Vanamonde

At the top of the screen to the right of the altitude display, there are three buttons. Lights on/off, landing gear up/down, and brakes on/off. Holding the B key only keeps you stopped as long as you hold the key down, but mouse-clicking on that altimeter button locks the brakes until you take them off again.

To include pics in a post, upload your screenshots to a free service like Imgur.com, then use the links they provide in your posts.

Congratulations! Suggestion for a flashier picture: hit L to turn the guys' helmet lights on, and turn one of them to face the ship.

Kerbin is already moving around the sun at a fairly high rate of speed, so the speed you're seeing in your picture is a vector that will be added to Kerbin's velocity once you leave the planet's SOI. Since Kerbin's velocity is the greater, your ship's velocity will be a proportionally smaller deviation from Kerbin's motion. That means you will be pretty close to the plane of Kerbin's orbit, on an ellipse, the shape of which is hard to guess from the picture. (At a second look, I think I was wrong to say that this orbit would be "highly" elliptical, but it is going to be more elliptical than Kerbin's circular orbit.) But since the other planets are also more or less on the plane of Kerbin's orbit, it's likely that you will, sooner or later, pass close enough to one to be affected. This will, depending on the geometry, either slow you down and drop you to a lower solar orbit, or speed you up and through you to a higher solar orbit. There's a tiny chance of actually hitting a planet or moon at this time, but the odds are vastly against it. As Tex_NL points out, though, you should just pass through the encounter SOI and not enter orbit unless you brake. However, because there is a little bit of inaccuracy in KSP math, it actually is possible to end up in an orbit without a burn, but only if the geometry works out JUST right. But that's just a minor glitch in the game, and not a matter of orbital physics. But that might not be the end of the story. Depending on just how your ship gets thrown out a first encounter, it might end up having others. NASA sometimes intentionally sends probes on paths that cause them to pass and interact with several planets.

That is a nice, sensibly sized moon lander, and rover deployers are quite a trick. Congratulations.

Mounting the load in pairs does make balance a breeze, but it also doubles the payload mass, which can be a deal-breaker depending on the goal of the mission. But in theory, you can just keep piling sub-ships on indefinitely. This was mission that delivered a manned lander, 4 orbital probes, and 8 landing probes, to the Jool system, but did not have enough fuel to come home. (The crew is currently colonizing Bop.)

Since it's so hard to land precisely, I give my buildings wheels that can be ejected when they reach the desired position. Then it doesn't matter if you're a kilometer or two off.

The number of chutes you'd need depends on the mass of the ship and the atmosphere of the world. An arbitrary numerical limit doesn't make sense.

It looks like it will end up in a highly elliptical orbit of the sun, looping until it happens to encounter Moho, Eve, or Kerbin, and then any number of trajectories could result.

They told you the game was a work in progress before you bought it, and they committed to no timeline for its development. In what way do you feel they have let you down? This kind of attitude really grates my cheese. Squad gets a rash of manure if they don't flood their media outlets with constant announcements of new features, and then they get a rash of manure if any of those provisional release times are 10 minutes late. Can't we just leave the guys alone to work on the game in peace? I'd rather they spent their time adding to the game the game than TELLING us that they're adding to the game.

Well? Let's see it.

Yes, you are in just about the worst position to try for the planet. The easiest (NOT most sophisticated) thing to do would be to make your orbit a matching circle at either a slightly higher or slightly lower altitude, then fast-forward until the planet is parallel with your ship. (This could take MANY orbits.) Then play with the maneuver node system and try to get an intercept with a small nudge. This is how I used to fly my interplanetary missions before we had the maneuver node system and Olex's intercept calculator: http://ksp.olex.biz/

The motion of the winglets doesn't waste any fuel, except for the tiny amount of additional drag they add to the ship. I don't believe the game's aerodynamics model is sophisticated enough to take that changing airflow into account, and the increase in drag due to canard AOA would be tiny. Replacing the ASAS with SAS would stop the canard flutter, but only because the canards would be inert then and acting like static fins, not contributing much to the stability of your craft. As for your ion ship, what body parts does it need? Perhaps just build the working parts off of structural sparts extending from the probe core?

Why is this Kerbal speaking backwards?

I had no trouble understanding your English. There is a whole section of the forum for tutorials and how-tos here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forumdisplay.php/15-How-To And I did make a training moon rocket for new players here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies, but I'm afraid it doesn't work in the demo. But if you do like the demo, you won't be sorry you bought the full game. It has more of everything! More parts to build with and more places to fly to.

I'm thinking of using this: Yes, it's supposed to look cartoonish. It's meant to be something between the Voyager plaque and a sketch a happy Kerbal would draw.

They also LOVE to bounce your lander over on its head.

Wait. The linear RCS has the same thrust as the quads? I thought they were stronger?

I don't know about the other problem, but do not put your landing legs in the extended position until you're ready to land. That's because if you resume a flight in-progress with landing legs extended, sometimes they just detach themselves and float away. I've seen it happen twice.

SAS mode is TRYING to keep you steady, but the mass of your ship is distributed to the sides, and it's going to have a far amount of rotational inertia for the guidance to fight. Also, gimbaled engines currently do nothing to fight spin, so the guidance has very little to work with. Some canards or fins with control surfaces, though, should fix that little ship right up.

How did they move around in there? Any surface you touch is likely to eject the payload or select Botswana as the landing site.

The simpler-est way is to just send the lander to the pad, where it is generated sitting on the engine or other lowest point, then extend the legs. If it tips over or gives you any other trouble, it would probably have trouble landing anywhere anyway.

The thing you make in the VAB is a template, and then the game makes an actual working copy when you go to launch. As strange as it may seem, there are minor variations in this, so the same design does not always perform exactly the same way from one launch to the next. However, it's a much less severe problem than it was a few versions ago.

Nope. charactercharactercharacter

Congratulations.