Blu_C

I can help you with #2: Assuming you are using windows it is ALT+F12. It has a whole bunch of options, but I personally recommend against messing with most of them other than perhaps the visualizations for physical forces since those can help you decide what is going wrong with a ship. Instead, if you are looking for a more difficult game you might want to check out the mods forum. There is a whole host of mods that make the game more challenging in different ways (for example, the Real Solar System mod re-scales the entire solar system to be realistically sized and changes engine values to be more realistic).

Since things worked out can you please edit your original post to change the question status to Answered?

The most popular use of the admin building is to use the strategy that boosts income from contracts at a cost to the reputation awarded. In the game reputation is pretty easy to come by so long as you aren't killing your Kerbals and failing a lot of contracts. For the most part the strategies let you make one type of resource (Science, Reputation, Funds) easier to get at the cost of another. Most people find science pretty tight in the early game (at least until you are able to get to the Mun/Minimus) and while you can gain funds fairly easily by gaming the contract system a bit to take very easy and cheap contracts in order to build up cash most people don't enjoy grinding out missions that way. In contrast Reputation is pretty readily available and only affects what type of contracts you get so most people are willing to trade that away in favor of more science/money.

If you want a good walkthrough about how to do this I suggest watching Scott Manley's new series where he is laying out how to do most basic operations: It is especially good at showing how quickly you can start to access different parts of the game and that making mistakes doesn't necessarily end your game.

Personally I actually don't particularly like either and favored the pre-set fairing sizes that came with KW Rocketry. I always thought part of the fun/balance of a fairing should be having to design a payload that fits inside. Yes, I understand that realistically a payload could just have a fairing designed specifically for it, but even so.

If you have an integrated graphics card then anything you can do to reduce the load will help significantly. When I play on my laptop (which also has an integrated card) I basically put everything to the minimum and will still get lag with craft that have a moderate amount of parts. That said, turning off AA and Terrain Scatters will probably give you the biggest boost (Scatter Density I believe is only used to determine how much terrain scatter is on the ground). Reducing Shadow Cascades and Render Quality also typically give me a noticeable boost.

The pointed forward detail depends. At really low airspeeds it doesn't matter much. I only mention this because it is possible to launch a VTOL Jet-assisted Rocket backwards when all the intakes point forwards.

You can achieve something like this with Infernal Robotics. It is certainly possible, but I've found that the benefits aren't worth the hassle beyond the cool factor. The KSP aerodynamic model isn't that realistic, even now. That said if you want to give it a try take a look at Infernal Robotics.

I think the real thing that people have against MechJeb is that there is a feeling that people who use it only ever use it and don't try to learn how to do things on their own. Cannot say how true this is, but you can also equally argue that watching MechJeb do something (like a launch or landing) can let you learn how to do it yourself or that once you already know how to do stuff it can be nice to be able to just tell MechJeb to do it for you since you already know how to circularize things. Personally I've been taking a different approach. While I like the idea that rockets can be automated (especially when using RemoteTech) I feel like there should be more involved than simply attaching a part and then having it do all the flying for me. So I've picked up kOS and written my own launch program (and am in the process of writing similar programs for other common operations). I really like this because although I now am slowly building an autopilot (for lack of a better term) it is one that I have cobbled together myself using the things I have figured out, which feels much more like a real space program to me. It also gives me the opportunity to have realistic launch failures as a result of bugs in my code or setting parameters incorrectly (such as when I accidentally told my rocket to fly to an apoptosis of 100 meters instead of 100km). It makes my whole space program feel significantly more real. But then I also keep in mind that different people are playing the game for different things. I want a very hard, realistic approach to the game and run mods in an attempt to achieve that. Other people are more concerned with simply building a thing and getting it into orbit. They just want to see it in action and are less concerned with the actual flying. And then there are people who are more into testing their own ability to fly something even - or especially - when things go wrong. As long as the person is having fun doing it I'd say that they are playing the game properly according to their goals. Seriously, why is there this big argument over how to play the game 'right?' Is it that horrible if someone is having fun playing the game in a way that is different from how you enjoy it?

This is actually pretty easy for the Mun. Wait until the moon is a bit more than 90 degrees off from the KSC and then launch, then continue your burn until you lift your apoapsis up to the mun's altitude. You may have to try a couple times to get a feel for how to do it, but it is actually pretty easy and modestly more efficient than circularizing in between. As a shortcut simply target the moon (so you are going to need some career building upgrades if you are doing this there), then end your gravity turn with your nose pointed directly at the Mun. Ideally it should be at or near the horizon, though the Mun's SOI is pretty big so you have a fair amount of fudge room.

Another comment here: The load at the top of your rocket isn't very aerodynamic at all. You may want to consider putting a Fairing around it or redesigning it. This will make it less likely to catch the airflow when you pick up speed.

Also in the Administration building you will notice there is a Bailout option. It gives you a rather large lump of cash at a cost of a TON of reputation. This will make it so that you both get money and are given easier to complete contracts (at least until your reputation builds back up).

It can be done and I have done it, depending on what you consider a continuous burn. I will sometimes for fun cut throttle back some and such, which real rockets generally are unable to do. To be honest, it isn't worth the effort since it really requires babying the rocket a lot during the ascent. Although you might think it would be easier in reality it is just a pain in the butt and probably too difficult for a new player to manage when contending with all the other things KSP demands you pay attention to.

I should also mention here that ships are not typically shared between save games, so make sure you are in the correct saved game.

This would probably be a fairly simple mod (basically a texture replacer), however I suspect a lot of people prefer the kerbals for a bunch of reasons. For one, they are cute and (I at least) have grown pretty attached to them. I could also see an argument about how changing them to humans may limit the ability of educators to use KSP as a teaching tool since people could protest over a game where kids can intentionally build death traps for their astronauts/kerbonaughts should they be humans (of course, as a mod that isn't likely to be an issue).

You should have PLENTY of dV to get back so long as your apoapsis high enough that it will encounter Kerbin's SOI, but it is going to take a very long time. What you can do is create a bunch of manuver nodes. Make sure Kerbin is your target and each new manuver node (after the first) happens after your craft would pass Kerbin's orbit. As you add more nodes for your subsequent passes you should see that you should be able to see how close you get to kerbin on every pass. Keep adding nodes until you see something that looks reasonably close. Then, at that point, make very small adjustments to the first node and watch how it affects the closest encounter. Because you have such an early manuver node compared to the encounter the deltaV required will be very small. From there, once you are close to your kerbin encounter, you can adjust your orbit to try and get a capture orbit with aerocapture. Just be careful on the heating.

If you have it on steam, steam will update it automatically (so long as you don't move the files from the steam folder). If you have it through the KSP store instead, you can either just follow the instructions for the Launcher.exe OR re-download it from the store (that download is always the latest version).

^-- This, however Stage Recovery is currently not working and the modder has asked for a couple days to figure out what is going on. It is likely the recent hotfix Squad launched changed something the mod depended on.

It depends on if you are running stock or using a lot of mods. I run a fairly modded game and am around 1.7GB.

I'm not having luck either. Only I don't get any Adding Funds log message or errors. It is properly detecting when stages should be destroyed, but even with the latest real chutes it seems to be not recognizing recoverable stages, not even sending a log message.

I presume that SHIP:HEADING would return the ship's relative position to itself, is there any way to get a ship's current compass heading? EDIT: While I am asking I may as well also wonder if there is an easy way to get it's pitch relative to the horizon or roll relative to level flight too.

Ok, I see a couple problems that may be contributing, though I'm not sure if they are the actual issue. 1) Your center of gravity looks pretty high, which makes your rover much more likely to topple. 2) It is hard to read because of the video's res. but it looks like you were going about 8m/s? That is pretty fast for rovers in this game. It is possible that the forces you got at the bottom of the hill caused a structural failure (you didn't include the end of mission report, though, so I cannot confirm). From those two alone I would try redesigning. First I would try for a wider wheel base with more space between the front and back wheels. I would also attempt to reinforce them with struts. Maybe add another pair of wheels at the midsection to help bear the load. If that doesn't help it may be a problem with the physics of the wheels (people have been reporting them behaving a little weird in 1.0.0, and I am not sure if they made any fixes there).

I don't believe there are any mods that do that specifically, but I'm willing to bed that with Infernal Robotics you could make something similar.

The old MechJeb used to have a part (a couple actually) that was effectively this. That is where I would start looking.

Heh, that second one of yours is almost identical to the first one I got to work in 1.0 for myself (replace the docking port with a cargo bay and the crew compartment with more fuel though).