Vanamonde

Four guys built an airstrip next to an erupting volcano and pawn shop, then dropped an egg on the sidewalk?

I can't find a diagram right now, but compressed air from the jet engine (before combustion) is ducted to attitude thrusters on the wingtips, toward the nose, and the tail boom. It's pretty cool.

There is a known bug associated with the Hitchhiker. Sometimes Kerbals that you put into it simply disappear.

If you are not close to your target, wait until you are passing over the orbit of the target, on the same plane. If from that point you are going to pass south of the target's orbit, turn 90 degress to the north and burn, and you will see the path of your orbit rise to match that of the target. If you are going to pass south, turn north and burn. However, if you are already within just a few meters, all you need to do is make sure you are in target mode, point your nose at the target-retrograde marker, and burn until your velocity reading is zero. This will kill ALL of your motion relative to the target, including any deviation due to planes, leaving you on essentially identical orbits.

"Weight" is a measure of the force exerted by a mass in the local gravity, so yes, if the local gravity is higher, the ship weighs more, and its T/W is reduced. However, the G meter on the navball is not measureing weight, and instead measures acceleration in earth-gravity-equivalents, and its reading sums acceleration due to both gravity and thrust. So during launch on Kerbin, the increase in G reading you're seeing has nothing to do with gravity (which is actually getting slowly weaker as you get farther from the mass of Kerbin), but is rather a measure of how hard the engines are pushing the ship. The fuel wastage you're seeing is due to air resistence rather than gravity, so you wouldn't need to throttle down like that around vacuum worlds, but it does save fuel in atmosphere to prevent your ship from exceeding the terminal velocity at that altitude. And the throttle setting has no impact upon the ISP of KSP engines. It used to, but that was fixed a couple of versions ago.

That also describes the Harrier (except it ducts air rather than burns RCS fuel for the reaction thrusters). In other words, you're doing it right, and it's just a hard thing to do in reality or in the game. Out curiosity, why are you trying to put the ball in the cup?

Congratulations!

It is in the current version of the game because our construction crews never need to take a break, take their suits off, or set their tools down, but it's not an inherently bad idea. However, I started off building ships this way, but found that the lag got nasty when the part count of the ship was added to the part count of the station, so I don't do it anymore.

Welcome to the party.

Well, I would say hello, but you said not to mind you.

Well, what are your questions?

You can also run fuel lines directly to the engines pieces themselves.

There is a line in the settings file you can change from "CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 3" to "CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 0". You will then see the project path your ship will take, depicted within the target world's SOI. You can then set a manuever node long before you arrive there, move the node direction markers around, and find a couse correction that will bring you close to the world upon arrival.

When I build my Duna ships, I test them on Kerbin and keep adding parachutes until they fall at about 3m/s or less. I find that this brings them down on Duna at about 10m/s, which is roughly the maximum speed that you can land anywhere without taking damage. You can land on Duna using chutes alone, but I find that the chutes rip off if I open them while going faster than 300m/s. So what I do is come in at as shallow a descent angle as possible, then when I'm approaching the ground I use engines to get my speed down to 300m/s, then pop the chutes and shut he engines off, floating the rest of the way on the chutes.

It's a newbie trainer. I don't want them to have to figure out action groups and whatnot when they're still just figuring out how the basic game works.

If it's only the final docking that is giving you trouble, you might try my docking trainer. It carries two smaller ships with it, so that you start the manuever already docked, and then can detach and re-dock again for practice. You can download it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25425-Help-with-Docking-A-Trainer-Ship-for-Newbies

Take the situation in your pictures for an example. Rotate view until you are looking at the orbits from the same plane, and you will be able to see if you are passing north (above) or south (below) the target at closest approach. If you are passing south, point the nose of your ship due north and fire the engine. This should cause the line of your path to rise and meet that of the target. Once the intercept markers appear, you can further fine-tune your intercept. Try to get it within 2kms, and then you can close the final distance with short burns and RCS.

Yes, the game's aerodynamic system is a placeholder, and all parts contribute to drag, even when they're not exposed to airflow.

This ship went to Duna, dropped off the little station, sent the lander to the surface, and the reusable segment came back. The lander pilot and station crew stayed in the Duna system, though the lander/station combo had enough fuel to return to the ship if I'd wanted the mission to go that way. All stock, mission assembled from multiple launches in Kerbin orbit.

A small gray below an orange still has a larger capacity than any other pair-combination of tanks, so at worst you're trading 2 tanks of lesser capacity for 2 tanks with a larger capacity.

Orbiting retrograde means the approaching ship starts with a deficit of 2x the world's surface rotation speed, though on Mun, which is tidally locked, that's not so much. However, you'll have to pay that penalty for each and every flight to your station, both on the way up and the way down. Reversing your station's orbit would fix that, but would also take godawful amounts of fuel. I think you might be better off sending a whole new station into a prograde orbit. Whether you do that or not, 150kms is quite a high orbit, which again means burning more fuel on each trip to the station and back. Since Mun has no atmosphere, I believe the optimal orbital height would be the point at which your lander can reach orbital speed on a single burn at full thrust, which would, given perfect piloting, put it right at the station with a matching velocity, and no waste. That altitude would depend on the thrust/weight ration of your lander. All in all, 30km is a pretty comfortable altitude at which to fly rendezvous from Mun's surface, not for ideal efficiency, but as a compromise of efficiency and piloting difficulty.

The vehicle you're handling must be throttled down to zero and the other vessel must be within 2.25kms.

... because after playing it for almost a year, it's still so freaking hard. I can come up with projects that take days or weeks to finish, and it takes skill and perseverance to see them through. I don't just shoot 75 badguys and then progress to the next level, where I shoot 75 more badguys.

A probe can not contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos.

This is asked very often, so I made a moon rocket for newbies. You can find it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25029-A-moon-rocket-for-newbies