bewing

If the same faces were looking out, then the two handles in the picture would be right next to each other. They aren't.

The contract will tell you which CB the satellite is in orbit of. Go into map mode, and focus on that CB. The correct satellite will be highlighted.

???? But that's not how you do it. When you place the small hardpoint with default rotation, the lower attachment point (assuming editing in the VAB) is the one that always separates. It doesn't matter which attachment point is attached first. If you want the hardpoints to stay attached to the central fuselage after decoupling, then you need to attach it so that the "high" end is attached to the fuselage. If that orientation isn't the look that you are going for, then attach the high end to the fuselage, and rotate the part vertically after it's attached.

For the Kerbin system, if I'm trying to do things the easy way, I prefer to mine on the Mun. The reason I prefer that is because of the round-trip time. You can mine, refine, repeatedly send a mini-lifter up to LMO, gradually fill up a tanker, send it to Kerbin, offload it to a station, and return to the Mun to repeat the process every 3 days if you try. Trying to do anything of that sort via Minmus ends up with a lot of timing problems and delays. The thing about mining any other CB is that you generally only go there once. It's not all that hard to bring along some drills and a converter, but if you do then you have to visit a moon first, drop off the mining equipment (and probably an engineer), then visit your real target, then go back again and recover the kerbal later. Unless you are using a rocket to land multiple times (in multiple biomes), the extra fuel does very little for you. The only real exception is the Jool system. It takes a lot of fuel to fly around Jool and visit all the moons. So having a refueling station on Pol or Bop makes a lot of sense.

It's easiest to wait for a "land a station on X with some engineers and pilots" contract, so that you get paid for doing it. You really don't need all that many multi-star kerbals in the end. You can send along an MPL if you want to give them their stars immediately, and they are a long way from home.

It's fairly easy to test this on Kerbin. Use an identical craft that has both types of parachutes, and probably a SRB, so that the launches are identical. Launch straight up from the launchpad and test. Open one set of parachutes or the other, and check their terminal velocities while descending. I think you will find that the efficiency of the parachutes do not scale with mass, and the MK3 parachute is crappy. Also, mulitple overlapping parachutes are more effective because of a glitch. Also, the more you increase the spread angle, the more effective the parachutes are.

Ike is so big that it's actually really hard to miss it. Any craft orbiting around Duna that has an Ap within a million meters of Ike will rapidly find itself in an encounter with Ike. When the Ike/Duna system was created in the game, that's specifically what makes that pair of CBs challenging -- plus the fact that Ike is in a synchronous orbit. Visiting other moons is just like visiting the moons of Kerbin. It's easiest to visit the moons first, then bleed off energy to visit the planet last. That is, before you reach your target's SOI, adjust your flyby to give you a really low Pe. Burn just enough at your Pe to lower your Ap into the SOI. Then adjust some more to encounter the outermost moon, and work your way inward after each encounter.

There is no way back to anything prior to 1.0.5, unless you saved a backup yourself.

Wait until you've finished putting together the rocket before you play with the staging.

Generally, the moderators around here want to keep everything permanently for historical purposes, so they don't delete anything. However, if you really want your thread to die, then look in the upper right hand corner of your post for 3 dots. Click that. See it says "Report"? Click that, and report your own thread to the moderators. In the box, explain that it's your own thread and you figured out your answer for yourself, and you want your thread to die. They will probably lock it for you. Also however -- sometimes it's a good idea to leave your own question there, and write your own answer to your own question, for the enlightenment of future generations -- rather than killing it.

Yeah, it's likely it doesn't give a message if there are no techs left.

It's pretty easy, actually. You just need to know one (or two) angles. But it depends on whether you want to launch your rocket straight up from the launchpad (which is the easiest way), or whether you want to go into orbit and then eyeball a transfer without a maneuver node. If you just want to go straight up, then you need to lead Minmus by a minimum of 30 degrees, and a maximum of 45 degrees. This is called a "direct launch", and usually takes a bit more deltaV than going to LKO first. You have to be a little careful that the Mun will not be in the way, because the Mun's gravity can easily mess with your nice vertical path to Minmus. (Note that the Mun will move a significant distance while you travel, so launching straight at the Mun is fine.) So, go into the Tracking Station, arrange the map so that Minmus is a little more than 30 degrees right of vertical, fast forward until KSC is right at the top of Kerbin, and launch. When you launch: lock SAS on, and burn until your Ap reaches Minmus' orbit. When your craft passes the Mun's orbit, look at your projected path and see whether it's above or below Minmus' orbital plane. Then burn either due North or due South until the Ap is exactly on the plane. At that point, you should get an intercept. Once you get most of the way there, if it really looks like you are going to miss -- then you may need to burn a little prograde or retrograde to either get there sooner or later. Once you are there, close your orbit and then land on a flat somewhere. Expect a travel time of 5 days. If you put yourself in LKO first then a transfer takes more time. So you need to lead Minmus by about twice the angle -- closer to 60 degrees. Do not bother trying to match planes during your transfer burn. Just do it like the direct launch (above), get your Ap to the right altitude, wait until you pass the Mun -- then burn North or South until your Ap is touching Minmus' orbit, and you should have an intercept. Expect a travel time of 8 to 10 days.

There are two steps in activating a drill. First you deploy, then you harvest. And it has been pointed out to the devs that those "harvest" options are redundant -- because it is indeed the same action on all three, but it's not considered an important issue. It's not like you're short on action groups these days, though. So one action group performs the deploy toggle, and another one toggles all the "harvest" options.

Generally, the easiest way you want to do it is to get science from biomes on easily-reached CBs until you've unlocked the highest end probe cores -- especially the RoveMate. Then you send a robotic probe to every CB you can reach. At that point, the only techs left to unlock are 500 and 1000 points (mostly), and you can use KerbNet to find the anomalies and green monoliths from space. Then fly down near them (don't bother to land), at something less than 500 m/s and 2km distance to unlock each new tech. Picking up an extra 2500 points of science from a few CBs that you've already scrubbed clean is very worthwhile -- especially if you play on hard mode or worse.

That means that your front landing gear is generating too much drag when it touches the ground. As a general rule, "too much drag in the front, and not enough at the back, means your craft will be directionally unstable." Sometimes this can mean that your landing gear is tilted (not vertical). Sometimes it means that you left the "friction" setting on "automatic", and it's set too high. Or you put it on "manual" and set it too high yourself. So try switching the front landing gear's friction to "manual", and set it to zero. See if that helps.

Are you playing in Science mode? Or using any mods?

In general no, you can't pick and choose which experiments get temporarily housed in which science containers. Whether the experiments are in a Kerbal's "pockets" or whether they are stored in some other science container, the only button you have available is to store all the experiments into a new container. Most containers will only accept one copy of an experiment, and leave the rest in the original -- that's the only filter that you have available. As these guys are trying to say, the other thing you can do is selectively "process" enough experiments (of the ones that you actually want to process) to fill the buffer in the Lab, and then transfer the rest of the experiments back out of the lab into some craft that will be returning to Kerbin. There is a known feedback report to the devs to add some kind of mechanism to the game that will allow you to selectively copy only some experiments from one science container to another, but it hasn't been added to the game yet.

To the best that I can tell, it's an extremely weird mushroom-diamond-spherical shape. I am almost absolutely certain that it is not some simple geometric shape.

Once you enable them, and you have 'struts' unlocked in your tech tree, then autostruts appear in the menu of every single part as you are building your craft in the editor. They are better than struts in many ways. They are free, massless, dragless, and do not add to partcount. They can (and often do) stretch from the very bottom of your rocket to the very top, unlike struts which only connect parts within 'line of sight'. The only advantage of regular struts is that you can connect two random parts with them. Autostruts connect the current part to a very limited set of the other parts in your craft.

Command pods almost always have strong-enough reaction wheels to spin like a top. Try tapping Q or E and see if you can get the hatch facing up.

You are fooling yourself a bit by drawing the orbits as circles. It helps to answer the question if you visualize the orbits as fairly eccentric ellipses, instead. If you burn in a direction other than prograde/retrograde, a significant portion of the energy that you are putting into your orbit is going into changing the orientation of your orbit, instead of just raising the Ap. So yes, at any instant you always want to be burning prograde, so that all your energy is going into the Ap. There is also the question of Oberth, so you only want to burn when you are really close to your Pe. 30 degrees before and after is a bit much for me. I'd limit it to 10 degrees at most.

A grabber, a couple of tiny perpendicular wings for aerodynamic drag, a small girder for something to attach to, a couple of parachutes, and a decoupler to disconnect it all is plenty. And then you need to maneuver it cleverly to get it to reenter.

When you go beyond "hard" mode in career (by manually reducing the contract reward percentages even further), you have no choice but to be cost-conscious. The main way to make more money per launch is to have each craft complete more than one contract during its life. The second way is to land every vehicle back on the runway, and recover it from there for a 100% refund. This makes airplanes and Kerbin-based contracts especially lucrative. But it still applies to any other rocket, because you can fly all of them down from space and land them on the runway too -- if you design them properly. Once you can mine and process fuel in space, then you don't even have to launch all that heavy stuff from the ground anymore. That saves even more money. And now that we can take satellites apart in space, and mix-and-match their parts to make new & better satellites, there are even more opportunities for frugality.

Are you in career mode? What level is your VAB?

There's an option in the "settings" that turns the other pads on and off. Did you look for that?