FullMetalMachinist

Press 'v' to cycle through the view modes until you get to 'locked'. Then rotate the camera so you're behind and slightly above your ship. Now pitch up is up for the ship, left is left, and so on. Same for translation directions.

Something that can help with that is to use 'fine controls'. Press caps lock to toggle it on, you'll see the pitch yaw roll indicators in the bottom left go from orange to blue. It makes the RCS thrusters fire at less than full power, which is usually enough for the reaction wheels (if there are any) to counteract any imbalance with the placement of the RCS thrusters.

Mods. That is currently the only way to get clouds. Usually those 'hi-res' videos and screenshots use some combination of SVE, Scatterer, Planetshine, Distant object enhancement, and EVE.

I'm not certain, but that might be your problem. When two vessels dock, their stages can (and usually do) get jumbled up in some way. And the default numbers for fuel flow priority are based on the staging. You might want to lunch your transfer/lander stage and test that out. Use the 'set orbit' feature to save time getting to orbit.

You've brought this up before, but I'm still not convinced it's a major concern outside of some odd edge cases like aerobatics aircraft. Takeoff and landing are odd edge cases? Huh. Snarkiness aside, those are two very important (and common) scenarios that would be helped by a slower stall speed.

No way to do it in stock. I've never used it myself, but I think FMRS is what you're looking for.

I disagree. Have you seen how much info is in the KSPedia? Then there's the part descriptions, science result descriptions, contract requirements, and tutorial instructions. And how would they know that they have selected a sat/station/base contract if they don't speak english? You're saying that people are better off selecting a contract at random, and then randomly throwing parts together in the VAB until it magically meets the requirements? Seriously? Also, you cannot see if the craft you're building in the VAB will give you a green check on the contract window while in the VAB. You have to go to the launchpad for that. That's why they have recruited native speakers from those localized languages to help qc those languages.

Yep, the general consensus is that it's one of the hardest things to do learn in the game. So if you're trying to tackle it after only a day or two, then you're much braver than I. Anyway, another couple of things that might help. I know of two good docking tutorials here and here. Hope these help.

There is indeed. Most people refer to KSP's learning curve as more of a wall. Just remember that we're mostly a helpful and friendly bunch here on the forums, so don't ever be afraid to open more threads asking questions. After all, we've all been there at some point.

Not sure exactly what your circumstances are when you saw that, but it was probably the difference between a Kerbin day and a Kerbin's sidereal period. On the surface a 'day' is measured from one sunrise to the next. The sidereal period is how long it takes Kerbin to make one full rotation relative to the stationary distant stars. To exaggerate and make the difference easier to grasp, imagine that a Kerbin day on the surface is exactly 6 hours (like it is in the game now). But instead of the 400 and something days it takes now for a year, imagine that it takes only four days, so that each day Kerbin moves 90 degrees around it's orbit. That means that in order to go from one sunrise to the next, Kerbin actually has to rotate the 360 degree for a full rotation, but then it has to keep going another 90 degrees in order to present the same spot on the surface to the sun. So if 360 + 90 = 450 degrees takes 6 hours, then how long does it take to go 360 degrees compared to a stationary reference (ie the distant stars)? It takes 4 hours 48 minutes. Now take that extreme example and put it back in terms of the current game. A day on the surface still takes 6 hours, but instead of also moving 90 degrees around it's solar orbit it moves less than a degree. That makes the sidereal period (as reported in the wiki) 5h, 59m, 9.4s. So that less-than-a-minute difference is probably what you're seeing. Unless it's not, and I've wasted a bunch of time telling you something that you already knew.

There's your problem. The contract window says 'measure the temperature in spaceflight above 11,900 meters'. Go higher.

Loads, I'm sure. Too many to list here in fact. We could narrow it down if you were more specific about exactly which step of the tutorial you're stuck on, and exactly what things you have tried to do that aren't working.

Yep. The game sees that you have a size 1 part stuck directly to a size 2 part, and it will take into account that there are flat edges in the airflow and adjust drag accordingly. I'm not sure about structural strength increase, though.

Which is a very silly pay wall to put them behind. I was so happy when they added the option to have them unlocked at the beginning in the difficulty options.

I second this. The in-game tutorials were recently re-done and are quite good now. I would start there, before you even consider using mods.

A fairly new feature is a tweakable on probe cores for hibernation. Right click on the probe core and click on the hibernation mode button to cycle through the options. Put it on the one that auto hibernates it during time warp. You still won't be able to recharge your batteries, but at least it'll use next to no power during time warp.

@Spricigo @Rhomphaia @Snark, my apologies. No body ever likes admitting that they are wrong, but I'm afraid I must. You are all correct about the way to calculate it out. I spoke up before thinking about it thoroughly (and before my morning coffee ). Thanks for politely setting me straight.

Not exactly a spreadsheet, but the better burn time mod has what you want, and some other stuff. That will give inaccurate results when the burn times are longer than a few minutes because it doesn't take into account the higher acceleration as the ship gets lighter from burning fuel. (no it won't)

FYI, this used to be the case, but ever since version 1.0 came out KSP has used drag cubes. Basically each part has an imaginary cube built around it, and each face of the cube has a certain drag value assigned to it. Then it figures out how much of each face is exposed to the airflow, and which direction (is it prograde and head-on to the air, or is it the trailing part at the back). Then it applies that amount of drag to each part of the ship/plane/craft. This has the benefit of making stuff that looks streamlined and 'fast' actually behave that way.

Simply put, the Mk II parts give lots of lift from the central 'body' parts (meaning you can get away with less wings), but at the expense of increased drag. The Mk I parts give very little body lift, but also have much less drag. You can get around this a little bit by building in some angle of attack into your wings. Rotate them so that the front edge is higher than the back by a few degrees. This will let you have less drag from the Mk II parts (because they stay prograde), while the wings have some angle of attack to generate lift. This is called angle of incidence.

You can get a visual approximation, but not a hard number. Once you have an encounter trajectory, go to map view and focus the view on the target planet. That will show you your trajectory through it's SoI.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.

Specifically, an actual Pilot skill kerbal, not just any old kerbal to fill the seat.

That's because science experiments from the surface/flying on Kerbin do not get processed into data in a lab on Kerbin. It's designed that way, because otherwise it would be far too easy to get infinite science. It's supposed to be a little bit of a challenge. What you can do instead is put an MPL in low orbit. Then go around the surface of Kerbin collecting all the science experiments you want. Then load a rocket up with all those results and put them in the lab in orbit. Still relatively easy. Or you can cheat the game a bit and make a MPL that can hover a few meters off the ground (so it's technically flying) and then transfer your experiment results over.

@Biggen what you're looking for is a method called 'periapsis kicking'. As was suggested earlier, you split your single long burn into many smaller ones. The trick then becomes the timing of all the small burns so that your final one has the correct ejection angle and you do it at the correct time for your transfer window. Luckily, someone has already done the work for you.