Superfluous J

You know what would be cool? A mod like Dmagic13's Sensible Screenshots that - when you hit F5 - saves not only quicksave.sfs (so you can F9 to resume) but also quicksave-yyyy-mm-dd--hh-mm-ss.sfs (so you have a full archive of all the times you thought something important enough was going to happen that you wanted a save).

Technically it can, but autosaves are just writing to the persistent.sfs file so that's all you can load. Actually, if the OP had IMMEDIATELY just closed KSP (like with alt-F4) he'd have had a moderate chance of reloading it before re-entry started with no other action. Also, OP, if you use KAC it may make backups of your game state at every point you used it to "jump to ship." I've been saved by that a couple times.

To stop the wiggling, I turn off SAS and hit time warp, stopping all rotation. Then I turn off time warp and rotation remains arrested, hopefully roughly where I wanted to point But yeah, it's annoying that they wiggle like that.

I may be dense, but what does holding F12 do? Or did you mean you held F9, and then found out you hadn't quicksaved, assuming that each autosave was a new quicksave?

I 2nd this, though for me it's more: 3) "Oh man, I forgot to rotate the ship before clicking launch. Now it'll take DOZENS OF SECONDS to revert, rotate, and relaunch." (AKA I'm lazy)

Assuming neither of you are running any mods (at least, none that would require me to install a bunch of mods just to load the saves) and you can provide me with your save files and a description of the ship with the problem, I'll happily take a look. Until then "I have a problem!" isn't a problem report that anybody can take any action on.

That could be on the box art for the game. Actually, that'd have been a funny entry to the box art competition. A lot of us know, it's just there are also a lot who don't know. ALL command pods that seat at least one Kerbal can hold an infinite amount of science experiments. There is no limit in the game code for how many can be stored. The only restriction is you cannot have more than 1 per experiment/situation/biomes. For example, you can have an EVA report orbiting over the desert, flying over the desert, landed on the desert, and splashed down in the desert (yes, you can splash down in the desert if you aim right), and you can have those 4 experiments from all the biomes in the game (again some may take hunting. And obviously "splashed down on Minmus' Highlands" et. al. will be hard to come by) all in the same capsule. But the moment you take a 2nd of the same experiment from the same place in the same situation? BZZT. No space in the pod Joseph Kerman.

Hear, hear, though it worked out for me this weekend as I totally forgot about it until just now

I don't offset my solids, but I do tend to stick them to the bottom part of the decoupler, which may help. It encourages them to peel off faster at the top.

It's also annoying that you can't go somewhere to time warp without losing your option to revert. This is one of the main reasons I installed the HoloDeck mod.

I always figured it was some Bond-villainesque type who was hiring you to get him on a suborbital Sun trajectory so he could throw a business partner - who either did him wrong or simply disagreed with his plan - out the airlock. The contracts don't need removed. They need their payouts looked at to verify that they are reasonable for the cost to perform them.

Exaaaaaaaaactly. And also, recently I've been plotting courses where I leave Kerbin's SOI at a very small relative velocity, single-digit m/s, but AWAY from Kerbin. The conics show me exit Kerbin's SOI, and go on my merry way like you'd expect. In truth what happens is, I exit Kerbin's SOI, go about 10 meters, and then re-enter Kerbin's SOI to take a trip around the ellipse.

7 pages and almost 2 weeks and nobody's mentioned how - in certain predictable situations - patched conics LIES to you. It's hard to plot a course when your tools don't tell you what's actually going to happen.

A launch window to Mun? Are you trying to go straight up or something? However you like to launch, just do it, and when your ship gets to Mun's orbit note how far away Mun is and in what direction. Revert, and then time warp so your ship is in the correct position so that this time, if you launch in exactly the same way, Mun will be where you will end up. Memorize that angle and you should be able to hit it most every time. If you're talking interplanetary transfers, I suggest the Transfer Window Planner mod.

More fun would be getting it to 0 m/s while as low to the ground as possible, for as long as possible. The "Go West, Young Man" challenge.

I tried to perform some of the burns it suggested and gave up after about 5 minutes. It was far easier to spend the time to actually look at what was happening and figure out the best strategy, than get the numbers all correct for the nth time and see - yet again - that the resultant trajectories in no way resulted in anything that could be called an intercept. - - - Updated - - - I'll be doing it in a future episode of my LP (Episode 3, assuming I nail it) but I may be able to actually do a "how to" before that, either video or pics. We'll see how the weekend treats me.

It only "makes sense" if you have to do it with every craft you launch. Why can you recover your own guy in a massive ship on the North Pole for free, but not recover some dude standing off in the grasslands west of KSC?

I think this is request SHOULD be addressed by mods and not the stock game for a very specific reason: It requires you to act in a different way than the game requires you to act normally for no discernible reason. Any vessel, part, or Kerbal anywhere on Kerbin is recoverable for free, and you get a refund for the parts as a bonus. Having people on the surface of the planet that you not only can't recover, but can't even get close to, put into a ship, and then recover that ship is not just needlessly complicating things, it's breaking the rules that the game has set down.

Yay! I was coming here to say I did too Though I am pretty confident I can replicate it. Basically what I said before but you eject - it seems - on the prograde or retrograde side of Kerbin's orbit moving a bit radially sideways (and very slow) relative to Kerbin. If you eject prograde, you're moving inward toward Sonnah, so you natually speed up away from Kerbin and meet Aptur when it's on the inside track, 180 degrees (Relative to Sonnah) away. If you need to meet Aptur when it's outside Kerbin, you eject retrograde with some outward motion to keep yourself from speeding up and catching back up to Kerbin. It seems that the sweet spot is 5m/s more than you need to escape. You generally need about 760 from a 100x100 orbit, so I tested at 765 and it was perfect to get an encounter with a cheap (Like, 50-60 m/s) orbit insertion burn at Aptur. And this time I actually did it to make sure and it worked like a charm. Bonus, getting home for about 50-60m/s (from Orbit) seems pretty simple, and can be done most any time. All you need to do is set up the node and then use precise node to go forward a few orbits until you get a Kerbin encounter. That encounter will always be low speed, so your periapsis will be close (if not well in) the atmosphere. I'm filling in my personal dV chart with LKO <#--760--> Escape <--5--> Aptur Transfer <--50--> Aptur orbit for now. (# means aerobraking is possible)

I'm in this boat as well, with a nod to "each stage has a payload" as well. For contests, the payload is defined by the contest. For your own personal missions, it's defined by you. For the Space Shuttle, the contents of the Cargo bay are the payload. For the SRBs and that big orange tank, the shuttle and its contents are the payload. If you're lifting a bunch of fuel tanks to orbit and you fill them, just to drain that fuel into the lifter engines, then you're being clever and smart but it doesn't change the fact that the empty tanks that once held fuel are a payload. If they have any leftover fuel at the end, that's also payload. So it's simple, really

I think you should be able to right click a tank and dump all fuel from it. Ideally you should be able to dump all of any one resource, or all resources in one go. For super bonus points engines could have the ability to dump fuel from all tanks that feed to them. Instantaneous is fine. It should be quick in any case. That said, I doubt I'd personally use it much.

Aha, there's a trick I've never not been forced to avoid not doing. It also saves you from Kraken attacks sometimes.

Yeah if you can restore a quicksave (Note: Kerbal alarm Clock may keep some quicksaves for you so you may be able to find one of those) then that'll do it, though of course you'll lose anything you did after the save. If not... I don't know. There is a section of both cancelled and open contracts in the save file (just search for keywords) but be very careful. Far more careful than you were in the game. Everything can look perfect and you've still munged your save. If I had to suggest, I'd say living with the canceled contract is better than the risk.

Time it so the final burn happens at the time you'd normally just do your one burn. It also helps to re-place the maneuver node each time, or at least on the final burn so you know you're doing it correctly. Also, interplanetary burn windows are generally pretty wide, several days usually. Once your orbit will get big enough to care about the time it takes, you're at the point where you should just do the whole burn because you're only "saving" a couple dozen dV before ejection anyway.

I don't know about space ships but aircraft do it all the time. It's SOP when you land earlier than you thought, and therefore have more fuel than you would normally upon landing.