FullMetalMachinist

This. When I dock, I only look at the 'main' part of the screen for distance to target and roll orientation to the target. The rest of the time my eyes are glued to the navball. Just make sure that when you start your 'close approach' you set your own docking port to "control from here" and set the other port as the target.

I'm still waiting for Kerbal Space Program versus the Kerbal Space Random Contract Generator that we have now.

Is...is that not what Internet forums are for?

That relationship only exists because the objective of that tutorial is to lower your Kerbin PE. It would be better to think about it more like "a burn of a certain m/s at this spot in my Mun orbit has a bigger effect on my Kerbin PE, and that same burn has less effect on my Kerbin PE on that other spot." The 'most efficient' spot to burn is all relative based on what you want to do after you eject from the Mun. It's all about using the same size of burn at different times in your Mun orbit to effect your Kerbin orbit in a specific way. You've basically already shown what is meant by 'parallel' in that screenshot. The reason that it most efficient (for what you're trying to do) has to do with relative velocities. The Mun has an orbital velocity of 542.5 m/s. Let's say that your ship is in Mun orbit of 200 m/s. That means that on the 'far' side, when your ship is traveling in the same direction as the Mun's orbit, you add that, and your ship's velocity around Kerbin is 742.5 m/s. When it's on the 'near' side and traveling opposite (retrograde) of the Mun's orbit , you subtract, and your ship's velocity around Kerbin is 342.5 m/s. In the case of returning to Kerbin, the near side is more efficient because to lower your PE to the atmosphere, you need to burn retrograde. And on the near side 200m/s of that burn is given to you for free. It's the same rough principle that gravity assists work on. I'm not really sure what you're asking here. But that site is mainly for finding the transfer windows, which is simply the timing of when to leave Kerbin to have the least expensive dV flight to another planet.

Wait, are you saying that the Bussard Collectors from Star Trek are actually based on a real thing!?

I would say it's very stable, I haven't seen any crashes. But then, all the 1.1 versions were stable for me as well, so take that with whatever size grain of salt is appropriate for you.

[F4]

Unfortunately you can't assign crew to the command seat from the VAB or SPH. You have to launch the rover and leave it there , then lunch another manned ship and EVA the kerbal and walk over to the rover. Or, alternatively, you can have a pod connected to the rover by a decoupler or stack separator and do it all in one shot. Still have to EVA the kerbal and enter the command seat that way, though.

I'm using it with 100% occlusion, and the DSN modifier bumped up to 20, and vessel antenna modifier taken down to .1 IMO it's silly, bordering on ridiculous, to have to use relays to boost the range because of distance from Kerbin, especially considering KSP's tiny solar system. Relays should only be needed for communication with things that are occluded by a planet/moon.

The short answer is that your rocket is not aerodynamically stable. I know you said that you've already read some tutorials, so I hope that I'm not giving you something you already know, but this is a good tutorial for flipping rockets. So basically your CoM is too far backwards because the combined mass of those two Hitchhikers is only 5 tons, much less than what that tank and engine masses. This means that it's stable if it's flying backwards. In your case I would get rid of the side boosters and add a second in-line stage. This will not only shift the CoM forwards slightly, but also give the fins at the back a longer lever arm to try and force it to fly front first.

If you turn that on then the legs will ignore being shielded by a cargo bay or fairings. So no more 'cannot deploy while stowed' business.

Pretty sure it's whether or not it's loaded into the physics calculations. In other words whether it's within physics range or not (2km, or 20km if in atmospheric flight).

Ha! Touché. Although I have to say, doing that and planting the flag at the exact correct time is almost certainly harder than just landing a craft. Job well done, though.

I believe it does.

Yes, but that's only half of the story. The formula for finding range between two antennas is: sqrt(antenna1 * antenna2). Not quite, see the formula above. Regular antenna will work on the controlled ship. The range does increase. That (combinable) tag after the range means that you can combine multiple for more range. Unfortunately, I forget what the formula for combining antennas is, but I'm pretty sure it's not linear (i.e. 2 of the same antenna don't get you twice the range).

The antennas and the probe core were, but the asteroids and the related contracts were not.

Yep. What I do is set all my experiments to an action group, and then after running them all right click on the container and hit 'collect all science'. Note that while it can take the results out of the goo and science jr., those still need a scientist kerbal to reset them. Also, if you have more than one science container on a ship and do the 'collect all', it will pull from the other container before the experiments. Not sure if that's a bug or not, but something to be aware of.

To avoid the tedium of having the kerbal EVA just to gather the thermometer and barometer readings.

I haven't tried in the full release yet, but in the pre they could stay inside the ship, as long as it was landed or splashed and within physics range.

It's right click now, been that way since 1.1

Main menu options, before you start a game. It used to be that you would unhide it once, and then it would stay that way as long as you controlled that craft. The new default is that every time you go into map view, the navball is hidden. But you can change that so that it's always shown.

Is there a chance that when you installed 1.2 you upgraded on top of your existing 1.1 game? If so that could be the problem. The old settings might not have been correctly overwritten by the new install. I think that if you delete the settings.cfg file in the main KSP folder then the game will create a new one with the default values. Or you can try downloading and running a completely fresh install.

Very interesting. No, I don't think you're missing anything. It seems like it would make sense to always choose the strongest path, but it certainly isn't in your case. @RoverDude, any thoughts?

What specifically is the problem you're having? Unless we know where things go wrong for you, you're just going to get a lot of general advice, like those above. (Not saying that it's bad advice, just general tips) So, where are you having trouble? Is it that your ship doesn't have enough power (TWR)? Do you run out of fuel? You always have too much downward vertical speed? There is an in-game tutorial on landing and returning from the Mun. Have you tried that?

Yes, and it's very simple. It's just (engine thrust)/(current gravity)/(total craft mass). Let's take these one at a time. First the engine thrust. This is given by the info panel when you hover the mouse cursor over an engine in the parts list. It has two numbers, both given in kilo-newtons. One is the thrust in vacuum, the other is the thrust at 1 atmosphere of pressure, which is what you get at sea level on Kerbin. Since that's where you're launching at, you'll want that 1 atm number. Type that into your calculator (if you're using more than one engine, then add them all up). The second number is the current gravity that you're experiencing. At sea level on Kerbin this is 9.8066 m/s^2. The last number is the total mass of your fully fueled craft. This is given by the engineer's report. Find it on the bottom right corner of the VAB screen, the icon that looks like a wrench. Hover your mouse over it, and towards the top of the small window that pops up is the mass of your craft. (If you are in career mode it will be formatted as <mass1>/<mass2>. Mass1 is your craft mass, mass2 is the max weight that the launch pad can handle.) Then you take those three numbers and divide them out. Here's an example: 175 kn thrust / 9.0866 / 11.8 tons = 1.51. That 1.51 is your thrust to weight ratio, often written as TWR. If you're going to be able to lift off, that TWR must be grater than 1.