UmbralRaptor

Define "free." There's the 32ish biomes on KSC that have plenty of science to get started, and exploiting contracts (possibly including the Outsourced R&D strategy) will yield lots. The more traditional (easy but not free) approach is to scour Minmus. But at a certain point it's worth considering if you actually want to play career, or sandbox. And if you do want the $ aspect of career mode without the science, start a new game with the difficulty tweaked appropriately.

I'm going to keep on linking the rocket I used to land on the Mun in the previous version, because it seems to be a useful starting point. Required unlocks: Basic Rocketry, Survival. Optional Unlocks: General Rocketry. Expand the lower stage from 3 to 4 columns if you're having trouble getting it to orbit. There's no real mass headroom for adding science gear for a Mun mission, and not much for a Minmus one, but then this design is about simplicity.

Stock atmospheric density is a simple isothermal (heh) model, that falls of exponentially with altitude, and is conveniently always directly proportional to pressure. The atmosphere cuts off when it hits 1e-6 datum pressure. eg: Kerbin's datum pressure is 1 atm, and the scale height is 5 km. So pressure is exp(-altitude_ASL/5000 m) until you hit 69,078 m, when it's 0. Eve's datum pressure is 5 atm and the scale height is 7 km, so the pressure is 5*exp(-altitude_ASL/7000 m) until you hit 96,709 m.

I can't say I miss the level of strutting once needed. Besides, wobbles still exist and must be dealt with.

It has a crazy-good mass ratio when compared to the RT-10, though offset (probably more than offset in a career mode) by the higher cost. Of course, since you'd have to edit it into a node...If you want it to be a mini-RT 10, I'd aim for ~215 funds, and up the dry mass to 0.35. Yep. Pump around if you need to shift CoM in flight, without your ballast burning off.

Not really. We can talk about some engines being vaguely similar in thrust, mass, or Isp, but rarely 2 and never 3 at the same time. If you want to use real-world analogs, I suggest looking at Real Solar System or the like. You could try to compare the AJ-10 with the LV-909 or 48-7S, but I'm unaware of any real-world analogs to the LV-T30/45.

I'm not entirely happy with this design at present, but it's simple and can be done with as few unlocks as Basic Rocketry and Survival. Additional ones just make it nicer: Big problems currently: adding goo pods/materials bays removes the ability for Mun landings. And shortly thereafter Minmus landings. Scaling up the launcher much requires struts (and/or fuel lines if you wish to convert from SSTO to asparagus). And it's really too expensive for higher difficulties.

10098 as of 0.24.2, and I don't think there were any tech tree changes in 0.25

As best I'm aware, this bug is even sillier than you encountered. See if you can get another Pol mission, and try fulfilling it with a flagpole on KSC...

There is in the wiki

Ooh, in that case I can be directly useful! (I'd like to link to my blog posts, but they're sort of outdated with the engine changes in 0.23.5, 0.24, etc)

Anerobic SSTOs are pretty normal, just with a somewhat worse payload fraction because you can't drop unneeded engine/tankage. Aerobic SSTOs have absurdly efficient but altitude (and speed) limited engines, and need to take a different path, maximizing horizontal speed at surprisingly low altitudes. Expended ÃŽâ€V may be in the range of 7-10 km/s, but this doesn't matter, since the rocket portion may need as little as 20-40 m/s to circularize.

Determined the official mass of minmus, both before and after it was changed. Found size and mass of several planets (notably Jool) the day 0.17 dropped. Developed an analytic method of designing launchers. Helped to get the aerospike fixed.

Pretty much this. There have been designs that needed to start at ~50% and then smoothly go up to 100% to avoid breaking, but they were very much the exception. Liquid fuel engines (even the NASA ones) have quite limited TWR. There's not the same tradeoff between Isp and TWR that there was before they were added, but over-engining is still a good way to have expensive craft that are terribly short on payload. (If you never spend much time at 100%, you have engine mass that could have been used for fuel, payload, or removed entirely to reduce cost.) Most designs stay below terminal velocity and only need to throttle down for fine maneuvers. SRBs are a rather different case. If you treat them as "normal" engines with some fuel attached, they have absurdly high TWRs, meaning you are more limited by things like heat, mass ratio, Isp, and control authority. Throwing a thrust limiter on some stages is a lot less hassle. Especially when a decoupler is more expensive than an RT-10...

The gravioli detector has always done that. Firing up a copy of 0.22: (As a bonus, you get to see some of the wonkiness in how old science values were displayed!)

It's been a problem since 2011, though things are slowly improving.Anyway, geographical features that I'd like: The Dark Sea (it's the only good one on that map, and a nice shout-out to before Kerbin rotated) Booster Bay (guess) Sea of Ruins (location doesn't matter, but it should have an anomaly. Or at least be a place where you can easily become stranded.) Lagrange Point (a very tall mountain. If on an airless body, one of those evil ones that sticks above the 5x timewarp level.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

There were control issues, then I learned about T to toggle SAS (the tutorial only mentioned F). Orbit was achieved shortly thereafter, as was various bits of insanity. (Playing with designs and a lack of destinations, really) But then, this was 0.8.4, so minor things like ASAS, struts, RCS, the map, planetary rotation, and any body other than Kerbin didn't yet exist...

Pretty much never. My craft/parts are too small on takeoff and slow on landing. Though I haven't done anything Danny-like this version...

Thanks for the link. After messing around with things a bit: 1) Temster's Supernova isn't *that* cheap. 393769 is better than your 547468, but the difference is rather less dramatic. 2) Deleting nosecones and adapters make for an easy way to save funds. 20900 in your case. 3) As others have mentioned, rockomax tanks have better mass ratios than kerbodyne tanks. The S3-14400 is the only one worth using, and that is because it is almost 21% cheaper than it "should" be. 4) Also as others have brought up, Mainsails are quite cheap for the thrust that they provide, while 4x KS-25s are rather expensive. There is a TWR difference, but I think it ends up not increasing the payload fraction enough. 4) You have too many engines for this. In particular, the vertical staging (keeping the KR-2L as dead weight for most of the ascent). The best thing would probably to use a KR-2L as a core stage with a "normal" amount of tankage (say, 1 S3-14400), and other engines around it. Above 3500 m, the KR-2L is likely to have better Isp than anything else you were considering. Also, getting rid of an entire engine plus switching to cheaper tankage should save you ~38400 funds. I think I found something that can get 135 t into 70-80 km orbits with a bit of fuel leftover for deorbiting. Amusingly, it runs <225k funds. Clicky download!

I'm er, not seeing the download link.

Not recently, but I've mainly been building tiny craft that use SRBs to get 50-90% of the way to orbit. I'll bring it back as needed.

It probably should. That said, why a 100 km circular orbit? 70 km would be better as a parking orbit or sweeping out biome science from LKO (high orbital science can be grabbed in the process of a mun/minmus mission). An up/down suborbital mission can fullfil 3 of the 4 initial contracts and the repeatable science from Kerbin space until you get the panels for a station.

The light used to indicate something about descent rate, but as best I'm aware it's been broken since before the Mün was implemented.

That 0.02738 U appears to be LF+IntakeAir in tonnes per second. o_O Isp = Thrust/(mass flow * 9.82) = 112.5/(0.02738 * 9.82) ~= 418.4 s 418.4 s is conveniently half of what is displayed, and this is a stock turbojet that would be getting half thrust while sitting on the runway... (The fuel consumption in 0.34 units/second appears much the same, though mind the 16x from the "free" intake air.) For clarity: 0.24 unit/s of LF into the above equation: Isp = 112.5/(0.24*0.005*9.82) ~= 6738.9 s. Divide by 16 (since LF is specified to be 1/16 of the propellants in the part.cfg), and you get ~421.2 s. I'm going to say that's the same to within measurement error.