Vanamonde

Enture, are you nuts?! Never look into a palantir!

Considering the distances involved and the precision that would be needed, that's really not bad. By "directly in" do you mean that you're hitting atmo without orbiting first? If so, try burning 90 degrees away from prograde to the east or west, and watch how your path changes. It should round into a loop around the planet. Note that this may waste fuel, if your intention is to land on the planet anyway. Also, I'm not suggesting this as a precise technique. I'm just pointing out that there are burns you can make to alter your trajectory into an orbit. Play around with it and get a feel for the processes involved.

Neither free nor orbital settings will follow you. There is a chase camera mode that will, but it isn't fully implemented yet, so you need to activate it yourself. Page 2 of this thread tells you how: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/10954-Enable-the-Chase-camera/page2?highlight=chase+camera Note: I haven't tried this in .17 yet, but it worked in .15.2 and .16.

Bob was unavailable, as he is currently the first man exploring the Jool system. (Okay, to be honest, he's marooned in Tylo orbit without enough fuel to land, but we learn by doing.)

To keep lander weights down, I design them as one-way ships which land, then are abandoned after meeting a recovery ship in orbit. So I sent landers to Duna and Ike. I then dispatched the Crew Recovery Vehicle 1 to retrieve their crews. This mission had all kinds of ups and downs, such as an accidental slingshot boost from Mun on the way out: The CRV-1 managed a somewhat sloppy, semi-polar orbit around Ike, where it was able to rendezvous with the Minor Moon Explorer 1: and transfer the pilot. The CRV-1 then proceeded to an eccentric orbit of Duna, where I attempted aerobraking. This is NOT advisable on Duna because there's a razor thin margin between "This isn't doing anything" and "Hey, how did we get into the planet's mantle?" The XRc Prototype Duna Lander ran out of fuel a little sooner than I hoped, but close enough that the pilot could make the rendezvous with his RCS pack: I then got another unplanned gravity assist from Ike on the way back, but ran out of fuel while trying to showboat my way to a pinpoint KSC landing, ending up splashing down half a world away, just off the coast of some scenic mountains, but with all 3 pilots alive and well. Three missions out: one mission back. It's amazing the emotions this game puts you through. All the while I was struggling along with one game crash or botched orbit after another, I was frustrated and angry. Then when I got the guys back, I forgot about the six zillion quickloads this required, and I'm all, "Who's the greatest pilot that ever lived? This guy!" Anyway, this concludes my narrative. Thanks for reading this far.

Could you post a screenshot that shows the staging display down the right side of the VAB? That would help identify the problem.

Has anybody else noticed that the little crew portraits on the lower right get brighter or darker depending on whether the windows on the ship are facing the sun? Because they do.

There's no simple answer. There is an optimum, of course, but it depends on a lot of complex math involving drag, the thrust/weight ratio of the ship, etc., and will vary a bit from one design to another. There are some challenges in the challenge section of the forum to try to find the most efficient ascent, but I don't know their names. Personally, I turn about 30 degrees prograde as I leave the lowest atmosphere zone (light blue on the gauge), to 60 on leaving the second zone, and then rotate to horizontal fairly quickly after that. But that's just a rule of thumb, and not at all rigorously derived.

In the sense that part of your acceleration vector is not contributing to vertical ascent? I see.

Galileo proved that the speed with which objects fall is dependant primarily on the mass of the world. 1/6th weight on Kerbin will fall just as fast as anything else on Kerbin, but not hit as hard. There's also aerial drag to consider, though that wouldn't be much if you kept your speed low. I know of no way to simulate alien conditions on the home planet.

But since circularizing the orbit is done with a prograde burn, isn't that fuel you'd need to burn anyway, in the direction you'd need to burn it (prograde) anyway? As long as you're not braking to achieve it, I can't see how circularizing would be a loss.

Orbit is merely a velocity you pass through as you're accelerating, though it's a particular velocity that has the handy property of keeping you going in a circle. It's neither more or less efficient to shut the engines off and leave yourself at that speed for a while before proceeding, unless you're factoring in an Oberth effect from doing more of your burn low in the gravity well, but I'm not sure how much of an effect that would have for the kind of flight that you're doing.

Remember (my) KSP motto: never leave a man behind, unless it would be a really big pain to get him back.

Click on the part you want, but before attaching it to your ship, hit the keys ASDEWQ, each of which will rotate the part 90 degrees in one direction or another, then attach the part. For fine control, hold the shift down while hitting those keys, and the part will be rotated 5 degrees at a time.

It's not so much that you use the sun, and more that you can't avoid being affected by it. What I was trying to say is that any time you are not within some world's sphere of influence, you are, by default, orbiting the sun, so it's not a bad thing. It's just a transitional state that you pass through between one world and another. Nothing is wrong when you're in solar orbit, so you just modify your trajectory to intersect a world and keep going.

Doing the inclination burn halfway to the target is the most efficient way, but not the easiest to eyeball. If you match planes at one of the two spots where your ship's orbit crosses that of the objective, you can watch from the side and burn until they coincide fairly precisely. And yes, it can be done after matching orbital height, if you don't mind the inefficiency.

Short answer: accelerate in the direction of Kerbin's orbital motion to climb to higher orbits, accelerate opposite Kerbin's orbit to fall to lower orbits. Of course, meeting a planet when you get to its orbital height is a matter of timing, and there's no short answer to that. Look at the how-to and tutorials under how-to for interplanetary travel.

I have no mods currently, partially because I just don't like to complicate things, and partially because I'm trying to simplify things to help diagnose that freezing problem. The mods I have used are only to fill in aspects of the game that aren't finished yet, such as the floodlights and Tosh's carts.

There's all kinds of helpful info in the how-to section, but you could also post a screenshot of your ship here and people will try to help out. Are you turning the stability assist (SAS) mode on? Does your ship have any fins, vectoring engines, and/or SAS modules installed? Those will all help with stability.

$30 doesn't sound reasonable to me. I've already had much more fun with KSP than most games that sell for $50, and KSP isn't even done yet. It's worth WAY more than that.

I am too lazy and impatient to do the math. I match orbits at a slightly different altitude, then fast-forward until I get an intercept. Sloppy, but it works.

It's the same problem, just scaled up. What sort of trouble are you having? Solar orbit is just a stage, and a necessary one, between planets. The trick is to make that orbit meet the objective, which is a matter of matching planes and timing. The short and sloppy version is, match planes, set your ship's orbit slightly lower than the target planet (to have your ship catch up to it) or slightly higher than the target planet (to let it catch up with your ship), and fast-forward to an intercept. The scale can be deceptive, though. Planets have much larger SOIs than moons, of course, but on the map view you're zoomed out so far that it looks like you have to match exactly for a capture. It's actually very much like trying to get 2 ships to rendezvous in a planet's orbit. Have you tried that yet? It's very hard, but good practice.

What sort of a problem are you having on launch? Not enough thrust, or stability? I'm asking because, while I'm not familiar with the mod parts you're using, that narrow waist between the stages looks like something that's going to flex an awful lot and throw the ship around violently, resulting in both steering chaos and possibly damage. Struts between the stages would help a great deal, but I also like to build my ships so that the stages overlap vertically, keeping the rocket shorter and providing more connection points for struts. The shorter a ship is, the less it flexes.

Since pirate captains seem to be in short supply at the moment, allow me to welcome you to the forum. Uh, welcome to the forum.

The price didn't increase; the pre-final-version discount decreased. Welcome aboard.