Fraktal

Whoa buddy, you are overengineering that lander a tiny bit. If I may, I'd recommend that you use your rocket's final pre-lander stage for the transfer, munar circularization and deorbiting and have the lander's own engine take over only during the actual descent towards the Mun's surface. Examples with and without Making History parts: All of these are capable of landing near-equatorially on the Mun and returning to Kerbin with about 200 m/s to spare. On the stage readout, Stage 1 is the lander, Stage 2 is the transfer stage immediately below the lander.

I was thinking of something similar but in addition to the air being thin, it's the craft falling nose-first. The Mk1 does not have enough drag when falling nose-first to decelerate to parachute deploy velocity, regardless of whether it's coming in from atmospheric flight or orbit, and the reaction wheels are not strong enough to turn the pod around for proper deceleration if anything other than a heatshield is attached to the rear. Pretty much the only thing that can be done in this case is to use the reaction wheels to produce drag by coming in as high an AoA as possible and sustain it for as long as the batteries allow, but even that isn't guaranteed to be enough.

Maybe, but are you really going to be that cheapskate to use Mk0 tanks for NERVs? Or more to the point, just what kind of eldritch part count that 18k figure is going to take with only Mk0 tanks?

I've had this problem too, not just with Minmus but with Duna as well. My first trip there, aimed to aerobrake into orbit upon arrival, ended up missing the SOI completely when I went to warp. Not only that, but any change to warp rate, no matter how minimal or how slow, ended up adding a couple hundred thousand kilometers to the closest approach.

Also check whether you happen to have the AECS Motion Suppressor mod installed. I recently caught it force-overriding engine gimbal locking settings whenever SAS is steering, regardless of what the player sets in the VAB.

From personal experience, 0.1 deploys at 10 kPa, so I think 0.5 is what you need.

Very nice! I usually don't bother being that precise, anything within 3-4 kilometers is good enough for first pass. I'll just match course and close the rest of the distance from there.

You're thinking of geomagnetic storms caused by coronal mass ejections; those only happen in extreme close proximity to planets with a magnetic field. Regular solar flares are more dangerous to astronauts than electronics (radiation sickness and cancer risk), although they can cause issues with electronics too (charged particle happens to pass through a chip, a RAM bit or two may randomly get flipped and cause the computer to crash from sudden nonsensical data; this happened to Curiosity once, but NASA weren't stupid and put two computers into the rover just in case one dies).

Family announcement.

...okay, I just got IP-banned again after having spent the past half hour editing a wiki article. The error message, in case it helps: UPDATE: and now I'm getting a CAPTCHA too!

Weird thing happened today. I suddenly got IP-banned for an hour from both the forum and the wiki by CloudFlare rate limiting after having opened the past seven or so major version announcement threads looking for something in the changelogs. Is that normal?

Same here. I generally try to put all experiments in range of the command pod's ladder. Failing that, put everything into a 2.5m service bay and slap a ladder in the middle the scientist can hold on to while I'm clicking around. One improvement that could definitely be made with these is that if you have a scientist or a lab onboard, transmitting data instead of keeping it doesn't pop up a yes/no confirmation dialog complaining that you'll need to reset the experiment every single time.

On the contrary. They can survive a Minmus reentry on 120% reentry heating just fine.

FYI, they can still withstand a Minmus return at 120% reentry heating. And to answer the OP, the KV pods have less ablator because they also use up that ablator at a much slower rate than standard heatshields. At 120% reentry heating, a KV-2 pod can ride out a Minmus return at 35 km Kerbin periapse with slightly more than half of its ablator remaining. The pod will get hot enough to display the overheating bar, but it will not explode because once the pod is running at about 80-90% of its maximum heat capacity, the ablator will be cooking off fast enough to keep up. It's not as good as a dedicated heatshield but as long as you're not returning from Jool or something, it'll keep you alive. Depends on how you're trying to launch. As I've said elsewhere, the key to launching KV pods without a fairing is to keep AoA low and have the stage your rocket's fins are on pack enough fuel to last you until about 50 km altitude. Anything below that, you'll flip the instant you drop that stage. Once you get that down, KV pods are a godsend to have for the "post-LKO, pre-interplanetary" stage of the game due to being so darn efficient with crew space and reentry survivability.

I already proposed modding the tech tree for that, but was told it'd break compatibility with a lot of other tech tree mods.

KV pods have more drag, yet they're still usable.

Remembered another thing I'm not using, though it probably doesn't count as a major feature: the Making History service bays. I've simply never found any good use for them. The SM-6A is just too small to carry anything bigger than thermometers without clipping like crazy, the 1.25m end doesn't conform to the 0.625m top of a Mk1 pod, doesn't conform to the rounded top of the KV pods and you can't put it on the bottom either because whatever's in the bay will be destroyed during reentry due to the bay being impossible to seal back up. The SM-18 is also clipping hell and unable to reseal (although that last one's less of an issue due to the bay being cylindrical rather than conical, ie. it can be heatshielded just fine). Literally all the stuff that fits into it without clipping fits into the stock 1.25m bay too. The SM-25, I simply don't need because whatever I want to store in a service bay is big enough for the stock 2.5m bay.

Currently 1286 hours according to Steam, probably a hundred or so more outside Steam.

You want a marathon game, play 10%. You'll run out of Kerbin science in reach of sounding and suborbital rockets by the start of tier 4. You'll run out of Mun and Minmus flyby/orbit science just before completing tier 4. And unlocking aircraft as anything other than last on this tier will softlock you. Mun/Minmus surface science is enough to complete tier 5 and unlock the first 2 or 3 nodes for tier 6. From that point on, you either go interplanetary or you start abusing the science lab. Forget going to the Mun with an Apollo replica, that's Duna-tier tech here. You won't even have the Mk1 lander can during your first couple of trips (but if you have Making History, the KV-2 is invaluable). There's enough science in the stock game to fully unlock the stock tech tree, but no celestial body is optional anymore if you want to pull it off. Not Tycho, not Moho, not Eeloo, not Dres, not even Eve.

Exact opposite for me. I find it an absolute godsend to be able to rotate and translate with one hand without having to take my hand off the keyboard for even a second (though I often find I could use some kind of visual reference for which axis is which at the moment). WASD, I can find blindly; IJKLHN, I very much can't, even with having taken lessons in blind typing in high school. Anyway, what I don't use aside from the dedicated translation keys... Anything higher-tech than tier 6. Career mode; want to, haven't gotten around to it yet. Anything beyond Duna and Gilly. Don't recall anything more at the moment.

You could always just use both. I personally use autostruts solely to flex-proof fuel tank stacks. Core stack? Autostrut-to-root the bottommost tank in each stage to combat metronome flexing from gimbal and aerodynamics during the initial gravity turn. Radial stack? Autostrut-to-grandfather on whichever tank the engine is mounted on to combat flexing under high thrust. For attaching radial stacks to the core stack, I use normal struts.

No, the Stayputnik needs level 0 SAS. Its size, shape, lack of reaction wheels and lack of top attachment node are enough drawbacks.

If you don't have reaction wheel power, how do you execute precision burns prior to developing RCS without physics exploits to make the craft start rotating?

I'm not on the bugtracker.

I noticed that too. It's not just the clicking that doesn't work, the time warp controls don't even display mouseover tooltips, as if another window was covering that part of the game view.