Vanamonde

If you like that, you'll LOVE the south pole. (Assuming they haven't fixed it since last I visited.)

You can also do some really useful deceleration slingshots at Ike and the moons of Jool. That's really a matter of the luck of your arrival time, but Ike is large and there are several Joolian moons, which means opportunities are not rare.

It's simple if you stumble into it by accident. When trying it by design, waiting for one world to line up the right way with another world and then plotting a burn to come out of the slingshot on the right trajectory ends up being extremely difficult and time-consuming.

I've posted this several times, but it still amuses me. Once my guy on Gilly tripped and fell down, and you know how they do that little jump when they get up again? When he did that he headbutted the ship, and this was the result. It flew through the (lack of) air, spun 1.5 times, and landed on its stide.

I've also recently gone back to playing around with small ships, and things have really changed since I last dabbled in this. The various kinds of SAS seem much weaker, and as tntristan12 observed, it's now quite challenging to keep a small ship flying straight. It's almost like learning the game over again.

I sent an interplanetary ship to the Jool system, and then launched RCS-propelled probes from it to several of the moons while the ship itself stayed in Jool orbit. So yes, if the probe is small enough, RCS can do the job by itself.

Were you telling it to roll or was it doing that on its own?

Both of those wheel types work quite well in Mun's gravity, though the mid-sized ones will go MUCH faster. That can be a bad thing, though, because it means an increased risk of rolling. The little rocket engine on the back is probably a bad idea, as zipping over even gently rolling terrain can cause you to do Dukes of Hazard leaps and lose control. Besides, you'll be astonished how quickly you run out of fuel while motoring around on the surface. An engine that thrusts for 5 minutes may get you from the launchpad to orbit, but that's still only 5 minutes' worth of motoring on the ground. There's nothing wrong with orienting the control piece vertically, put it can make steering kind of confusing. Anyway, fly them both up there and see how they do.

Docking ports are quite strong and I've never seen one fail during aerobraking. In fact, one time I botched an approach quite terribly, dived far too deeply into the atmosphere, and nothing broke off of this until it hit the water. (Yes, that ship started off straight.)

Because you can assemble things in orbit, there's no need to struggle a "huge thing into space." Make the parts as big or small as you want and feel comfortable with, and if a part doesn't work like you hoped, eject it and fly up a replacement. It's a learning process. In fact, you SHOULD start small to get the hang of docking.

It also seems to determine which piece you stay in personal control of after undocking part of an assembly. But then I also see saying that this doesn't work for them, so I'm not sure if that's consistent.

I don't put my jet exhausts in places where the airflow from the intakes could not reach them. All my rover designs allow the driver a view of where he/she is going. In addition to a command capsule, every station or ship in which a kerbal is going to be stationed for days or more has at least one hitchhiker module to simulate living quarters. Yeah, I do a lot of that sort of thing.

Um. Yeah. Well, me too, I must admit. Herbert McCheese-Wang, upload your screenshots to a free service like Imgur.com, and use the BBCode link they provide in your posts.

I haven't seen a cactus since v.17.2, but as I discovered last night, apparenty they are still in the game.

You had a kerbal jump from a ladder onto the ground, didn't you? Exiting the game to the desktop and starting it up again should fix it, though the mission you were flying my just be flying debris when you get back to it.

Triangle arrangements are very stable, and it's helping to distribute the stresses. From looking at the recording, I think a couple of lateral struts to either side of the decoupler would fix the problem. You've got all the forces of a Mainsail shoving up and the mass of 1.5 orange tank-equivalents dragging down on that decoupler, whereas in the other arrangement in your screenshots, the decoupler is much higher, less of the mass of the tanks is riding directly on it, and some struts are helping distribute the loads.

After you enter Mun's SOI, turn retrograde and burn until your periapsis is at the height you want. Then wait until you reach that periapsis, turn retrograde again, and burn until apoapsis = periapsis. It's most efficient if you go to your settings file and set patched conics draw mode = 0, and then your projected path through Mun's SOI will be displayed right by the moon itself, and you can see how close you will pass. Wait until you're half-way there, set a maneuver node, and try moving the radial/anti-radial tabs until you've got the periapsis you want. Burn to set that, wait until you reach it, then burn retrograde to set apoapsis.

I'm making very small ships right now and they only have one tank, so there's no fuel flow to become unbalanced.

As a change of pace, I've been making some very small rockets lately, and it is driving me nuts. Some time in the last few revisions, probe torque seems to have been seriously nerfed, because I CAN NOT get these stupid little things to hold a heading under thrust, even when they are balanced so well that there is no visible displacement of the COM marker from the centerline. I've got these little 3 ton probes with gimbaled engines, ASAS, SAS, and two probe cores, and as soon as I hit the gas, they start lolling around anyway, always in the same direction so that it's obviously a balance issue.

Is that consistent? Because sometimes there are patches of terrain which, for some reason, don't show shadows.

I made an example ship and written instructions for reaching orbit, which you can find here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25008-How-to-reach-orbit-and-a-rocket-that-can-do-it-a-walkthrough-for-newbies

Fins with control surfaces low on the stage help a great deal while you're still in atmosphere.

So what do you need help with? Ship designs, methods, or both?

What kind of trouble are you having getting it to Mun? There are different ways to land it, but with a shape like that, it's always going to be hard to steer.

As I recall, that takes around 4 million years.