Vanamonde

I don't mind the story so much, as not many people would bother to figure out how to do something like that, and it's nice to encourage the guy. But yes, the story is aggravating because reporters are generally idiots who get things wrong because they don't know better, or because they're trying to make the story more dramatic than it is. "His pictures are comparable to the images that NASA's team produces after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on technologically advanced satellites." Yeah, "comparable" in the same way that my KSP screenshots are comparable to Curiousity's images. (This made me so mad I posted my first-ever comment on a news or Youtube piece.)

Not to me, it wasn't. I was playing the game for about three months, laboriously switching back and forth just like you, before I saw Pebble_Garden steering on the map view in one of his tutorial videos, and asked him how to do it. KSP is almost a different game, once you know this little trick.

Is it the reddish ship markers that are lying around, or the white debris markers? If the capsule survives a crash, you need to "end flight" it or the reddish marker will stay there forever.

It really helps if you can post pictures of your ship.

It's a pretty ship, but I'm afraid I'm not seeing the "plane" part of the rocket plane. How the heck did you land it?

Don't do that! Steering towards 90 adds the speed of Kerbin's rotation to your flight speed, whereas steering at 270 SUBTRACTS Kerbin's rotation from your flight speed. Approaching Mun at 270 puts you on a collision course with a body that's coming at you at 542.5m/s, so you have to burn to kill off that much speed just so you don't crash into it. In short, compass heading 270 wastes lakes of additional fuel.

That can happen when you change the patched conics settings: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/16172-How-to-change-Patched-Conics-mode?highlight=patched+conics It's just a matter of the curve projection getting confused when you try to have it think too far ahead. Your ship won't actually do that.

Rover odysseys I have made:

Interesting detail: water is one of the substances that take up MORE space in solid form. Water expands as it transforms into ice, which is why ice floats: same mass but greater volume = lower density = bouyancy. But how is this issue a controversy? The incompressibility of liquids is part of the definition of that phase of matter. American Heritage: "The state of matter in which a substance exhibits a characteristic readiness to flow, little or no tendency to disperse, and relatively high incompressibility. " Merriam-Webster: "a fluid (as water) that has no independent shape but has a definite volume and does not expand indefinitely and that is only slightly compressible" Nasa.gov: "Regardless of gravity, a liquid has a fixed volume."

From a distance: On the map view, put your trajectory line directly over but a little beyond the target location. As you approach and brake, the curve will gradually fall onto the spot where you want to land. There's nothing magic or necessary about this; it's just that since you're braking anyway, your trajectory will tend to fall, and this helps prevent it from getting out of hand. When you get close, it's easier to brake harder and come down straighter than it is to find yourself coming in too low, which requires speeding upwards, wasting fuel, possibly over-correcting, etc. Final approach: Set the camera looking past your ship at about a 45 degree angle to the target location. From that vantage, it's very easy to see if your ship is drifting to the sides or up/down. Neither of this is the "correct" technique, but just things that I have found helpful.

On the map view, if you hit the decimal key on the keypad, the navball will pop up. While it's there, you can steer and throttle up and down while watching your trajectory line change in real time. Not all controls are accessible this way, though. For example, you can't activate/eject stages from map view.

Maybe on some websites, but you won't find that to be the case around here. The short version is, get to orbit first, then learn how to aim not for where Mun is right now, but where it will be when you get that high. Check out this guy's tutorial videos: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/showthread.php/15652-Orbital-Mechanics-101-A-Kerbal-Space-Program-Tutorial (They're actually at the top of the how-to forum page.) (By the way, nivvydaskri, that is one awesome diagram. It's like "Matisse's guide to Mun shots.")

I think kodemunkey is talking about that minor glitch that makes tail connectors extremely difficult to attach in certain places. If that is what you're talking about, they fight you a lot, but you can make them go where you want eventually. Try taking off the part you want to attach the connector to, stick it back on the plane at some angle that the tail connector doesn't complain about, attach the tail connector to it, then move the whole assembly back where you wanted it in the first place.

As I understand it, it's the other way around. The mass of the vehicle is already taken into account in the delta-v calculations, so if you change the mass, the delta-v changes. (Which is a quick and dirty version of what Bluejayek said.)

It won't while you're flying, but will while you're on the ground.

I tried using chutes that way, but they just ripped off. There's some limit to how much speed or force they can handle.

I wonder why NASA never used that "invert the ship 100 feet over the launchpad" technique? I was very amused that you got those two improbable ships to Mun, and then 2 of the kerbals missed hopping onto the dance floor. When you started bouncing the kerbals around on the platform, it gave me an idea. What if your next nightclub was an orbital/zero-G club? You know how some people have made ships that are hollow boxes? Why not put a light rack inside and start rolling the ship around. Think of the possibilities for kerbal bouncing! (I've forgotten how to make kerbals run. What key is that?)

I used to live half an hour from Miramar about the time that Top Gun came out, when the armed forces went all-out to exploit the free publicity as a recruiting tool. That spoiled me on airshows. Nothing else seemed impressive after that.

I'm not sure how wise it would be in the real world, but in the game, the capsule itself will do most of the braking, and you can indeed leave the chute until quite late. Experimenting with 1-man capsules, I've triggered the chute at 300m and it opened with about 8m to go, and I spashed down just fine. It's not advisable to play chicken with the planet like that, of course, but it was an interesting experiment.

Anything you do to close the gap wil inevitably loose you the altitude match. That's just the laws of orbital mechanics. You can speed up, but that will cause you to rise above it, and then you'll need to burn down to correct. Or you can brake (counter-intuitive as it sounds) which will cause you to drop below it, thereby speed up and overtake it, but then you'll need to burn up to meet the target again. Those are pretty much your only options. It's an unnatural situation to have two objects orbiting at the same altitude but different speeds, so you'll need to just keep making burns until you're close enough to finalize things with RCS, which is 20km or less. Personally, I would speed up because that approach is a bit less complicated to carry out.

I am still being asked if I want to update the patcher every time I start the game. Has there been any word yet about how to tell if the patch has been updated? The file properties say it was modified at the time I last agreed, but the dialog box just keeps coming up.

If you're talking about the white-ish ripples, there's a bit of a glitch in the way light sources shine on the surfaces of worlds. Those hills are receiving direct sunlight, even though the planet should be in the way.

Tab only switches the camera settings on the map screen. The square brackets keys [ and ] will transfer you between ships and objects, if they are close enough to each other. On the map view you can double-click to switch to another ship, kerbal, or piece of debris, but also only within a certain distance. Otherwise, you'll need to go through the tracking station.

There is no Kerbin 2 on the map view. Unless it has a planetary cloaking device, I suspect parts of this account to be fabrications.

Have a couple of the guys EVA while you're still on the pad. Or if you're feeling mean, on the way to the Mun.