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One minor issue I've not seen mentioned yet: Renaming vessels. It took me a while to find out that I could rename vessels via the tracking station (renaming them on the fly via the command pod in KSP1 was handy too), but that's a discoverability issue. The main problem I had was the colour of the text, and the colour of the background when renaming a craft were so similar I couldn't really read what I was typing. (I'm very slightly colourblind, but it's almost never an issue form me in games). Just picking a more different colour for the background would really help here. Re the Part Manager. Like most KSP1 players, I do miss being able to just click on a part in the VAB/in flight and alter just the options for that part. I also miss being able to pin the windows for certain parts on the UI for easy access. That said, the Parts Manager does have a use when there's a part buried deep inside my craft, and there's no easy way to click on it (especially if my craft is rotating etc.), so the PPart Manager does make it easier to just drill down the list to find what I need and change it's settings.

And here's a guide for using SCANSat

If your periapsis isn't quite low enough, but your AP is very high, then you can change your orbit using just a kerbal. I found it was easiest to point my ship retrograde just before AP, so I had a nice target to push against (ie the engine nozzle), then Jeb did an EVA and pushed with his jet pack against the engine. With an AP about half way out to the Mun, a 10s push from Jeb dropped my PE down by a few thousand meters. A useful trick if you just need a few more m/s of dV to aerobrake.

I ended up modifying the tech tree in MechJeb, as I wanted at least the info windows and the warp helper to be available from near the start.

That said, pretty much every control part (probe bodies or capsules) has at least a small amount of battery built in. A small probe should be able to get away with no extra batteries, and a few small solar panels or an RTG.

You can get plenty of science by sending Jeb to go visit all the different biomes on Kerbin itself. You can reach four just by walking (KSP itself, the beach, the sea the grasslands). After picking up some quick science there, a small suborbital ship, or a spaceplane should get you to enough of the other biomes to unlock unmanned tech.

MechJeb can allow you to pick a spot on a planet/moon and will either attempt to land there itself, or can give you a plan and a prediction. It can also create manoeuvre nodes for you (and execute them if you wish) for handy tasks like making a trip to another planet, or returning from a moon. Some people consider it cheating, some won't fly without it. Either way, you can use it just for the information it can provide, you can get it to plot courses for you, or you can let it do the flying as well. All up to you. Note that in career mode various functions are unlocked as you move through the tech tree.

Not to mention, if you don't add the batteries then you can almost guarantee that you'll have to do a darkside burn once you get to your destination.

If you watch video of a shuttle launch carefully you can see the moment they lit the shuttles engines (SSME) the entire stack leans and settles back. Quite unnerving!

They did destructively test a prototype nuclear rocket: https://archive.org/details/GPN-2002-000145

My last rover had a small docking port on top to connect it to the 'skycrane' descent stage. However, to get all that into orbit I ended up flipping it upside-down, so the rover ended up flying wheels first into orbit. It looked weird, but it worked in the end.

Ok, I've updated the bits about the names of the scanners in the small map, and added damny's explanation of the orbital nodes. Damny, can I ask, what does it mean when the name of the scanner shows as blue on the small map?

I thought I'd help by writing a how to manual, which you can read here. Obviously it's only based on SCANsat 0.4 and KSP 0.22, so for example, the pictures of each part just use the same image. Give it a read and let me know if there anything that needs changing. There's no kind of license on this, feel free to take it and make it better, oh, and I've just realised there doesn't seem to be any way to go back and edit a blog entry, so I probably should have thought about that earlier.

May I present the "Look Ma! No Wheels!", and the "Look Ma! No Wheels! 2 (with added science!)" Amazingly both of these fly quite well. The second one has a materials bay, and two goo canisters (for balance), and an aerial. Both have tiny solid boosters to get them moving, probably not necessary, but more boosters is better right? You can down load them here and here.

I managed to make a plane which used winglets as skids, instead of wheels. It used a decoupler on the cockpit and parachutes to 'land', and I used it to go investigate the mountain biome just near KSC. Then once I'd got the larger radial decouplers I added some rockets so I could go check out biomes on the other side of Kerbin without having to fly for ages. I'll try and post a picture/craft file when I get home.

From the latest dev update: Hooray!

I managed to build a working plane using small winglets as skids. That combined with a parachute on the capsule enabled me to parachute onto different biomes and do an EVA on each for easy science. Of course there was no taking off again, but if you hold the mouse over the altimeter at the top of the screen then you'll find a handy new "Recover Vehicle" button to click. To get to the further away biomes (eg the poles or the badlands) I ended up attaching enough rockets to my basic plane to almost get into orbit, so I could drop down near my area of interest.

You could just pick a good looking part of a SCANsat map and use that as the texture. No licensing issues there surely?