Vanamonde

Tri-couplers drive your part count through the roof very quickly. Three rings, on each side, plus a tri-coupler, on each side, and then some struts to preventing wiggling, on each side equals around 14 parts to do what 2 Srs. will do. The only reason folks used them in the past is because we didn't have the Srs.

Discussion of such ships: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/37952-Round-trip-ships My own 2 designs for download: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/48610-My-roundtrip-ships-for-download

The propulsion seems precarious, but the rest quite practical.

I believe the next game version will have a way to combine saved designs. In the meantime, build a rocket up to a decoupler or docking ring, save it, then when you need it, load it and build the payload on top of the decoupler/ring.

Or ask fellow players on the game's official forum. Oh hey! That's us! There are 6 other planets which have 6 moons between them. There are probably going to be additional worlds as the game develops, but plans are still pretty tentative.

Here's a written walkthrough and a ship you can download to practice with: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25008-How-to-reach-orbit-and-a-rocket-that-can-do-it-a-walkthrough-for-newbies

Design of the ship is also a factor. The lower and wider it is, the less likely it will tip over.

Yes, some people absorb better from listening, some from watching, and some from reading, which is my preference. I'm glad this was helpful.

For ships, copy the craft file to yourKSPfolder/saves/yoursavedgame/ships/VAB, and then the next time you play the game, it will show up in the VAB just like the ships you have made and saved yourself. As for mods, I don't know because only evil people use them. (Kidding!)

There's no single answer to this question. It got easier when they introduced landing gear, easier when they re-did SAS, harder when they re-did the terrain recently, etc.

The default landing gear key is G. Works for plane wheels and landing legs.

Once downloaded, copy a craft file into yourKSPfolder/saves/nameofyoursavedgame/ships/VAB, then when you start up the game next time, the new ship will show up just like your own saved ship designs in the VAB.

Parked a rover on the little hill that marks the precise location of Ike's south pole.

Well, people keep asking for this sort of thing, but when I posted some http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/48610-My-roundtrip-ships-for-download, the thread is getting no attention and only about 11 people have downloaded them. I don't get it.

In the northern temperate lattitudes there's a big Mariner canyon-kind of thing. It's a good landing spot for scenery, because the bottom is almost perfectly flat, and because it's so low that the atmosphere will make parachutes work better.

Okay, when you build and post your own newbie training rocket, you can put as much effort as you like into the precision of the symmetry of the launch stage, and the only difference it will make is 5 or 6 fewer keystrokes during minutes 2-6 of a roughly 800 minute roundtrip. But until you're willing to make a better one and offer it to newbies, please stop criticizing mine. Criticizing a man's rockets is like calling his children ugly.

Some shots from my current Duna/Ike mission: An unusual perspective; Mun transits Kerbin. (Minmus is over on the left.) The pilot's view during a Duna aerobrake. I haven't been to Duna's polar regions in a while, but is that pink/purple terrain shading in the distance new?

Most common mistakes: 1) Are they the same size? 2) Are they facing the right way?

The larger mass you're hauling on this trip is requiring a longer burn. The longer the burn is, the more your current path deviates from the point in space where you placed the original maneuver node. But the burn direction and duration were calculated on the ideal case of an instantaneous acceleration at that point. And so you are finding that your actual burn is deviating from the estimate. Don't worry. It will still get you pretty close. Just plot a mid-course correction to bring yourself back spot-on for the intercept.

Steering is steering; it's only difficult if you don't practice it. You have to use the WASD keys anyway, right? And how much rotation are we talking about, anyway? I've tested that rocket extensively, and it rolls sedately if at all.

Chris_C, your primary difficulty is not that you are doing anything wrong, but that you are trying to cross roughly 54,000,000km and then hit a target that is around 96,000km wide. Use Olex's calculator http://ksp.olex.biz/ to get close, play with a maneuver node until you get the "closest approach" markers, and either finesse those, or plot a mid-course correction to achieve the final intercept. That's how I do it.

Alright, since this has come up, here's my feeling on the matter. 1) I am already quite carefully with the symmetry of my construction, so if it requires more care than I'm already putting into this to prevent a bit of rotation, then it's too finicky to bother with. 2) Rotation around the long axis is a minor nuisance which doesn't change where the rocket is headed, and only affects how long and in which combination one applies the WASD keys. 3) Most importantly, most of the time the orientation of the needed maneuvers will not neatly line up with the control axes, and the sooner a new pilot learns to adjust to that the better off he/she will be. And since the ship I posted is intended to be a trainer, it's just part of flying practice. In short, if it's hard to entirely eliminate, doesn't matter, and is good practice anyway, I don't consider a small degree of long-axis rotation a problem.

Well, I was going to post in this thread, but then Rage097 killed it.

For me, the TW series went off the rails with Rome 1. They sped up the action to the point that the only way to maintain situational awareness was to pause the game every few seconds to make sure that, for example, no cavalry had zipped around your flank and was chewing up your archers. The tactical AI was actually pretty good in Shogun, but got stupider with every new game in the series. But the thing that really killed the series for me was the unit AI and pathfinding, which was flat-out awful. When you gave an order to a group of units, there was only about a 60% chance that they'd all actually do what you told them to do. Infantry would get confused and march to the wrong place on the field, archers would shoot at whatever the snot target they felt like shooting at (which was a problem because it could cause nasty friendly fire casualties), and cavalry would charge an enemy unit, hit it, and then stop and just stand there until you gave them more orders. I got so mad once that I wrote out a list of just the *major* bugs and gliches of RTW, and it was 1.5 pages long. And they never did fix most of those even in Medieval II, which was when I gave up on what was left of the series because they started requiring that Steam nonsense. In my 22 years of PC gaming, I have seen no other game series that started off so well and had so much potential become so thoroughly and absolutely ruined.