bewing

pshaw! Moar boosters! Moar staging! Broccoli and cauliflower and asparagus and spinach! (Especially spinachk -- toot! toot!)

In general that contract requires landing, then mining and refining the fuel at minmus, then returning to orbit. Unless you want to haul something crazy with a ground launch at Kerbin, as you say.

The stock way to modify a craft after it's been launched is with the Klaw (Advanced Grabbing Unit). If you need to add more electrical generation, you fly up a new ship with more panels, and dock it to the existing ship with a Klaw.

The only harm is if you have accepted contracts that expire in the near future. If they expire, you get penalized.

My bet would be that the burnoff of fuel on your trip to Eve raised your CoM. So what you would want to try is pumping all your remaining fuel to the lowest-possible tanks, from the highest-possible tanks.

I have the most fun playing by the seat of my pants. While I am perfectly capable of doing the math -- I don't. So, I slap together my craft with little regard to aerodynamics -- and I mostly don't bother with maneuver nodes. I mostly just guess on my dV costs. This allows me the fun of watching things go wrong. And then I revert, because I'm playing career mode with 40% rewards (or less).

For experiments gathered by Kerbals, they get stored in the pod where the Kerbal boards the craft. Experiments gathered by devices are contained in the devices. There are only two ways to move experiments around from their original containers: Either you can use a Science Container's "Collect All" button to move one copy of every experiment on the combined ship into the Science Container. Or, you can send a Kerbal out on EVA, float over to the container/pod/device that contains the experiment, open the context menu of that container/pod, use the Take Data button to gather all those experiments into the Kerbal's pockets -- then float over to a new pod or container and either board it, or open its menu and use the Store Data button. Moving a Kerbal around inside a craft does not move any experiments. However -- that is not how you use a Mobile Science Lab. To use a Lab, you must have a scientist in the Lab. Then you open the context menu of any science container/pod on the entire craft and select the "Review Data" button. As you examine each experiment, it will have an additional yellow button: "Process Data". Click that. Doing that will convert your experiment into some Data Points in your Lab. (Note that the experiment is destroyed when being processed.) You can load your Lab up with 750 Data Points. Over time, those data points get converted slowly into Science points. After you have some Science points, you transmit them by hand back to KSC through an antenna. It takes quite a bit of EC to transmit 1 science point. So you have to have a lot of EC stored, or a gigantor panel in full sunlight.

Are you intending to fly it for hundreds of km through the atmosphere? If not, then it doesn't matter all that much. If you are building an airplane, then try the two designs with the same engine -- and see which one breaks mach 1 the easiest. An alternate technique is to build your craft with two stacks attached by a wing to each other. Then see which way it tries to yaw.

Yes, as I recall you do have partial control with your settings. You can change SAS modes on your probe cores, and you can go to full throttle with the Z key. During half your orbit you have full control, so you can set the thrust levels of your engine very low, and then you can perform dockings or many other manuevers by just going to "full" (reduced) throttle.

If you don't feel like redesigning anything -- then lock SAS on vertical and launch straight up. That's almost always a lot more stable than trying a gravity turn. You can begin a turn once you are up to 20 or 30km or so. Yes, it's slightly inefficient, but it's sometimes better than tearing your hair out.

The contract system is about filling requirements creatively. Which is what I proveded. Players get punished for being too literal minded, and I have no problem with that.

Most likely you have swept wings on your plane. Imagine a canard-wing system, with control surfaces at the very front of your plane. If you want the nose to go up with canards, which way do the control surfaces need to push? They need to push UP. OK, now you have the control surfaces at the back end of the plane. To make the nose go up, which way do the control surfaces need to move? They need to push down. So what's the rule? The rule is: control surfaces need to move in opposite directions depending on which side of the CoM they are on. A control surface that's at the CoM has no control authority at all, and should not move. And that's what the game tries to do. Figure out where each control surface is, relative to the CoM, and then make it move in opposite directions (or not at all) depending on that CoM position. But it doesn't always do a perfect job of locating the CoM or the control surface when it does this quicky calculation -- swept wings cause all sorts of difficulties for the game. It takes its best shot and guesses. If it consistently guesses wrong, then you can use the "control authority" slider for that control surface, to make it move in the opposite direction. But if your control surface is close enough to the CoM to cause it to move in the wrong direction for pitch control -- then you should probably turn pitch control off for that control surface in the first place.

The only way to complete it is with a trick. There is no way in hell you can get more than a kilogram of ore off Eve's surface and into orbit. The thing is, the game does not track the origin of ore. So you mine 3000 ore on Eve, and don't launch it. Then you land 3000 ore on Gilly and complete the contract. Or mine an additional 3000 ore on Gilly and complete the contract. But that's cheating ... if you don't want to cheat, don't take the contract.

Yup.

Have you tried using the KerbNet functionality on all the advanced probe cores? That shows you the biomes as you pass over them. It's on the list because you did the experiment, but never returned the results back to KSC. To know which ones you still need, you need a list of all the experiments you can perform, and a list of all the biomes on the CB. You can find such lists on the wiki, or various players have made spreadsheets. No, technically you get five times more science by processing it in a lab on a station. But it takes forever. And you can always get two copies -- one to process in a lab and the other to bring home. Or three copies. One to transmit, one to process, and one to recover at KSC. There are two ways of transferring experiments. One is using the "collect data" button on a Science Container. The other is to have a Kerbal on EVA get close to the pod that contains the experiments, open the context menu for the container, and click the "Take Data" button. Those are the only two ways. You understand that you do not actually have to have 15 Kerbals on board? You just need 15 seats.

The V1 aka doodlebug was also ramp launched.

If I understand correctly, this sounds like a recurrence of the old docking port bug, for which you need to use a persistence file editor tool: I think that KML fixes this docking port problem automatically -- but if it doesn't, then there's another thread I can point you to.

You can use SetOrbit in the cheat menu -- and then you don't have to launch it? You can pretend you launched it, and just never admit that you cheated. Or you can put wings and wheels on it, with decouplers. You might be able to fly it to orbit like a spaceplane?

Yeah, well, I'm pretty confident that's a bug that will get fixed sometime.

Part clipping is when you have two parts on your craft occupying the same space. Generally because you built it that way in the VAB/SPH. In some old versions of the game it was definitely a problem, because the parts would tend to repel each other and explode. In all the recent versions of the game, however, no two parts on a single craft can collide with each other. They always pass through each other harmlessly -- like ghost parts. If you decouple a docked craft from another craft and there were clipped parts, then those clipped parts will probably explode as soon as you decouple -- because now they are suddenly not part of the same craft. The only current issue with clipping is that some players consider it to not be aesthetically pleasing.

I agree. It allows you to pick your landing point and biome with precision (especially if you want to land on the top of a mountain).

Another option is to find a nice natural ramp -- AKA a hillside.

Timewarp does not work when your craft is under thrust, roving across a surface, or when you are flying in atmosphere, or underwater. In those cases where timewarp does not work, you can use physwarp instead. Physwarp only goes up to 4x time, and it is dangerous. It exists for people who are desperately impatient to waste their time playing a game, efficiently. The reason it is dangerous is because large craft can become physically unstable and explode. Alternately, craft can sink into the ground and explode. To mine, your craft has to be at a standstill. So timewarp always works for that. If you are getting very little output from mining, it might be because you have no engineer on your craft.

The editor sets the symmetry quantity according to the part that the cursor is hovering over. If you don't want that number to be three, then just avoid putting the cursor on top of the part that's set to three. If you can't get the cursor where you want it without touching something that's set wrong -- then set the symmetry to ONE, move the cursor where you want it, and hit the X key three times to set the symmetry to four.