IncongruousGoat

Use the difficulty preset labeled "Moderate".

Waiter, why did you use a Fourier transform on my soup? It's all dissociated now!

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who get that this joke is in trinary.

When your favorite mug has the Riemann zeta function and the general form of a Fourier transform on it, among other things.

Don't feel that way at all. I can practically guarantee that the grand majority of the people in this community learned a good part of what they know (the broad strokes, at least) from videos and other community members. I know I did. Don't ever feel bad about asking questions, even if they seem really stupid. As you said, it's practically impossible to figure things out without a basic understanding of orbital mechanics. Plus, some of the most important things to know are rather counter-intuitive (see the Oberth effect). There is no shame in asking. So ask away. The community will do its best to answer.

@Carl The problem with that thinking is that there aren't sufficient resources on the Moon to make that work. To start, a lack of copper, which you would need for wire for power systems. Sure, you could ship it up from Earth... but then we're shipping stuff from Earth. Avionics pose a different problem-there's no feasible way to build up enough infrastructure on the Moon to permit fabrication of the sorts of solid-state electronic you would need for spacecraft avionics. You probably wouldn't be able to make engines, either, because of a lack of the kinds of precision machining you would need to make turbopumps. Fuel would also prove problematic. It would have to be LH-LOX or LH NTR, since the Moon lacks the carbon, nitrogen, chlorine, and fluorine needed for any other propellant combinations. Unfortunately, both require hydrogen.. which you would have to extract from the scant supplies of water present on the Moon. Fuel tanks would also be a problem, since you would (somehow) have to manufacture cryogenic tanks using only resources on the Moon... And, on that subject, if you want to use NTRs you have to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon, find uraninite (somehow), and refine it (somehow). All of which are problematic. Of course, you could ship the uranium from Earth... but that's dangerous and expensive, since uranium is so heavy. In short, building things on the Moon sounds like a nice idea due to the composition of the regolith, until one starts looking at what that would actually entail.

We won't even go to the Moon to get resources. It just doesn't make any sense-we're nowhere close to running out of mineral deposits here on Earth, and it's just more energy-efficient to dig up metal and refine it down here. Schlepping all the infrastructure needed to set up a serious mining/refining operation to the Moon is resource and time intensive, and to what end? It's more difficult to refine things on the Moon, since you don't have an extensive power grid in place, nor a handy supply of highly reactive gaseous oxygen, and then you need to send those resources to Earth (presumably), which means you're going to need to build a lot of throwaway capsules capable of surviving lunar re-entry when full to the brim with metal. Which is going to cut into your already-expensive production. Mining the Moon at this point in time doesn't make sense. You can (maybe) make a case for the asteroid belt, but that's only because of the large quantities of precious metals (iridium, platinum, etc.) found there. And the asteroid belt has a whole host of problems.

It's not a question of being wasteful. The problem here is you wouldn't be able to expand the population without bringing people from Earth. The carbon needed to make more people simply isn't present. Sure, perhaps not a problem for a scientific outpost... but a serious hindrance for a colony. Also, on the subject of being harder to get to... From what I remember, transferring to the Moon is 3-3.1 km/s, plus 700 m/s to capture. Transfer to Mars is 3.5 km/s, plus aerobraking. The delta-V differences are close enough to be negligible. The tricky part about Mars is the travel time, and the aerobraking, not so much the delta-V. Also, mass drivers are nice... but they're also very resource intensive and power intensive, and of course producing resources on the Moon is power intensive since you need a lot of electrolysis. This is a serious problem on the Moon, where your only power source is solar (well, nuclear too, but NASA would never go for that option), and the nights are 14 days long... A colony is frankly not an economic prospect at this point. The real motivations to do it at this point are cool factor, human progress, and security of the species... none of which have any short-term economic prospects. And for each of those, Mars is a better candidate.

Sadly, no. The thing inside the potato was some 2.5m fuel tanks and a vector engine, for use during landing.

I second this sentiment, having actually (due to an excess of zeal and an equal lack of judgement) written a program to do that very numerical approximation. It's really not worth anyone's time (And no, I'm not going to dig up that code. I'd rather re-write the whole thing from sratch than distribute that... thing). If you really want to do the math, Newton's laws of gravitational motion are almost certainly the way to go.

Well... except water. Which is pretty important. Sure, you can get oxygen out of things like silica and alumina in the regolith, but that's very power-intensive, and it still doesn't solve the water problem. And yeah. there's the water trapped in polar craters. But that isn't particularly much water compared to the amount contained in the subsurface ice in, say, Utopia Planitia. Plus, The most common elements in Martian regolith are silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron, calcium and magnesium (not necessarily in that order)... the same elements as make up the major components of lunar regolith. Furthermore, Mars has an atmosphere of CO2, which contains carbon. Y'know, that stuff you need for life. On the Moon, you would have to ship every single atom of carbon in from Earth, making expansion of any operations a pain, and strictly in-situ expansion nearly impossible. The atmosphere on Mars is also thin enough to not be much of a hindrance to launches, but thick enough to permit aerobraking.

Glasgow

Here's my (unabashedly silly) submission: One very special delivery... Of a space potato... To Duna (where else?)... Because no one had made a submission that was a reference to The Martian yet, an unfortunate situation which called for immediate rectification.

East Greenbush, NY

Nope, no parts. And good luck with the challenge.

Nope. The time taken is irrelevant. The challenge is to unlock as many nodes as possible without upgrading any of the space center facilities. So that means limits of 30 parts, 18 tons, bumpy runway, and, of course, no patched conics. Oh, and it's also stock (except visual mods). So, no parts/informational mods.

Well, you got within 350m of it, which means you got into physics range, which means it's now a vessel you can switch to. Which means you can use Hyperedit's lander utility to "land" it at whatever its coordinates happen to be.

My oldest... Is this, a screenshot of the craft used in my first Jool 5 attempt. Yeah, I know, not particularly exciting.

I sit waiting at your runway and snag the cookie just as you roll to a stop, driving off into the sunset in a cobbled-together fuel cell powered rover. My cookie.

Yep. Just find the install folder; KSP_x64.exe (or equivalent) should be there.

Well, sure, towards the end of career mode, when you get that kind of tech. I'm talking before then.

Receives overcooked spaghetti. Inserts coffee mug.

Docked tanks count, don't worry. Although, try not to lose money on this one. 4000 units of liquid fuel is a lot, and in my experience shipping that kind of mass to LKO often costs more than the contract pays in the first place.

You might want to look for programs running in the background that eat a lot of memory and close those. You might also want to increase KSP's priority in Task Manager. It'll cause other stuff to run badly while KSP is running, but I don't think that that's much of a concern, considering.

Getting out and pushing isn't so much a challenge as a thing everyone does at some point or another, for some reason or another, just as part of space program ops. Everyone does it at some point for some reason just as part of normal space program operations. So, sorry, but this isn't a particularly good challenge.