Spricigo

BREAKING NEWS!!! Business want to maximize profits. </sarcasm> It's pretty simple: the publisher may explore whatever revenue stream they see fit and I will pay for whatever product/service I think it's worth my hard earned money.

YMMV. By the time I finish the tech I have a good stockpile of funds, so I trade science for reputation at first.

May I vote "no "? Because I'll be happy if my option 'win', not sad.

Did you realise that twice the Mun's SoI diameter is 9.7Mm? With that ludicrous 'safety margin' you can't even have your satellites in geostationary orbit. This is not an issue, there is plenty of space between Kerbin and Mun, and the later will not catch your satellite halfway between the two celestial bodies. Point is: I don't have any motivation to delay the placement of the 2nd and 3rd satellites. A single launch make things a lot simpler, faster, and, even on hard settings, the cost is not that much anyway.

Another advantage that is not particular to the geostationary orbit. At higher altitudes its even less an issue.

You only need 3 from anything over 600km.

Off course relay satellites don't necessarily go on geosynchronous orbit.

Which one?

So, what new challenges the proposed celestial body would bring?

You know, from a certain point of view...Any product is marketed as something a tad more attractive than it really is. I'm sure you did took that with a grain of salt. In any case I really think was a development choice that resulted is this minimalist approach. In part because of the work needed to implement a deeper career mode. But mostly to preserve the open-ended nature of KSP.

I'm convinced that the major advantage (if not the only) is style points. As long you stay below the critical temperature, it makes no difference if heat peaks at 50% or 99%. Off couse if you come with a higher velocity (e.g. from Mun) it's a different story, but from LKO most spaceplanes can take the heat without such high AoA.

I think you mean you want to change ship attitude. (since the trajectory, the orbit, will only change with some force being applied(e.g. engine thrust)) The same way you need some force to translate your ship you need torque to rotate it. In KSP we have reaction wheels that provide a fixed amount of torque regardless of where in the ship you put it (also regardless of some real life physics, but that is beside the point here). Another way to have torque is with thrusters not aligned with the CoM of the vessel. In that case the amount of torque will depend on how much thrust you have and by how much it 'miss' the CoM. OTOH the vessel resistance to rotation* depends on how much mass it have and how it is distributed around it's rotation axis (CoM) . More 'tightly packed' mass offer less resistance to rotation. So, how much your craft respond to your attempts to change its attitude depends on those things. *more correct, resistance to change of how fast it rotates

There is a chance you misread the fine print in the contract and actually missed some requirement. Check it out, if you are sure you did everything the contract asked for write it off as a glitch and solve it with the cheat debug menu as other suggest.

It's like any other ship. Make it simple with balanced mass distribution to avoid off center thrust and cover the draggy parts with a fairing during the launch. For landing is good to have a wide base and low CoM. Also, make the ship useful for something else if you can. (e.g crew space may be taken by tourists/rescuees; adding some instruments may allow you to get new science; ) But be careful to not use it just for the sake of using it, be prepared to ditch parts that become a hindrance and abandon the whole thing if your only use for it is finishing that contract. Aside that, as always, more specific advice requires more specific information about the issue.

Oh well, convenience has its price. I'd rather use that bit of fuel and bring that craft down quick than worry about a few extra funds.

Kind of issue that is solved in 3 steps: 1.practice 2.practice 3.practice In any case the best path is craft dependent. How much heat it can resist and which AoA it is able to hold make a huge difference. My spaceplanes tend to rely more on thrust than lift. Such flying bricks reentry with Pe below the ground a bit ahead of KSC coming with little AoA, miss the "too short" mountains by some hundreds meters and land without much style at the runaway. Mind you, I'm more of a rocket guy. Someone else probably will offer better advice.* Edit: *e.g. @bewing post. Which I didn't notice because how long took to post mine.

I'm not questioning that. Rather I'm pointing out that what people put as "compelling career mode" apparently was never in the vision devs had to the game. The whole time the idea was to allow the player to decide how to explore space without being too concerned with losing conditions and/or other arbitrary restrictions. Also the 'lack of objective and challenge' of career mode (and KSP in general) is easily solved by players setting it themselves, either modding or adding house-rules. By the way you sound seems inevitable. Why torturing yourself with high expectations to a game that probably will not meet it? Finding a different game to fulfil that expectations at least may improve your personal entertainment and may also make you more open to enjoy KSP for what it is.

So you may need to find another game. KSP is a sandbox game, even in its "career" mode

So...ignore career, problem solved. Right?

My favourite kerbal is Gene. And he sent me to everywhere in the solar system.

That coud be interesting. Contracts to find the anomalies with the kerbnet, and once those are complete contract yo visit it.

well...looking for what you have in this craft, I think You can use this one. (I wondering why you weren't using FL-T800 tanks) Anyways, tested it with a dummy payload with a similar shape of your 2 topmost stages, and 6,7t. As you can see it reachead a nice orbit with 200m/s in the core lifter and 1300m/s in the transfer stage. I hope you like the launch profile: T0: press spacebar, T43s:press pacebar, T1min33s:press spacebar. Yes, that is it. You don't need to steer or use SAS (in fact you should let it disable until its time to circularize), fire all engines and the rocket will fly itself to space, you just need to drop the spent boosters. Album https://imgur.com/a/j4A0g will appear when post is submitted

As @Foxster pointed is more useful to talk about deltaV. In any case, I' think that craft, with 1200unit of LF in LKO, can reach Duna and maybe get back to orbit from the surface, at that point it will be stranded.

@Starchaser, may you please post a image of your tech tree, so we know what parts are available to you. A little description of the intended purpose of the craft and a description of what is inside the fairing may be usefull but just for the lifter design not really a necessity. I still have a day of work between me and KSP but I think I can come up with something that works and even cut the cost a little bit.