papagoose

I would guess one strategy to follow would be - Orbit Mun at some calculated altitude - Use liquid rockets to reduce orbital velocity to 0, and hover - Hover as precisely as possible at this calculated altitude - Cut off liquid engines and drop down - Ignite SRB at precisely computed height - Make sure the pod is controllable enough to remain perfectly upright - Win. I don't know offhand how difficult it will be to compute the height...well, for x being the altitude, we have something like d^2x/dt^2 = -m(t)F_g(x) + m(t)F_r(t) where F_g is the gravitational force which depends on altitude, F_r is the SRB thrust and the dependence on time comes from the time of ignition (it is a step function that is zero at all times except when it is the constant thrust produced by the SRB when it is burning), the target condition is x=0,dx/dt = 0 and F_r(t) = 0 at x = 0, so then integrate backwards for the duration of time the SRB burns for, and this will give the required vertical velocity at the altitude when the SRB should be lit. Then, work out how long a freefall (from orbital hovering) is required to arrive at this altitude with the correct velocity. It would make sense to do something like aim for a landing velocity of dx/dt = -5m/s or something so that there is a bit of leeway, as long as the lander was designed to sustain a -10m/s impact or something.

I would have thought it was the opposite- newbies who can't figure out how to fly might just give up instead of persisting. The kind of person who enjoys the challenge of figuring out how to do it manually is the same kind of person who, if given mechjeb from the start, would decide they wanted to learn how to fly manually. That being said, the idea of earning mechjeb is a fantastic one...maybe after a couple of initial flights e.g. after attaining orbit for the first time.

The notion that all mods should be free is ridiculous. An ideal example is the third-party addon community for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Companies such as Precision Manuals (PMDG) create an aircraft that can only be used within the proprietary simulator, and they charge for it about as much as FSX itself costs, if not more! Of course, the quality of the addon matters a lot- and whether it would actually work financially here is a completely different issue. But the question is not whether all mods should be free, it is to what extent marketing and business should be done on the official KSP forum. It is not as though PMDG are able to advertise on the Microsoft website. The question is where the line should be drawn- is it banning a paypal donation link in the forum post? What about a link to your own page that has a donate button on it? What if the only way to download the mod is from your own website...should you then have your own forum to discuss your work? Does having a KSP forum thread about your paid mod constitute an advertisement for it? These are the real hard questions

Well one issue I have is that often the rocket simply isn't strong enough without lots of structural supports e.g. strapping on 3 side tanks requires 5 supports per tank. So very quickly, instead of having 6 parts (3 tanks + 3 side decouplers), you have 21. And as the rockets get bigger, you need more and more just to keep it controllable. Thus by making the standard connections more rigid and stronger, it would be easy to reduce the part count by requiring less struts. Similarly, as others have said, taller tanks would allow stacks of like 5 tanks to become 1 part. But my pet peeve is that if I'm using time warp on approach to Kerbin re-entry, it doesn't automatically reduce the simulation rate when approaching the atmosphere. That is, if I'm near Minmus in an orbit with a periapsis of say 20km, at normal speed this will result in landing on Kerbin. But if I crank up the simulation rate to full, it just keeps orbiting and orbiting.