bewing

Rear stabilizers work by pushing the back end of your plane down, constantly. This is very inefficient for flying (because you want lift), which is why Burt Rutan never used them. Canards work with your wings to always provide lift. Since the entire purpose of this plane is going to be maximally efficient distance flight, you can not afford to waste lift, and therefore fuel. Additionally, that increased lift makes for shorter takeoffs, softer landings, a higher top speed, and the innate ability to take off from water because you don't have to "rotate" to get airborne. A rear stabilizer design is literally always worse than the equivalent canard design.

You can fairly easily build a plane that goes halfway around the planet and back on one tank of fuel (effectively a circumnavigation). The more important question is -- what do you need to do on the other side of the planet? 1. You want to go to the Badlands to collect biome science. 2. You have a survey contract that is either low altitude, or on the surface. 3. You have a high altitude survey contract. 1 & 2 are fairly easy with the tech you have, but the flight will take a long time. There is no way to do #3 without a Panther engine. You can get a panther engine from a "test" contract, without needing to actually purchase the technology -- because it is in the next higher tech node that you haven't unlocked yet. The best engine for a low-altitude trip will be a single wheesley. You only want to use MK1 parts, because they have very low drag for their capacity. You will want the MK1 Command Pod for your pilot, because it is lightweight and low drag (remove the monoprop fuel from the pod when you build the plane). One small circular intake is fine, 800 to 1200 units of fuel in your fuselage, and I highly recommend a canard-wing design using tailfins for your canards. The type B modular wings are probably your smartest choices for wing parts. The next big problem is your landing gear. I would highly recommend delaying your mission until you have the small retractable landing gear. Either by purchasing the tech node, or getting the gear from a "test" contract. The starting Cessna landing gear is not rated for the mass of the plane you would need to do this mission.

It only works when you're building a mission. Not when you're playing.

1) Partially, it depends on your TWR and drag characteristics. Launching straight up is technically simpler, has lower drag (because you increase altitude faster than with a proper gravity turn), and has much lower control requirements. You can achieve higher speeds faster, which helps with oberth. There is almost always a small dV penalty to launching straight up (because your gravity losses never end until you cross the SOI boundary), but that penalty can be countered by, for example, not needing a fairing for your payload. 2) You will find that, as you burn to leave Kerbin, your (constantly changing) projected orbit always encounters the Mun from the back, first. It always takes a little more of a burn to get an encounter that goes around the front. However, there is a name for a trajectory that encounters the Mun from the front. It's called a "free return" trajectory. If you read about the Apollo missions, for example, you will find that they did it this way. The reason is that if your orbit insertion engines fail, then the rest of your trajectory takes you back very close to the home planet, and you can get home again with just a very small burn. Since KSP engines never fail, this is not really a concern, but it is interesting for historical and IRL reasons. 3) One interesting fact often makes a difference, here. If you are prograde orbiting a planet beyond Kerbin, and you want to come home, then your burn point is always in the dark, and usually has no comm link with Kerbin. Similarly with a moon, the burn point for a retrograde orbit will never have LOS comms with Kerbin (orientation with the Sun is random). So, having solar power is sometimes important (especially for ion drives), and having comms and control is sometimes important.

I'd just put a wagon underneath it with a decoupler as a connector (using whatever propulsion necessary). And I'd launch it from the runway -- anything you can launch from the launchpad, you can also launch from the runway (assuming all the proper upgrades). Launching from the runway is always easier than the launchpad. Then drive the wagon + sea dragon down to the water and decouple the two. Maybe you have to do a little jiggling to get the wagon out from under the other craft, but it's always doable.

Contract orbits are always shown with respect to the current selected craft. If you switch away from one craft to another, then all the contract orbits are shown for the new craft. If you have a craft with a Sentinel and an antenna that is showing a good orbit when you have it selected, then that is good enough. A sentinel contract takes months to complete, and you do not need to have the craft selected while the contract is slowly being completed. So you get the correct craft into the right orbit, and then you just leave it there until the contract completes.

A set of electromagnets on each ship can provide enough force to keep a couple of craft stationary wrt each other without using propellant, and without them physically touching -- over a distance of a few meters. Alternately, you can use steerable solar sails on two craft to keep them stationary wrt each other at much larger distances with no propellant.

You don't want to stop in Eve orbit. When you get there, you already have an Ap that's outside Eve's SOI (beyond Kerbin, in fact), and you don't want to waste all that dV. Because speed is the source of Oberth. If you slow down to get into orbit, you are wasting Oberth. Adding a few hundred m/s at your Eve Pe should raise your Ap as high as you want. Additionally, the whole point of a gravity slingshot is not to stop. You want the velocity of Eve to add to your ship's velocity, or you get no points for a gravity slingshot.

You can always boost the difficulty level of the game. Every time you drop the contract rewards for science and funds by 10%, it gets a lot harder.

Couple points. Even if you have to drag your fuel up to LKO, deltaV in KSP is really cheap. If you mine either of the moons, then deltaV becomes almost free. So there really is no point in gravity assists, except for bragging rights, fun, or the satisfaction of solving a puzzle. That said, Kerbin->Mun->Eve is not a particularly challenging slingshot. Eve has a very deep gravity well. Since all you are trying to do is raise your Ap super high -- I think that's the cheapest slingshot that will do what you want. Oberth at Eve is huge.

Kerbals and MPLs are both science containers that can store infinite numbers of copies of the same experiment.

Both of these things have been brought up as suggestions for the devs to add to the game, repeatedly. But, as far as I know, #1 is still impossible. Experiments can only be grabbed in batches from one container to another. The only "filter" that you can add to that statement is that some containers can contain infinite numbers of copies of the same experiment, and other containers can only contain one copy. So if you have lots of copies of lots of experiments, you can use that fact to make multiple containers with only one copy each. You can use that as a technique to separate out one "complete set" to return to KSC for science credit, and one to send to an MPL for even more credit, for example. For #2, it's been a long time since I've done it, but as I recall -- if you are in the middle of examining experiment results, and you right click on any part or kerbal on the screen, and open its context menu, then the experiment screen closes. It's not intuitive, and from a user's point of view it looks potentially dangerous, but it works.

Only wheels and legs.

It's usually more that you have to have a clear path between the two endpoints. If the fuel pipe intersects any other part, then you are not allowed to place it there. By moving the camera around carefully, you can usually find a way to make it work.

Ion engines don't do a darn thing until you are out in vacuum.

Generally, my experience says to make subs slightly positively buoyant. Yes, using fuel makes them even a bit more positive. I have never found a good reason to deliberately modulate the buoyancy. The ore tanks are generally so massive compared to the onboard fuel that fuel usage does not change buoyancy by a significant percentage. A positively buoyant sub means they will always come back to the surface, which means they are always reusable. (Provided you do not come back to the surface too violently, which will always destroy parts of your sub.) You build a sub just like a plane, except that the medium is much denser -- so you don't need much (or anything) in the way of wings, and small control surfaces are plenty adequate. So long as your control surfaces remain below the surface of the water you can use them to dive or climb.

The one outside KSC is not green. They have to be green ones to get free tech. And as gargamel said, there is only one per CB, and they are in randomized locations. Yes, it is stock -- not a mod.

I'm not telling you not to do them. I have a very nice submarine that I use. KSP submarines simply are either very slow or they have very limited range. And they are difficult to launch. But they are fun. I have made suggestions to the devs to put anomalies under the sea for players to find. I have also suggested that survey contracts be created that require submarines to complete. I have never made a helicopter. But I know they are fairly easy to do. I don't know why you are having a problem with that.

A) Ore tanks full of ore are extremely negatively buoyant. That's what everyone uses as ballast for submarines. B) Kerbals are smarter than us, and their jet engines work underwater. Propellers? Bah. Try wheesleys.

The M700 scanner reports on a very coarse scale. In fact, the scale is averaged over each entire biome, and then smoothed further by distance. So if the scanner reports ore in the Eastside Crater, for example, all that really tells you is that there is some ore in the Eastside Crater. It doesn't really tell you a concentration. Sometimes you can vaguely get a sense that one biome has a greater maximum concentration than another biome by looking at the maximum intensity in the survey scan. If a biome reports zero ore with the scan set at maximum sensitivity, then that should really mean that there is zero ore there. Otherwise, the density of the ore is highly variable within a single biome. If you care to find a spot with relatively high ore density, then the only way to actually find such a spot is with a surface scanner. However, the only real benefit to finding a high ore concentration is that you mine more quickly. And you have an infinite amount of time, so the concept of "quickly" is pretty meaningless.

It's most likely a mod issue, but I have no idea which mod. But it sounds like a mod issue. (Unless you have a kerbal on-board.) And no, you seem to understand perfectly well how it should operate. If your connectivity goes to zero, your probe icon should turn yellow. You should lose the ability to do fine control of throttle and direction, and the ability to set maneuver nodes. You should retain the ability to use on/off throttle control, and change SAS modes.

Only relay antennas can develop a connection between satellites. It is hard to tell from the image which satellites have relay antennas. However, the important thing is the power of the antenna. Each type of antenna has a power rating in the description. The Tracking Station antennas have a huge amount of power. To calculate the maximum connection range between two antennas: Square root ( power of antenna 1 * power of antenna 2) If your two satellites are farther apart than the maximum range from the above calculation, then there will be no connection.

Well, it doesn't quintuplicate forever. The maximum Oberth dV that you can gain in LKO vs. Minmus is about 2000m/s, and the maximum you can gain vs. the Mun is about 1000m/s. So it's really a question of whether you can conveniently get free fuel to LKO vs. LMO as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, the difference is entirely Oberth effect. In LKO you have over 2000 m/s of velocity. In Minmus orbit, you only have 72.9 m/s. Round that down to zero in your head. The Oberth effect says that if you burn while you already have velocity, then you get to keep more of that velocity all the way to your destination. Burning is much more effective (yes, easily 5 times more effective) if you already have a decent velocity.

Hold down Shift. I think that's it, at least. But yes, there is an override.