Hodari

If it's just "Send a probe anywhere you want to go before sending a Kerbal", that really isn't much of a challenge. There's probably a lot of people who do that as part of a normal career game anyway.

If you're dropping ANYTHING before reaching orbit, it's not an SSTO.

Where they're going, they don't need...roads.

Sorry, I posted first, but had to keep editing since the album didn't display correctly for some reason...

Hold my beer.. http://imgur.com/a/u4Qcb No control inputs at all other than staging and managed to escape the Kerbol system altogether. I challenge the next person to land an airplane on the island runway. No parachutes/drogue chutes/airbrakes or anything like that allowed.

And just hope that neither one was exposed to Kerman measles...

Like pretty much all games out there these days, I don't think KSP will EVER reach that stage. There's always going to be new stuff that can be added, bugs that need to be fixed, or SOMETHING that can be adjusted to make the game better. And hopefully, they will continue to make those changes for as long as the game is popular enough to justify them doing so. The game is pretty much "complete" now, so you're free to stop patching it and stay with whatever version you prefer, but it doesn't sound like they'll be finishing development on it any time soon.

Sounds like a very good expansion with a lot of the stuff I was hoping for in there and a few extras as well... Perfect for Apollo 13 missions?

Depends how flat you're looking for. If your lander is reasonably well designed, it should be able to handle a 10 degree slope, in which case there are plenty of good spots. Not sure if there are any areas which are completely flat like Minmus. As for mods, it depends on exactly what the mod does, but most will usually just add more planets/moons or move the existing ones around, but won't actually change them. Some will also resize them though, and some could change the existing ones as well.

Well first of all, if you're playing on normal difficulty(and higher difficulties really just seem to add more grind rather than actually making the game HARDER), it's not really THAT much of a grind in order to get up to a level where you can reach the Mun or Minmus and once you reach those, you can unlock the rest of the tree very quickly. If you need to learn the parts anyway still, your best option might be just to grind it out at least one or two times until you do feel like you know the parts well enough to just jump into a sandbox mode game. If funds are the main thing slowing you down, you could also use Science Mode instead which still makes you unlock the parts, but removes the cost and contracts part of career mode. Or you could start a Career mode game and just use the alt-f12 menu to give yourself enough money and science points to skip past the "initial grind" part and go to the parts you find more interesting. Or of course, there's always mods to change the progression around a bit.

If you're trying to do your first interplanetary mission, Moho is definitely NOT the one to go to. I'd say it is by far the hardest planet to land on(though there might be a couple of Jool's moons that are arguably harder). I'd definitely go for Duna first. If you can build a rocket capable of landing on and returning from Kerbin's moons, then that rocket will have enough dV for at least a one-way trip to Duna as well. As for Moho, I've been playing for a while and only just did my first Moho landing. Aside from all the advice people have given above, one thing worth considering would be rather than trying to go directly to Moho, instead first drop down into a much lower orbit(I went for a circular orbit somewhere between Moho and Eve's orbits) and then go for the Moho encounter from there. Might not be the most efficient way to do get the encounter, but it does mean you won't have such a huge velocity difference once you do encounter it. If you have a mining base set up on Gilly, you could even go there first, refuel, and then continue on to Moho from there.

Good to know, but either way, you'll have to reroot it eventually, so might as well do it before saving and only have to do it once.

This, or you can also load one, then click Open, select the second ship, and click Merge. Either way, make sure to use the reroot tool on the second ship before you save it so that the part you want it to be attached by is the root part.

Yeah, I'd only ever done the low orbit eva report before, but this topic finally inspired me to build a plane, fly all the way around, and land there.

All of these and also larger(or procedural) wings, especially for larger SSTO's.

If you're having trouble with building normal planes, spaceplanes will be MUCH more difficult. They're a lot of fun once you do figure them out, but you have to worry about all the normal plane stuff plus a number of additional issues like fuel balancing, making sure it can handle reentry, and still having all the components it needs to function and maneuver in space. And at the stage of the game you're currently at, you shouldn't need anywhere CLOSE to that big of a rocket. You could probably easily make a Mun lander for a quarter of that cost. Maybe if you're going for a full Apollo-style mission, it'd get close to that much, but there are much more efficient ways to get there if money is that much of an issue. Edit: In about 5 minutes, I threw together a craft capable of landing a single Kerbal on the Mun and returning. Even with a rather inefficient ascent profile, landing, and...well actually none of the maneuvers were particularly efficient...it still had over 1k dV left when it returned. Total cost: 34502. Science instruments are very expensive, so if you put all of those on as well, it might be another 20k or so, though you could probably recover at least some of them. With a few more adjustments, I could easily cut the cost of that in half again. Even if you object to sending a Kerbal out to the Mun by himself and want to have a crew of 3, it can be done for under 60k(even using the Mk1-2 pod).

Yeah, one of the biggest problems with making any sort of meaningful "Career" is that time is completely irrelevant right now. Add in some recurring costs and meaningful deadlines(Not "You have 15 years to run this Mun mission that will only take a week to actually complete) and you could open up a lot more possibilities.

Yeah, the cost makes no sense at all, especially when you can get them for free doing rescue missions. And the whole experience system makes even less sense now, especially for pilots.

Yeah, might as well just simulate your "space elevator" by using the cheat menu to pop the craft into an appropriate orbit at that point.

Also, for the Mun at least, if you don't even have maneuver nodes unlocked yet, you can get a reasonably good encounter by just getting into a low Kerbin orbit and then time warping until you JUST see the Mun start to rise in front of you, then switch to map mode and burn prograde until it shows you getting the encounter.

Or go for the true Kerbal solution: autostrut EVERYTHING. Then add a few extra regular struts for good measure.

Usually for me it's launching a rescue mission, completing the rendezvous, and only THEN realizing that Bill and Bob had snuck into the seats that were supposed to be used for the stranded kerbals and I now had nowhere to put them.

That depends on what you're trying to see...

They could achieve it quite easily if everyone agreed on what a proper career mode is in the first place...and there's the problem. Everyone has different ideas about what they want and it's probably impossible to please everyone all at once. There's certainly lots of room to improve on the current system, but you still might end up having to use mods or even just setting your own goals at some point.

I usually think of funds as "something I need to worry about in the early-middle stages of a Career game and then almost completely forget about once I get past Minmus and have all my buildings upgraded to max level".