bewing

You might want to look at this thread:

You can also use the offset tool to make the two wings not be precisely overlapped, to avoid the issue.

The correct answer to the OP's question, however, is that when you recover a vessel that has a crew in it: on the 3rd tab of the recovery synopsis, where it is showing how much XP each crew member receives, at the bottom of that little popup window it says "Total Reputation: 866" (for one of my career games). You can force this, of course, by putting Jeb in a command pod on the launchpad, and immediately recovering him.

"Tundra" in KSP also includes beach grass. You will find spots of it all over Kerbin, mixed in with the "shores" biome. It's not a bug or exploit. There are two patches of it at a heading of about 300 degrees from the beginning of the runway, starting at about 700 meters out. There are also other patches across the bay, north of KSC. If you harvest all the kerbin biomes with every science activity, it comes to over 500 experimental results, and over 1700 points of science. It's not that hard to do, either. It just takes several hours at the beginning of the game and a lot of clicking. I do it at the beginnings of all my games. It gets you far enough in the tech tree to make it a lot easier to get a drill to Minmus, for example.

That's what happens when the ladder is too close to being overhead. There is a large artificial torque in trying to grab a ladder at that angle, and if the grab fails your kerbonaut gets flung away.

Kerbonauts cannot access anything directly (or close to directly) above their heads. Which generally means "north" when they are on EVA. If a ladder or hatch is in the wrong orientation, you need to reorient the rocket, not the kerbonaut.

See, if you follow this through to its logical conclusion, what you anti-lens-flare people are saying is that if Kerbol is always just displayed as a perfectly round flat white circle (with no decorative touches at all), then this will dramatically improve the aesthetics of the game? I think that's just nuts.

I disagree. Adding ramscoop fusion drives & timewarp jumpships & wormhole divers & etc. to the tech tree, and adding several nearby solar systems is the obvious progression for the game to take in far future versions. Yeah, maybe you have to launch them all from KSC still.

I keep a "KSP notes" text file in an editor minimized while I'm playing. Almost all my rockets need detailed "flight instructions" because they do funny stuff during launch, if I try to maneuver them too much while they are boosting. It has to be editable during flight, and be able to hold several paragraphs of text per craft.

Of course, the gravioli detector also tells you the biome you're over. I often pretend that my first kerbonauts to a new celestial body put a gravioli detector on autoscan mode (they always have one on the ship) to map all the biomes they pass over -- and then I pretend the "show biomes in map" cheat is the map they made.

Well, I went and faked up a hopper design as you suggested. I am very surprised that it ended up costing 1500 kash less than the jet. It also uses lower tech than the jet -- which is helpful. When it's hovering, it only uses 4 times more fuel than the jet. Again, I am very surprised. It's a little annoying (of course) to get it moved to a permanent location during its first launch. But I think this is going to be the design I actually use. Thx.

Well, there are some minor technical difficulties with your suggestion (as I'm sure you understand). But the major problem would be time. Without ever leaving Kerbin, you can only have zero-star scientists. To generate 16000 science points in an MPL with two of them would take about a thousand Kerbin years. So yes, doing it that way eventually unlocks the tech tree without leaving KSC. That makes sense, because IRL that you could do that too. And I still say that career mode is supposed to include some grinding. It's not supposed to be all about "interesting challenge"s.

Yes, well, that sounds like an unrealistic progression to me. I concentrate on getting the scientific instruments first. Upgrading my facilities second. Getting some decently efficient engine tech third. Completing enough contracts to pay for all of those things fourth. And my program ends up 100% in space just like yours after a couple Kerbin weeks leading up to it. It's still a Space Program. We all know what the second letter in NASA stands for, right? Because, IRL, science & engineering & technology does not come from space at all. You make technological progress by studying things on Earth. Also, science studies need control data. To find out why things are different elsewhere, you need to gather samples of everything that's "normal" to compare with. So gathering a mittenful of dirt from the grasslands is one of your control samples.

I like the suggestion that Kerbals are a type of mold. Mold lives a very long time. And can reproduce (if it needs to) by just budding off a spore or two.

I'm not sure if I have my settings similar to KerbMav, but it sure doesn't sound like your settings. I have the lab before I've even made it to Kerbin orbit the first time, on Kerbin day one. On the tech tree I have one liquid fuel engine unlocked, and the fuel tank for it holds 180 fuel. I have Hammer SRBs. And that's it for rockets! I get the lab about the same time as I get the Wheesley jet engine. I suppose that I could build some giant crazy dangerous monstrostiy of a rocket and make a successful return trip to Mun/Minmus. But the VAB is level 1, and the launchpad is level 1, and the SPH is level 1, and I'm scrounging for science points and funds to complete my earliest contracts. As far as science goes, I haven't even unlocked the accelerometer, the variometer, or the grav meter when I get the lab. Getting 3 points a day out of the lab at this stage of the game sounds very nice. It's not completionist, it's just one way of unlocking the early tech tree to get off Kerbin in the first place. And I said above in a response to you, I do roleplay for frugality. Why should KSA leave its employees playing video games in the Astronaut Complex, when they could be out gathering science points? Especially when it's not the tiniest bit hard to do! Once you have all the instruments, you take one final trip around KSC, and make just three stinking plane trips, and you've got everything there is to get on Kerbin. And then you can go to Mun/Minmus and get all those points. I can understand if you only have 10 hours a month to play that you can't spare the time to fly even one jet anywhere, but that sounds like an extreme case to me. I can't understand why anyone would even play career mode if they have so little time.

For those of you who have (so far) enjoyed looking at my wackier designs, here's a Kerbin MPL jet that works rather nicely for all that it's an engineering abomination: In order for the gigantor to not rip off, the airspeed must stay below 120 m/s -- so the jet needed some extra lift at very low speeds.

OK, it turns out that after all that I was being stupid and not testing things sufficiently. It turns out that an MPL in flight is just as good as an MPL in orbit. So if you just want one to process Kerbin data, you don't need a rocket. If you just get it one meter off the ground before you process data, you avoid the (nearly infinte) landed data penalty. And that makes it trivial to access the thing on the ground, to load experiments into it.

Does it excuse you, for arguing with me, when I take it slower?

For me, the whole point of the game is about roleplaying being a Space Agency. And a space agency would be frugal with funds and science points. And take things step-by-step. First Kerbin. Then LKO. Then the Mun. Verifying safety and functionality at every step. Maybe sending off a scientific probe into orbit around the Sun early on. But certainly not just sending a kerbaled mission hither and yon to gather some low-hanging science points because they could. For me, it's not about efficient use of my gaming time. I have plenty of that. And anyway, for all you explorers out there, Kerbin is a celestial body too. Don't you want to explore it?

The weight discrepancy comes from the mass of the solid fuel for the two Hammers, I think. The mass of the fuel is not added into the base mass of the part. The easy way I use to figure launches to orbit is: Use enough SRBs in stages to get you sub-orbital. Then, once you are up there, you need about 400 fuel (or a little more) to get to 2300 m/s and into orbit. Your design would get 3 kerbonauts to orbit. That's a lot for just starting out. It's much easier just to get an OKTO into orbit. A command pod and crew cabin + fuel tanks + engine takes about 540 fuel to close your orbit and then get back down safely, after the SRBs have gotten you above the atmosphere. SRBs may be a little less efficient, but they cost a lot less than liquid fuel stages, at the same time.

Then you missed this quote from the wiki: " and if the experiment is from the same body as the one the lab is orbiting or landed on the data value is greater. "

Yes, but you only get a reasonable deal on the experiment->data conversion if you process it in the same SOI where it was taken. Kerbin data in Kerbin SOI, Mun data in Mun SOI, etc. Almost all experiments turn out zero data when landed on Kerbin. The last few other ones produce one point worth of data. You can collect Highlands landed, Highlands splashed, Badlands landed, and Badlands splashed all at the same location. It takes a couple hours of flying time to get to the Badlands and back, if you don't mind flying. You get 218 points of science for doing it. You only have to make three flights to collect every last bit of science on the ground on Kerbin -- is that really so hard? And anyway, career mode is supposed to involve a little bit of grinding. Is everyone really so impatient these days?

Yes, the ladder car is fun, and silly, and cheap. I switched out all the pegasus ladders for telus ones and knocked 1000 kash off the price. Foxster's solution is more elegant, I think, but uses some tech I don't have yet in this career (and is a bit more expensive). But, as I said above, the science data will not transfer with the crew if you use a crew transfer -- so that "simplest solution" is non-functional.

Time warping to avoid electrical drain is cheating. And when you send an MPL to a new SOI, its plane gets all messed up anyway. So I dock with them after they have moved. And I have lots of time to spare and don't care about the difference between "real world time" and game time. I don't find polar orbits particularly difficult to dock with, either. You just have to wait until the timing is right. And it only takes a handful of hours to gather all 470+ samples from Kerbin. It's not that bad. It certainly takes less time than doing 10 docking maneuvers in a row. Or trying to drive a rover a few kilometers on the Mun -- now that's tedious.

Hmmm. You've been confused by an oversimplification. The numbers on the navball are the degrees of a compass. 0 is north, 90 is east, 180 is south, 270 is west. All celestial bodies rotate east, by definition. So if you go east, you are going prograde with the planet. But going east is only "equatorial" if you happen to launch from the equator -- which we do on Kerbin, but nowhere else. If you launch north or south, you will always put yourself in a polar orbit. "Inclination" is measured by the value of the Ascending Node, when compared to a pure equatorial orbit -- for example, compared to the orbit of Mun around Kerbin. The way you have been given is just a quick and dirty calculation that gives the right answer -- but do not look deeper for any meaning in it, because there is none to be found.