Sirrobert

You probably didn't turn on SAS when you left. Without automatic attitude control, how is the station suposed to know when it should and should not do something? Use mechjeb smart ASS for easy attitude control.

Yes, acceleration of a craft is dependend on thrust of it's engines, and the weight of the craft. The ISP is a mesure for how efficient an engine is. Higher ISP means it can get more deltaV per fuel unit. To calculate it, you need a formula you can find somewhere on the wiki I think. You'll have to google it

This is what I recomend anyone who has any form of trouble If that takes to long, it sounds like you don't use the map view. Once you have a comfortable trajectory upwards, you can switch to map view to look at your apoaps (highest point). Once that reaches the hight you want, you can stop the engine until you float up to it. Than point your rocket prograde and start burning again.

Could you post some screenshots of it? I have no idea what you are talking about

If your save stays compatible when they update the tree, I'm sure you keep your science, as that's logged in the save file. If your save does not stay compatible, it's not relavent anyway

Devs declared there would be no random events. So no

How the hell do you accidently hold F9 for 2 seconds? It's not exactly something your pinkey rests on while operating WASD

No, that's what quicksave is for. F5 to quicksave, F9 to quickload

I see you discovered gravity assist If you want to try landing somewhere, I'd suggest you start with Minmus. The reduced gravity makes it much easier, and the total fuel to return is actually less than you need for the Mun because of that.

In the Tracking station, left top (right side off the ship list) is a list of craft types. Right click them to toggle show/don't show. Same menu is in the map view, hold your mouse on the top center of the screen and it'll drop down

I'm HORRIBLE with names. So I just name them after theyr function. Mun lander. Jool Probe. Minmus lander. Mun rover. You get the idea

Meh, you don't need the mainsail. That's the biggest thing career taught me. Mainsail and atomic engine are extremely overrated. Second is it taught me to keep my designs small, cause I didn't have mainsail for atmosphere, or atomic for vaccum. But turns out that makes for better rockets anyway

Are you sure you can't get it into sub-orbital? If it has only jet engines it might flame out to soon, but you could add some aerospikes to take over than. Once you are out of the atmosphere, you can decouple the rocket, establish a stable orbit, than switch back to the plane before it reenters to atmosphere and gets deleted. If you don't care about the plane, you could point the plane in a gravity turn-like trajectory (so 45degrees up or so), and once it gets the apoaps you want (or runs out of fuel, if it can't get to space), decouple the rocket and start steering that. If the plane is still in atmosphere while you do that, it might crash or get deleted (deleted only if lower than 23km I believe, so you might still have time)

That's a bug in the display of that specific science part

Just because they have the same last name, doesn't mean they are all family. In our universe, it means that. Not in the Kerbal universe. I'm pritty sure that the Kerman name is a tribe name, rather than a family name. The tribe has a strong tradition that only males do the heroic/dangerous stuf. My theory is that the Kerbal race has, for some reason, more males than females. This sparked the tradtion of keeping the females away from the more dangerous stuf (they used to all do it)

As a student, I think 4 pages is very short. It may seem like alot when you start, but once you really get going you'll hit the limit way before you have said everything you wanted to say. I wanted to add a little something on the mass/gravity thing: In our own universe, Kerbol could not exist as a star. Stars have a certain minimum mass. Anything less than (if I recall correctly) 75 times the mass of Jupiter. Anything less and there would not be enough pressure inside (due to lack of gravity) to start fusion

It's up to the game specificly if that game is compatible with a controler, steam has nothing to do with it

Than just use the mod. For optional things that only a few people want, we have mods

Welcome aboard. I'd like to point out that, once you have landed on Kerbin, you can recover the rocket (or commandpod In KSP, if the pod survives, it's concidered a succesfull landing). Recovering will net you all the science points you 'kept' (that's what the keep result option is about), + some science from the rocket itself (a bit for surviving flight, little more for sub-orbital flight, little more for orbital, and so forth). Since this is still an alpha, there are indeed quite a few parts missing. I'd recomend heading to youtube for the tuturials. There are some VERY good ones around. My personal recomendation (and I'm sure that of many others) is Scott Manley: He has tuturials on everything you can think of, but this link is for getting into orbit (includes building a rocket that can do it. The parts he uses may not all be available to you yet, but I'm sure you can adept). It's actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. Have fun. And don't forget: A spectacular explosion is a succes in it's own way

Are you using manouver nodes? It'll tell you how much deltaV you need. A 90km orbit needs a total orbital velocity of 2400m/s or so

IIRC, jumping back to 1 from high warp would have a high chance of awekening the Kraken

If you think people should ask you what you meant, maybe you should make your suggestion clearer in the first place? Cause it sure as hell ain't clear. Anyway, there is a resource mining feature planned, way bigger than what the Kethane mod is now. It's still planned though.

Idk, maybe so you can do EVA reports, surface samples, crew reports, plant a flag...?

Kerbin ofcourse, but that doesn't count. I recently aerobraked for the first time for real, on Duna. That just happened to be the first planet one of my probes arived on. Didn't really slow it down alot, not even to a capture, but it did get me in a perfect Ike encounter. Which the probe is now orbitting. Shortly after that another probe arived at Eve. My experience with Duna made me expect a rather ineffective aerobreak, so I almost put the periaps at 50km above Eve . Good thing I reconcidered and went for 99km

Going to space center just puts the ship on rails. If the orbit intersects with the atmosphere to far while it's on rails, the ship will get deleted. Simulating the crash it would normally have because of the drag. Remember: a stable orbit is above the atmosphere, not just above the surface