bewing

You need to establish an inclined orbit the way you did. It's good if the inclination is just a few degrees more than the required latitude. To get the target right, you have to estimate the angles carefully. The first time you pass over the correct latitude, you check how many degrees of longitude away your actual target is. Kerbin rotates one degree per minute. So that tells you the correct period for your orbit to get back to the correct point at the correct time. To land fairly accurately, you either need a large retroburn, or you need to reenter steeply (very low Pe, high Ap).

I hope that when you are approaching a landing, you have your engines off. But yes, the point is that to actually fly subsonic, you need to be low enough in the atmosphere to have actual lift at subsonic speeds. Which means you are down there with all the nasty drag. So the Isp boost from 4000 to 9000 for panther dry mode doesn't help you a bit, since you are fighting all those nasty air molecules the whole time. So yeah, to fly very long distances with excellent fuel efficiency with a whiplash -- you want to be flying somewhere between 24km and 28km altitude, at 1400 m/s if you can manage it. Just be careful not to blow up your plane's nose from overheating. When you are getting close to your landing zone, turn off your engines and glide as high as you can for as long as you can. Then do a nice steep dive toward your landing point.

1) The only way to add fuel to the lander as it sits is to dock with it. Which you can do using a Klaw, but it's not worth the effort. You could also take the Kerbals out of the lander by docking with a Klaw, but that's not worth it either. 2) Yes, you can easily build ships that can take on two (or three, or more) Kerbals for transporting back to Kerbin. It is actually very wasteful to only pick them up one at a time. As 5thHorseman said, the smartest thing to do is to get your lander almost to orbit until it is out of fuel, then EVA each Kerbal from the lander and give them 20 or 30 seconds of prograde thrust from their RCS jetpacks to get them into orbit by themselves. I don't think they have enough thrust for "get out and push" to work for getting the entire capsule to orbit. 3) Yes, when you EVA from the lander (and you are still hanging on the hatch), open the Part Action Menu for the lander. There will be a button there that says "Take Data". When you click that button, all the experiments that are currently stored in the lander will be transferred to the Kerbal's pockets.

Flying at low (subsonic) speed for extended periods of time is almost never useful. The only reason to use panthers in dry mode is if your plane has low-enough drag that those two engines will make it go supersonic anyway and get to 650 m/s, or if your trip is so short that the cost of climbing to 20km altitude is wasted. Beyond that, I can't imagine any plane where this engine tradeoff is going to work. Either a single whiplash will be enough to get it to 1200 (or 1400) m/s, or 1 whiplash and 2 panthers is going to be so underpowered that it won't even be able to go supersonic. So I think you're going to actually have to build it and try it out. As far as "best fuel efficiency" goes, you get that when you are zooming along in the upper atmosphere at 3 times the speed of sound and your engines have flamed out because your altitude is so high.

Yeah, in version 1.2.2 (which is what you have) they get hot from residual heat. But I've never seen it cause an actual problem.

One additional point is that the Communotron 16-S doesn't stack. So there is no point in having two of them.

Engine efficiency is measured by "Isp" (specific impulse), and is shown on the extended part info window in the VAB or SPH. Another important factor is the mass of the engine, which is also shown on the part info window. Exactly what do you mean by "fill the fuel tanks"? When you build a craft, the fuel tanks start out full. You can take fuel out and put it back in again in the VAB or SPH by opening the Part Action Menu for the tank. To refill a tank in flight after you've burned the fuel, you need to dock your craft with another that has excess fuel on board -- then do a fuel transfer. Is that what you mean?

Well, it's been a constant problem in the game engine that KSP is built on top of (unity), that landing legs sometimes make landed spacecraft jump into the air. So, I've never ever seen a converter explode from heat. Sometimes, I see fuel tanks get red hot, but I've never seen them explode either. But I have seen ships jump and have parts of them blow up when they hit the ground again. I rather recommend never using landing legs for that reason.

The crawler that puts your rocket on the launchpad does not rotate it. So looking straight out the door is East. And you are looking at atmospheric dV numbers. Since the Mun has no atmosphere, those are the wrong numbers to use. You need to click the button that shows vacuum dV numbers instead.

No. There are really none.

Yes, I think it's easier to do it in the other order (Minmus first then the Mun on the way back) , for several reasons. First, getting to the Mun from Minmus is pretty trivial. You can leave any time you want and still get an intercept at the Mun for an extremely small deltaV cost. Second, if you are returning directly to Kerbin from Minmus, you have an extra 100 m/s of velocity at Kerbin that you need to get rid of -- than if you go from Minmus to the Mun, then the Mun to Kerbin. Third would be the timing to get to Minmus. If you are leaving from the Mun, you can only leave on one day out of six. If you leave from Kerbin, you can leave during any orbit.

There is no way in stock to show An and Dn visually. As Zheetan said, the An and Dn happen when you cross the Equator, and that's when you burn. To know when you are crossing the Equator, open Kerbnet and watch the latitude readout. To know when to stop burning, watch your navball. You still have to lock onto either your Normal or Antinormal marker while you burn. While you are burning, your marker headings will move toward the East. When your Normal marker is at a heading of 90, and your Antinormal marker is at a heading of 270, then your orbit is going over the pole and you can stop burning.

You have to launch onto the planet's orbital trajectory. In map mode, zoom out until you see the orbit path of the planet. When KSC is exactly underneath that line, launch straight up in orbit mode on your navball.

AFAIK, converter equipment does not follow priority rules -- it always fills all tanks proportionate to their capacities. Doing so would be an interesting idea, but you'd have to put it into the bugtracker as a feedback.

Suggestion #1 would be to put 4 control surfaces (tailfins, for example) at either the top or bottom of the rocket. Suggestion #2 is that your goal #3 (docking to complete a contract) can't be done that way. KSP keeps track of which rockets came from which launches. If you take a rocket, undock 2 pieces, and redock them -- the game will know what you did and won't give you docking credit.

Because now your "rover" is being controlled by a different probe core that's pointed in a different direction. Use "control from here" to set it back to the proper probe core. The steering of any ship (including rovers) is based on the orientation of your probe core. It's also controlled by the "center of mass" of your vessel. So when you have craft docked together, your CoM moves, and the steering on some of your wheels will change -- depending on whether the CoM moved to the other side of the wheels after docking.

That's not how you move resources. The way you do it is by opening the Part Action Menu for a fuel tank (or more than one) on one craft, and then also opening a Part Action Menu on a tank (or more than one) on the other craft at the same time. When multiple Part Action Menus are open at the same time, any resource that is shared among ALL the open Part Action Menus on your screen will get an additional pair of buttons that say "In" and "Out". Then you click one of those buttons to start a transfer in or out of that tank (respectively). There are two ways to open multiple Part Action Menus at the same time. You can open the first one, and then "Pin" it, and then open the second one. Or there is a button combo that will open a second one while not closing the first.

Welcome to the forums. Everything except heatshields and I-Beams allow crossfeed, AFAIK.

Vector dot product. It's like a multiplication, with the cosine of the angle calculated in too.

Never looked into it myself, but perhaps the Thermal Data GUI in the cheats/physics tab will tell you? If one of the external air temperature numbers goes over some threshold, then a plasma gets generated. But it would certainly be altitude dependent also. I think you're going to need to make some plots of temperature vs. altitude. Or speed vs. altitude. I don't think it's going to be a simple relationship.

The diagram is drawn based on a particular "consumer" or "source" of fuel. The green nodes are consumers, the yellow nodes are sources. The arrows show the ways that fuel can flow in and out of the particular node that you selected. You open the diagram by selecting a particular engine or tank's context menu -- the red hoops show which node/part was the one you chose when you turned on the diagram (ie. the base node of the diagram). So in FloppyRocket's case, he opened the fuel flow diagram by right clicking on the discardable fuel tank on the left -- and then he opened the context menu for the main tank afterward (which you can also tell because the flow diagram button is unclicked).

I like to just put up one powerful relay, in a 2Mm orbit. That gives you guaranteed coverage over more than half of minmus at all times. Then I put a couple fuel tankers in low minmus orbits with little HG-5s on them. At that point, there's almost always something in the sky that you can see.

OK, I changed my mind. If you have defaulted settings, then your probe core should be in "limited control mode". Which means you should be able to turn on SAS, even with no CommNet connection. Which means to me that you probably clicked the "No control without signal" button in the Advanced Settings, sometime since you landed your drilling rig.

If you have commnet turned on, then you need to have Commnet connectivity for the probe core to work. Which means your antenna needs to be strong enough to link back to KSC or to the nearest relay. You can turn commnet off if you want, and that will fix your problem. Perhaps you had a 2G relay at minmus when you landed the first time? And yes, there is a tiny antenna built into all the probe cores.

Looks to me like your red dot and your green dot are not precisely aligned. I would guess that there is a small amount of horizontal displacement in the attachment of one of the bottom parts -- ie. something got attached in a non-centered way. I suppose you can build it so that the science container is on the side that it tries to yaw towards, so that it will automatically counteract the yaw.