Superfluous J

This is the single closest I've ever seen anybody get and not complete the contract. That's crazy close.

Things on rails do not interact with atmosphere in any way. If they get low enough, the game just deletes them. I don't know exactly what "low enough" on Kerbin is but it's somewhere near 20km. Anything with a Pe higher than that will just orbit forever. If you want them to decay naturally, you do indeed need to watch them the whole time. I personally delete anything in the Tracking Station that interacts with any atmosphere, figuring it'd go away anyway if I wasted enough of my play time babysitting them.

I don't consider KSC science to be an exploit, but I generally don't bother because at stock settings I don't find science very hard to come by. I do farm it in challenges, when time is important.

I'm on hiatus right now, and a general Kerbal vacation, so will have to bow out. Edit That's a crazy modlist. I don't think I've ever had that many installed at a time. Does sound like my kind of thing though!

One of the most annoying thing in contracts is needing to be stable for 10 seconds. 5 is less bad, but maybe 1 second? I've been known to quickly hit "recover" to save a Kerbal before my rocket falls over, and understand the desire to curtail such shenanigans, but still...

The game is indeed subtracting the sun's radius, just like it does for all the planets and moons. Instead of working with Pe and Ap, maybe try to get the difference between your Ap time and Pe time to be as close to half a Kerbin year as possible.

Yeah the game expects odd things in save files. I swear sometimes it uses the ship's placement in the file, relative to other ships. So, when you deleted that one ship it thought another ship was that ship, and another one was that other ship, etc. and then there were one less ships than it expected. It's far better to try to do as much in-game as possible, and only go to the save as a last resort. Good to hear it's a science save. You should be golden once you remove all the references.

This is tough. The big problem is you probably got some contracts auto-completed for Duna as well, which gave you not just science, but rep and funds as well. This is the best I can do for you: First, back up everything. Before sending your guys to Duna, even But no, keep a fresh copy of the file. Then, alt-f12 your guys back to Kerbin orbit, and then the surface. DO NOT RECOVER ANYTHING. Get the Kerbals out of the ship so they're standing on the surface. Alt-F12 everything else back into space and Terminate it from the tracking station. I say to do it this way because I think you can't terminate on the surface, only recover. Save the game, and make another backup of your save file. Edit your save, looking for every reference to Duna. Delete it if it looks anything like it was put there when you went. If in doubt, just delete the one line but sometimes you may need to delete a whole block of data. I'd leave the contracts alone, because I have no idea how they work, but the list of where a Kerbal has been and the list of whether or not you've been to a planet is pretty straightforward. Load that save, and hope your two Kerbals are on the surface of Kerbin with no knowledge that they were ever gone. Oh, and good luck!

If you have ground stations enabled, there's no real need for any relays around Kerbin except to handle communicating with something on the far side of Mun, or on Minmus as it rotates. And those can be addressed easily with a few relay satellites around each of those moons. Similarly, a couple satellites with large relay antennas (so long as they can communicate with Kerbin, you're good) in orbit of your target planets will do wonders. You may not have complete coverage but you'll have enough to start the fun stuff. Then anything you send to those planets should have an antenna that can reach the relay satellites with plenty of leeway. There is a page in KSPedia (in the game, a button in the toolbar) for the commnet that shows how far one of each antenna class can hope to talk to another of another class. Sadly, the antenna descriptions don't list their classes, but you can deduce an antenna's class by how far the game tells you that you can still talk to Kerbin (which is also on that chart) with that antenna. In my experience, any antenna that can talk to Kerbin over interplanetary distances, can talk to the smallest antenna within a planet's SOI. But check the chart just in case.

Best. Screensaver. Evar. Other than "blank screen" of course.

That passenger cabin is very light, so your ship is front-heavy and flips around. Also, that mystery goo is adding drag at the front on descent. You basically have 2 options: Add lots of reaction wheels (1 or 2 would probably do it) and tell your pilot to hold retrograde on the way down. Redesign it so the passenger cabin is on top of the pod and the pod has the heat shield, so it's really ugly bottom-heavy, and stays facing the correct way naturally. And in either case, put that mystery goo up near the top of the descending rocket so it helps your drag instead of hurting it. Also, I'd add a drogue chute. Those can open at much higher speeds. You open it first, let it slow you down, and then open the main chute. You *may* be able to save the current ship on re-entry, by aiming upward on descent. This will actually cause you to glide a bit (Not much, but a bit) and slow down a little more. and slow down enough to hit the chute. Probably not, though it's worth a shot.

Oops. I can't even blame when I redid the list, because you did that after. I will instead blame the forum's UI. I think I edited the code field, but forgot to then save the post. I've fixed it all, and await your final two planets!

Nicely done! I was wondering why the ship was so large but then I saw that you landed on all 5 moons with 3 kerbals! I've never landed more than 1 on Tylo at a time. Impressive! Oh, and welcome to the "TO DO" list, where you have less things left to do than you have done.

I voted no to the question I think you wanted to ask, which is would I care if they hosted one. Put me on the "not in the majority" column, as I don't think TT buying the KSP IP is a particularly bad move. Barring any evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty solid in that view.

I've been to Eeloo several times. Here's a quick video for my most recent trip.

The height data can come from various sources. Someone probably went down that river in a boat, or hiked it to get that height data, and it was considered (or could actually be) more accurate than the data for the surrounding area. I recall people showing "proof" that something was going on in the Atlantic ocean because of weird hash marks in the sea floor where the depth was different than the surrounding areas. Turns out, that data had come from a seafloor-depth sampling mission in which the boats actually patrolled the area in a grid.

I don't want to dissuade, but you are literally asking to learn rocket science quickly. I spent an entire weekend, probably 20+hours, getting a successful mission to Mun and back. And that was before science gathering was even a thing and the game was much smaller. Not simpler, mind you, but smaller. As in far less things to take into account. I second though the Scott Manley tutorials. Watch out for anything dealing with the atmosphere that is more than about 2 years old (April 2015), as the atmosphere got a HUGE update and any advice given before that date is not just wrong, but will likely be detrimental.

Money to science until I don't need science, then science to money. Around then I also do rep to money. That's when I bother to. Like you I frequently don't even pay attention to the building.

So boats and planes are cheating? They're not space.

Level 5,000: What NASA actually does.

You can get the limits in the game too. Go into map mode and select a planet (Moho) and you'll see it's Pe and Ap markers. Then check out Kerbin's as well. You'll see the values that mk1980 said above.

None. It should take none weeks.

One way to support it would be to "dock" the Kerbal into the seat.

Been asked for many times, probably won't ever happen. I personally prefer to not have to boost my LKO stuff every few months while waiting for a transfer window.

Behind my username? A grey circle. Oh you mean how did I pick it. I made a video of that once.