Jimbimbibble

One option is to set up the first couple of sats with manned missions until your network is good enough to go unmanned.

Fuel savings would likely be a few tens of m/s by lowering the orbit. You also need to consider that at that altitude you would be limited to 10x time warp. However, a different landing/ascent trajectory could make much more of a difference. In the ideal landing, you lower your Pe to just above the surface and get most of your deceleration done just above the ground. You want to time it just right so you finish your burn just above the ground. Ascent follows a similar path where you reach orbital velocity and kick your Ap up to 75km while still just above the ground. Also, you want to be pointed prograde/retrograde at all times.

Can I assume that if I'm using RSS I can use all the mods that go with it (procedural parts, FAR, RealFuels, engine packs, etc)? It's nearly impossible to get to orbit without those mods, let alone do something interesting.

Each satellite needs 4 dishes. 1 large dish aimed at active vessel, and 3 small dishes to relay the signal to ground. 2 of the small dishes are pointed at the adjacent satellites in your network and the third is pointed at the tracking station. When I did this I put 4 satellites 90 degrees apart in a semi synchronous orbit, but the configuration doesn't matter as long as you have enough of them.

Have you tried going up the slope at an angle (as opposed to straight up the hill)?

Yeah, that will work. Even at 5-10x any deviations would be very small.

That pretty much covers it. Just remember that you can steer small rockets with the command pod but you will need something else if you want to steer a big rocket.

If you have something like Kethane that allows you to use air breathing engines, sure.

I haven't used KOS for a while but it looks like the period after your brackets should not be there if you have periods on the internal lines. At least, that's how C works. If it's not that, then you're trying to reference a structure incorrectly but I can't tell which one.

It would be a better approximation to split the dV, but the analytical solution is pretty complex. Either way, you're going to be making correction burns.

I would try to get your speed as high as possible on jets so you need to burn < 1 minute on rockets. I ascend steeply until 10km, then at around 10-15 degrees until 20km and keep it shallow after that to reach my max speed around 30km when the jets cut out for lack of air.

That tiny processor is getting bogged down by the physics calculations, which must be done on the CPU and chrome books don't have much of a graphics card either. I'm afraid there's not much you can do with changing settings, but reducing part count will help. Chrome books were not designed for games. On a side note, I'm also running a 4670k on my rig.

It was replaced by the SP+ parts.

Yep, cargo bays and fairings are essential if you're playing with FAR.

Sure, you can do it, it's just hard to get the trajectory right without hyperedit.

pcpartpicker.com is a great tool to help you build a computer. Building is not very hard and it saves money because you only buy what you need and you're not paying someone else to build it. I have the i5 4670k overclocked to 4.6GHz and it runs at an acceptable temperature with the cooler master hyper 212 EVO. Just make sure you have good case fans and air cooling will work well for a chip like this. You only need liquid cooling for more powerful chip like the i7 Extreme.

My intuition tells me that gunning it is not best because in order to gun it you need to be burning a lot of fuel in the lower atmosphere where it's less efficient. Sure, you get out in less time, but time doesn't matter here because we care about the amount of fuel consumed for a given change in height. To test this, build a rocket with a TWR of about 3:1 and about 3km/s deltaV. Launch it strait up at full throttle and again at terminal velocity using Mechjeb. The one that achieves a higher apogee is more efficient.

It's usually best to have the rear gear just behind the CM. Also, having the brakes on at touchdown would cause the symptoms you listed.

Based on that data it might be worth it to use LV-N only if you don't want to bring a jet. You only have to get up to 1km before it's the most efficient rocket engine.

Did you bind the throttle lever to an axis or did you bind it to throttle up/down? It needs to be on an axis.

You ought to be able to get the orbital periods to about 0.1s difference. Kerbal Engineer can tell you what your orbital period is with that resolution so I'd suggest tweaking it until it's as good as it can be, unless you're out of RCS fuel or something. At 0.1s you'll hardly notice drift.

Fuel flows from the farthest tank down the line, so if two tanks are tied for farthest you can get weird fuel flow.

To clarify, if you attach liquid fuel tanks end to end then the fuel flows automatically. You would use fuel lines when you attach tanks side by side. Google "asparagus staging". That technique is very useful. One last note about fuel lines is that they only work one way. When you put a fuel line on you have to click the tank you want fuel to flow from first and then click the tank you want it to go to.

Every engine has this parameter listed in the VAB. Right click on any part to show/hide more information. I would strong recommend getting Kerbal Engineer, a very useful mod that will give you a lot of info about your ship. Here's the link. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/18230-0-24-2-Kerbal-Engineer-Redux-v0-6-2-10-and-v1-0-7-1

If you press Alt + wasdqe you can rotate a part in 5 degree increments.