Brapness

I had the opposite problem with my first Moho probe; I was aiming for a flyby but hit it head on at about 7km/s

If TV sci-fi has taught me anything, it's that a deep understanding of the maths is completely unnecessary for space travel. Now screw the laws of physics, I'm going to Jool...

I love docking mode. IJKLHN just feels weird to me and I keep hitting the wrong keys, plus I like having one hand on the mouse. I normally line up the craft far in advance by pointing them north and south so rotation is almost never a problem and when it is, it doesn't take much to switch controls. The only thing that annoys me is that when you press space to switch to rotation-mode the SAS disables. It's a layover from back when SAS had to be switched off to rotate, it really isn't helpful now.

Following the deaths of 3 Kerbals, and the skyrocketing costs of replacing crashed and destroyed vehicles, KSC director Gene Kerman chose to shutdown Project Penguin, the KSC's Munar program. Attention is now shifted to the new interplanetary projects, with two three kerbal crews going to the Duna and Eve systems to land on Ike and Gilly respectively.

Jeb is stuck head first into a crater wall on the Mun after he got a little careless while driving his rover

Set up a career mode Munar base. TAC life support introduces an interesting challenge, storing enough power to last the night is harder than it might seem. the speck in the background is the return module Sent two kerbals hill-climbing in an RCS-assisted rover and though it worked brilliantly on the slope, I somehow managed to crash later on perfectly flat ground. Both Kerbals were killed. On the bright side that eased up my supply concerns.

Had 3 kerbals orbiting the Mun when a glitch removed all but their capsule. Sent a rescue and then decided to land, only by then the base had passed onto the nightime side of the Mun. Landing on uneven terrain caused me to crash, but the capsule survived and the crew made it to the base. When morning came two of the three went for a drive in a rover, crashed and were killed. Not a lucky mission that one...

My specialty seems to be crashing Munar Landers (seriously about two thirds of everything I've ever sent to the Mun has crashed there - it's like the Russians with mars)

Personally I find myself becoming sentimental about old designs in career mode. Presently I have two main lifters, a big one I call Obelisk that I built before I got fuel lines and an asparagus design that uses LV-T30s and a skipper engine (as I haven't unlocked the mainsail yet) named Skippergus. Although Skippergus can lift a heavier payload higher, I just really like Obelisk for some reason. Seeing as of yet in career mode I haven't launched anything particularly heavy these two do just fine. Obelisk is fine for LKO station modules and Skippergus does 1-way trips to the Mun landing base parts and rovers. I use a slightly modified version (more delta-v but slightly more prone to accidents) for landers I expect to return. Both can launch ships on return missions from Minmus and both have sent probes to other planets. I also have a simple liquid fuelled tri-stack for launching small payloads.

Launched 6 kerbals and four rovers to the moon as two missions. The first landed near the equator and despite crashing one of its rovers, it retrieved science from 3 different biomes. The second mission landed near the south pole with a prototype base which I had hoped had enough power to support 3 Kerbals throughout the Munar night (I'm using TAC life support). The mission hit disaster though when Jebediah was killed in a rover crash and the base module ran out of power during the night, resulting in an emergency evacuation back to Kerbin for the remaining 2 kerbals.

Usually I just turn down the debris slider to try and eke just a little more performance from my laptop. When I first started I had debris on for a while, and while collisions and near misses are extremely rare, if you have a particular orbit you use a lot (in my case around 105km) the chances do increase substantially. Once whilst I was launching a refuelling pod, a staging mishap caused it to break up as it approached apoapsis on a ballistic arc. I was surprised when a purple marker flicked across my screen. My space station, with 4 kerbals on board had passed within 200m of the debris with a relative speed of 1km/s. Needless to say I was somewhat relieved it was okay.

On a "games you might not have tried" episode of extra-credits on youtube. My physics lecture also recently told our entire classical physics lecture that we should get the game as we'd "learn more in 3 hours of playing than we would in 10 hours of lectures". Felt a bit smug that I already had it.

Ran into an odd bug while constructing a small station. As I approached with a new module the station went into a spin that I couldn't pull out of, even time warp failed because it thought the station was under acceleration. It was like someone was firing a rocket off the side. Fortunately as the station was under construction there was only 1 kerbal on board, Hadnand Kerman, who was sitting in the cockpit of his shuttle. As the station span out of control I had no choice but to try an emergency breakaway, it's not easy to right click on a docking port when it's spinning in circles. Once Hadnand had broken off everything settled so I cautiously rebuilt the station which for the moment is spin free.

This is a very good idea.

Why? No one is forcing you to do things in the optimal way. If you want to use probes, use probes. At the moment, yes, there is one optimal way of getting science, but at least you are getting the choice. If you edit the career so as to discourage all except a certain style of gameplay, you're going to alienate players who don't want to play it that way. I like career mode, most likely because I don't see it as my duty to max out the science I can get; instead I get to run a developing space program, starting with low tech and moving up. That said, the tech tree could probably use another look, but that's a small edit that isn't particularly urgent.

I normally don't use quicksaves, mainly because I forget to make them.

Get out and push? That's the only idea I've got

That sounds unbelievably awesome. I hope that somewhere out in space this is actually happening. Wish I could see it...

"And lift off...wait a minute, this is a rescue mission for Jeb. Bill get out."

Looks like it's down for everyone, or at least nobody's ribbons are loading in their signatures

Although it's best to try and correct inclination before capture, if that for some reason can't be done you can use flybys of Jool's moons to correct your inclination for relatively little delta-v (provided you have a suitably large orbit). When I did my grand tour I shaved off a 1500m/s inclination correction by flying over Laythe's north pole. The intercept only cost me 200m/s.

Said this a few times after downloading B9. "Wait why isn't the lander engine firing, it's got full fuel? Hang on, that's a jet fuel tank isn't it?"

Personally I've been using ion engines more these days. My particular favourite was a rover mission to Duna. Full science package (except for goo and materials) and still only 2 tonnes. It gets launched on my shuttle, propels itself to Duna on an ion engine and then jettisons the gigantor solar panel and ion engine as it enters the atmosphere and lands on parachutes (Its wheels did break on landing but seeing as Duna has no biomes yet that wasn't a major issue, once it does get biomes I will certainly repeat the mission with more chutes).

@levelord: You regularly claim that only a very small minority of players have time for the engine, yet the poll on this thread indicates that just less than 2/3rds believe it should remain the way it is, so where exactly are you drawing that conclusion from? I also disagree with your statement that an ion probe can carry no significant science payload. I launched 3 ion probes as part of my shuttle program equipped with the small science parts (so no goo or materials bay). 1 flew by Dres and then went to Moho, 1 went to the sun and one equipped with wheels, parachutes, atmospheric, presmat and seismic science parts went to Duna. The burn times for each were about 12 minutes or less at 4x phys-warp (including time spent lifting them from a 120km orbit to a circular 4.5Mm orbit) as none of them weighed more than about 1.5 to 2 tonnes. They returned plenty of science for me and that was just by transmission.

Exactly how much time is 'two days'? Designing my shuttle probably took 6 or 7 hours from initial design to completion, spread out over a week or two (I was busy in the real world). In those two days how long did you actually spend designing, because if it's 1 hour I'm impressed, if it's 48 congratulations but it's not really something to brag about.