Jimbimbibble

If you want to minimize required dV you also need to aerobrake as you're coming in. The ideal transfer will put you on a course so that your orbital plane is more or less lined up with gilly after the aerobrake and your Ap is close to Gilly's orbit. Then continue to adjust and raise your Pe until you get the encounter you want. I find it helpful to get the trajectory reasonable half way to the planet and fine-tune immediately after entering the SoI.

It sounds like a mod issue. Try redownloading and reinstalling your mods. Which ones are you using?

Once you get high enough and your apoapsis is several minutes away, you don't need a whole lot of TWR to keep going. Also, it's ok if you circularize a little bit after apoapsis. The space shuttle actually did that and so did other real spacecraft.

You want to shoot for an initial TWR of about 1.2-1.5 and start your turn when you are between 50-100m/s vertical speed. You should be at about 45 degrees when you hit 1000m/s. Second stage TWR is typically less than 1, maybe around 0.6. You won't really coast to apoapsis if you have your TWR and turn profile correct because you burn at 100% all the way up. It takes about 9km/s to make orbit in rss. Orbital velocity is about 7.7km/s for a low orbit. If you need moar thrust, you can place engines on the bottom of your rocket in symmetry to create your own engine cluster.

Well, it's sure got time giddy-up! That ship is massive. You should be able to get to Duna or Eve and back no problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it can get to Jool too. Just make sure you aerobrake when you get there.

I've never really had this issue. Just make sure the mouse is pointing directly at the decoupler and slowly move it until everything is lined up.

You can check your CoM and CoL in the VAB. If the CoM is behind the CoL the rocket might be unstable. 4 winglets ought to do it unless you have an especially wonky payload.

You may also want to reduce your TWR for Ferram. Shoot for an initial TWR of 1.2-1.5 and start your turn when you get to between 50m/s and 100m/s respectively. Pitch over about 5 degrees and you know the rest.

I'm doing the same thing as Hodo. The game lost it's challenge and became dull when I could do everything.

There is no way to change this in the stock game and I am unaware of any mods that would do this either.

Make sure the navball is set to surface mode and point your ship retrograde. From your description, it sounds like you're killing your vertical speed but not your horizontal speed. The engine you're using should be fine though.

That pretty much covers it.

Agreed, that's the best way. KSP tries to figure out what kind of vessel it is based on the design and name you give it but it doesn't always get it right.

Another option is to use hyperedit's rendezvous feature to put the kerbal next to the ship.

Have you checked the CoM with tanks empty? It may have shifted in flight as you burn fuel.

+1. You need to download a lot of mods to make RSS work. Get Realism Overhaul and the other required mods (real fuels, engine pack for real fuels + a lot of different engines, stretchy tanks, kerbal joint reinforcement, etc). It will take a while to figure this all out because you basically need to relearn the game. Good luck !

Velusip, that picture you posted was really cool! It's like modern art or something. Why would you want to get rid of that?

Reaction wheels are equally powerful no matter where they are placed because their torque is fixed and is independent of distance to CoM, whereas RCS is more effective at the extremities.

I'm using rfts for my engines.

I'm having an issue where some engines (such as the SPS from NovaPunch) have no decoupler shroud, which makes my rocket look ugly. I'm not sure whether it's an interaction between mods or if the engines are not supposed to have a shroud. Anyone know how I can fix this?

Get in a low Kerbin orbit, then burn prograde toward the mun when the mun comes over the horizon. Adjust your orbit so you get as close as possible. When you arrive, do your capture burn as close to the mun as you can (but don't run into a hillside).

You will notice that returning a single experiment now gives you a much larger percentage of total science. After returning 2 goos or bays you will have maxed it. Also, you can now remove science from your sensors and store it in your command pod. As a result, they had to make it inoperable after removal or transmitting to balance the game. The purpose of the mpl is to clean out your experiments so they can be used again. You can put an mpl in orbit around the mun with a fuel tank, then run back and forth with your lander, refueling the lander and cleaning the experiments. It allows you to get half the biomes in a single launch.

On a side-note, you can get going like a bat out of hell if you head out to Jool, do a powered gravity assist to lower your Solar Pe to almost zero, and burn at Solar Pe. By the time you get back to Jool you'll be going over 50km/s if you do it right.

So, to summarize what has been said, see if a gravity assist can help you. If it can't, match planes with the target as far from Jool as you can. Then lower your Jool Pe to just above the atmosphere and burn there to lower your Ap for encounter.

Yeah, that should do fine, but be aware that ksp is not currently capable of utilizing more than 1 processor core, so your quad core won't help you very much. This means you will still get lag due to lots of physics calculations even though the graphics would be ok. Also, it can't use more than 4Gb of ram because it's a 32bit program.