Fraktal

I concur, this would be a very handy thing for someone who tends to build more than fly. As things are right now, building low-tech stuff has me opening a browser window either via Steam Overlay or on my secondary monitor, displaying the wiki's tech tree so that I know what I'm allowed to use.

Exiting the Mun to the rear like I wrote above means that the whole time while you're moving away from the Mun, the Mun's gravity is slowing you down. By the time you exit, your orbital velocity around Kerbin is slow enough for you to fall back down without a retroburn. Minor addendum to the above: if the Kerbin periapse starts rising again during the final burn, you burned too late (tested the above today, the "roughly halfway" is slightly too late; burn before that). In this case, stop burning, warp until you're out of the Mun's SOI (you're behind the Mun now and it's moving away from you, so you won't get recaptured by its gravity if you decelerate), then burn retrograde until your periapse is ~45 km or less. At that trajectory, coming in from the Mun, you will have a nice and shallow entry that uses up about 50 ablator on the heatshield (so don't take more than 60, it's a waste of space; you can make it with less, but whatever the heatshield is directly attached to might get a bit singed) and won't overshoot back into space (which is not that big of a problem anyway unless you're very low on battery power and/or using a life support mod).

Minor proposal, not meant to be obnoxious: Take off from the Mun in the other direction (counterclockwise, ie. to the right when looking towards north). Rotate the map so that Kerbin is upwards and you are looking down at the Mun's north pole. Burn prograde when your craft is in the upper right part of its orbit, roughly halfway between the direction of Kerbin and the line on the map representing the Mun's orbit. Precise timing is not needed, just eyeball it and burn. This will get you back to Kerbin the fastest and easiest.

Me, I use two-part names where the first part is the planet/moon name while the second part is Spacedock for low orbit (ie. a staging ground for multi-module ships and research labs) and Gateway Station for high orbit (ie. a fuel depot to serve as the launch point of interplanetary flights).

Same here. More often than not, timewarping after doing the intercept burn towards Minmus takes off a couple hundred kilometers from my apoapse and screws up the intercept. It started happening after updating to 1.8.1.

I'm experiencing the exact same thing myself. It only started happening after 1.8.1 came out. Before, it was fine. How many craft are you having in flight at the time? I thought it was caused by the game having to keep track of too many objects at once, but if it's also happening in early career like @herbal space program says, the cause is something else.

Protection during aerobraking. Same reason why @razark's idea is sound in vacuum due to saving weight, but leaving holes/seams in the outer hull is asking for a Columbia if the ship is meant to enter atmosphere at any point.

Or use the Kerbal Engineer Redux mod, which gives more detailed information in addition to timing.

...wouldn't it be easier to watch time to apoapse instead, for the benefit of people who can't pay attention in three directions at once? I found starting the turn at 100 m/s at 5°, sticking SAS to prograde, throttling down after SRB separation + reaching Mach 1.5 (to clear the transsonic shock region), then nudging the throttle up/down to keep time to Ap between 30-60 secs to work optimally for not overly draggy payloads. By Ap 60, trajectory is almost completely flat and quite often I get a positive periapse by the time Ap reaches target altitude. Of course, I've never flown a single stock rocket so I can't speak from experience with those.

Have you throttled up (gauge on the left side of the navball)? Even if you activate the engines, they won't fire if your throttle is zero. SRBs didn't need throttle, hence why you're only running into this problem now.

That one's visible without even going into the game. I found one on the Mun, in one of the Midlands Craters just to the south-southeast of the big northwestern crater. Wasn't even looking for it, it was my first lander probe for that particular biome in my current save. Later visited it with a manned mission as well.

Ouch. They mess up the AM/PM or what?

Update: mission timer anomaly caused Starliner to detect its position incorrectly and expend too much fuel circularizing. ISS rendezvous is impossible. Only question now is whether the capsule will come back down in one piece or not.

You may want to consider upgrading. 1.8 includes some major performance improvements.

Oh, right. The earlier posts weren't clear on the matter.

Um... why does everyone claim that you can't access the naming menu in flight? All of my command modules and probe cores allow renaming in flight and I didn't manually edit anything. Am I missing something here?

Yep, it crashes for me too. Not as much as it used to since I bought some more RAM, but still dies. Anyway. For concurrent flights, in addition to the three ground probes and three relays sent to Minmus, I was at the same time having two space stations, one at Kerbin, one at the Mun, plus three relays and seven or so ground probes at the Mun, plus one probe en route to Eve. I can't even turn on full network visualization for CommNet without it flickering like crazy from the sheer number of DSN connections.

For the last few days, I began noticing some weird behavior from multiple crafts I launched. Multiple times over, I launched something towards the Mun, performed the burn for an encounter - and as soon as I engage time warp, I'm suddenly several thousand kilometers short of an encounter. Then yesterday, I was launching six craft to Minmus in rapid succession. One of them landed on the surface but the surface texture was visibly shaking everywhere. Another craft was a few minutes away from the Minmus SOI when I noticed that when time warp isn't engaged, the encounter was moving away from the craft and the Kerbin apoapse was slowly dropping as if I was doing a weak retrograde thrust, but the moment I engaged time warp it stopped. I disengaged time warp and I once again began passively decelerating for no reason. Is KSP's on-the-rails trajectory calculations having trouble from having a large number of concurrent missions running at the same time or something? All of the above happened with the mission timer on green, ie. no physics bottleneck.

Something that came up today. I had this mod installed for over a year, but never actually used it. Today, I suddenly had my rockets not behaving the way they should and when I looked into the reason, I discovered that CKAN installed FAR earlier today without my knowledge - and when I try uninstalling FAR, CKAN insists on also uninstalling Inline Ballutes and lists FAR as "Requires" rather than "Depends". Not a single mod I have installed is listed as dependent on FAR, only Inline Ballutes. I apologize if it's only me who's out of the loop, but since when did FAR become a compulsory dependence for this mod rather than optional? It wasn't listed as compulsory yesterday.

I know this one is. The mouseover FPS drop only started happening after the 1.8 update and is not exclusive to PAD. Some mods trigger it, but not all of them.

By any chance, was that the reason why mousing over a few addon windows (Part Angle Display is one I can name off the top of my head) in the VAB caused a massive FPS drop without any errors in the log?

From what I experienced, stage 2 doesn't require even a TWR of 1 for the most part. My launch procedure is a 10° pitch-over at 100 m/s, then stick to prograde, full throttle until Mach 1.4 then throttle down to where time to Ap stays between 45 and 50 seconds. This usually leaves me flying near-horizontally at 0.5 TWR for most of the ascent with no noticeable dV loss compared to a more aggressive flight profile and no Mach/heat effects past transsonic. For something like a satellite launch, this means a single Swivel running at 30% thrust.

Very lucrative day today. Put down five more listening posts on the Mun, so data is flowing to the orbital lab nicely now. Almost all of the major craters have a listening post now, minus the two highest-inclination ones. I had to add a third fuel tank to the design to reach the non-equatorial craters. The training flight to Minmus also arrived back to Kerbin safely with all scientists immediately leveling up to 2-star. I'm thinking of automating the design. The cargo launch and refueling designs are already probe-controlled in order to cut down on pilot flight hours, but I might need a few relays because I have intermittent outages in low orbit even with the DSN on. Only frakup was my very next launch sending those scientists up to the orbital lab and rotating the 0-star rookies back down to Kerbin for the next training flight... except just like two days ago, I forgot to stage the goddamn parachutes yet again. I must be getting too used to having the chutes set to the same stage as final booster separation, only to have no such thing on this particular craft design. Last quicksave was a couple of hours before the training flight's reentry, so I'm only one flight back. And for once, the game didn't crash during my entire session (crashed four times within two and a half hours yesterday; maybe I shouldn't be watching Youtube videos on my other monitor while playing KSP...?). I also happened to launch this crew rotation mission so efficiently that the launch stage minus SRBs actually lasted me for the entire mission. I only dropped it on reentry. Made docking a bit tricky due to the off-balance weight distribution.

Ditto with service bays.

As a matter of fact, I am. And if you're trying to say something about my inexperience, I'll have you know that Steam says I've got over 780 hours clocked in KSP. Anyway. In today's session I set up a station in Mun orbit. It's still lacking a fuel tank, living quarters and lander shuttle, but at least it's got power and comms. Lab will be added later; I have no scientists available for recruiting for reasons detailed below. Still need to figure out how to land the unmanned cargo shuttles without them breaking to pieces. Touchdown is OK as it hits ground at 5.6 m/s, it's the falling over part that breaks stuff (usually the nosecone, ironically enough). Landing legs probably won't survive, as in this particular session I accidentally pulled off a 9 g shaking-screen reentry that had me at the edge of my seat over whether I'd slow down enough for the parachutes to open in the first place. I also did two more launches, both of which failed epically: I tried launching two monitoring station probes in a single rocket but not only one of them didn't detach from the fairing's truss structure when I popped the fairing, the fairing somehow crossfed its fuel tanks to the launcher so it had no fuel either. Reentered and crashed. Other probe made it to the Mun but I had to cheat with the propellant to actually get it down to the surface due to having used more fuel for the inclination change than I expected. I recruited three scientists to speed up research in the orbital lab (I got the 6-seat lab mod) and sent them out on a training tour to slingshot around the Mun to Minmus, then slingshot around Minmus back to Kerbin, bagging enough XP to reach level 2. Problem is, I decided to not stage off the engine in order to save cash and ended up plowing into the ground at 150+ m/s due to having forgotten that the parachutes were on the same stage until I was only 3 km above ground... And my last save is twenty days beforehand, before the whole flight was launched and while the Mun station was still under construction (as in, the core was in position and the unmanned cargo transport bringing the power and antenna modules were in munar orbit waiting for rendezvous), so now I have to do it all over again. But that's still better than having to train Jeb's XP up again. And people jest with image macros over the fact that I like building stuff in the VAB more than actually flying said stuff...