bewing

Your description of your ascent profile sounds pretty inefficient. Blasting along at 1200 m/s in dense air is a lot of fun, but it's going to waste immense amounts of fuel. If you'll be a little more patient and save the majority of your speed run until you've climbed over 15km with a much lower pitch angle, I think you'll find you have plenty of fuel to make orbit. Also, those particular swept wings you are using are a trick to trap newbies. Every other type of wing gives twice as much lift for the same drag as those ones.

Normal. All the restrictions that make career mode hard are removed in Sandbox.

Probe cores only start with about 5 EC. They use .02 per second -- so yes, the electricity stored in a core only lasts about 15 minutes, typically. SAS/reaction wheels use a lot. So you have to learn to be efficient about reorienting your rocket. Transmissions of any sort use a tremendous amount of EC. You have to memorize in advance that a SciJr will use 125EC to transmit a report, for example, and plan for it in advance. Researching in a Lab will use 5 EC per second, which is quite big compared to what a solar panel can produce. And the big drills can use almost 30 EC per second - similarly with the big converter. And transmitting a survey from orbit can easily cost 1000 EC depending on the number of biomes. You have to have enough batteries on your craft to handle all of these things that you plan to do, and then you have to have some solar panels to charge everything back up afterwards.

If I recall correctly, that tutorial gives you a readout in the tutorial text window of your current AGL altitude.

It makes a difference if you adapt to it. It's not a big difference with standard difficulty. If you eventually play with an extremely hard difficulty setting, then you will need every kerbuck in the worst way. You get a 100% refund for anything you land on the runway, or on the launchpad platform. Or on the Island Runway itself. If you miss any of those targets, even by a little, then it gives you a partial refund, by measuring the distance to the VAB end of the Crawlerway. Obviously, it's smartest to land everything on the runway because it's the biggest target. This is really useful for planes, because you can always taxi them back onto the runway, no matter where at KSC you land them. It also makes a difference for rockets, if you build them knowing that you will try to land them on the runway. Many players stage away all the expensive parts before reentry, and reenter with a bare capsule (and maybe a heatshield). This is a waste of money. It is very challenging and interesting to try to reenter a complete rocket, and then land it as close to the runway as you can -- to try to get that refund.

You have to click on one of the doors on the end of the cabin. You will activate a menu that allows you to EVA anybody inside the crew cabin.

I think that to unlock all that stuff, you need to upgrade both your Mission Control and Tracking Station to Level 2.

I think @Streetwind may have also seen this exact problem -- something about a comma instead of a period in the settings file? In any case, I think he knows the answer.

Try hitting the backquote key (upper left on the kbd). If that doesn't work, try backspace.

Using aerodynamic control surfaces to increase reentry drag works about 100 times better than any method of heat shielding, to allow reentry of delicate parts.

There are several ways of doing it. One way is to get into orbit around the Mun. If necessary, adjust your orbital plane so that the orbit passes as close as possible to being directly above the target. Lower your Pe to maybe 7km, at a point approximately over your target. As you approach the target point closely, burn in map mode until your descending leg of your orbit goes right on top of your target. Then land as normal. Using this method, you will generally end up within a few hundred meters of your target -- easy walking distance or driving distance for a rover. Another way is to act like this is a rendezvous maneuver. You adjust your orbital plane and retroburn as above so that your orbital line hits the Mun's surface near your target. You set the target as an actual target. You go into target mode on the navball. You fly your navball, constantly pushing your retrograde marker on top of your anti-target marker. When you get within a couple hundred meters of the surface, you do a normal landing. This will usually get you within a dozen meters of your target. If you do not remain aware of your altitude, you may land on top of your target and/or destroy it with your rocket plumes.

Connected together as a single craft via docking or klaws or something similar.

If you have set your Difficulty Settings to anything higher than "Normal" when you started this game, the range on your antennas gets reduced. Additionally, if you turned off the "extra ground stations", then you will only have an intermittent communication link to KSC. With this combination of settings, I can imagine that you might see what you are describing. Additionally, relay satellites need to have a probe core in order to work -- do yours?

Rule of thumb is that a stage should have about 3 times the mass of everything above it.

You can, but going into the debug menu will turn off trophies/awards for that game, if you care.

The only thing that you can really do is to fly it through all of these possibilities and see if it works in the real world. The CoM/CoL thing is a handy rule-of-thumb to get your plane into approximately the configuration that it will fly. However, the Center of Pressure is actually much more important than the CoL, and there is no way to actually visualize CoP in the game. So in the end, it's really a guessing game. To finalize your design, there is no other choice at all -- you absolutely have to just try it and see.

You always have exactly one explore contract in Mission Control. The destination is partially randomized, except for your very first one (reach orbit). The contract is generated to either send you someplace you have explored already, or to send you to a nearby CB that you haven't visited yet. The one explore contract in Mission Control is either accepted, or has not been accepted yet. If you don't like the one you have, and it's been accepted -- you either need to complete it, or fail it. Failing a contract has consequences. If you haven't accepted it yet, then it has a time limit for acceptance -- or you can usually decline it. When the time limit expires, a new explore contract will be randomly created.

The 3 degree gimbal on the Rapiers is tiny and not very effective. Pretty much all airplanes (and definitely yours) are somewhat unstable at speed. There is always much more drag at the front of the craft than at the back. If your craft goes even the smallest amount off prograde, the tendency is always for the craft to flip around backwards. So you need extensive control surfaces and gimbal to prevent the natural instability of the craft from actually swapping ends. So I think that's what is happening. Your "yaw" control surface (the tail) plus the engine gimbal is simply not enough to keep your plane pointing mostly forwards.

If you are feeling a desperate need to circularize, then yes the stage you are using to circularize is underpowered. Having white streaks or red streaks in the atmosphere on ascent is normal, has very little effect on your ascent, and should either be ignored or celebrated. You need that velocity. Do not, under almost any circumstances, slow down to avoid aero effects (unless the aero makes your rocket unstable). Once you get above 35km or so, it may be helpful to you to just point your rocket straight at the horizon by hand, and forget about pointing prograde. Once your Ap gets to 80km, you can kill your thrust, flip to map mode, create a maneuver node at your Ap, and pull the prograde tab until it shows a >60km Pe. This maneuver node will do two things. It gives you a total burn time, and a marker on your navball. If you point at the marker (which will be slightly nose-down) and burn for the required time, you will circularize fairly efficiently -- even if your engine is underpowered. But the important point is that doing this will prevent you from waiting too long to burn, which is what causes you to reenter. However, the most important thing of all is that circularizing is overrated, and mostly just gets you style points. In general, the reason to go to orbit is because you want to go further than that. So you are going to eventually need a high Ap anyway. So having a high Ap is a good thing, just so long as it's pointed in the right direction. Because of Oberth, you will want to do your next burn at the Pe of your orbit. Which means you want your Ap to be exactly on the opposite side of that. Or, in other words, you need to know in advance which direction you want your Ap to point -- and then you time your launch so that your Ap will point in that direction. And then it doesn't matter how high your Ap is, because it's already pointing in the right direction and all you need to do is add to it. So you burn and burn and burn prograde until you are almost in orbit, and then you stop. If your Ap ends up not pointing quite right, then burning prograde before your Ap pushes it forward, and burning after your Ap pushes it backward. Burning exactly at your Ap only raises your Pe, of course.

The only reason for them not to connect is because you are not in range. Do you understand the range calculation? range = sqrt ( antenna1_power * antenna2_power)

Yes, and it's true that there are things you can't do -- the game considers anything "without control" as being debris. You might not be able to transmit without a probe core. There is a chance that you can't process experiments without a probe core. However, any piece of debris that has any experiments in it at all will always have a "review data" button, unless there is a recent bug that I don't know about.

When you carried the experiment back on EVA, did you enter the hatch of the MPL? Or exactly how did you store the experiment into the MPL during the EVA? You may want to watch a few youtube videos on "rendezvous" in KSP. All you need to do is get within 2.2km of your rescue victim at any speed (low speed is best). The key concept for nulling your speed is: using whatever method to actually set the target vessel as an official target (usually selecting it in map mode and clicking the "target" button), then putting your navball into Target mode, locking your SAS to "retrograde" mode, and burning until the navball says 0.0m/s of relative speed. You shouldn't need RCS for that on your craft. Once you are within 2.2km, the rescue victim will fly over to the rescue craft by themselves. They have 600m/s of deltaV in their EVA jetpack. It's better to use that than using RCS on the rescue craft.

How to use an MPL for non-scientist Kerbals (scientists instinctively know how): Have an MPL, in space, with a scientist or two, an antenna, batteries, and solar panels. Do experiments. ie. Crew reports, temp readings, pressure readings, EVA reports, etc. When you do an experiment, you get a "results" window. On that window will be an extra yellow button called "Process". Click the button. The experiment is destroyed and converted into "data" inside the MPL. You can fill the MPL with up to 750 points of data, AFAIK. The more data it has, the faster the MPL converts the data into science points, via "research". That final conversion process takes a lot of time, unless you timewarp. The process happens in the background -- that is, you do not have to continuously watch the craft, you can go pilot other ships. When you feel like it, you come back and visit the MPL. You check how much science is available, and you transmit it back to KSC. Transmitting science points takes a lot of EC -- it can take 5 points of EC to transmit 1 point of science, IIRC. If you want to carry experiments to the MPL to process them, then go and gather them with another ship, fly back to the MPL, do an EVA to physically move the experiments from the ship they are on and load them onto the ship the has the MPL. Once they are there, click the "Review Reports" button to look at all the experiments you just transferred. Doing that will give you the yellow button you need in order to process the experiments into data. And it's generally pretty easy to land a lander without RCS. I'd say to not bother with adding those.

If you hate arcade sims, then why are you flying using IVA mode (inside the cockpit, looking at gauges)? There is no reason to use that mode.

Kerbal Markup Lister.