bewing

Well, if you look up "keplerian orbital parameters" on wikipedia, for example, it gives the formulas on how to calculate period based on things like your orbit's SMA (semi-major axis). Then you choose a number for how many orbits (years) you want it to take for you to get there. Then you decide whether you want to raise your Ap to slow your orbit down, or lower your Pe to speed your orbit up (generally, raising your Ap for a slower orbit works better).
Or, you can just do it the really easy way. You want to circularize the P3 satellite in 1.25 Eve years, the P2 satellite in 1.5 Eve years, and the P1 satellite in 1.75 years -- all at your current location. So you send them a bit outside of Eve's SOI, turn prograde, and burn until the Pe marker shows you returning to your Pe in the proper number of days. Then circularize when you get there.

For the last couple years, I've never felt the need to build planes bigger than 20 tonnes or so. And the small steerable/retractable wheels are perfectly fine for that. I tend to leave the "steering" turned on for the rear wheels, since it gives me a tighter turning radius with no real drawbacks.
 

No, they get full credit for being in orbit. When you initially "switch to" them, their orbital state may not get logged. However, when they go EVA from their initial wreck, their "current status" gets logged into the logbook.
So a Kerbal rescued in LKO will get two XP, and will certainly get one star when you land them.

Yes, something is wrong there. All rescue victims are supposed to have both a jetpack and a parachute. Did you get your game from Steam? Have you done a file validation?
 

Spricigo got it right. Those items can be stacked in a single cargo slot.
 

I don't know anything about Mac OS, but in general:
You open the Object Thrower window and leave it open!
Click the "Arm" checkbox.
Aim with the cursor.
And middle mouse button (as antipro said) to shoot.
 

Check to see if you have parts autostrutted. Especially across the docking port (Root Node autostruts). That is the most common cause of explosions or shaking on docked craft. Turn off all the autostruts as fast as you can after you focus on the craft in orbit. (As spricigo said, "decouple node" is normal for your first undocking.)

Check to see if you have parts autostrutted. Especially across the docking port (Root Node autostruts). That is the most common cause of explosions or shaking on docked craft. Turn off all the autostruts as fast as you can after you focus on the craft in orbit. (As spricigo said, "decouple node" is normal for your first undocking.)

Check to see if you have parts autostrutted. Especially across the docking port (Root Node autostruts). That is the most common cause of explosions or shaking on docked craft. Turn off all the autostruts as fast as you can after you focus on the craft in orbit. (As spricigo said, "decouple node" is normal for your first undocking.)

No, I mean this:
 

Your game may be corrupted. You may want to do a file validation from Steam, if you bought the game on steam.
 

Basically, you can't.  At least not directly. Partly it depends on your atmospheric maneuverability. Let's say you can adjust your reentry by 10km to each side -- by either thrusting, using aerodynamic control surfaces, or adjusting the timing of your reentry. Let's say you can manage to complete one full Kerbin orbit during your reentry. So that gives you a 20km-wide strip around the planet. If there's a runway in there, you can land on it, but your odds are basically zero.
Or maybe you can aerobrake into a permanent inclined Kerbin orbit. You're still orbiting once every 30 minutes, which gives you 12 orbits a day, and still your odds of flying directly over a runway are bad.
So pretty much the only thing you can do is to increase your horizontal range on your RV. To be guaranteed to be able to land on a point, you need to have a lateral traverse range of a minimum of about 75km. And then you need to aerobrake into orbit, and wait for that point to be on your orbital path.
 
 

The direct antennas don't help at all. They don't mix with relay antennas, and cannot bounce signals. They only provide control for the current craft.
So all you have is 9 100G relays. That gets you a relay antenna signal power for the satellite of 100G * 9 ^ .75 = 520 G.
There is a "range modifier" in your settings that gets multiplied into the range calculation, which is the square root thing, which depends on the antenna of the probe craft.

Well, you can either roleplay this game, and make up your own backstory, and then send your brave kerbals out to manifest their destiny --
or, if that sounds like too much work, you can start a career mode game to give yourself some random targets to shoot at.
But it mostly sounds like you've got the basic orbital mechanics of the game down pretty well. Rovers will be a small challenge for you. Airplanes will be a medium-sized challenge. Spaceplanes are a huge painful challenge. Flying kerbals around in orbit in their EVA suits is a medium-sized challenge -- especially flying distances of 10km+ between ships. Rendezvous between craft in fast eccentric orbits is a big mental challenge.

Separators and decouplers give off a puff of smoke when they activate. It's just a visual effect.
 

No, it's probably not the symmetry, it's almost certainly a reaction wheel somewhere on the craft generating torque.
In the default setting, the reaction wheels and the rover wheels use the same keys. For the rover wheels, the keys mean "forward, reverse, turn left, turn right". And for the reaction wheels, the keys mean "tilt forward, tilt back, tilt left, and tilt right." So whenever you push a key to try to make your rover go in some direction, it also tilts at the same time.
The easiest thing to do is to go into your settings, and remap the rover controls. You can use the keypad, or the arrow keys, or anything -- just as long as they are not mapped to the same keys as your reaction wheels.

For stock KSP, aerodynamic lift has a very simple model. There is no way to reduce drag. For the first few degrees of attack angle, drag increases very slowly, up to about 5 degrees, where you get maximum lift. You get rapidly increasing drag, but slowly increasing lift up to 10 degrees. From 10 to 30 degrees, you still get increasing lift, but drag increases extremely fast. At 30 degrees, your wing stalls and lift falls to zero rapidly over the next 10 degrees of AoA. The amount of wing that you need depends completely on your ascent profile, which varies tremendously between players.
All wings are identical for lift/drag. The basic swept wing, however, weighs twice as much as any other wing per unit area.
The BigS and FatS wings can additionally store fuel. The FatS wings have very low heat tolerance, however, and tend to explode when used in a spaceplane unless you are extremely careful.
Sorry I can't help with supersized planes. My biggest spaceplanes tend to be around 40 tonnes.

I've done something like this myself in the past, and it was fun. I'd suggest making a little rocket ship, turning on "infinite fuel", and then just trying it a few times for practice.
The basic deal is that you look first at where you want to go. Even at a high speed, your target will still move a bit in its orbit before you get there. So you have to lead your target a bit. Then you look at your current location and velocity. If you have blackjacked Hohmann, then (on average), all of your current momentum is wasted, so you need to finish killing it -- or at least kill all the part that you don't want. (Your current momentum can vary from being 100% in the correct direction, to exactly 100% in the wrong direction, so on average it's 0%.) Then you point your nose where you actually want to go, and start accelerating (make sure you get your plane inclination correct).
As you burn, your projected orbit will stretch until it reaches your target CB's orbit, then the intersection point will move along that orbit, then your close approach markers will converge on your target point, and then you will get an SOI intercept shown. Then cut your engines and start looking at how you need to fine-tune your approach. A little burn north, a little burn east or west, a little burn prograde, and you can get a nice approach. You will already be moving so fast at that point that you do not want to continue burning. Adding more deltaVs won't save you that much time, and it totally messes up the process of getting a close approach.
Doing a constant acceleration, followed by a flip ship, followed by a constant deceleration and ending up at exactly the right point in space is an exercise for a computer, not a KSP player.
 

250km. It's in the wiki.

To be able to control a decoupled chunk of a spacecraft, it must have a probe core on it. And that seems like the component that you are iffiest about. An OKTO, a HECS, a RoveMate, a QBE, or one of the two advanced probe cores.

There are two ways. The first is to "lock" all the fuel tanks on the space station. If you open the context menu for a tank, next to each resource that the tank holds is a "lock" button. If you lock a tank, no fuel can flow in or out. So, if you lock all the tanks in the station and then refine the ore, all the resulting fuel will end up on the vessel.
Alternately, if your R&D is upgraded to level 2, you can transfer fuel from one tank to another. If you open up the menus of two fuel tanks, each will have a button that says "In" or "Out". So you refine the ore, and then transfer fuel from the station tanks to the vessel tanks.
 

The biome system was built many years ago to take advantage of a couple automatic systems in the game engine. The most important of those is the color interpolation system.
The way it works is that the game is given a low resolution pixel map of every planet/CB, and the colors on that low-res map are the biomes of each area. However, as you pass over the terrain, the game builds a much higher resolution map from the low-res map, and uses color interpolation between all the neighboring pixels from the low-res map to figure out what the biome is of all the pixels in the high-res map. This allowed the game to create an on-the-fly biome map that was complex, detailed, interesting, and repeatable.
This system worked well for many years, but it had a couple of issues.
On Kerbin, the main issue was that the interpolation between the "shores" biome and the "grasslands" biome mapped to a color that was then mapped back to a biome that was unfortunately called "Tundra". If it had been called "scrubgrass" (as I tried hard to get the devs to rename it), there wouldn't have been a problem. But this "tundra" existed all over the planet at any shores/grassland boundary. Even on the equator (and on the KSC campus itself). Sadly, many players and devs are rather OCD and found this little bit of "tundra" biome in unrealistic locations to be unbearable.
On CBs such as the Mun, the situation was more severe. Since all the biomes were very similar colors in the low-res map, the interpolation zone tended to have a lot of odd biomes mixed in. For example, in the boundary between the East Crater biome, the Canyons biome, and the Midlands biome -- you could find 3 or 4 tiny spots of other random biomes mixed in. Such as various polar biomes. Again, some OCD folks found this to be unbearable.
Now me personally, I loved it. I found it easy to make up little stories about why the various biomes showed up in strange places. I spent many fun hours scouring Kerbin and each CB for little agglomerations of odd biomes where you could pick up a lot of science from a lot of biomes with one long flight and then a little bit of roving around.
And then I lost my little one-man battle, and the accumulated weight of all the complaints finally ended my little biome party.
The biomes of all the planets were redrawn to attempt to eliminate "accidental interpolation artifacts". The biomes became the boring-as-hell ones that we have now. No surprises. Nothing interesting to find. No special places to go and gather science. No reason to explore an area, once you've landed in the biome one time to pick up your science. Many of you won't understand those last sentences, but those brothers of mine that I call "biome hunters" will understand perfectly.
However, the interpolation scheme is still there, and some biomes have been added (especially on Kerbin). Eve was always a complete mess after the biome redrawing. (Maybe Eve's low-res biome map is backwards -- I never managed to figure it out.) And there are still interpolation artifacts on Kerbin and almost all the CBs.
So, antipro, the answer to your question is that there are many tiny spots on Kerbin where color interpolation between various biome pixels produces strange results. The most commonly misplaced biome currently is the Southern Ice Shelf. You will find spots of it at the edges of some lakes. You will find spots of it mixed in with the Northern Ice Shelf at the North pole if you look hard enough. But these oddly placed biomes are the result of the devs trying for months to get rid of other, different, oddly-placed biomes. No good deed going unpunished, and all of that.
 

IRL, it's extremely dangerous in a mission to ever retract anything. The motors and hinges that do extend/retract operations will often freeze up or fail. So, IRL, if you successfully manage to extend some gizmo then you never want to touch it again, because the process may never work again. So they usually don't even build anything to be retractable. It just extends and then locks into place.
 

Mine it, to reduce the mass of the asteroid. Especially if you then convert the ore into more fuel. Many asteroids are more than 80% ore.
 

No. Autostruts are free, massless, and dragless.