Hodari

It would definitely be nice to have an option like this.

Make sure that you set the part you want to attach it by as the root part before you save it.

I definitely would take all the low Kerbin orbit rescue contracts you can get. Early on at least, they're good money. Later on, maybe not so much, but by then, extra crew members still make them worthwhile. The reputation gains aren't bad either. And once you design a ship for one, you can keep reusing that design for all the others, so no reason NOT to take those contracts unless you're getting completely sick of them and have enough Kerbals already.

I'd say you already have a Val station, so might as well use it. And if you're going to be sending ISRU equipment out there anyway, just use the first load of fuel to move it into better orbit.

Try putting a heat shield on the TOP of your vessel maybe?

I've gotten plenty of rescue missions so far, so yeah...either you need to do a Mun flyby or some other prerequisite first, or you're just very unlucky with them so far. And on a slightly off-topic note, speaking of the Klaw...is it just me or does it seem a lot harder to get it to actually grab on to the pods now? Used to be as long as I was anywhere close, it would work, but now even coming in at 0.1m/s, if the alignment is even SLIGHLTY off and/or the pod isn't at just the right angle, it just bounces off a lot of the time.

Definitely some potential here at least.

Definitely sounds like a bug. Depending on your ship design, it might be possible to get some lift from hitting the atmosphere and bounce off, but don't think it would be anywhere near THAT much.

In that case, hit f3 and see exactly WHAT part of it is blowing up first and why. Probably either something wrong with your staging is causing an engine to fire into another part and overheat it, or there's a structural failure somewhere in which case you need to either redesign that section or add more struts to make it stable.

For b. the problem is that if you don't do the maneuver EXACTLY at the AN/DN, then the position of that node will start to move. And the closer you get to 0, the more precise you have to be with that. If you end up pushing that node too far away, then you won't be able to zero it out without moving your burn to where the node is now. As for d. that depends. In theory, you can still intercept your target with an inclination of 90 degrees. You'll ONLY be able to do so exactly at the AN/DN though and even if you do get a close approach, you'll have a huge velocity difference that you'd need to cancel out in order to STAY close to them long enough to do anything useful. The lower the difference in inclination is, the wider a range is for where you'll be able to get a close approach to your target and the smaller your velocity difference will be when you do get there. In order to actually dock, you're going to have to cancel that difference out entirely at some point anyway, so might as well get it as close to 0 as possible right from the start. c. Burning your engines changes the shape of your entire orbit, especially the point directly opposite where you are burning from. If you start out fairly close to the target and just burn straight towards it, at first, it might move you closer to it, but it's also causing your overall orbital path to diverge further away, so at some point that effect will make your separation increase. d. For getting the initial encounter, just use the maneuver nodes(or don't even bother with maneuver nodes at all and use normal/antinormal to zero out the inclination and then you only need prograde and retrograde from there on). Once you're on final approach(within a couple km), switch to target mode and watch the prograde/retrograde and target/antitarget markers. You want to get and keep those markers aligned with each other as closely as possible. To do this, burn slightly off to one side from the prograde or retrograde markers. This will "push" the retrograde marker away from the direction you're burning or "pull" the prograde marker towards it. Then when you get in very close and have your velocity almost matched as well, switch to RCS and use that to maintain alignment. Gradually reduce your approach velocity as you get closer. By the time you're within 10m or so, you'll probably want to be going as slow as 0.1 m/s.

You don't really need to worry about Apollo 1 or Challenger type situations in this game since parts don't randomly fail(aside from bugs of course). The three main things that will cause a part to actually fail are impact, overheating, or too much stress being placed on it. Impact: Obviously, make sure you don't hit the ground too hard. For landing anyplace with an atmosphere, make sure you use enough parachutes and come in at a shallow enough angle to give the atmosphere time to slow you down so you can deploy them. For other landings, use your engines to slow yourself down. Landing legs are good once you get them or until then, you can use something like girder segments if you really need to. The other main impact risk will be when staging. Make sure you allow enough clearance between booster stages and the rest of the rocket, using the larger decouplers if needed. Keep your rocket in stable flight while staging and not turning(even using autopilot to follow prograde marker). Allow a couple seconds to make sure you've fully cleared the old stage before starting the engines for the next one if you can. Overheating: Mostly this is an issue during reentry, so again, make sure you come in at the right angle. If you have plenty of fuel left over, you can also lower your apoapsis a bit first. If you're really coming in fast(interplanetary missions espcially), you may also want to use aerobraking over several different passes through the atmosphere before doing your final reentry. Other sources of overheating will be ISRU units and nuclear engines(use radiator panels for these) and some of the larger rocket engines(lower thrust levels or don't use them for too long at one time. Stress: Keep the shape of your rocket as aerodynamic as possible. Use struts where needed(especially on the larger SRB's) to hold things in the right positions and stop them from bending too much. Other than that, the main design principles are: Keep your mass as low as possible. Each kg of mass you add means more fuel that you need to bring. And then more fuel to lift THAT extra fuel. And so on. And then possibly more powerful engines to lift all of that as well. Use staging to keep that mass down by getting rid of mass(especially empty fuel tanks) as soon as it's no longer needed. Keep your design symmetrical. Start designing your rocket with the END of your mission and work backwards from there. Figure out what you need to bring back to Kerbin first(crew capsule, heat shield, parachutes, any science experiment data etc) and design that stage first. Then figure out the most efficient way to get that back from wherever your mission was going and build that stage. Then figure out what you need in order to get THAT stage to where it needs to be and so on untol you get all the way back to your initial launch. At each stage, make sure you will have everything you need(don't forget things like batteries and solar panels), but keep the mass down as much as possible. Use the right engine for each stage as well. In general, look for the highest specific impulse while still getting the thrust to weight ratio you need. During launch, you probably want a TWR of around 1.5. While in orbit or flying between planets, it doesn't matter as much, but if it's too low, your burns will take forever(had some with ion engines that were 20+ minutes) which isn't much fun and makes it much harder to time them properly. Keep your center of mass forward. This is mostly an issue when using the larger fuel tanks and trying to stack more than one on top of each other. They'll use up fuel from the top one first and work down from there which is the opposite of what you want. This means the rocket will start out fine and then about 10km up, the CoM has shifted far enough back that it will start to flip and become uncontrollable. If this becomes a problem, either use radial attachment instead or split each tank into its own stage. Using a mod like Kerbal Engineer Redux which shows the delta-v and TWR for each stage of your rocket as you are building it will be very helpful in allowing you to plan out your missions. It's possible to calculate these values manually, but doing so every time you change anything will be a real pain, so using a mod will make the game much more fun. And finally, save often and if something does go wrong, try to figure out what happened, go back, and fix it.

I got a contract once to place a satellite in a Molniya orbit once(think it was around Gilly or someplace weird like that, so didn't actually do it, but at least it shows the idea is in the game...)

Kerbal Engineer is the only one on either list that I think should be(and even then, only a couple parts of it are absolutely necessary, namely the dV info and height above terrain).

I usually have a heat shield on pretty much anything going into orbit at all. And some sort of reaction wheel as soon as they are available. Probably not needed for something like this, but better safe than sorry. And a lot of times, you're better off doing the reentry with just stability assist and not using the retrograde hold option anyway since the latter options uses a lot more electricity. With what you have there though, I'd say only use the engines if/when you absolutely HAVE to. Either when they're getting close to overheating if you don't slow down soon or when you're starting to have serious trouble holding retrograde. If you can manage to hold at least some of it for when you hit about 20-30km, that's probably the most critical time, but don't be afraid to use it before then if you need to. And of course, unless you're playing with the option to do so disabled, make sure you quicksave first.

Is your thrust properly aligned with your center of mass? Not sure if Val has any mass which affects this, but if so, make sure you account for that also.

I'm sure this is only after a LOT of practice and possibly a few outtakes. But yeah, EVAs are definitely not easy and I usually avoid them as much as possible. I just wait until I have unlocked the Klaw and use that for rescue missions or anything else that doesn't already have a docking port on it.

Those contracts have certain prerequisites that have to be met first. They also expire after a certain amount of time and are only offered once, so if you missed them, you're out of luck. In between that though, it looks like it's still random whether you get them or just some other contracts instead. So if you don't have the one you want, you might just have to either do something else first, decline one of the other contracts, or wait for it to expire.

Sure, it's POSSIBLE to play without it, but it's going to be a lot harder and less fun. Getting as far as the Mun might not be THAT hard, but if you're trying to get to another planet with a crewed mission, things get a lot harder. There is only so much you can overengineer. And if you're not careful, just adding more fuel or more boosters can give you less performance overall rather than more. So at some point, you're left with either manually calculating dV and TWR for each stage and then recalculating it EVERY time you change your design...or just completely guessing and wasting a lot of time. So yeah, I'd also say that I could live without any other mods and without most of the other stuff that KER does have, but the dV and TWR info is definitely needed.

Much lower mass and the fact that you don't need to return a crew back home means you can go a lot further with a probe than with a manned mission, especially in career mode before you've unlocked everything and while resources are still limited. By the time you can barely get a crew to the Mun and back, you can probably do at least a fly-by of almost anywhere else and easily get all the science you need to unlock the rest of the tree. The much lighter mass also makes them better for ion engines which even further increase their range advantage. From a realism standpoint, it makes sense that you would want to send unmanned probes someplace before trying with a crewed mission. In the stock game at least, probes and satellites might be worthless early on(one of my biggest complaints about the current tech tree), but they are very useful in the middle-game stages.

Performance seems to be better for the most part, though I've had the game crash a couple times. UI changes were somewhat mixed. Some things like the navball are a bit too big, but I do like the new orbit lines. The buttons for each building at the KSC and better tutorials came too late to really be helpful for me, but I'm sure they'll be a good thing for new players. I'll assume that the crashes and the wheel bugs will be fixed soon, so assuming they are, I'll give this update overall a "good" rating. By itself, this update didn't really change much for me, aside from a few minor quality of life things, but it wasn't really intended to and I can see that the engine upgrade gives a lot more future potential.

Also worth noting that you don't actually need maneuver nodes just to get into orbit. You probably won't need to worry about them at all until you're trying to go to the Mun or Minmus. For orbit, just follow any sort of reasonable ascent path and burn until your apoapsis is above 70km(probably 75 or so is better if you can, so you have some margin for error) and then 15-30 seconds before you reach that apoapsis, burn prograde until your periapsis is also above 70. Of course, make sure you save at least a little bit of fuel so you can lower that periapsis back below 70 and reenter. Even getting to the Mun isn't that bad without nodes. Get into a stable orbit and burn prograde at Munrise and you'll probably end up with an encounter. But having the nodes will certainly make this much easier.

Yeah, it also adds a lot of unnecessary clutter, especially if you want to use the "fly-by Mun, plant flag on Minmus, escape to solar orbit" training mission to get ALL of your Kerbals up to level 3+ before sending them on any interplanetary missions. And if you're planning on putting bases or space stations in a lot of places, that could end up being a LOT of Kerbals and a LOT of flags.

Also, did you activate that engine by STAGING to it while in suborbital flight and at the correct altitude?

"I would fly you to the Mun and back if you'll be, if you'll be my baby." "Ike, Ike, Baby!" "You cannot escape your Drestiny."

You shouldn't need to touch the admin building at all, actually. Maybe on higher difficulties, it might be useful(not even sure then), but definitely not needed on normal difficulty. The most important thing is to plan ahead for how you're going to spend the science points you do get early on and make sure you unlock the nodes you absolutely NEED first. Once you're able to land on the Mun and/or Minmus, you'll have all science points you need for the rest of the game available, but until then things are a little bit trickier. Your top priorities should be any nodes that give new science experiments, the node for your first solar panel and batteries, and better rocket engines. Larger fuel tanks will also help, especially if keeping your part count under 30 is an issue before you can upgrade the VAB. And as noted above, there's a lot of biomes available on Kerbin, especially right in the KSC. You won't get a lot of points from them, but if there's an early node or two that you still need, or you're just a few points short on something, make sure you get all the available science from them.