bewing

With SAS, your nose will rise slowly all by itself. Without SAS, yes, a slow rise is best, I think.

I am surprised you aren't getting the spam message then. It looks exactly like I thought. As I said above, to complete the contract just get your satellite to have the right Pe and Ap -- you can use Mun as a target to verify that your An/Dn are less than 1.

Reasonably efficient, yes. MK2 parts are much more forgiving on reentry, which helps. You can also try replacing the Whiplashes with NERV engines. Light them around 22km altitude. There are many experiments to try that may work reasonably efficiently.

If you start burning prograde a little before your Ap, the Ap will slowly scoot forward ahead of you in orbit. If you control the thrust of your burn properly, the Ap will stay about the same distance ahead and not gain any altitude -- all the time, your Pe will be rising. You often need to thrust limit your engine, and just touch the thrust a little for this to work. It's just another trick that takes practice.

First: no, if you put an MPL on the surface of Kerbin you get almost nothing for it, ever. A grand total of maybe 500 science points in 3 years, if you load every single one of the 500+ Kerbin experiments into it. (As I recall, an MPL in Kerbin orbit filled with Kerbin experiments will get you about 6000 science points eventually -- so it's not enough to fill out the tree.) I had a thread about the MPL once. Another player made a comment about a personal rule that he was only allowed to put one MPL in Kerbin orbit and load it with Kerbin data only, and that was it. If I use an MPL at all, I kind of like that rule. But an MPL in Kerbin orbit with one scientist only produces 5 points of science a day -- so a big science mission returning from the Mun or Minmus totally overwhelms the output from the MPL. That makes it more of a balanced part. It's also true that the MPL is on the tech tree in (what I consider to be) the best path to the Variometer device. So I get it very early in the game -- before I've even gotten to orbit, usually.

I only use them on early contracts where they want me to stage an SRB or engine at a very particular altitude and speed. (If I even take the contract, because those contracts are among the most annoying to fulfill.)

Two hammers? Are you sure you don't mean three? Since you say you have three stages, I assume the hammers are the first stage. But two is a very unusual number for a stage. In any case, the "gravity turn" maneuver you describe is an advanced player technique to squeeze out a tiny bit of extra fuel in orbit, over launching the easy way. Forget that until you've had some practice. The easy way to launch (especially for beginners) is straight up. A level 1 pilot or OKTO can handle it on SAS and you don't have to touch anything until you are above the atmosphere. When the ship is on the pad, turn on SAS. This locks your rocket into staying vertical. Launch at full power. Watch your Ap marker go up and up until it's about 130 km or so (you will still be in the atmosphere at this point). Turn off your engine. Wait until your altimiter reads 60km. Turn off SAS, and hit D to rotate your ship. When your ship is pointing at the horizon, stop the rotation and lock it in with SAS again. Go to full thrust. Keep on thrusting until you are in orbit. (Your SAS will gradually climb above the horizon, and for extra points you can tap it back down occasionally to be on the horizon again.) You will need a velocity of just under 2300 m/s to be in orbit. You'll make it every single time.

Yeah, it makes me a little sad that there are no 2.5 meter LF-only parts. I like NERV tech, so I get my nukes as early as I can afford them. But that means that I make all my designs with MK1-sized stuff. Long and skinny. Drill: Deorbiter: My tourist bus looks a lot like the above drill -- with the ore compartments replaced with mk1 crew cabins. I suppose that for the aesthetic you want, you could attach radial MK0 tanks?

First: your plane is very pretty. I'd put some little canards on the front, but you seem to have plenty of attitude control. BUT, the deal goes like this: 1) MK2 parts (despite being supposedly "higher tech") have significantly higher drag than the equivalent MK1 parts. So by using MK2 you are already starting at a disadvantage. 2) To have lots of fuel left when you get to orbit, you need to get through all that atmosphere with not much drag. So you need to pay attention to the way drag changes with speed and nose inclination. Drag basically goes with the square of your speed -- so you don't really want to be hitting 600 m/s until maybe 8km altitude. 1200 m/s at 22km or so. If you're going faster than that before then, you're going too fast. Drag increases rapidly as your nose rises from a 2 degree inclination, to 10 degrees, and then to 30 degrees. Then it really goes crazy. In the lower atmosphere, keep your nose to maybe 5 degrees above prograde, max. In the upper atmosphere, don't let your nose go over 30 degrees. 45 degrees is a very bad idea. 3) You have a lot more engine than you really need, and engines weigh a lot. The whole point of RAPIER engines is that you do not need any other kind -- admittedly they are not as efficient as Whiplashes (or Panthers on afterburner). I like those shock cones myself, and I understand that you need something to stick them on -- but you may just want to try a couple of the radial ramp intakes, get rid of the nacelles, and the whiplashes, and see what happens when you just run on the two RAPIERs. 4) Heating. If you launch properly, your speed will be between 1300 m/s and 1500 m/s (surface) between 25km and 35km alt. This is the danger zone. My answer is to climb through it as fast as you can (this is where I say you should let your nose go to a 30 degree AoA). There are other answers for how to get through this zone -- throttle back, minimize drag, etc. 5) Don't overuse the controls. Every time you hit a key, it slows your plane down. A lot. I like using the SAS system, and just alternating between "prograde" and "stability" to control the nose angle.

I don't use them either, but I did some beta testing on it -- and one trick I saw was that you can't just left click any old place, you have to left click on particular parts of the fairing to get them to snap.

Move the wingtip canards to the front of the plane, where they can do you some good. Right now, they have no leverage -- they do nothing at all. The dihedral is not really an issue, I think -- AFAIK, dihedral is not actually modeled in KSP. Even if it were, it would be a roll stability issue, not a pitch stability issue. But as Venusgate said, move the wings back just a little bit -- get the CoL ball so it doesn't quite overlap with the CoM ball.

From a programming perspective, what this bug means is that the code that reads the physics.cfg file is broken. When the game creates a new file, it loads all the default values into memory at the same time as it builds the file. But if the file exists, it tries to read it in -- and fails to set some of the values that the default init routine sets correctly.

Not me. Never seen such a thing. I'm on WinV7 Pro 64bit.

Doesn't matter how many are in orbit. You have to count the ones on the ground, too. Do you have any spare ships or pieces of debris laying around?

Just do a right-click on battery, alt-right-click on pod and do a manual resource transfer of the electricity before you decouple.

It's a known and reported bug, and it was completely fixed in build 1230 ... and then somebody went and added a few lines of code and broke it again in build 1250 (1.1.1). If they would just look close at the changes between 1230 and 1250, they could isolate it and fix it trivially. http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/7698

Or orange when you are landed on another celestial body. It's fun for Kerbonauts running across the Mun ... blue/orange/blue/orange -- every time they take a step and leap into the "air" again.

You come in very shallow, and bleed off all your speed in the stratosphere. I liked your first plane much better. You can double canard control by putting a pair of canard wings in a shallow X. I think all you really needed to do was add another fuel tank in the front of your SSTO -- once you dump the orange tank, move all your remaining fuel into the front tank. That'll rebalance your CoM.

Can't edit the action groups in flight ... but you can open the right-click context menus of all the rcs thrusters on your mini-ship, and just disable all of them. If you set the thrust limiter of one unit to zero, then all the units that were created using symmetry with that one will also have their thrust set to 0 -- until you re-enable them.

Definitely transmit. An MPL can only hold 500 science points at one time, so that's the most you can get if you recover the thing without transmitting. And they are very hard to land, of course. As FullMetalMachinist said, there is no penalty on transmission of science, and you can transmit repeatedly. Keep in mind that it takes 6 points of electric charge to transmit 1 point of science, though -- make sure you have enough.

Actually, I was doing an orbit last night, and my 16km Ap was changing by 100m/s. It was, in fact, rising in this case ... but still. 300km in 8 hours can happen pretty easily.

Yeah, but now the default is "off", AFAIK.

For most of your objections, I'd say that's what sandbox mode is for. It takes five minutes to slap a megamax lifter onto whatever design you want, boost it into orbit, and timewarp it to Duna to test. Testing in advance is very practical, quick and easy. You want to know where the planets will be in 300 days? Start a new game, port in your persistent.sfs file, timewarp ahead 300 days, and look. I don't find I need mods to do any of these things. For reentry, you need to be clever. Aerodynamics will get your stuff to the ground whole with no fuss -- and heatshields never will. As far as efficiency goes, you can only start measuring efficiency once things actually work correctly. Until that point, every design is inefficient. If it has to be heavier in order to work, then that's what you have to do.

Yeah, well, 1.1 is a totally different game than 1.0.5 and nothing works the same as it did anymore. So that's not really a good argument, unfortunately. If you reread what I said above carefully, I was suggesting that you increase the authority to 150%. Your canard is the only thing keeping your plane from flipping at all. Then you need to use the CapsLock to decrease the input from the keyboard. Or not use the keyboard at all to control the pitch.

You'd need about 30km/s of dv (with high TWR) to get there just before it hits the ground, plus perfect maneuvering. I don't think it's possible. But (to answer your original question) I do not think that the contract system has the ability to figure out how "hard" a contract is going to be. I really doubt that the intention was to create a suborbital trajectory, when it generated that random orbit.