Vanamonde

Not to be nasty, but what else could "end flight" possibly mean but that it "ends" the "flight"? I mean, if it said, "keep flight going" or "snooze" I could understand some confusion.

Trees are not only big, but mobile. When you load a save, they're usually gone.

1) For the same reason you don't want extra engines, you don't want the engines you do have putting forth less than they're full effort. An engine lifting 80% of its own weight, for example, is ADDING 20% of its weight to the load being lifted. If you exceed terminal velocity, drag due to air resistence may be so strong that it's worth reducing thrust anyway, but it's a tradeoff, and generally you should be running as close to full thrust as possible. This is with regard to takeoff in atmosphere, I should clarify. In vacuum, it's less critical, but there are still good reasons for generally using full thrust. For one thing, it's most efficient to expend dV at precise times/locations such as periapsis, so the longer the burn lasts, the less efficient you are being. 2) Right now, there's not much advantage to SRBs. They burn out too quickly to contribute much to your whole journey. But if you look at the specs, their big advantage is that they are much cheaper than liquid fueled systems. The idea is that SRBs will be a financially viable choice when the full campaign mode of the game is introduced, mostly for a quick, hard shove to help you get up to an efficient ascent speed right off of the pad. (Which is how the shuttle used them.)

Mostly due to physics slowdown, my big interplanetary ship can take over an hour to make a Jool transit burn. I alt-tab and poke around the internet while it's running, checking back now and then to make sure it hasn't blown up or drifted off heading. It's just part of the game.

The figures you see are ideal numbers that assume you didn't do anything wrong, but there are lots of ways to use more fuel than the minimum and run over those numbers. For example, if you descend very slowly to Mun's surface, you will burn a lot of fuel hovering even though you're covering the same distance that the ideal figures talk about. Landing at higher lattitudes on Mun can also cost more fuel than landing near the equator (depending on how you get there), and so on. If you'd like an example, I made a rocket that should have enough dV for the job, and wrote out a flight path that is not ideal, but should be reasonably close to a minimal fuel method. You can find it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies

I lost 3 or 4 small missions when I was first learning the game, and then never again. I really can't figure out why this is supposed to be such a terrible problem. If you're really worried about it, do what I did and teach yourself the habit of hitting F5 before leaving a flight whether to end it or just switch to another mission. That way, you could undo an end flight if you ever did do one by mistake.

Take a small satellite deliverer like you've already built, attach a docking ring to it, and put it in orbit. Then build a pusher stage that uses LV-N engines and dock it to your ship. The combined vehicle will be able to reach most of the worlds in the game.

Here's a motive to explore: scenery.

The engine should be proportional to the ship, but if you like an example rocket, I made one that 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

You can look at my moon mission tutorial and just skip the steps after achieving Munar orbit: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies

On atmosphere worlds, there's just not a lot you can do. Try to estimate how much aerobraking will cause you to drop from the map view's curve, and aim to overshoot by that much. You can adjust a little along the way by opening more or fewer parachutes, but that's pretty crude. On vacuum worlds, my method is to do most of my braking and then once I'm down to the last 5000m or so, come at the target location roughly 45 degrees from vertical, looking past my ship at the target location. From that vantage point it's easy to see any deviation from the approach: if coming too low throttle up to slow descent, if coming high throttle down or shut off, and steer accordingly for right/left misalignments.

Could we get some official word on whether or not we should be using the patcher?

I thought so, too, until Maltesh explained that this is incorrect. I believe that if you try both methods and compare them, the mid-course inclination correction saves so much dV that the sum of it and the transit burn is significantly smaller than the dV of a single burn for transit/inclination combined. But I'm afraid I must leave it to some of our more mathematically-inclined forum fellows to check my recollection and explain why that's the case. Is there anyone who'd like to help out?

I'm glad it was helpful.

Go to your settings file and change "patched conics draw mode" from 3 to 0. Next time you get an interplanetary intercept, you will see your path past the planet indicated within the planet's SOI, and you can see whether you will approach it prograde/retrograde, the inclination, and what the periapsis will be. You can then do quite a tiny burn at the halfway point of the trip (play with maneuver node and watch the result), and set your approach the way you want it.

travert's advice is pretty good, but I believe there is an issue with being in TOO low of a Kerbin orbit. If it's a long burn, can't this cause you to come out at the wrong ejection angle? Also, it is EXTREMELY costly in fuel to try to change inclination during a departure burn. That's better left to a half-trip course correction. (The ideal would be to begin the departure burn already on a Kerbin orbit parallel to the target's inclination, but that's extremely difficult to align and time.)

85. That includes at least one probe orbiting and one probe landed on every world (except a few that were eaten by glitches), 2 marooned missions I must eventually get around to rescuing, some flags, light fixtures at KSC, a couple of test rovers, a couple of exploring rovers, manned observation stations around Kerbin, Mun, Minmus, Eve, Gilly, Dres, Duna, and Ike, an orbital shipyard, a successful interplanetary ship, and an unsuccessful planetary ship serving as a fuel depot. And some other stuff. Oh, and my new Mun base, growing to replace the one I deleted when it got buried by 20.0.

There was a game called Capitalism that was pretty interesting. http://www.amazon.com/Enlight-Entertainment-Europe-Ltd-Capitalism/dp/B008K4A2II/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1370038572&sr=1-1&keywords=capitalism+2 There were several dozen products you could collect as raw materials, turn into products in factories, and sell in stores. You also had to setup product flows in your facilities, and you could try to take over other companies or even sell your own.

Why do people try to do rolling landings on Mun anyway? In the low gravity, even small bumps risk throwing you off on weird angles and flaming death, it's harder to touch down gently because the elevation of the surface is changing as you're moving over it, it's much harder to build a rolling vehicle that can withstand the shock, and of course there's no air to help you conserve fuel and slow your descent. Are there any advantages to it at all?

Even if you had the thrusters placed perfectly, ASAS is currently not tuned well and would blast them all in a frenzy anyway. It's kind of a pain, but I just make sure to never have both RCS and ASAS turned on at the same time.

As for not turning, it sounds like you have hit the alt key, which puts him in a movement mode where he walks in the direction you want without changing the direction he is facing. The spinning thing I only saw one of my kerbals do once. He was stuck that way for a moment, but I think I had him jump (spacebar) or take a short hop with his RCS pack, and that seemed to reset the glitch and he moved properly again.

1. If an engine is not burning, it is not paying for its own weight. Of course it's not possible or even always advisable for every engine to be firing, but you always want to minimize the dead weight you're carrying. So burn all the engines in your example at launch, but there's an additional trick most players use, which is to run fuel lines from the outer tanks to the inner one. The outer engines will run out of fuel sooner and you can eject their weight sooner, leaving the middle engine to keep going with a topped-off tank. This is the "asparagus" staging you will hear people taking about, because the clustered columns of tanks once reminded somebody or other of a thingy of asparagus. 2. There are many ways to carry rovers, and it mostly depends on the size of the rover. For a big one, it might make sense to build is as a lander-with-wheels, whereas small ones can be conveniently dropped off the bottoms of little descent rockets. Some players do like to build shells around them, but in the current version of the game, there's no benefit to this and it's just for looks. In fact, it makes the rover heavier, and is counter-productive, which doesn't mean it can't be fun to do anyway. As CamelotKing524 says, it's also possible to mount them in pairs on either side of a landing ship, which neatly avoids the problem of trying to balance an asymmetrical rover on a symmetrical rocket. But while I have used this approach at times as well, don't forget that it does mean doubling the payload weight, which requires the whole rocket to be proportionally larger. 3. It is possible to build non-radially-symmetrical ships, but it's extremely difficult, even for experienced shipbuilders.

I liked it so much that I've done it a couple of times myself. "That didn't work. F9. That didn't work worse. F9. That almost worked. F9. That finally worked! F9 to save... AAARRRGGGGHHH!"

But be warned that this can cause all kinds of headaches. Struts can disappear, parts can get stuck to the mouse pointer so that you can't put them down, symmetry in the VAB sometimes attempts to default to 3x and can't be changed, and after ending any flight that started construction in the SPH you can't select return to VAB from the escape menu and vice-versa. That 3x symmetry glitch is especially noxious because what it does is place your original part, place a mirror of it on the other side, and the it places a mirror of the mirror superimposed upon the first part so precisely that you can't tell it's there. Then you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why one side of your rocket is twice as heavy as the other. Honestly, I don't think it's worth the trouble, and I've gone back to building my rovers in the VAB.