Superfluous J

Launch from the normal KSC, about 10 degrees west of North. Do everything else like you'd normally do for the gravity turn and whatnot. As you're going up, force yourself into Orbit mode on the navball, and keep aiming 10 degrees West of North until your prograde marker is exactly North. Then, aim North. If you want to move KSC around, check out Regex's KSCSwitcher mod.

I thought for sure that when the order mattered, the contract said so. Frequently they said "and finally, fly by XXXX" or whatnot. But I haven't done one since 1.0.4 at best, and probably earlier.

You CAN get your Kerbal into orbit of Mun from the surface, and then you don't have to land near him. It's tight, so I suggest burning all the rocket fuel to get him going to start. Then hop out, grab all the science (!) and jet pack into orbit. Then all you have to do is rendezvous with your rescue ship. There is no fuel transfer in the (stock) game. The rescue ship will need an open seat for your Kerbal and enough fuel to get itself back to Kerbin. You'll leave the stranded ship on the surface. Or let it crash if you do what I outlined above. And you don't need pods big enough for 2. Just bring an extra - empty - pod.

Get your orbit line intersecting Mun's SOI. Time warp to Periapsis around Mun. Burn backwards (aka retrograde) until your flyby becomes an orbit. There are far more steps if you want to be efficient, but this is getting into an orbit in a nutshell.

*cough* NavHud *cough*

You realize that pretty much every oil mining operation on the Earth (in the "Real World") burns fossil fuels to power their pumps. Sure in KSP the fuel never runs out but that's more of a "It would be annoying" thing than anything else.

"Like" their posts. You can "Like" 25 posts a day. Each "Like" gives the person 1 rep.

I don't know what the first S means, but in my experience WAG is "Wild-Donkey Guess" where a different word is used for "Donkey."

Landing on Eve isn't the hardest. It's the easiest. The hard part with Eve isn't landing. It's returning.

Your (reasonable) moral objections aside, that's part of the stock game.

Isn't the Island Airfield command pod a solid prop, like the VAB or every other thing on the surface of Kerbin (that you the player didn't put there)?

ISRU is balanced for the stock game. If you add mods that make it harder, you can't really be frustrated at the game for it. Personally I get around this by allowing (Via modulemanager config) the converter to convert ore to a necessary component of the life support, which makes self sufficiency possible. This may not be realistic, but if you want realistic you should probably not be doing much ISRU anyway

I don't know for a fact but I always thought it was "Everything slid to the far left or far right, whatever is worst." And congrats on winning hard mode!

It's not as obvious but I think it's still there. Truthfully I rarely notice Mun when on Kerbin's surface. I know for a fact you can see Jool's phases from Laythe's surface. And they're beautiful. We all want eclipses to cast shadows. Rbray is working on in in the new EVE. So fingers crossed there

Sadly that sounds nothing like KSP. I WISH your Kerbals could do anything even remotely like that.

I gotta say I agree with you. I've actually been considering not doing them anymore, but in this one things have started turning around. When watching a new TV show, I have a personal 6-episode rule. If the show totally, completely sucks I don't watch any more but if it has some redeeming characteristics and unrealized potential, I force myself to watch 6 episodes before I drop it. The reason is that in the US at least, 6 episodes is commonly either a half season or halfway to the mid-season break. I'm taking the same tack with Squadcast. I will do summaries for 6 total Dr_Turkey episodes no matter what. Let him get his feet wet, figure out what "his" Squadcast will be, and start to tease stuff like Max used to do. The previous episode the tease was a letdown as it was just an in-game, re-textured shot of something we've seen before but in this episode there was some good discussion and clarification of some devnotes things. So, I'm hopeful.

I of course can't actually speak for Squad, but nobody on the cast (or anywhere else I've seen) mentioned simplifying or even changing any keyboard controls on the PC.

Odd that the game introducing new challenges has caused you to not want to play. I'm in the opposite boat. I've not played much because of Fallout there's nothing new to challenge me.

But they do. Land on Mun and look at Kerbin. It has a dark side and a light side. Time warp a bit and that changes. Same on Kerbin, looking at Mun. There are pictures in this thread showing it. Unless you mean something different when you say "phases"?

Interesting stuff. I always assumed that the game centered your rocket on the pad. I guess I just don't drag the ship around in the VAB enough. The game SHOULD center it on the pad. It already adjusts the vertical placement so the ship doesn't spawn in the air or in the ground. Maybe this is new in 1.0.5? I haven't played much of the new version (due to Fallout et al). But I literally cannot remember one time in my playing where a symmetrical rocket fell over within a second or so of spawning it.

Just a "center of RCS thrust" marker would do wonders, though nothing Squad could do (other than incorporate RCS Build Aid into the game) will replace RCS Build Aid for me. The two things I would like is to be able to toggle off RCS for rotation while leaving it on for translation, and to toggle whether or not the computer uses RCS or if it only gets used when I'm controlling the ship. Fine controls does this at least a bit, but sometimes you want full controls on and to not spew gasses all over the place like the movie version of Mark Watney.

@Aethon your post to me looks like a huge block of nothing. I block some images to save on bandwidth but that is a surprisingly large post even considering that.

Every 15 minutes I drop a time stamp, so if you can find a spot in the video more easily. Descriptions of gameplay are in green. "Something in quotes means it was directly said." If you want to watch the episode yourself, you can find it at http://www.twitch.tv/ksptv/profile/past_broadcasts Squadcast was just under an hour, and is posted in 3 parts. I ignored the first 2 as they were only a few minutes long each. 0:00 Lots in the studio. Mike. Nathan. And Chris. No Kasper this week. He has a contract to test a parachute still. He accepts another to test a radial decoupler. He builds a ship with the chute and the decoupler. And a heat shield even though he's not even going into space. Turkey offers for people to expand on Devnotes Nathan discussed moduleengines and the sound fix. Why fix moduleengines when everything is going to moduleenginesfx? Becuase there are a lot of legacy parts that still use it, and lots of mods also use it. "We shouldn't go out of our way to break old stuff." It was a quick fix, too. He launches with Phoicca Kerman at the helm, with a lot of help from Nathan to hopefully make the ship fly well. The moment the rocket gets to half fuel (and the top tank empties) it flips. He lands okay but loses a lot of his craft due to staging shenanigans, and completes none of his contracts. Throughout this, they discuss the Casper movie, and the differences between Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. 15:00 Nathan helps him more, getting all the cruft of of the rocket. But it's still going to be bottom heavy with that huge engine. Then he adds fins. 2 of them. So they won't help. You need 3 or more for stability to actually work. He launches. He flips. He's high enough that he could fix it, and kind of does but not really. Mostly he just left the engine running even when facing down. He runs out of fuel way too soon and doesn't get the height or speed for the decouplers. He's also coming down like a lawn dart. He pulls the chutes the SECOND they turn yellow, and somehow they don't shear off. Phoicca lives for another day. More help from Nathan, he puts on 4 fins and shifts them down. After a surprising amount of difficulty with the widges and snap mode. "Nathan, save me from myself." I don't think he can. Another launch! They start talking about Star Wars, so Dr_Turkey misses... He accelerates the whole way up, meaning he's going over the maximum 920m/s 10km below the minimum altitude of 34km. When he reaches 34km, he's going over 1.3km/s He runs out of fuel at 40km, going 1.5km/s straight up. In a lawn dart. "Maybe on the re-entry it'll be okay" followed by: "This is not going to end well I don't think." On Nathan's advice, he starts tumbling. He hits the atmosphere. He MAY have survived if he put the parachutes into 3 stages. as it was, the 3 chutes slowed him down to about 250-300m/s before shearing off. If they'd gone one by one, maybe one of them would have stayed on. But that did not happen. Dr_Turkey kills Phoicca and blames Nathan for it. Like any good Space Program director. 30:00 Nathan suggests a 45 degree angle of launch, and actually paying attention during launch this time. His rocket falls over on the pad, so he launches. I don't know why he's having these issues with rockets falling over. I have to work to get them to do that. Valentina dies. "It started to tumble." No it didn't. It fell over. On the launch pad. When physics loaded. I think that's a bug. That should never happen. Especially on Squadcast where the game is being showcased. He decides to add a decoupler and heat shield. At least the Kerbal will live. Probably. It falls over again. Seriously it's not "tumble"ing. It's falling. Tumbling implies it's moving at the time. That rocket is perfectly symmetrical. It should never, ever fall over just sitting on the pad. And that happens to every rocket it seems. That is not the way the game works. "People are laughing at me at the office." "Not just at the office." While true, I stand by that there is something fundamentally wrong with Dr_Turkey's install. He decides to start over, and build a new rocket "My way. My way or the highway." Dr_Turkey's way is one of the smallest ships possible, launched into the air with 4 RT-10 SRBs at max thrust. And somewhat ironically they're not enough. He manages somewhat impressively to kill Bill by pulling the chute too early. He's out of cash, and almost out of Kerbals. And surprisingly his rep is decent. But he ends the career in shame. 45:00 Nathan convinces him to try to cancel his contracts and accept the "orbit" contract to get some cash. He'll try that next time. Mike(?) on devnotes: He's redoing the settings screen. Better controller support. Input classes behind the scenes, to tie the input together. New screen, platform specific and controller specific. Steam controller would have its own screen for example. And moddable. Chris: He can't spoil it. He's making things pretty. Dr_Turkey: He's looking through feedback from the PS4 version that was shown this week. Some people complained about the controls, but they're changing those. Things are "less complicated" using the PS4 controller. Dr_Turkey prefers it.

I hate to suggest a mod as well but Kerbal Engineer to tell how much dV you have - plus a transfer calculator or dV chart to tell how much you need - is in my opinion critical to an enjoyable interplanetary experience. You can do it without but I personally don't want to and don't think anybody should be forced to like the stock game does. Check out this dV chart and start building your ship at the top, with what will return from Duna. Make sure it has the 800 or so m/s to get home from Duna orbit. Then below that build a ship with the 1100-1700 m/s you need to get there and get into orbit. Then put that on top of a launcher with the 3300-4000m/s of dV you need to get that into Kerbin orbit. Then actually do it (Don't try to land or anything. Start small)

I just did a forum search for "fuel balance" which seems like a logical thing to search for. Calling the resultant page "Useful" isn't just a stretch. It's a downright lie.