damny

I have a plane with lander that's meant to do that. I wasn't going to ask about it, but IMHO there's no real difference in difficulty. I'm pretty sure it's just one more fuel tank or thereabouts if I wanted to make my lander fly to Mun by itself, and obviously a plane that can reach Mun and beyond will have no trouble lifting the extra weight to orbit. It's the mods that make it easy. B9 removes half of the challenge of building an SSTO spaceplane by adding engines that are actually meant for SSTO spaceplanes.

Of course I would buy expansions. I bought the game so there's a precedent for me buying KSP content. I don't know how useful it is to base this decision on the price tag alone. I don't really care about the price tag, I care about the kind of content in the expansion.

I generally try to land at the KSC. I put small cars on either end of the main runway, so I get markers in the main view that tell me exactly where it is and how far it is away. This way it's not very hard to line up a plane with the runway. With everything else I just try to land nearby. I don't use mods. I'm hoping career mode will somehow reward you for good landings near the KSC (better recovery value or something).

Do you mean uninhabitable like the moon? I guess they'd just stay, then. The pilots wear space suits anyway and the engineers seem to have a neverending supply of capsules they can live in. If it's any worse than the moon I guess they'd go to the moon, since that's something most of my vehicles (mostly spaceplanes) can reach. There's an existing base there, and if there is advance warning they could send up some more base modules too. The biggest problem would be the downfall of their space based culture, since I don't use mods. They'll run out of fuel and they won't have launchpads. Maybe they can shift to an electric rover racing based culture.