than any probes.

TBH, I find Moho a lot easier than Dres. Both require a lot of deltav, true. But Moho whips around kerbol so fast it has transfer windows about once every Moho year, which is a lot. Dres.. 4 years between windows, and 4 year flight time. Also, I find Moho's capture burns more predictable. For an unmanned program 6kps at LKO isn't hard to achieve, so I have a whole commnet at Moho. The first probe to Dres just arrived, and was launched before I started putting probes in Moho orbit.

That would be because it doesn't actually make any sense. The Ishimura would better serve earth by grabbing asteroids to smelt. More resources, less gravity and energy required.

Dres doesn't offer enough of a science bonus to make it worthwhile with the amount of hassle it takes to get there. It's highly inclined, which makes transfers very expensive, except on the rare occasions they line up with Ascending/Descending nodes. Unfortunately, its orbital period is close enough to Kerbin's that transfer windows are even rarer than Duna, Good ones worse than that. Basically, Moho, but even more time consuming, and boring. At least Moho has the Mohole.

which is a change of twice the velocity. Velocity includes direction. at 1000m/s prograde, you need 2000m/s deltav to get to 1000m/s retrograde.

Until publishers start offering games on GOG at release, steam is the *least* intrusive, annoying and unpleasant option available. Further, steam doesn't require DRM at all, that would be the publishers insisting that all their titles have DRM regardless of venue. I've never had any major issues with it, except the autoupdate of KSP breaking all my mods once.. It's also very convenient being able to play my games wherever I happen to be, without having to cart around dozens of disks (if I even have a disk reader of any kind available). Basically, as much as it does have some downsides, mostly because it allows DRM bundling and doesn't allow skipping updates, it's still the best option available for a great many games. Steam is actually the reason why I can skip the optical drive from any systems I build nowdays, since everything is available by digital download.

a good delta-v map should help with all your questions.

For this design, lowering orbit to 75x75 would be pointless. It won't take enough energy out of the orbit to matter. Either it can hold heatshield first, or it will burn (unless a barely suborbital hop at well under 2000m/s). in general, it's only useful for designs that are overfuelled, and underprotected from heat. Nothing beats the efficiency of an atmosphere for stopping spaceships, except *maybe* magic. Even then, only by a little bit, and maybe.

it's a lot worse than people on this thread have made out. If J random troll from somewhere like 4chan wanted to, they could do an enormous amount of damage to the forums. And it's entirely because of the lack of login security. Any half decent script kiddy could capture a mod, or admin's credentials, login as them, and use the moderator/admin powers to completely trash the place, and that admin's reputation. if, for example they stole @Snark's, @sal_vager's, or some other high ranking member's login, All the damage done by J random troll is going to look exactly like it was done by the legitimate owner of that name. Not a wonderful outcome, even if all the lost/defaced threads are recovered from backup.

Trying to slow down before entering the atmosphere is worse than useless. The rocket equation means that the extra fuel to slow down enough to matter(2+kps) will completely cripple your rocket, by adding a *lot* of mass to the last stage used. this means you need a vastly bigger rocket at every stage to achieve your mission. Re-entry doesn't require a periapsis anywhere near ground level on kerbin. Once you dip below 30KM(for most craft) you're committed to landing, even from interplanetary (except maybe jool). Atmospheric drag will see to it you slow down. If your re-entry vehicle is designed to be passively stable flying heatshield first, it'll even do it safely. For your current design, it's neither passively stable heatshield first, nor close enough to it for SAS retrograde hold to keep it pointed the right way. @Spricigo is right. You need to rearrange the last stage, so that the COL is above COM, and heatshield right at the bottom. This will keep it stable flying heatshield first, or near enough for SAS retrograde hold to make it work.

Kerbals get visits from the big pink kerbals

Do you have any mods installed, and what version of KSP are you running? Neither value adds up correctly, as at 0.0004/s you should get 0.025 per minute. I've got a lab in minmus orbit producing 11.87 science/day. by my math that makes 0.00054 science/second. When in command with no timewarp I see the third place tick up by 1 every two seconds, which is about what you'd expect for that rate. Which suggests it's one of: KSP version (I'm on 1.2.2), your mods(if any), my mods(*lots*), or some weird diminishing rate behaviour (my lab has only 100 science,and 720 data).

6 hr day is 21600 seconds 9.29 science every 21600 seconds is 0.0004 science per second. that means it takes 2500 seconds, or nearly 42 minutes, to get 1 science. the number just goes up *really* slowly, so you can see it under timewarp, but not by sitting and staring.

With an older AMD chip like you have, there's really nothing that you can do. The Bulldozer core that AMD used until this year was a *very* bad design (almost killed the company it was that bad), and it's worst at exactly what KSP does the most. My FX8150 (also 8core) with 16Gb ram starts to drop physics frames at about 100 parts. You'll get better performance for KSP out of a cheap intel I5, (maybe even I3) to replace it. That, or save up some money, and get a Ryzen based system (either 7 or 5), these are the new AMD chips, only releasing this year, and are *far* better than the old at what KSP needs.

True, the NASA design was 850 seconds (slightly higher than the KSP design) Later designs, never built, range up to 5000 seconds for gas core nuclear thermal rockets.. Not simple to build, and never been done, but damned efficient.

IMO, they're well and truly worth the burntime in stock game if you're headed inside eve, or outside dres. The ISP(hilariously low compared to RL) is just too good, almost 3 times the nearest chemical rocket. There's no other way to push a mass too heavy for practical ion drives to any respectable delta-V. With some of the more exotic drives out there in mods, maybe not so good.

TBH, the lander cans are only intended to be used in vacuum, and not for atmospheric entry. Heat tolerance of parts is misleading for re-entry. For a direct interplanetary re-entry the heat load is so high that no part has the heat tolerance to just ignore it. A heat shield loses ablator when too hot, anything else explodes. You'll see that the 1.25m lander can sticks out past the 1.25m heat shield. This means that it's not actually shielded at all, and can't be used for direct re-entry without a bigger shield. Parts that fit entirely behind a heat shield don't experience much heating at all, so even low tolerance parts survive just fine. Basically, your design is wrong, because you're using a command pod never intended to re-enter kerbin.

It is. It's why my 750cc sportsbike accelerates like a supercar with damn near a thousand horsepower, yet only has 148 horsepower. It only weighs 200Kg fully fuelled. As for too much kerbal? No such thing.

Combining the maneuvers only makes much savings if the alignment change is small, and doesn't skip aligning planes at all. The method you outlined will work well as long as step 1 goes off well. get a poor plane match (and don't/can't revert) and you're talking a *very* expensive burn to match orbits at intercept. often enough that it's cheaper to raise the apoapsis high, and planechange there as a seperate maneuver. I usually play career with no quicksave and no revert, because they make it way too easy.

This only works for intercepts in very high orbits. By definition a rendesvous requires matching planes(and all other orbital parameters). Otherwise you're not in the same orbit, and will fly past at speed. So you're making a large plane change, but at a high enough altitude (and thus low velocity) that's not too painful.

I think it depends a lot on what you're docking, to what, and with what supporting tools. With some kind of alignment indicator, and a reasonably well built craft with RCS balanced in all 6 degrees of freedom, it's pretty straightfoward with a little practice. Lose the RCS balance, or alignment indicators, and it all goes bad fast.

TBH, if I couldn't go interplanetary, I'd have quit within weeks. Getting about in kerbin orbit and moons is just so easy even in fairly early career mode that I get bored. Just added OPM and TAC life support for my 1.1.3 career.. Going to be fun trying to get something that will be self sustaining for the 70+ year transfer orbit out to plock/karen

Shifting the calculations server side won't stop all griefing. Never claimed it would. But it does make it harder to do things like simply ignore collisions, or fuel requirements, because the client no longer has control over collision detection, or burn calculations. It makes some of the more blatant cheating much, much harder to do.

A pair of screenshots showing what's going on would make this much easier to help with. However, I suspect Bewing has the essence of it correct. Detached shocks are just one more reason why a spaceplane always wants to reenter as nose high as you can possibly manage without losing control. *way* past the stall point in normal flight. The huge flat face of the belly forces a detached shockwave, spreads the heat load over more parts, and maximizes drag. All these things help you not cook before dropping below compressive heating speeds (1.3kps ish) A bit of an extreme example perhaps, but coming in this high means everything gets heated evenly, and you slow down *fast*