Millie

I only had enough fuel to get within 55km of Kerbin, and so spend the next hour going around the planet shaving off a few hundred metres at a time before, finally, getting the thing to slow down enough to land on the surface. That'll teach me to be greedy and try to do a Minmus and Mun flyby with the starting parts in career mode... And Manley can land on freakin' Minmus...

How do you know, for sure, that: a) the amount of times something is Googled is the best metric of "popularity" (whatever you mean by this) that any waning amount of Googling is due to the long development time? "Prolonged" is relative and subjective. "Popularity" is relative and subjective. All that matters, really, is that there's a prospect of Squad making more money over the next few quarters than they spend. Yes, popularity will be a factor in that. But I'd rather have a quality - relative and subjective concept! - game than something rushed through because I'm impatient. I am impatient - a relative and subj... bleh - but that's beside the point...

If you put your fingers on all four keys and then make "nyooooowwwwwwm" noises with your hand while swooping left, right, forward and backward, the "w pitches down" thing makes perfect sense. I encourage all people to do it. Especially when they have company.

Without claiming that one way of playing is better than others, stock parts and game concepts TEND to be better balanced within the game than mod parts. Pro devs have more testing time and can see the bigger picture of how one feature interacts with the others. You tend to get a smoother overall experience with officially sanctioned parts. At least, that's my experience with other games. This is one of the reasons why I tend to play stock most of the time, especially with the game in alpha state. But naturally there are some kickass, balanced and well-tested mods out there. It's how you choose to play the game that will determine which way you go. If something is really cool and adds core flavour to the game (Kethane, anyone? ), it ought to be stock before 1.0 in some form.

Thanks all! Plenty to chew on. I'll go away and digest.

Another noob question! I've noticed that landing on slopes is generally a bad idea. While I've finally managed to get to the Mun and back in one piece, I'd like in the future to have a bit of a moon base. While I am getting better at using manoeuvre nodes for targeting where I smash into... sorry... "land", I'm really bad at telling from the zoomed in view what the elevation or gradient of the surface is. So, two main questions here: 1) how can I be a little more precise about where I land? and 2) how can you tell what the terrain (kerbain?) is like at your target? Is this something I need to find out with trial and error? (Related to all that, it would be cool in the future if you had to send probes to these bodies to conduct mapping/scanning missions before you could tell anything about the surface. Would add something to career mode, certainly.)

@purpletarget - Thanks! That's basically what I was after. I'll start installing mods only when I've got a handle on the vanilla game. Thanks for the other replies too, though. At least I know where I can get that info if I really need it.

OK, perhaps a noobish question, but I am a noob. Bought the game three days ago and have been glued to it since. Which probably isn't productive, but there we go. Right. I know that I need to balance my mass with my thrust to get my ship into space and do cool things with it. So far I've been able to successfully put a small craft into orbit and got a lander on the Mun. However, I didn't have enough fuel to get back. My design was based on the video tutorial by pebblegarden, with the difference being I used a 3-man pod rather than a 1-man pod. The difference in mass was clearly the issue, given that my fuel usage was relatively similar to the tutorial but I didn't have enough thrust to achieve escape velocity from the Mun. Which is most unfortunate for Jebadiah Kerbin's mother... So, the actual question after the ramble: is there a way to check the total mass of your vehicle? Or is this something I have to estimate from the parts I've bolted on? I've got a rough idea of how much thrust/fuel I need to move a something, but I'm not yet experienced enough to optimise this for my payload. Of course, every time I add a fuel tank, I add mass, which required more thrust, which requires an engine, which requires more fuel, etc. I'm sure through trial and error I can calculate these ratios, but it would be much easier if I could tell quickly my total mass. Any help on this would be appreciated. Even if the answer is simply "go and work it out for yourself"!