rflrob

I can't quite tell how your gear is laid out, but in my (very limited) experience with the SPH, vehicles with two front wheels are more likely to pull off to one side or the other, so that might help you with the first half of your space planes. Good luck with flying!

When doing circularization maneuvers, I like to stay in the map view (with the nav ball brought up so you can actually perform the maneuvers), then just watch the AP and PE nodes until they're in the right place. If you do your burns as close to AP as possible, then only your PE should be increasing, but in practice what I do is start my maneuvers a few seconds early, then keep the "Time until AP" readout around 5-10 seconds. When you're almost exactly circular, this becomes a lot harder, but I figure a circular orbit ±300m (which I can pretty routinely achieve) is close enough to circular as not to matter.

@Diggydug, I think the reason not to speed up in orbit is that your maximum warp rate is limited by altitude, except if you're on the launch pad. From orbit, it could conceivably take a while (in real time) for Duna to come into the right angle.

I tend to find that when I go above about 80% on my standard heavy-lift rocket (6+1 mainsails, plus 8 more large SRBs), my parts tend to squish into each other, causing a very expensive fireworks show.

It seems like most of my 0.16 designs have been nerfed somehow in 0.17 (I've seen references to a fuel glitch... I wonder if I was unintentionally exploiting that?), but when I get to the point of doing inter-planetary missions, is there an advantage to establishing a parking orbit first, then leaving LKO, or would it be more efficient to simply take off at Kerbol-rise or Kerbol-set (depending on whether I want to go farther in or farther out in the system) and rocket straight upwards? My intuition is that way there's no steering losses, and slightly less drag losses, but I haven't sat down and done the delta-V calculations. Come to think of it, I haven't done any delta-V calculations... seems somewhat un-Jebbish.

Put simply, always fly east. It comes down to your piloting skill (or MechJeb's if you go that route), and how much time you spend with a heading anything other than 90º.

It's risky, and I've only almost done it once, but you can have Kerbals hanging onto the ladders and try getting them back that way. I managed to take off with one kerbal hanging on (one fell off... sorry, Richfrey!), make it back to Kerbin through a series of "Release from ladder, time warp until they drift almost too far away, return to ship and refuel jetpacks", and reenter the atmosphere. The atmospheric flight was the hardest part, but at one point, he fell down onto an exterior fuel tank and was held in place through acceleration. If deploying the parachutes hadn't torn the ship apart (it was an experimental design), I think he would've made it safely to the ground.