Eric S

Personally, for Munar landings, the Apollo style isn't worth the extra work unless you want the feeling of accomplishment. Just getting back into orbit from the Munar surface is 75% of the delta-v required for the entire trip home. Having a separate descent/ascent stage is even worse. I've had to make custom tanks just so that my landing stage didn't have so much fuel it could land, take off, and go back to kerbin all by itself. The reason this worked well for the LEM is because the LEM was designed to cut every corner possible as far as mass went (I seem to remember it didn't even have seats), and there's no way it could have survived reentry. In KSP, we don't have a manned pod that can't survive reentry. We also don't have the quantity of equipment that we can leave down there and still get the science benefit. As for leaving things on the Munar surface, sometimes I do, but only drop tanks and maybe the landing struts attached to them. Leaving an engine down there is a waste, since you're almost never leaving enough mass down there to allow for a smaller engine. Every LEM-style lander I've used on the Mun has had two identical engines, so I bailed on that design and went with drop tanks instead. The only exception to that is when I do a lander that's got enough delta-v to hit several biomes on the same trip, in which case I might throw a pair of 48-7S's on the bottoms of two of the drop tanks. Vanamonde, if you want to improve that design, ditch the 909. The 48-7S may only be half the thrust, but it will still be more than enough, and at a fifth the mass, will easily get you more delta-v despite the lower ISP with tanks that small.

I think it goes farther than that, I got the impression that the lab was only one part of a bigger feature set being added to science. This is above and beyond whatever they're doing to nerf repeated transmissions.

From what I understand, this, or something like it, is expected in 0.23. They've only hinted at it, so no clue how close to your suggestion it will work.

One more for team Solar Panels. RCS really isn't very helpful until you're trying to dock, and you need a lot more research to get docking ports. As others have said, returning from the Mun or Minmus is rather easy. About 75% of the delta-v it takes to return to Kerbin from the Mun's surface is just the delta-v it takes to get off of the Mun's surface, so I find that a lunar rendezvous mission profile takes more than it returns. Not to mention the fact that if you don't return the capsule that landed, you won't get science points for landing on the Mun or for the EVA reports and surface sample(s) stored in the capsules. In my campaign saves, the only thing I use RCS for is for adjusting orbits on fairly light craft, and an LV-1 still beats RCS since RCS isn't throttleable. By the time I'm doing something ambitious enough to need docking ports, I've finished the tech tree.

Rather than take my rover with me, I combine my lander with a rover. It actually works out fairly well. It's not perfectly balanced, but it's close enough that SAS barely has to try to keep it on target.

To be honest, it breaks down to three categories plus a few "bonus" categories. First is actual piloting. Then there's ship design, and then mission planning. On piloting, he's good, I haven't seen any that I consider better, but I haven't looked hard. Ship design, not so much. He often does something I find surprisingly effective, but at other times, he misses something or tries something I know will cause problems. Mission planning tends to fall into things that vary from straight forward to well beyond my abilities, and on the latter, I haven't seen anyone eclipse him. The bonus categories: he's educational to watch, and not just about KSP, and he can make anything seem fun. For crying out loud, he made early versions of "Papers Please" look fun to me, and that's a game I'd hate to play. So, I don't think he's the best KSP player in every way, but I don't know anyone that beats him in every way either, so he's definitely one of the better players and beyond my skill level.

Minor clarification just so that people don't go ballistic when this doesn't happen: Harvester said "soon" rather than "in 0.23" and given that the devs have said that money won't be in 0.23, I'm working under the believe that soon meant 0.24, maybe 0.25. Given the fact that they mentioned that 0.23 may go into experimentals soon in yesterday's livestream, 0.24 may be sooner than some would expect.

An SoI by itself doesn't fully define a frame of reference. An orbital frame of reference doesn't rotate, the frame of reference when your navball is in "surface" mode does rotate. An easy way to see the difference is to switch the navball between orbital and surface modes while doing a parachute landing on Kerbin when the parachutes are fully deployed (so you're moving less than 20m/s). Your surface mode prograde marker will be almost directly down, your orbit mode prograde marker will be almost directly horizontal, since your orbital velocity is much higher than your rate of descent. As I understand it, it is possible to get SMARTASS to track the surface-relative prograde/retrograde in the advanced mode, but I've never played around with that.

Yeah, I expect they'll leave the unified fuel alone, they haven't shown too much interest in that level of detail in the past.

Correct, the limitation is that currently, they'd need to duplicate all the fuel tank parts in "fuel only" variants. The devs have stated that they plan on changing the way the Atomic Rocket Engine so that it only uses fuel, no oxidizer, when they add the tweakables, as that will let them have "fuel only" fuel tanks without needing multiple parts. And coincidentally, tweakables are planned for 0.23, so we could be seeing this change to the LV-N very soon. Also, there were variants on the atomic rocket engine idea that did "consume" the radioactive materials, I believe those were referred to as various types of "open cycle" engines, as opposed to "closed cycle" variants, so that may be an additional source of confusion on the subject.

Personally, I've done it in four and could easily do it in three if I lined up all of my ambitious missions into one career mode save, though I find myself taking a few more now that I've stopped spamming transmitted science.

Kerbal Engineer Redux has all that in the orbital section. It's lighter than MJ, but not as light as something dedicated to just orbital info (in flight, it has four sections, and orbital is one of those four).

64-bit code and multithreading are two separate issues. You can do one without the other, and having one doesn't make the other any easier.

Just so that no one gets the wrong idea, a 64-bit client and running on all cores are two separate issues, a 64-bit client doesn't get to fully utilize multiple cores for free. And really, even "running on all cores" doesn't matter unless the physics simulation workload can get split between the cores, and I don't see that happening before 2.0 (or some form of expansion), since in all honesty, it will probably take an engine swap, or at least switching to something else for physics simulations. That said, the Unity upgrade will at least eliminate some of the stability issues of a 64 bit windows client, and the devs sound more hopeful than they have in the past on the subject.

I've only had one time I really wished I was recording things. I was testing an escape pod for use on my space station. It was pretty simple. A hitchhiker pod, a probe pod, RCS and RCS thrusters, a battery, sepratrons, and parachutes. First test, I learned that the hitchhiker pod is a bit on the fragile side, everything worked fine until the actual touchdown, at which time the hitchiker pod blew up. Tried it again with more radial parachutes, and this time it splashed down fine. Decided I wanted to make sure that it was safe for a ground landing as well, so I tested it again. Everything was going fine. It came down, parachutes deployed, and the escape pod slowed down to a nice slow descent, and landed. On the side of a hill. The RCS tank was on the bottom, so the whole pod fell over, at which point it started to roll down the hill. I figured the radial parachutes or sepratrons would stop it. Nope, those got ripped right off. It starts rolling faster... and faster. I'm wondering how long it's going to take to stop rolling, though at least it's rolling towards a valley rather than the coastline. Then, just as it hits the bottom of the hill, it either spun too fast or hit a bump, and the hitchhiker pod explodes. Again. At this point I was laughing so hard I couldn't even begin to work on the redesign.

Not quite what he said. To clarify, he said that the tech tree organization was taking the place of a more traditional tutorial for new players, and as a way of changing the challenge for veteran players. The more important clarification being that he was talking about the tech tree, not about career mode overall.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear on that. I know that there are moons that are tidally locked. Heck, Duna is tidally locked to Ike which is tidally locked to Duna. I was referring the forces that create tidal locking, which makes it harder to create something like the ISS where the same part of the station always faces earth. So no, not a very significant effect for most players, but someone coming from a real celestial mechanics background might notice the lack of it.

I'll third that. I use KER in the VAB and MJ in flight, and that's one of the reasons I use KER in the VAB.

You probably mean mass (mass and weight aren't the same thing), and MJ already outputs in the metric system. The masses are in kg in some places, mg in others, but usually not labeled as such. If you want kg, you either have them, or you have mg (also known as a metric ton, or 1000 kg).

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've never had a problem with that. Then again, you can't have the the science jr. without having radial parachutes, and I usually put a pair of those on any craft that's returning with a science jr.

The lack of N-body physics is the biggest issue, with "on rails" calculations being the second largest issue, as Smidge204 says, as far as orbital mechanics. Other minor issues would be the lack of tidal locking and barycenters. I'm not sure how you can say that Kerbin's year is too short for it's path, unless someone botched the precomputed orbit for Kerbin. The planets are on rails, which is to say that they're following precomputed orbits, but I suspect that the precomputed orbits were computed with the relevant gravitational factors in mind. Once you look beyond orbital mechanics, other things pop up, like the aerodynamics model which is at best a gross approximation.

Alternate solution. http://www.reddit.com/user/KSPDevTeam. Shows the recent posts by the reddit user that they're using to post answers.

It just occurred to me that it's fairly easy to work this out with two mods. Hyperedit and the one (I use it but can't remember the name of it) that summarizes your research history, since it includes a sum of how much science you've earned, and how much is remaining in the various biome/experiment combinations that you have done. Create a capsule with one of each science part, a transmitter, and power, then hyperedit it into each biome. Transmit one set of complete results in each biome (over each biome, etc). Pull up the addon and add how much you've earned with how much is left to earn. I might just do that for the curiosity factor.

It's at least a multiple of the amount needed to unlock the entire tech tree, as people have unlocked the whole tree without going into the solar SoI. I'm usually unlocking all of it on my first or second interplanetary mission, and I have yet to do more than one munar landing mission, so I'm missing a lot of science there.

Gameplay yes, but not just because it's easier (because that's just a matter of balancing TWR and ISP of engines), but because it takes less time. As was pointed out above, LEO orbital period is about three times as long as LKO, and the transfer time of a Hohmann transfer orbit to the Mun is probably going to be at least three times faster than a Hohmann transfer to the Mun. That's not too bad, timewarp fixes that, but then there's the fact that there's time you can't timewarp through that gets magnified if you don't downscale the universe. Launch burns take longer, transfer burns take longer, etc.