bewing

Heh. Well, just try to get to Jool when it's on the wrong side of the Sun. It'll take at least 25 km/s of deltaV. Which is a bit more than just "inefficient".

Your efficiency is determined by 1) the time it takes to get there, 2) the dV you spend getting there, 3) personal aesthetics. So, burning a little later is bad for 1), you have to look at your dV numbers for 2) (but it's usually worse to wait too long), and for 3) you have to decide for yourself. Just getting an intercept and then tweaking it en route is actually a perfectly fine way to do it. The only times you need to be really careful about your intercept are when you are doing a gravity slingshot, and not just a simple capture.

Yup, that counts for bonus points! Just gotta brake properly into that target orbit now and you get the big kerbucks.

No, in that case you are in good shape. Just burn a little bit more prograde. You could have done it during your ejection burn too. The theory is: burning prograde now will make you arrive at your encounter sooner. So the Mun will not have moved as far in its orbit. So you will arrive "in front" of it. Which will put you in a retrograde orbit. Keep this view that you are showing in this picture. Lock SAS to prograde, and burn very gently while watching your orange projected orbit. You will see it move west over the surface of the Mun. Then it will hit the center of the Mun dead on. Then it will continue moving west until it emerges out the west side of the Mun and gives you a Pe orbiting in the other direction. Just watch it, and it will probably suddenly make sense. For bonus points, stop burning when your projected orbit is tangential to your target satellite orbit.

Heh. OK, you have a special situation there. You are going to crash into the Mun! You can tell, because the display is not showing a Pe. A counter-clockwise rotation around anything in the Kerbin system is prograde. So you actually need a little bit less oomph here. So, click on the Mun and say "focus view". Look at your projected orbit, and note that it has you plowing into some crater somewhere. You also may be above the Mun's North Pole, or below the South pole -- it's hard to tell from that one pic. In any case, you are going to need to either burn west, or retrograde. You may also need to add a little normal/antinormal to approach a little closer to the equator -- or closer to your target orbit around the Mun.

I'm not sure I have time tonight, but I think there's a possibility that you need to have at least one teeny fuel tank in that center stack for the fuel to flow into, before it goes to the nuke. Below the cupola and engines, I think you have another tank and another set of docking ports? Do those docking ports have crossfeed enabled?

Have you tried building good airplanes yet? Good spaceplanes? Hydrofoils? Or perhaps the next level of KSP is playing mods. Things like FAR or RSS. When you scale the system up to real-world sizes (or add ullage and boil off, etc.) the game gets a lot harder again. Do you want to know what rocket science is like in the real world? Personally, I find that redesigning my old ships to work better is my favorite thing to do.

I generally go for #3. Or for #3 plus a scientist -- which gives you full throttle control, full WASD rotation, and retrograde hold through the probe core.

You're going to lose all the oberth benefits anyway, so I don't see any point of doing this inside Kerbin's SOI. Just gently get it into a Kerbol orbit a tiny bit ahead of Kerbin, and burn from there. Once you are out of Kerbin's SOI, setting up the maneuver node and burn will be trivial. (And therefore, I think the 500k orbit was a bit of a waste of fuel.)

I'd say forget the shuttle. They are extremely difficult to make and fly. Especially if you make their thrust asymmetric. Fly up a rocket with a docking port on the nose and a lot of parachutes, then deorbit the whole thing. Or a rocket with two docking ports and a detachable section with RCS and the parachutes on it. Decouple the two pieces and dock the parachutes on the front end of the station, and the rocket on the back end of the station, and deorbit it that way.

Fortunately, reputation is asymptotic. So you can never run out of it, no matter how hard you try. On the other hand, if your reputation is low, then you will only get crummy "part test" and tourism contracts. I've never found the admin building strategies to be helpful in the game, myself. Theoretically, if you end up with lots of money and rep before you complete your tech tree then you can convert rep into a little bit of science. But it'll never be enough to make a serious dent in those last 1000 point tech tree nodes.

Each contract has a time until expiration or completion. That time is effectively random, but it's at least a day. Some have an infinite expiration. But the answer is: new contracts are offered when you either complete a current contract, or when an unaccepted contract expires, or when you decline a contract, or when you fail a contract.

There is no maximum. You can be 100% inefficient.

Aegolius' suggestion about vacuum engines is exactly on point. Either you want an all-LF design (with nukes for your rocket engines), or you want to use a low-mass, vacuum rated LFO engine. So reliants and swivels are out. I'd disagree with his point about fewer+larger rocket engines, though. Sticking with 1.25m engines gives you the opportunity to terminate each nacelle/stack with a rocket engine plus a displaced jet engine. The reduction in drag will pay for the extra jet engine. Even spark/juno combos on .625m stacks give you good enough performance for spaceplane work.

Yes. Not necessarily. The probe cores will still provide basic functionality even if they have no signal. So you can send a probe to Eeloo with a relay antenna, and even if the signal is blocked you can still use all the SAS modes and full/zero thrust. You can still stage, and you can enable/disable engines in their menus. This is enough to allow you to land, or to complete a satellite contract (if you have a low-thrust engine on your craft).

The 5k antenna will give you "control" if you have connectivity back to Kerbin, which will give you the ability to make maneuver nodes. However, you can't transmit science reports through it. So it depends on whether you want to wait to transmit science reports until you dock back to your mothership.

Sorry, but a DTS-M1 is not a relay antenna. The only relay antennas are the HG-5, and the antennas that start with the letters RA-xx. In the editor, when you are building your ship, the description of each antenna will say whether it's a relay antenna or not. One other thing to note is that relay antennas do not "combine" with the standard direct antennas. So having some of each type on your ship does you no good.

You are doing a slingshot past Duna to where? Dres? Jool? Eeloo?

Oh jeez, you're right. It's not on/off like I remembered. So yeah, slide the slider down some. And yeah, you only get to access the wheels' menus in pairs if you place them in pairs with symmetry.

You have to go into your settings and turn on "Advanced Tweakables". The game has it turned off by default to avoid confusing the newbies -- but once you have some practice, you need to turn it on. It's extremely useful. Once you turn that on, you go into the fairing's menu, and turn on "interstage nodes". It's a super useful (advanced) way to use a fairing. It's a little joke in the game. All you have to do is count the sides on the probe core. OKTO = 8. HECS = 6. OKTO2 = 8. QBE = 4. HECS2 = 6. So the one in the image is a HECS. A HECS is very nice because it has prograde and retrograde abilities, as compared to an OKTO. Which makes a HECS much easier to land, or to do satellite contracts with.

Then that sounds like a mod bug. I'm not seeing it in the stock game, and I've heard no reports of that in stock. Wrong, yup. Any crewmember can drive a rover. They just can't use SAS, unless they have a probe core. Traction control and friction are two different things. Look on the context menu for a pair of wheels. Read it very closely . You will see there is a button for Traction Control (on/off).

As far as question 1 goes, you can get the rover on a flat piece of ground and disable the motors on all but one pair of wheels. Then tell the rover to go forward. Repeat for all the other pairs of wheels. Also, if you feel that your wheels are "fighting" you as you drive around, then you may want to turn off the "traction control" feature on all the wheels. Traction control applies the brakes on a wheel if it thinks that wheel is slipping. It can really slow you down a lot on slightly uneven terrain, or on hillsides.

In general, as you are creating your close approach, you are burning prograde. You start out with a very high Munar Pe and a prograde capture. As you burn more, your Pe decreases, and decreases, and decreases, and goes below the surface of the Mun. If you burn some more, your Pe goes to zero, then pops out the other side of the Mun with a retrograde capture, then starts increasing. So that's usually the best way to control the direction of the captured orbit. If you are coming in from Minmus or someplace stranger, you may start out with a retrograde capture. At that point you have to fiddle around with all the handles on a maneuver node to find out what turns it into a prograde capture. Worst case, you actually enter the Mun's SOI, capture to a super high Ap, and then reverse your orbit at the Ap for a very low cost. It depends on what parts you are using in your craft, and how much drag you can deliberately create. High tech, extremely heat resistant parts have a wide window for a direct reentry with no retro burn in the Kerbin atmosphere. Low tech MK1 parts don't, and usually require a big retro burn. Even if you do a full retro burn to circularize back into LKO, you still may have to retro burn some more before you reenter. If all you have is a MK1 command pod, parachute, and a heatshield, then you can aim for a reentry Pe of 30km from the Mun. For anything else you need to experiment to find out a safe and effective reentry Pe.

It sounds like you are not completely zeroing out your relative velocity before you go for the docking. If you have residual tangential velocity, you will get that "circling" effect. As far as the magnetism goes -- if you have SAS turned on, it will fight the magnetism. If they are fighting each other, you will get this "repulsion" effect. You can also get it if your approach is too far off from a right angle to the docking port. In general, it works best to have SAS turned off for at least one ship when the magnetism kicks in.

OK, you have it turned off. So that's good the way it is. You can still partially control your crafts even when you have no commnet signal. That means you don't need relays or pilots if you don't want them.