A Fistful Of Double Downs

Probably also worth mentioning that a lot of the more ambitious parts packs (Stockalike Station Parts, Interstellar, Far Future etc etc) also have a bunch of new science parts even though they're not specifically science-oriented mods. I'm only running Station Parts and Interstellar at the moment (my computer really doesn't like it if I try to run more than a few parts mods at the same time) and I've probably got as many new kinds of science as there are in the base game.

It's a sandbox game without any kind of official victory or ending, and the contracts and achievements in Career Mode are basically just there to give you things to aim for and a bit of direction. Basically once you feel like you've kicked Science Mode or Career Mode's ass the game is really just about seeing what you can do. People do immense megaprojects, or try to build something that can pass through the atmosphere of Jool or the Sun and survive, or intercept a comet on a thousand-year orbit, or replay career mode with cripplingly hard difficulty settings, or try to reach distant planets with a ship made from as few parts as possible, or set land speed records, or build robots, or test the game's physics engine to breaking point in search of the next Kraken Drive.

I'd say Pol is probably the most underrated. The wild topography, unusual colour palette, and alien-assed spires give it a "kerbalish" vibe that's almost up there with Minmus, but most people file it away as just another microgravity moon and give it a miss because they figure it'll be Ike or Gilly all over again. Also I'd say that Dres' status as a meme automatically disqualifies it from "most underrated". Lots of people go there just to prove it doesn't exist, and the Dres canyon is a magnet for people who want to do ridiculously impractical engineering projects.

My go-to build is a fairly standard lander with 2.5m parts and a poodle engine, an unmanned liquid-fuel-and-Nerv-engines middle stage that can be scaled up or down as required, and a launcher consisting of as many asparagus-staged Mammoths as it takes to reach LKO. It's not very glamorous but if I'm just doing contracts or farming science it gets the job done. If I'm tooling around making stuff for the heck of it I'll get a bit more creative though. My only constants there tend to be "it will be way bigger than it needs to be" and "only the payload stage will be built with aesthetics in mind because I'm too lazy to make nice launch stages".

A Munar flyby, Minmus flyby, and solar flyby (leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence for a few minutes and then turning around and going right back home counts!) are all simple and will net you decent amounts of science. If you actually want to put boots on the ground though, Minmus is the best choice because its hella low gravity makes it so much easier than the Mun.

Yeah I tend to go with a few tried and tested designs when I'm in career mode, and the only major changes that are likely to be made is scaling up the amount of fuel for harder destinations. I tend to mix things up a lot more when I'm dicking around in sandbox though, where the only thing most of my landers have in common is being unnecessarily large.

Landing on Tylo without blowing up, and landing at precise locations on worlds with atmospheres. Oh and airplanes I guess. I never bothered figuring out how to build planes in KSP, so everything about them is a mystery.

Probably less than five? I was in the "look up tutorials for everything" stage, so I had a pretty good idea of what I was supposed to be doing and wasn't working everything out from first principles. Getting into orbit in the first place was another story though. The main reason I started looking up tutorials in the first place is because I spent an entire afternoon not being able to put anything in orbit.

I think it does since terminal velocity is affected by both air pressure and the density of your parts, and I've got a sneaking suspicion that "water" is just modeled in-game as a layer of atmosphere with a density of 1 ton per cubic meter, but I can't say I've ever tested it. There are some airship mods out there that I haven't tried yet though, so you might get your answer by finding out how they model bouyancy.

According to the wiki you're not supposed to be able to get "while flying over" data from the minibiomes (and I've never seen it myself), but it does occasionally happen if you perform experiments while doing stuff like jumping, using ladders, or standing on top of vehicles. So if you're farming science because you need to unlock stuff it's probably more hassle than it's worth, but if you're just trying to get every possible science report for the hell of it then it might be worth messing around and seeing if you can find up with a reproducable way of doing it.

It turned out to be the impractically big brother. Chungopolis didn't have enough drills to keep up with the Convert-o-trons. It also didn't have enough solar panels to keep up with the drills or the Convert-o-trons (let alone everything at once), and it didn't have anywhere near enough batteries to stay online overnight. Oh and the one I landed on Minmus sorta accidentally didn't have any cooling.

Yeah I'm having the exact same problem as Glithy. Installed it today, and the game clearly knows it's there (files show up in the game's loading screen, new Planetary Base Systems flags are available), but no new parts are showing up in the VAB or SPH.

So I built on the two lessons I'd learned yesterday ("how to make kinda big things" and "Tylo is way too hard") by abandoning my plans for Tylo and putting something bigger on Minmus. Behold Chungopolis! A self-sufficient mining colony that weighs in at 460 tons fully fueled and has a crew of 46 (well more actually, but I got tired of picking up more at the astronaut complex and decided 46 is a good number of Kerbals for a 460 ton base). Three drilling/refining stacks and three habitation stacks surrounding the command tower. It also sports eighteen hella large solar panels and no less than nine reaction wheels, because I've learned my lessons. But how to get it into space? Some people might bust it up into six pieces that can be reassembled on Minmus, but that sounds too complicated so I just put six rockets under it. (not pictured: dozens of launch failures involving improper rocket staging, improper stack separator staging, improper fuel transfer line installation, lack of sepratrons, sepratrons installed backwards, and improper sepratron staging. At least I remembered to strut everything up though) So that gets it into space, and it makes a fine looking station right? Wrong! Let's ditch what's left of the launch stage and make like a spaceship! Now let's take it all the way to The Mun Minmus! (I'm lazy) And I forgot to take any pics of the landing, so here's one of it comfortably parked near the shore of a Minmusian sea.

Yeah I was thinking of doing fairings instead of nosecones so I could use the space for relay dishes or science parts or whatever, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. And I was about to say that I did the math and figured I could use a scaled up version of this for a Tylo mission if i refuel on the surface, but I've just been mucking around in the debug console and it turns out that landing a few hundred tons of virtually unsteerable metal on a high-G moon is hard and I think I might limit myself to just doing a self-refueling grand tour of more modest destinations.

You'll want to burn the normal or antinormal nodes (the pink triangles on your navball). They'll change your orbital inclination so that you come in above or below your target's equatorial plane. Then once you've done that, just finetune your burn a bit with the prograde and retrograde nodes until you're coming in directly over or under your target and not like, "over but also eleventy jillion kilometres ahead".

I put an unnecessarily fat 164 ton drill rig on Minmus, complete with an utterly superfluous seven-kerbal crew. It's by far the biggest lander I've used to date so I'm pretty chuffed about it even though I didn't install enough solar panels. Or any landing struts. Or a docking port. Oh yeah and since it was all sent up as a single unit, it's a teensy bit unaerodynamic and steers like a cow during launch. But that was a design choice rather than a mistake, because I wanted to get a feel for what it's like to just brute-force a larger payload into orbit instead of designing it with launch in mind.

I did my first kerbaled mission to something that isn't a microgravity moon and planted a flag in Duna. It was meant to be a learn-by-failing trip because it's the same lander I've been using on tiny moons and I didn't think it'd have enough oomph for Duna's gravity, but it turns out that landing on Duna is virtually free so they had enough fuel to get back into orbit and rendezvous with the transfer stage.

How much does SENTINEL telescope placement matter, and how wide an area does it cover? Like if I put one a slightly lower orbit than Dres for example will at detect asteroids anywhere just outside Dres orbit, or just anywhere near Dres itself, or just within a certain distance of the SENTINEL sat?

Mr Kerbachev, bring down that wall!

I've found that service bays are the way to go if you want a modular system that's easy to plug into pretty much anything. It lets you cram a bunch of pairs of docking ports into a single 1.25m or 2.5m part that can be copies and plugged into standard ship designs without much fuss, and you'll only have to use the Move tool to finetune the distance between pairs and you don't have to dick around clipping parts through other parts or any such nonsense (and the 1.25 metre bay turns out to be pretty much exactly the right height for port placement already). You just slap it together in a few seconds and badabing badaboom, you've got a little under 50kN of thrust in a 2.5m bay with 8 pairs of junior ports.

I violated the laws of man and god, and I did it in a convenient modular format that's easy to plug into most ship designs. Then I bolted that abomination in the eyes of the Lord onto the bottom of a lander module and got halfway to Eeloo before aborting because I want my first visit there to actually be a meaningful achievement.

And I'm done. Finished my first ever mission to a Joolian moon and totally nailed the landing on Pol. And I even managed to get everyone back safely, although I ran out of fuel midway through my final burn before aerobraking over Kerbin so the orbital capture was a roll of the dice. But I'm just gonna call that efficiency instead of poor design.

There's a whole bunch of stuff I haven't done in vanilla yet, so all I've got is Chatterer (because ambiance!) and MechJeb (which I haven't figured out how to use yet).

I dunno much about wings because aerodynamic flight is the devil, but when I tried getting to the bottom of the sea I found that pretty much everything is watertight and the only way down is to load up on parts with a density higher than 1. I'm not an expert, but I think the game just assigns each object a volume when determining density and doesn't really care whether it's opened or closed.

Yesterday I finally built a vehicle capable of getting to another planet and back and did my first ever interplanetary round trip by visiting the canyons of sunny Dres (by shamelessly copying something from a Matt Lowne video about getting to Moho). Then today I found out how woefully inefficient my transfer had been, and that if I don't do silly nonsense like changing inclination to match the target planet's plane before I start my transfer then I've got enough fuel to go basically anywhere. So today's gonna be my first visit to one of the moons of Jool.