thereaverofdarkness

1.25m long pod that seats two. Squad add it to the game.

Fix for flag thing: first flag goes anywhere, later flags must either be placed in a specific biome (each biome is only used once for this per game) or to a specific location on the body. The more specific flag-planting contracts will show up more later and will pay better. Another method to get multiple satellite contracts (done this twice): accept more than one and complete all from the same launch. Easy if they are all around the same parent body.

The #1 most important change we want is no drag on covered parts, so that long rockets don't fly as if they are going through soup. The second most important change we want is the removal of infinigliding; for wing surfaces to reflect lift rather than create it. Other than that, I think NEAR is probably a pretty good example of what the stock aerodynamic model should look like. One thing in particular I think the stock aerodynamics should differentiate from reality on is angle of attack stress on wings. In real life, turning your plane too fast will rip the wings off. In KSP we are impatient and have engines with absurdly high thrust, so it's all too easy to, and perhaps too difficult not to turn quickly.

I didn't even consider that. I was mostly using my own skills to stop its movement, and relying on time warp when I got lazy. I've got to try that! (And Squad needs to patch that time warp stabilization exploit!)

I use the Stayputnik quite a bit. On just about every game, I need a probe core before I've gotten around to unlocking anything else. Also, it's not that hard to keep it stable with a few tricks. I love my little Stayputnik even more now that it has no SAS. It is the King Underdog probe core of underdogs. It is the Little Engine that Could. It is a spectacular little low-tech device that defies limitations and pushes envelopes. Please don't take that away from me.

If you edit the time to a point earlier than certain things you did, it will undo them. If you have an estimate of how far you were into yoouor persistence when you left, you might try setting the time to just a little past that, then make sure your most recent creations are intact so you know you didn't go too far back.

I've never tried this, but you could likely drop a ball of cubic octagonal struts encasing a spotlight and battery inside. If it fell away ahead of you, it could survive impact and make it easy for you to see where the ground is from much further than the light shines. You'd just have to make sure it doesn't get more than 2km away from you.

You just want to control your plane's attitude (vee marker)--should have the nose pointed slightly above where you see your heading/prograde marker (yellow-green circle). If the prograde marker is too far below your attitude marker, then you're getting a high angle of attack and you need more wing surface area. If you are having difficulty pointing the nose up, you need more control surfaces (such as AV-R8 or Elevon). Once you have a plane with enough wing surface and control surface, you can come in for an easy landing. Don't start too high, just get yourself under 1km from the ground on a somewhat steep trajectory, and pull up as you get close to the ground. The extra speed actually makes it easier to pull up. Now try to level out. Watch your prograde marker. You are level when your prograde marker sits on the horizon on the navball. To land, just nose down a bit and let the prograde marker dip a little under the horizon. You'll see your altitude begin to drop, and the ground begin to get closer. If your plane is controllable enough, you can turn off your engines completely during landing. This is a good way to make the landing at as low velocity as possible. You want to land ideally under 100m/s and preferably as low as 50m/s if you can manage that. Turn off your engines and allow your plane to slow down, then verify that you can still bring your prograde marker significantly above the horizon if you wanted to. As you slow down, you lose control gradually. If you need to, turn on your engines a bit. Eventually, as the ground gets really close, you want to be hovering over it, very slowly losing altitude. You should see the shadow of the plane glide smoothly under you, and in a perfect landing the shadow will shimmy up and gently kiss the underside of your plane. Immediately throttle all the way down (if you haven't already) and start braking intermittently (hotkey: . Don't hold the brake down unless you are certain it won't cause your plane to spin out of control. Once you get under 40m/s you should be safe to hold the brake down, but watch your plane and you can judge that for yourself. After reaching a complete stop, you can click the brake icon at the top of the screen HUD (the one that lights up when you press and make the brakes stay on, like an E-brake.

I set my income gains down to just 30% and found it was still easily enough to build massive rockets, but far too little to upgrade the buildings. My guess is that the high cost of upgrades is supposed to help offset the high amounts of money you rake in during a game with normal settings. I think the upgrade cost of buildings should be altered based on your payout rate. It still makes the rockets more expensive. Or perhaps there should be a slider in the custom options to adjust upgrade costs.

Getting to Jool or Eeloo is pretty easy within the stock parts once you have a good grasp of how to build rockets and fly them. Even that much will take many game hours as you learn, step by step, various ways to build finer things and fly in finer ways. Not long after I made my first successful mun landing, I found myself reaching the conclusion that it was impossible to build a rocket that could launch from the pad in one piece and reach Duna. This prompted dozens of hours of building refueling stations and leap-frogging my way out to Duna. By the time I had finished building the stations, I had learned enough about fuel-saving trajectories and proper use of the LV-N nuclear engine that I found it was pretty easy to make a trip straight off the pad to Jool, even. Also, I learned that having three stations in Kerbin orbit was really just a waste of fuel, and it cost the least fuel to make the full leap right from low orbit. I am now well over a year into the game and still learning new things. I have once made a rather elaborate probe trip to Jool, have landed an air-breathing aircraft on Laythe, but have never brought a proper colony ship to Jool. There are always things left to do, learn, and discover. This game can take many hours away from you, but really brighten up your life. As always, my biggest suggestion to you is to try the demo first. It's a few versions behind so it lacks a lot of the full version's parts and polish, but it's an excellent way for you to figure out if building rockets is your thing or not.

The purpose of using the mobile lab as a storage facility is for taking the same experiment from the same location twice. This is useful for materials experiments (mystery goo, science jr., soil sample) because they do not give the full amount of science on the first try, even when returned to Kerbin. It's not a huge boost to your science return, but if you're a science snob or completionist, then it's the way to go. If you remove the goo from its canister and store either in the command module or the mobile lab, you can clean the canister out and use it again. This is useful when you want to return the science home rather than transmit. Even without a mobile lab, you can still collect the data from the small tools (thermometer, barometer, seismometer, gravioli detector). Collecting the data from a crew report and storing it in the same command module takes it out of the crew report slot and puts it in the data storage section. Why do you have to climb out to do this? It's one of many questions that may never be answered. Scott Manley stores his material experiments religiously on long excursions on his interstellar space program because he needed to collect as much science as possible. A lot of times he would take the data twice; transmit the first and keep the second. This gave some early science gain from the excursion before returning, but with the large amount of data stored on each vessel, they would return home bringing tons of science points. He might just be a science snob anyway, but it was also important for the huge amounts of science required to unlock the final technologies in the interstellar mod pack.

You can't do gravity scans in flight. You have to do it from orbit.

You still need the button to be present. Just make sure you're pretty close to 7000m but a bit higher, then swap to another craft (or the space center) and back to your Gilly ship.

If you click on the mark in the map, you can set navigation to lead you to it. It won't show in the main view, but you can see it on the navball.

It says in their data that they give +100% return ( which seems rather high) however I was seeing values that looked like the default return. I could have mistaken a +100% value for being default, but a +5% bonus would have been obvious as it wouldn't be a round number. I never returned the samples home, but I didn't see any bonuses on-site when I collected them with a scientist.

Same here. My guess is that remaining stable for ten seconds really just means staying within the bounds of the contract and not exploding.

I can't figure out scientists. I don't get any transmits in yellow font, and the scientists seem to have no effect on my science return.

I expected the mobile lab to count, but was suspicious it might not. I had not got around to testing that just yet.

Never mind. I re-read the OP again and I take back what I said. For getting surface reports, I find the trick is to just land the plane nearby and taxi to the spot. If you keep adjusting your heading relative to the target, you won't miss the site. If you exit it before you manage to stop, then you can try turning around (very slowly if your plane is using landing gear), or since you just need an EVA report, you can exit and walk back a ways.

The trick for selecting the right burn point for the Mün is to burn when you're at a 120º angle from it, which is slightly before Münrise. If you have sufficient TWR and stability, you'll get it every time when burning at 120º from a very low orbit. The right positioning relative to the Mün and to Münrise vary by altitude of Kerbin orbit. To rendezvous in orbit without maneuver nodes or targeting: 1.) Get in a slightly lower orbit if you're behind, or slightly higher if you're ahead. 2.) Time warp until you start to get a lot closer. The point at which you put your orbit back like the target's orbit is when you'd meet up on the other side of the planet. So watch how much closer you get in one half orbit. 3.) Lower/raise the opposite side of your orbit to match the target's orbit. Time warp around to the other side and see how close you got, and adjust your orbit circular again. 4.) Keep repeating steps 1-3, getting your orbit closer and closer to the target's orbit as you get closer and closer to the target. When you get very close to the target, switch out of map view to finish the rendezvous. 5.) Find the target's color diamond marker in your view and watch its heading relative to yours. Line up the target directly past your spaceship from your view. 6.) Point your ship in the direction that the target appears to be heading. It should be completely horizontal to you. Burn gradually until the target appears to stop moving. You might have to adjust your heading a few times. 7.) Burn directly towards the target. Watch its distance so you know how fast you're approaching it. Give yourself plenty of time to "stop". Turn directly around (exact opposite of the way you were just facing), then slow down at closest approach. 8.) You may (probably will) have to repeat steps 5 and 6 again once you get closer. Keep going through steps 5-7 until you're right next to the target. Careful not to crash into it! When getting close, you might consider not moving directly toward the target.

Guys, the OP clearly stated that the EVA reports must be done at altitude. My recommendation to you is to do them from orbit. That way you can just climb out of the ship and hang outside of it as you near the site. And no, you don't have to have your Kerbal clinging to anything to make an EVA report. You can launch em out of the cockpit at 15,000m and 600m/s and have em go flying far away from the plane, and still be able to make the EVA report.

I usually just use a plane to get those that are both on the local continent and require you to be below the given altitude. The ones that want you above can be done from orbit unless it's a barometric scan.

I believe you can see them in the tracking center even if you have not yet seen the contract, as long as it is on the list of contracts you can accept.

I've noticed this on suborbital trajectories when your current position is past the apoapsis. Sometimes if you just keep diligently moving the mouse cursor along the orbital plane, you eventually get a chance to place a node, if even only for an instant. Another way to fix it is to reverse your descent so that you are behind the apoapsis, or bring your self back into an orbital trajectory. And I also find if I adjust the camera angle around, sometimes I find a position that is easier to place maneuver nodes from. The major conflict seems to be from the post-crash orbit line sometimes allowing you to place a maneuver node on it but always preventing you from clicking on your present trajectory. But in 0.90 there is also no way to set nodes until you upgrade something...not sure what but might be the tracking station.

Me too. Wow, you'd think they would tell you which way to orbit if they wanted to be picky about it.