bewing

During the EVA process, as they are climbing out of the hatch, their suit gets heated to the "interior" temperature of the capsule. But the heat tolerance of a suit is much lower than the heat tolerance of a capsule -- so they can get a red temperature gauge even though the capsule is not red. But it's the interior temp, not the skin temp of the capsule that does it.

With an OKTO on the top (under the battery), this will get 5 tourists to orbit for under $16k if flown properly. With a 1-star pilot and no OKTO, it will get 4 more kerbals to orbit much more easily. And then it lands vertically on the runway for a huge refund on your launch costs.

Nah. Nothing in the interior of a vessel is ever calculated.

Do you mean with their helmets off, or do you mean in a full EVA pressure suit? The pressure suit has enough heaters in it to keep the kebals comfy indefinitely.

Rigid attachment was added mostly to make wings less floppy. Won't do much for a rocket. It also makes your craft more brittle. A sudden shock can cause joint failure.

Do you mean an aerobraking pass from interplanetary velocities? Or are we talking about strictly orbital velocities? Standard reentry is very slow and needs no heatshield at all.

You can also use a size 4 engine plate at the bottom, and then cover the plate with as many vectors as you can squeeze in. Or similarly with some kind of size 1.5 or size 2 engines.

It's not necessary to get to orbit before going to the Mun, though. If you lead the Mun by 45 degrees with your launch point, you can just launch straight up and get to the Mun very easily.

You launch when your launchpad is exactly on the orbit of your destination, provided that situation ever happens. If it never does (because your target inclination is less than your latitude) then you have to do a plane change. If a plane change is required then you minimize it by launching suborbital to a really high ap, and then doing a plane change at the Ap, and then raising your Pe above the atmosphere.

What version of the game are you running?

Yes, but only Kerbals can do those particular experiments.

There are science experiments that can easily be run multiple times, and there are two science experiments that need to be reset by a scientist specifically -- the goo and the "materials lab"/Sci Jr. So an unmanned rover can only run those last two experiments one time -- which usually isn't worth it. There are three experiments that can only be performed by a kerbal -- surface samples, crew reports, and eva reports. So you can't do those at all. Then you've got the atmospheric variometer which only works at all on CBs with an atmosphere. So what you're left with on a rover is the thermometer, barometer, seismic scanner, and gravioli meter (if you've unlocked all of those) -- and you need a science container, and an antenna. You can do those 4 experiments, transmit them, do them again, and collect them into the science container. Then drive to the next biome and repeat. But you still need to fly that science container back to Kerbin at the end. For a single-use probe, you can add the SciJr and goo experiments if you can afford the extra weight.

That's very very late to start, and too early to end. You want to start your gravity turn either right off the pad, or within a few hundred meters of the ground. You should be able to lock SAS to prograde within 10 seconds. Your prograde should drift to 45 degrees off vertical by 8km to 10km altitude. Yeah, thrusting towards the horizon is correct once you get close to your Ap. Many people find it useful to place a prograde maneuver node at the Ap, so they know when to start the circularization burn and how big it should be. I think the point is that RCS is only useful for making tiny changes for heavy craft. You may want to swap for vernors (they are much more powerful), or else you will need to learn how to do a lot more of your docking maneuvers with your main engine. If you work at it, you can do your entire docking with your main engines, and then you don't need any RCS on your craft at all.

The tutorials have been around, unchanged, for quite a long time. In the olden days when the atmosphere was thicker, it was a waste of fuel to blast along at full throttle. That no longer really applies. If you try really really hard, you may be able to get a rocket to blow up on ascent from heating. But to accomplish that you'd need a very non-optimized, inefficient rocket. You can still build airplanes that will overheat and explode during normal flight at full throttle with the two most advanced engines. If you turn off your autostruts, then you will also see more stress/strain effects from aero forces on ascent. It's certainly possible to build a deliberately weak airframe, and watch it crumple from aero forces.

Note that there are two sliders in the difficulty settings regarding occlusion -- to pretend to handle atmospheric refraction. If it's less than 100%, your signal can travel a little ways through the geoid. If it's over 100%, then even LOS is not quite good enough.

When you EVA, make sure to either doubleclick your ship to set it as your target. Or, if you forget and your distance gets too large -- go into map mode and select your ship as a target from there. Then set your navball to Target mode. If you are at less than 10km separation, you can always catch back up to a ship, just so long as your target velocity is less than 150 m/s or so. Just point your camera straight at your ship, click the spacebar to reorient yourself according to the camera, hit W to get some decent positive speed, and then readjust as needed. Keep in mind that the Kerbal's helmet is forced to point North (in almost all camera modes), so the only way to move North or South is by using Shift/Ctrl. If you are at more than 10km separation from your destination, you have to treat the Kerbal as a ship with no SAS. Put your navball in "orbit" mode, move your camera until it's looking prograde, hit the spacebar to reorient, then thrust prograde or retrograde with W/S to adjust your orbit so that you will catch up with your destination.

It depends on how long a glidepath through the atmosphere that you want. Often when I'm landing on laythe, I'm looking around for nice biomes and features as I glide for hundreds of km without reducing my reentry speed at all. With the intent of flaring heavily when I see a geologic formation that I like. Often that results in so much heat buildup that my poor little plane explodes. And then I promise myself not to do that again. If you're not picky about your biome or landing spot, I think you could easily enter laythe's atmosphere at 2km/s -- just so long as you start aerobraking immediately. I wouldn't enter at anything faster than 2200m/s, I don't think. The atmosphere is too thin to trust it for a lot of drag.

Your klaw is not armed? You need to arm it before you can grab anything. But as said above, your klaw needs to be close to perpendicular to the surface it's trying to grab.

Yeah, that bug got fixed several versions ago. I tried to reproduce it recently and couldnt.

No, the contract does not care about order.

I'm pretty sure that's the very first thing that every single one of us did, when we first tried to dock. The answer is that when you get close, you have to come to a dead stop. Your target velocity needs to go to something very close to zero. 0.0 is best. Residual velocity is what makes you do that dance. To get to zero, you want to be in target mode on your navball, then you want to lock SAS to retrograde. Then burn very gently. You may need to open your settings for your engines, and throttle them down to make them more gentle.

You have to be careful when it asks you to use a "new" craft to accomplish the mission. (Especially, regarding what ships you dock to.) But part of the point of the game is to nudge you into doing multiple contracts with a single mission. Doing multiples makes each contract trickier (because you can't customize the craft as much), but usually results in much greater monetary rewards. So yes -- just one new craft can certainly do all three of these contracts, if you fly it right.

Well, it's more that there were maybe 18 different ways to cause the same bug to happen. Bug reporters have managed to get 15 reproducible examples to the devs, so they could fix them. But reproducible examples are getting harder and harder to come by -- and the devs say there is no way to fix some kind of underlying cause. So yeah, the bug is getting a lot rarer, but admittedly it does still happen.

Also, for a strut to connect properly, there has to be a direct line between the two ends that does not intersect any other part. If the strut intersects something it's considered "illegal" and one of the ends will be moved automatically.

Sounds good to me.