Spatzimaus

So glad to hear that the physics bits are starting to get sorted out; this mod has been one of my must-haves for quite a while. The tracks were essential for my larger (400+ ton) rovers, obviously. Also, I'm a big fan of multirole vehicles and one of my favorite designs was an electric prop-and-ion engine SSTO seaplane capable of flying itself to Laythe or Eve to act as an emergency all-terrain recovery vehicle; while early versions tried all sorts of pontoon setups, these repulsors made it MUCH more practical. But this comment made me want to ask a question: So, the question is, how "launch-y" CAN you make things while still being controllable in normal situations? I get that you've been trying to adhere to real-world physics as much as possible, but is it possible to make completely different styles of repulsor by taking advantage of these springiness issues? Can you add an active "jump jet" mode to normal repulsors, to let them briefly get in the air? One of the biggest problems I had with that multirole plane mentioned above was taking back OFF from the surface of the water, since I couldn't easily pitch the nose up while on the ocean, and this'd avoid that. But take it further, and imagine three distinct styles of repulsor: 1> A "classic" kind that's ideal for ground-effect vehicles and/or a landing gear replacement for planes; more-or-less useless at altitudes of more than a few meters, and a "soft" deceleration curve (i.e., the repulsive force scales up at altitudes approaching zero, but not THAT quickly). That soft curve minimizes strain on airframes, but is only really useful for things flying more-or-less horizontally at surface level as anything vertical would bottom out on the ground before its velocity zeroes. It also isn't very suitable for vehicles floating across the surface of a craggy moon (like Mun), where the surface can go from horizontal to 45 degrees instantly, although it'd do fine on Minmus. 2> A straight lifting repulsor; less efficient, and with very little ground effect (force nearly independent of altitude), but resulting in a much higher altitude ceiling. Basically, a helicopter-style setup that doesn't require rotors and such but that requires a lot more micromanagement to fly. You could use these to reduce the need for large wing surfaces as well on engine-heavy aircraft, a la the Snowspeeders on Hoth. It'd also be a way to reduce or replace parachutes on high-tech designs, but VTOLs are what I'd want the most. 3> At the other extreme, a "hard" repulsor to replace/supplement landing gear for large high-tech rockets with lots of battery power to burn at the end of their flights. Huge energy drain (so unusable for general ground-effect use) but with as high of a deceleration in those last few meters as a pilot can safely survive, so that it'd be nearly impossible to catastrophically crash. If you add an active jump jets to your Mun rovers to clear crater walls, this'd be what you'd use to safely land. (My old wheel-based Mun rover kept throwing tires every time it hit a sharp bump at speed; this, combined with the first type, would avoid that. And you'd have plenty of time to charge the batteries back up between uses, so the energy cost wouldn't be an issue.) Similar concepts could be applied to old-fashioned wheels, I'm sure. This'd help keep this mod's wheels distinct from the stock rover wheels. But repulsors came to mind first, as they're the least constrained by reality...

Honestly, there are a LOT of things that could probably be handled like this. It's just way too easy to complete certain missions with craft that weren't designed for those particulars. Outpost missions? Land a larger rocket with a lander can, some wheels stuck to the side, etc. During the time it's sitting on the surface, the game counts it as a base, so as long as it's got all the bells and whistles it'll complete the contract. Science missions? Unmanned tiny lander with a thermometer, or an orbiting one with a grav sensor, can repeat these as necessary, and they'll pay for themselves after a few iterations for the nearby bodies and a single mission for the further stuff. They also work well as comm links to KSC, if you give them a decent antenna. Heck, I got my 1.2 career going by accepting six "recover a kerbonaut in low Mun orbit" missions at once, sending a single rocket with an Apollo capsule and lander can (all empty except the pilot), and recovering them all at once. The cash payout was insane, and set me up to send unmanned probes to every body in the system. While this does fit within the letter of the contracts, it probably wasn't intended when they decided the payouts (most of which would otherwise have gone to pay overhead on six separate launches). The problem with your suggested fix, though, is that many unmanned probes in KSP were initially attached to a manned vessel. It's cheaper to stick a 2-ton ion probe on the side of a 120-ton booster while it's busy launching your manned Mun landers than it is to launch the probe on its own dedicated rocket. Should it be disqualified because, at launch, it was part of a "manned" vessel? No matter how you parse it, there'd be abuses, and this is a single-player game with cheat options so it's not like people couldn't control the situation for themselves. Best to just let it go. Besides, half the fun of KSP is overengineering things, so it's not like people will cut corners that often just for the sake of completing one extra mission. I mean, back in 0.90 I launched this monstrosity, dubbed Mun Unit Zappa: When you're landing a 600-ton rover on Mun, launched by a ridiculously massive (~11 kton) SSTO booster "brick" setup, cost is not really a concern any more. There are no contracts requiring a rover that huge, when the dinky 25-ton rover in the foreground can serve just as well, but where's the fun in limiting yourself?

Dunes. There was a LOT of hopping on the terrain when I landed, and I'm amazed it didn't tumble during the LONG braking, but it somehow made it down in one piece. It's not easy to see from the picture, but it's got metric buttloads of lift. First, the Mk2 parts used as its fuselage base provide a little lift. Then, I used wing segments above and below the main fuselage to smooth out the design. And finally, that wing, while it looks small, is actually a triple wing with two full "shell" sections above and below a swiss cheese'd middle wing, like so: That's with the top wing shell removed. Here's a shot where you can better see the shapes of the shells: Point is, it had a LOT of lift, primarily due to my using wing segments for aesthetic reasons. I had no problems at all taking off from Duna and returning to orbit, and I didn't need to stand on the tail to do it. In 1.02, that much wing would be horrible for drag on Kerbin, of course.

I didn't really have a problem back in 0.90: That was my long-range SSTO spaceplane, designed to go straight to Laythe from Kerbin without refueling. On a whim I tried it out on Duna, and it landed just fine. Granted, I'll bet that part of it was my use of the B9 landing gear (which has better shock absorption than the stock small gear) but it still wasn't bad at all for a complete dead-stick landing. I'd bet that a big part of it is lift. That spaceplane design had plenty of lift for 0.90, so it could handle Duna's thin atmosphere just fine. In 1.02, everyone's using less wing on their Kerbin-ascending designs due to the new drag rules, and it's now just not nearly enough for Duna. A Duna-specific design in 1.02 might be just fine (although I think you'd really need something like the Firespitter electric propellers).

Kerbin's orbit around the sun has a semimajor axis of 1.3E10m, with zero eccentricity. Mun's orbital semimajor axis around Kerbin is 1.2E7m, again with zero eccentricity. So, the closest point and furthest point are only ~0.2% different in distance, meaning a 0.4% discrepancy in insolation between opposite parts of the orbit. (This'd also change the temperature of illuminated objects by 0.1%, or about 0.3 degrees Celsius, but that's not really relevant here.) Of course, we're only talking about half that difference since it'll be nighttime for the other half of each orbit, so the distance change would explain a ~0.2% difference in solar panel power output for a body in vacuum, assuming no energy is being reflected from the Mun itself. That's not quite enough to explain the observed disparity, although it's on the same order. (Yes, I used to teach radiative astrophysics, but this is well below that level.) Not surprising. Finding out if there's an unobstructed line of sight between two arbitrary points is not an easy process, since you basically have to move along the line checking terrain heights at each point. Sure, most of the line will be far, far above any terrain, but those aren't the parts you worry about. The accuracy of the answer will depend on how finely detailed the terrain mesh is (since the terrain is just a series of polygons connecting a grid of discrete data points), as well as how large a step size you use on the LOS check. I'd guess they're erring on the side of caution on either end, only turning the sunlight "off" when they're SURE it's obstructed, and only turning it "on" in the morning when they're sure it's visible again. Anything more than that would probably use up too much processor time to be worth the effort, given how rarely you'll actually care about those situations. That's not to say that you'll never care; I just landed a small probe almost directly on Duna's south pole, where even minor variations in the Sun's height above the horizon will change whether or not the surrounding hills block the light. But that's a rare circumstance, so I accept the headaches it might cause. (Yes, I used to develop simulation software involving terrain models.) ------------------ And yes, it's a lot of fun having these conversations about KSP. Where else can you learn stuff AND blow up things at the same time? Besides Detroit, I mean. I worry a bit that the new aero model will make the game a bit less accessible as a learning tool for schools, as it makes the game quite a bit less forgiving, but in general KSP is still an excellent way to learn physics. (Yes, I used to live in Detroit.)

More likely, it's that the aiming isn't perfect. To keep the internal simulation running at a reasonable speed, they probably do things like have the solar panels stick to integer numbers of degrees of rotation, and there's probably some rounding on the solar angles as well. So, even though it says 1.00 Exposure, it might be varying by a percent or so simply based on the fact that internally it's actually varying from 0.995 to 1.005 (yes, I know it's physically impossible to go above 1.00, but internal rounding CAN do that). That'd explain the 1% variation seen in those shots.

If your craft is a spaceplane, and you're talking about a payload to be deployed in orbit, the much easier solution is to disable the payload's tanks (right click on the part, click on the little green icon next to the LiquidFuel readout to change it to red) so that the craft doesn't consume it at all. Once you've deployed, reverse the process.

So do I. My little lander (nothing but a probe core, a small parachute, a 0.625m inline battery, four of the lightest legs, a thermometer, and an antenna) has four OX-STATs placed around the sides. Obviously these can't track the Sun, so they're not useful for this sort of test, but I was amazed to see how little energy they produced even at the optimum times of day. It took hours to refill the batteries from even a single thermometer reading. ------------- As to the astrophysics of this, it's pretty realistic if you look at total solar energy. On Earth, the Sun produces 1367 W/m^2 of energy. When directly overhead, about 83% gets through the atmosphere. Three hours before or after (45 degrees off-angle) and you're down to about 80% of THAT amount, i.e. 65ish%. Five hours before or after the peak (75 degrees off, or 15 degrees above the horizon) and you're down to about 25% of the total amount (30% of the in-atmosphere peak). The Kerbin numbers in the OP match this almost exactly, and it does explain Eve's horrible surface numbers (very thick atmosphere), which makes yet another reason to ditch solar panels and use RTGs as soon as you can. The catch is, solar panels don't absorb every wavelength of light equally well. Like a lot of other things (mirrors, digital cameras, the human eye, etc.), you'd want something that was optimized for the types of radiation that do get through our atmosphere with less absorption, i.e. visible light, radio waves, and to a lesser extent infrared. So, the amounts might actually go up quite a bit depending on the chemistry involved, especially as you approach sunset. Although, this'd be different for other planets with different atmospheres, so unless we want to assume the panels are "tuned" for each body's particular absorption spectrum we should probably just stick with the numbers we have now. Still, it's yet another example of how the devs have done their physics homework.

Exactly this. All of my boosters are like this, now. Remember, you don't need to aim exactly; just get in the general ballpark of KSC to recover most of your money.

They've rebalanced the electricity production, but I think it needs quite a bit of work. First, because of the new temperature dependence issues; an OX-STAT on Eve produces almost nothing, which has caused problems for the unmanned lander I put there. (Transmit one temperate report, and it takes hours to recharge off multiple panels.) Second, because the panels are so useless once you get out to Jool that you pretty much HAVE to use multiple RTGs to power any ions; I don't want the old distance scaling, but the base values might need a bit of tweaking upwards. I haven't had a problem with this; you generally just let atmospheric braking slow your incoming design down until the shockwave effects go away (400-500m/s), and THEN pop the chutes. Assuming you have enough parachutes on your design for its mass, it'll be just fine; old designs that used the souposphere might have insufficient braking under the new model, so you might need to just add more. Of course, you could also try adding drogues, or changing the settings on your chutes, but I haven't seen much need for that sort of multi-phase braking. Their use is that they're dirt cheap. You might have a fully recoverable liquid fuel launcher that uses disposable SRBs; it won't cost you nearly as much as an all-liquid design would, despite being a bit heavier. Sure, a liquid engine has higher efficiencies, but the larger LFO engines get REALLY expensive. Here's one of my own setups, to illustrate: That's a 7-man lander on top, designed to move people to Mun, Minmus, or for brief hops out of the SOI to get Sun credit. Great for training unskilled kerbonauts, and it also counts as a station/base since it has power, a docking port, etc. so I can get big money from those contracts. The booster is fully recoverable (probe core and all), but the SRBs get thrown away on the way up. The booster setup has enough delta-V to get into orbit with ~900m/s to spare, detach the payload, and safely return near the KSC. (The big black tanks are from KW Rocketry; they're just big LFO tanks that attach radially, nothing special.)

This one surprised me too, at first, but honestly it's just meant that I don't hire Kerbals. I've got a fleet of 1-man recovery vessels (costs ~22k on the pad, almost half of which gets recovered on landing) designed to grab stranded kerbonauts from low orbit. Basically it's an old Mk1 cockpit (launched empty), a probe core and small battery, a couple solar panels, a 1.25m heat shield, a couple parachutes, and some legs. (Newer versions add some RCS jets and monoprop, but the original just used a small, detachable liquid stage for orbital maneuvers.) Mount it on top of some SRBs and you can get to orbit with more than enough delta-V to spare, while still keeping costs to a minimum. I put several of these up at a ~90km orbit, in varying locations around Kerbin. Accept the contract whenever one comes up (10k up front, 40-50k on completion), find the nearest recovery vessel to the stranded person, and voila, new kerbonaut AND some cash. I've now got 13 or 14 kerbonauts at the KSC, with a half-dozen waiting recovery vessels if I ever find I need more. Well, seven of them are currently on a trip to Duna and Ike, but they'll be back (I hope). The thing that really screwed me up, as an experienced player, was the reorganized tech tree. I used to rely on ion engines for all of my interplanetary probes, but now those are an endgame technology. In ye olden days I'd lift a 2-ton ion probe inside my 10-ton RAPIER-equipped spaceplane for dirt cheap, and I could send it anywhere in the system even at the mid-tier techs. This really helped my finances, as those "science from X" missions were the best way to make money on Hard. But honestly, I've loved the changes. Sure, the new aero model is taking a lot of getting used to, but I do like the concept of it better than the old souposphere.

Not a bad design, although it's a bit top-heavy. You might roll if you try to make a turn too fast, or go up a steep slope. I'm currently trying out a large, flat design so that this isn't an issue. When you're at your imgur page, and you click on an image, one of the options on the right will be the "BBCode" entry: (img)http://i.imgur.com/whatever.png(/img) (except brackets instead of parentheses). That's the one you want to copy for embedding on boards like this.

Back in the old souposphere days, here's how I launched my huge 600-ton rover: Basically, the rover itself was close enough to symmetry on both axes that a mounting point under the center connector would stay balanced. The huge (12000-ton) stack of rockets below the rover was an SSTO launcher (fully recoverable, other than the fuel of course), and once in orbit the skyhook on top would draw fuel from the rover's tanks for the rest of the trip. (After landing on Mun and refilling all of the fuel tanks, the skyhook detached and flew up to Mun orbit to act as an emergency fuel depot.) With the new atmosphere model, that sort of design might have a bit more drag than it used to, but it should still work given the raw power of the booster.

It's doable. Back in olden days (0.23ish), I'd send this 300-ton rover to Mun: It was a mobile Kethane miner, using a number of parts from other mods. But, the wheels were stock, so it'd work for your contract. The downside was that it was only designed as a 1-man rover, but had the capacity to hold far more. I tweaked the design a bit, but I did this in three or four separate versions so I know it's workable. I later switched to even larger rovers, and that necessitated the use of caterpillar treads from a mod: That's a 600-ton megarover in the background (default crew of 3, but can hold 9), and a 25-ton smaller rover (also a kethane refinery) in the foreground. The smaller rover uses stock wheels, but it doesn't have enough crew for those contracts. I highly recommend using treads, though, simply because of the fact that they don't rip themselves apart under even minor shears. (They do have a very poor top speed, though. That huge rover tops out at about 12m/s; those 5m KW fuel tanks are really heavy when loaded.) Honestly, though, all of those base construction contracts are simple because of one simple flaw: a lander qualifies, as long as you stick any necessary parts (docking ports, antennae, wheels) on the side as necessary. The wheels don't have to touch the ground, the ports don't have to be reachable, etc., they just have to be on the craft (even inside a cargo bay). In my career I'm still in the second tier of techs, and I've got a 7-man lander (3-man pod plus hitchhiker) that I use for quick astronaut training. (One trip to Mun or Minmus with Jeb piloting, and POOF, a half-dozen level 2 kerbonauts!) I stick a couple extra parts on it, and suddenly it's completing my orbital station contracts as well for big money. I'm just about to send it to Duna and Ike for HUGE profits, as soon as I unlock the LV-N for my transfer burn.

If you're going out to Jool's moons for something like this, just forget the solar panels altogether. They're really expensive, but go with RTGs; one RTG can offset the drain from that scanner, although it'd take 12 to produce enough electricity to keep an ion going at full thrust. Realistically, I'm planning my ion probes to use four of the things and run at 33% thrust once I'm near Jool. If you're only using this probe to scan each moon once and then leave, you could even do it with fuel cells, but I prefer probes that can stick around to fulfill science contracts as well so that's not really an option. Back in ye olden days, that's exactly what I'd do with my Kethane and Karbonite fuel networks. Pol was the primary fuel depot for the Jool system, and I'd keep one refinery there and one tanker down at Laythe. I'm planning on doing the same with the new system, although it's also handy to have a land-based refinery (using a large rover) that can meet up with already-landed vessels. I had small 20-30 ton rovers and huge 600-ton megarovers for this sort of role, and it worked nicely.

Pfft. Efficiency is overrated. MY small satellites cost about 200k apiece. The big problem with the tiny probes are that once you start stacking on "essential" non-propulsion systems (like ore scanners and such) your efficiency will go WAY down on a probe that only masses 0.5 tons by itself. First, because each scanner masses 0.1 or 0.2 tons, and secondly because you need power generation and storage to handle those scanners' operation. Once you unlock ions, I found that the sweet spot for cost vs. capability was between 2 and 3 total tons. One thing you might want to do is stick a small parachute on that probe. That way, you can use them for the "return a craft from Mun/Minmus orbit to Kerbin" missions as well, and those things pay a tremendous amount for the effort (assuming it survives the reentry). With the new contracts, it becomes very easy to use a single launch to complete half a dozen or more individual contract requirements, as long as you design carefully. But honestly, money hasn't been a problem for me even in my Hard career. I've got small unmanned satellites around Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus containing a thermometer and an antenna, and I've got tiny unmanned landers on Mun and Minmus with a similar setup (dropped off by manned landers, as they don't have any propulsion of their own). Every time a "get science from X" mission comes up, I can complete them for no additional cost. I've even got a pair (satellite+lander) on the way to Duna right now, which'll make the money come in even more quickly. And instead of hiring kerbonauts, I've got a fleet of tiny recovery vessels orbiting Kerbin's equator to rescue any stranded folks (which also pays nicely). So I haven't bothered with any of the satellite placement contracts.

I'm perfectly aware of the physics involved, as I'm an astronomer by profession. The thing is, KSP has already changed quite a few other things for the sake of gameplay, primarily due to one single factor: only the active vessel can apply thrust, and only when it's not in time warp. While it sounds simple, in practice this has a couple significant effects: 1> Maneuvers are done at nodes. In reality a manned trip to somewhere like Mars could apply a low amount of thrust for the entire transfer, but in KSP the thrust is all done at once and then the vessel coasts until it enters the SOI and has to do an insertion burn. For a renewable resource like electricity, that means your vessel needs enough generation and/or battery capacity to handle the entire burn in a short period. and more importantly for this discussion, 2> In the real world an ion drive has a ridiculously low thrust (several orders of magnitude below KSP's version), which also means they don't have to use huge amounts of electricity for a burn in the first place. If you want to make something like an ion-propelled probe that can visit the outer planets using the real world's engineering efficiencies, it wouldn't need to stack a dozen RTGs and/or dozens of solar arrays just to power a single small engine. Primarily thanks to the 0.23 thrust increase (a factor of 4 difference), though, one KSP ion engine now uses about 8.5e/s, while one RTG only produces 0.75 and we've already discussed how ineffective the solar panels are. So, you end up stacking a ton of RTGs (at a ridiculous cost) for each ion engine, or use an appalling number of solar panels. The point is, it all depends on what the developers' concept of an ideal unmanned probe is. If it's supposed to be something with an ion engine, one RTG, four small solar arrays, and a few batteries, then you'd get something that'd look approximately like a real-world probe. But, that sort of design can't even produce one quarter of the electricity needed to offset an ion's thrust. Sure, if we could set the probe to 10% throttle and timewarp (or switch to something else) then it'd be different, but we can't, and the developers already made it clear with the new resource scanning system that they're not fans of the "go make a sandwich" type of gameplay. So, for gameplay reasons the current electrical generators need to be boosted substantially just to keep ions viable as a propulsion system.

The problem with this is, what about orbital probes? Without a way to replace the LFO, a fuel cell isn't really an option for something like a ScanSat mapping satellite that stays in orbit for a long time but has an ongoing energy cost. I've got a 4-ton ion probe I designed for these missions, but look at its power problem: ~2.5 energy/sec for the scanners isn't a huge amount. A small 1x6 solar panel produces 1.6e/s at Kerbin, but at Jool you divide that by 25, giving 0.064 at best. Even with 16 of them I'd only produce about 1.0e/s assuming perfect exposure (not going to happen with that many), so I have no choice but to load on several RTGs (0.75e/s apiece) instead for anything heading out to Jool or beyond. Sure, each RTG has as much mass as five of the 1x6 arrays, but it's still negligible compared to the size of a vehicle as a whole. I'm not saying that they should go back to the old equation, but it does mean that solar panels seem almost useless now for anything that isn't explicitly designed only to go to the inner planets. The base energy production numbers might just need a bit of tweaking to keep solar power viable.

Yeah, the new mining system works fine as long as you design with heat transfer and such in mind. Once we get the hang of this sort of thing, it'll become a non-issue. This whole package was dropped into our laps with little warning as to the specifics, so we're all still learning as we go. The bigger problem, for me, is the scanning; the clamshell scanner is just too big. Back in ye olden days, I'd put a Kethane or Karbonite scanner on an ion-propelled mapping probe capable of fitting inside a half-length Mk2 cargo bay and lofted by my light spaceplanes. The new narrow-band scanner is a bit larger than those, but it was still possible to make a decent design. However, the survey scanner is just far too large for anything like that. It'd be one thing if its mass actually required a larger probe design, but it's only 0.2 tons so you're still going to be moving it with tiny ion drives and such, and that leads to some ridiculous appearances.

Air-to-ground missiles. Seriously, they're really handy for blowing up the KSC. You can pack a lot of them onto a plane's wings, and you don't need a long burn to accelerate to killing speeds. Granted, one won't do enough damage to take down the big buildings...

Absolutely they're rivals. As we all know, the male Kerbonauts were all clones of Jebediah. Obviously, this made them a bit less awesome than him, but it made it easy for the program to create replacements no matter how many explosions occurred. Jebediah would survive everything I put him through in my careers, but his offspring were a bit more fragile. Valentina, then, represents the start of a newer clone line intended to eventually replace Jebediah's horde. It's obvious that there'd be a rivalry between them, then; this sort of situation has been the plot for quite a few sci-fi movies. And seriously, why didn't they just make Val an engineer or scientist? It's strange, because in my current career all five of the female kerbonauts I've rescued from orbit have been scientists...

Absolutely I would, because my designs are awesome. In the real world, designs are very fine-tuned to the exact performance needed to complete the basic mission, but KSP doesn't really give you enough feedback for that. So, to be on the safe side I made all of my designs a bit more capable than they really need to be. Maybe I want a spaceplane that can fly far, and I end up with one that can go all the way to Laythe without refueling, and that same design can also go to Duna and back (including landing and takeoff on Duna itself) with ease. Maybe I want a large rover with refueling capabilities, and end up with a 600-ton megarover that's more of a slightly mobile base. And so on. End result, I'd feel very safe in one of my designs because unlike NASA craft they're NOT built by the lowest bidder. My unmanned craft might be a bit riskier, but the manned stuff is now all very well tested, stable designs so I'm not even worrying about the prototype flights any more.

Even without landing, satellites are the easy path to unlimited money. The "get science from orbit around X" missions have no real limitations on them, so you can still complete them even if you've researched the thing in question enough times as to no longer get any science. All you need is a small satellite with a thermometer and an antenna, and you can do those science missions for everywhere other than Gilly. (Gilly's altitude limit for thermometers is below the max terrain height, so sooner or later the satellite would collide and blow up. Just use a gravity sensor for Gilly instead.) For instance, here's my oft-posted DinkySat satellite: 2.5 tons, ~80k roots, 23km/s of dV, and it fits into the half-length Mk2 cargo bay on my 10-ton light spaceplane (which only costs 30k itself, and uses less than 1000 roots' worth of fuel to reach orbit and land). All of the parts are in the first two science tiers (no need to wait for the level 3 research lab upgrade), and that's with two ScanSat sensors and a Karbonite mapper. I've got a version with legs and a parachute for landing on various bodies, but since unmanned probes can't complete Flag missions, why bother? A cost of 80k might not be pocket change, but a single science mission at Laythe might pay 130-150k even on hard. Unlike the satellite/station missions, these science missions (or the flag ones) don't require a new entity, either. So, the first thing I do in my new careers is launch a couple dozen of these and put them around every body in the system, and then I can sit back and earn income just by checking for science missions every 5-7 ingame days while I do the more interesting stuff, like fly spaceplanes to Laythe or launch mobile refineries to Pol. Honestly, I'd like to see that loophole fixed, along with the other ones mentioned in this thread; if each craft could only complete a single contract of a given type (science from X, station around X, etc.) in its lifetime, and we had a way to easily see this, there wouldn't be effectively unlimited money. Instead, just give us a nice baseline funding level, a steady income from government funding to pay for minimal operations.

Done it. Well, not tea, but I made dinner. My computer is near my kitchen, and during a landing there's only a couple quick spots where you need user interaction, especially with the new SAS that can lock onto the retrograde or prograde vectors. As it is, I almost always have several other applications open when I play KSP, since I get bored easily. So yeah, I've made lunch or dinner quite a few times while doing something monotonous in KSP. When I say it's a crutch, I'm not saying that it's not still useful; it WOULD remove the tedium from an operation you've repeated many, many times. (Crutches are useful in real life, after all.) But most of those situations are already somewhat avoidable with a bit of design work; for instance, I haven't done much docking recently, because most of my designs are SSTOs with plenty of fuel. (My long-range spaceplane can go all the way to Laythe from Kerbin without any refueling, for instance.) My stations are launched in one piece, too, so I don't need to assemble large objects in orbit too often. So as long as you've got a few other key mods to help with manual piloting (like the Engineer mod, which adds some critical data readouts) I'd say to avoid any sort of autopilot. Learning how to dock, or do a gravity assist, or optimize a maneuver node will go a long way in making you a better pilot in general.

All of them and then some; I've never used MechJeb, period. It's just a crutch that you don't need once you have some basic skills, and using it makes it harder for you to acquire those skills.