Blaarkies

My best experience was starting career, getting to the Mun and back...then restarting a new career now that i know which tech tree upgrades i really need, which building upgrades i really need. I would recommend starting career on easy, doing only essential tutorials(everything up until the Mun orbit training is enough). On easy you will get a lot of mercy for wasting money or science, but wont have to be overwhelmed by the 200+ part selection you get from sandbox. By the time you succeed at bringing back(safely) the first kerbal to step on the Mun, you will know just enough to make the correct decisions this time around, so restart on Normal difficulty then(the first few launches goes by much faster this time around). You will be able to plan a better, practical space station, will know which techtree nodes are most important for your goals and be able to get a massive headstart on experimenting for Minmus landings, or even interplanetary missions.

I have only seen this on old nodes(those that are a few orbits in the past already), and sometimes while burning(especially if you are adjusting on the second node while burning on the first). But i have never seen this during normal timewarp, the craft point at the dark-blue node marker, like @bewing pointed out. This because the craft does not rotate relative to the stars, and neither does the node...but the prograde marker doesn't care about stars, it follows the orbital line, which in turn follows the trajectory due to the gravity well. Maybe you maneuver node is moving forward/backwards in time? (i get maneuver nodes moving around phantom style when I do Mun slingshots to Minmus, the second maneuver doesn't stay at Minmus Pe but moves forwards and backwards)

Well, technically that would be bad for a space game if the "sky is the the limit"...you know, space being "above" sky and all that

I used to do that, ISRU base on the Mun, an orange tank with 2 NERVs and a kind of a forklift claw truck that assembles the base, and is later used to pickup the shuttle and port dock it to the base for refueling. Then i found the EVA fuelpipe mod. Made this stuff much easier. The closest stock gets to this is a claw field to land on with the shuttle. The worst problem is still the Kraken itself: After the 10th landing or so, your base is suddenly slightly below the surface, only to jump up and break a vital component. You can fix that, but something worse is bound to happen next. Thats when I decided: I need 100t of fuel in orbit, I can spend 15 minutes to make that happen, so what cuts out all the stops, all the docking, rendezvous and coordination? I know it's half the fun taken away right there, but it allows you to go ahead and build a Laythe base constructed via unfolding crawler rovers, delivered in pieces by a VTOL dropship, and a scout jet with a closed-wing design as a bonus!

What if I want the control to be slightly wobbly, but all my level 5 pilots are OCD perfectionists? Now i need to find a level 3 somewhere... What about they bring back that ridiculous over-correction we had in the previous version, where the ship would swing way past prograde, only to try and rotate backwards and again over-correct for it over-correction. Bring that back for low-level pilots and cores

I so hated that...I made a frontier exploration ship(that ended up going to Eeloo for the 18x science). I figured there are kerbals on board so i got all my ship control sorted out...expect for maneuver nodes. Once at Eeloo, i could not delete the node. I was 100+ days old at some point, and also pointing wildly in the wrong direction. Worse, i could not create a new node to find departure windows and eject back to Kerbin...i had to do it like we did 5years ago

I don't think we can do that anymore with the whole satellite network thing, since you need an active(green) connection to the KSC, or to a Piloted bigger probe core to be able to add/edit/delete maneuver nodes. Of course, that depends on the difficulty settings. This trick might not be available on default normal difficulty.

It is less efficient to bring along the ascent fuel with each landing. If you bring the ISRU to the surface, you only need enough to land(waste less fuel from your orbital supply) and then fill up all tanks on the surface. Due the minimum size/mass of an ISRU, this is not viable with small ships. Dont worry i am not dictating how it should be done For me, i like the least amount of effort. A lander ship built with a small loan of a few funds, like 240t that is mostly nuclear powered. Basically a fuel depot, with an ISRU, engines and landing legs. It goes down, refills in about 10 days, then back into Minmus orbit to supply fuel...it all takes probably 10 minutes of IRL time Anyway, back to topic: This seems very fitting...

Short answer: No Long answer: Noooo! Just kidding Remember Galileo and the Feather and the Cannon ball? Imagine a feather in orbit(70km?) and a cannon ball beside it. Both will orbit equally efficiently no matter the mass. Now imagine the Cannon ball in an orbit of 65km: it might be able to do an entire orbit before hitting the ground. Let's remove the cannon ball's contents(so that it becomes a thin shell, with a mass of just a few grams). Now it will only complete a half orbit, since it is more "feather-like". My point: If your stage makes the craft more "cannon-ball-like", keep it. That momentum and gravity losses are already paid for(as you mentioned), thus making the craft more "feather-like" is worse for you. Mostly this comes down to a fairing making the craft more aerodynamic(less aero drag per more mass = cannon-ball-like), so keep them fairings and pop them just before your next upper-atmosphere burn. Keeping a massive booster stage connected...well it depends. If it is aerodynamic(minimal fins) you might as well keep it. To make it clear, test these thing out. Get yourself into a sub-orbital trajectory, jettison the booster stage, but don't continue your burn. If the booster stage goes ahead of your craft, then it is more cannon-ball-like and you should keep it * "Galileo and the Feather and the Cannon ball" is made up and not real.

That thread has most of the questions already answered.

Just don't worry about it(not like that ). I mean, just go and collect every binome on Kerbin from now on...you will definatly land on the grass lands, only to find you already collect all but the gravity experiment. Thats ok, no harm done right? Just keep going "as if it was reseted" Now this is a horrible answer i am sorry So, here use this to help you out:

I bet we all were there at some time. I didnt want to believe the Oberth effect when I first heard of it(and i knew i was wrong because it is mathematically proven). My lightbulb moment happened when I realised this thought experiment: A probe starts at the edge of Kerbin's SOI with almost no velocity (just enough to have a 70km Pe). Let's say this probe takes 10days to fall/reach Pe, it now has about 3200m/s speed which it received only due to gravity (10days of gravity acceleration causes this much speed). Now do a tiny 100m/s burn towards prograde: This probe would have taken 10days to reach Ap, but this burn causes it to get there much faster. Gravity doesn't have that much time to slow it down by 3200m/s because it reaches Ap in just 7days. Naively we would expect the ending velocity to be 100m/s faster than what we had, but that is not the case...we exit Kerbin SOI with 500m/s. If gravity only has 7days to slow us down again, there is no way it will get near -3200m/s again...that extra speed is ours now *these numbers are not exact, actual results will definately vary. This does not explain what causes the Oberth effect, it's just a local proof based on input/output of a few craft speeds

you dont even need the cheat menu if that makes you feel dirty. Just start a new career, but bump up the science rewards to max. |You should be able to tick off the tech tree in a few launches

Is that what you want? Got that from Little green men from Mars mod, take a look

I am having real Déjà-vu over here... i have heard this before, the community explained Oberth to someone before, but they rejected the evidence and substituted it with their own... @WanderingKid Please don't fall into the same trap he did, please please

If price is a worrying factor, you will never gather enough funds to buy reactors if you keep sticking "backup" solar panels on every probe

Kinda easy landing there ...it's the going back up again that is the hard part

Use a RTG. Much lighter and one is enough for what you are looking for(also, Kerbal can open up solar panel while on EVA, even if there is no electricity left)

Use the stars! It's much easier than IRL because KSP has no axial tilt. You need a rover landed on the moon, then lookup at the same star for 4 kerbin years(this will give a nice average). Use the sundial method to draw lines indicating where the star was last year...if you see that the stars at it's peak does not have an azimuth of Pi/2, then move your rover(in the stars general direction...relative to the ground of course) Rinse and repeat, then some 20 Kerbin years later you should have the perfect, up to the closest eyeballing unit of measure accuracy in where the equator is. Glad i could help!

A Surface Scanner Module can increase the accuracy of those bright spots (on hard mode those bright spots frequently contain large 0% ore areas). A few landings of the surface scanner then you can really home in on the good mining site. But the same as with rockets. If it mines too slow, add MOAR DRILLS!!! ...does not have the same charm to it though

One relay dish will let an infinite amount of other probes talk to it simultaneously. This relay dished satellite will have player control via it's relay dish(no need to add direct antennae on it) Adding multiples of the relay dishes on a single craft increases it's range, but with diminishing returns(10 dishes are only slightly better than 9 dishes) Dishes need to be on the same craft to increase range, no need for extra electricity generation for relay services(they only use extra EC when the relay probes itself transmits science...relaying science from other probes doesn't care about having extra EC) Relays in highly elliptical orbits towards the north/south of planets can give you incredible coverage for very little effort/cost Having a ground based relay on kerbin's mountain west of KSC can improve consistent connection for a cheap price with low tech

I just tweaked the "authority" meter into the negative on my control surfaces and then they act in reverse. There might be something wrong in your installation/mod list that you want to take a look at

I absolutely agree, but "realism" adds a lot to immersion ...thats why KSP didn't end up being a 2D game with linear gravity(relating to real life physics certainly made me lose my mind over this game). I mean don't make stuff silly just for the lols, rather make it have a grounded reason(arbitrary even) which leads to wanting to use crewed missions. Thats why i say kerbals need better abilities(to have an advantage over probes), or probes need disadvantages(stuff breaks down over time and no one's there to fix it)

That's kind off why IRL humans have not been further than the Mun, but probes have been all over the solar system, and probes are already handling most resupply missions. Humans are slow, fragile and cause a much worse reputation hit to the agency when things go wrong. Should crewed missions in game be vastly superior to probes then? Need some useful things for kerbals to do

You can already do this. Right click on the control surface and set it to pitch only. You can invert the direction of positive pitch as well...there are canards in the stock game, they are specifically made to be elevators at the front You want to explore Kerbol system before everything is unlocked? Play with 30% reward settings, you will really enjoy that. Don't bring up the "science tree to be re-balanced" topic, it usually summons that career-overhaul guy