Pecan

You are absolutely right. That's what's not to like. (HHGTTG reference noted).

Hence "much" too fast - however inadequate it is the only indication stock KSP gives you. Oddly enough though, now you quote that bit, I have no idea what "b)" was going to be!

Rats! I deleted my 'Demo version starter ships' document because I thought there'd be no demand for it :-( Have you performed the training mission "To The Mun, Part 1"? (Start Game > Training). That gives you a ship already in orbit around Kerbin with plenty of fuel and power to transfer to Mun, land, re-orbit, return to Kerbin and land. (That was interesting, I haven't played with the demo for a while. No wonder I bought the full game once I had!) The important thing for getting to Mun is to burn (your engines) with the ship pointing prograde (in the direction you're travelling, yellow circle with 'wings' on the navball) roughly as Mun rises above the horizon - watch for this in flight mode. Switch to map mode (press M) and watch the apoapsis (high part of orbit) on your blue orbit line expand out towards Mun's orbit. When it intercepts Mun's it will change colour to indicate that you have an encounter. Press X to turn off your engines and off you go :-) For getting to orbit a good first ship starts with a command pod with a parachute on top. This is the 'recovery stage' that will land when you've finished. Add a stack decoupler, an advanced SAS module, an FL-T400 fuel tank and then an LV-909 beneath the command pod - this will complete getting into orbit and, when you want to, push you back out of orbit to land. Finally; put another stack decoupler, two FL-T800 fuel tanks and an LV-T30 engine to launch and power most of the ascent. Save then launch this vehicle. On the pad, once the camera 'settles', press T to engage the SAS unit. Press left-shift until throttle is at max then press the spacebar to activate the main LV-T30 engine. Standard ascent advice for beginners is to go straight up to 10km then disengage SAS (T again), yaw right (D) until the rocket is angled to about 45-degrees above the horizon then re-engage SAS (T once more). Getting to orbit means getting enough height AND horizontal speed so you stay in space instead of falling back down. This turn means you will be accelerating sideways as you climb. When the lower-stage burns-out (the engine stops) press spacebar again to jettison it and again to activate the upper, LV-909, engine. Yaw further right until pitched to only 20-degrees or so above the horizon - more of the thrust is going into building horizontal speed. Press M to switch to map mode and hover your mouse over the 'Ap' (apoapsis, high point of orbit) marker on your blue orbit line. When the apoapsis reaches 75km or more press X to switch off the engines. About 30s before you reach the apoapsis (hovering the mouse over the marker also shows you the time until you reach it) make sure the ship is facing prograde then increase throttle to max again. Burn until a 'Pe' (periapsis, low point of orbit) marker appears and then approaches in front of your ship. Hover the mouse over this and burn a little more until it's over 70km - you're now in orbit. Getting to orbit isn't easy; the first few times you make it is quite an achievement. Practice and, if none of this makes much sense, read. When you're ready to come home - turn the ship so it is facing retrograde (opposite the way it's moving) then burn the engines until the orbit line hits the ground. Turn off the engines (X) and press space to jettison the fuel tank and engine; now you're committed ^^. Watch as the capsule falls, press space again to deploy the parachute anywhere below about 10km. It will first appear 'semi-deployed', slowing you a little, until you get 500m above the ground where there is enough air-density for it to fully-deploy. Then the ship will just float down to land.

As I've said before I think sandbox is the best way to start with KSP. First, obviously, you can do whatever you want to without worrying about what someone else says you "should" be doing. Secondly, if you want to develop in a structured manner you can order projects and missions in a much more logical way - as I hope this campaign does - than starting with big, heavy, manned ships as you must with the tech-tree in science or career mode. Thirdly, I think having to deal with tech-requirements, contract demands and money is more complicated than it needs to be when you just want to find out how to put a rocket together and get it into space. The Mk1 rocket here is 3 parts to orbit - what's the tech-0 equivalent in science/career? That's if you know what you want to do, of course. If you have no idea then "winning" KSP by completing the tech-tree in science mode will at least give you a direction, a 'score' and a sense of achievement. The chances are though that you'll rush-through using more or less the same design(s) and adding moar boosters when needed, rather than trying different things and thinking about what works better and why. The 'tech tree' also becomes the whole point of KSP for some people as well - we have had lots of forum posts asking "what tech should I get next?" instead of "what's most fun/interesting?" Once you're comfortable with the way that KSP and spaceflight works it's a matter for you to decide whether you want the complexity of money and contracts. Career certainly adds more depth and some sense of purpose to the game. Squad have said they want to make KSP a 'tycoon' type game and I can see where they're going. The important difference between, say, Transport Tycoon (try www.openttd.org/en/ for a free, open-source, version) and KSP is that in the tycoon games you don't have to drive the bus, perform the brain surgery, or whatever. In KSP you do have to become enough of a rocket scientist to design, build and fly the ships! To be honest I haven't had enough time (too busy with work, this and SSTO rockets) to give career mode a fair go yet but, as you'll gather from several comments above, I really dislike the tech-tree. There is the Better Than Starting Manned mod to address that but there are several issues with it (eg; currently only 0.23.5 as far as I know). Several other mods also address the tech-tree as well, or even allow you to define your own. So, yes, I spend most of my time in sandbox because I'm either "just experimenting" or I'm following my own mission structures. Career mode is a more complete and interesting game though; I'm just not sure how accessible to new players it really is. Squad have also said that it's going to be considerably expanded as well though, so it might just be too early to say.

When, given a mission one step beyond your comfort zone you can nevertheless decide on your mission-stage strategy intelligently, look-up the deltaV requirements for each of those, competently design and build suitable vehicles to meet them according to the design optimisation criteria you prefer (mass, cost, part-count, potential for mayhem) AND know the difference, find the appropriate transfer parameters, launch and fly the mission. With whatever mods you prefer; it's up to you. "Serious" is capable of doing the things you enjoy without 'just' doing the things you already know ;-0

Mods that add equipment such as SCANSat (mapping satellites), and CactEye (new, space telescopes) and others tend to incorporate their own contracts for exactly this sort of thing. Meanwhile, the devs have only told us that this is just the first round of contracts and the whole career mode is still being expanded.

Although I haven't put a lot of effort into career mode yet I'm mainly working on SSTO rockets and therefore liquid fuel. If it turns out to be cost-effective to use SRBs and just throw them away, without being too much more complex to build them, I'll give them a run.

Download the launch vehicles - and the others - from dropbox in this zip file, then you won't have to look them up when you want them :-) The Spacecraft Exchange on this forum is a good place to find completed vehicles when you need one. You can learn a lot by designing your own launch vehicles though. Be warned that it is tedious; it was one of the first things I really practiced in KSP and 30-40 test launches with 'slightly' different configurations was normal for each target payload weight. Anyone wanting to try this is recommended to use MechJeb for the launches themselves because then i) you can rely on the flight being as repeatable as possible (results not ruined by your own wobbly flying ^^), ii) you can do something more interesting for each of the 5 minutes it takes to get to orbit (about 3 hours total, per ship, not including time in the VAB). Other people have written guides and tools for launch-vehicle design. (I don't know if these have been updated for 0.24.2): Blizzy78 is a well known modder in KSP (Toolbar, Precise Node, etc) and also has an online engine-cluster calculator and guide at http://blizzy.de/asparagus/. Notice the ".de" at the end of the domain name? As a wild guess I'd say he's a German too :-) There is a complete rocket calculator at http://garycourt.github.io/korc/. Although I find it slow, give it long enough and it will design the 'perfect' rocket. For me tavert is the ultimate authority on most things (because he publishes raw data) and the best tool I know is his Mass optimal engine type vs deltaV payload and min TWR. He's not often active on the forums these days but read the whole of the OP in that thread for alternatives to the published charts - the spreadsheet is very good. ------------------------------ Thanks for your comments. Apart from anything else I think I'll add an "Index of Ships" to the end of the PDF so you can jump straight to the one you want. I'm getting tripped-up in the update over stock ship versions vs with SCANSat and Procedural Fairings. Day off work tomorrow but there are more text changes than I thought, it's coming on though. Cheap vs low-tech is also something I'm still trying to work around for the next set of ships. For one thing 'cheap' begs the question of whether that's after recovery - a cheap rocket might be disposable but a more expensive rocket to build might be more cost-effective once it's landed and recovered. Until now my own designs (and the tools above) have concentrated on payload-ratio and part-count. Tech-level is new to me, as cost is to everyone, so I'm still getting to grips with those. Ultimately spaceplanes are the way to go for cost but I am concentrating on recoverable SSTO rockets as being easier and quicker to build and fly. Incidentally; it took a month to decide how I wanted to structure this campaign and another month to design the ships for it. Actually writing and publishing it took another two months, even knowing what I wanted to say ^^. It would all be much quicker if I didn't have to go to work *sigh*, but don't expect anything too soon.

If your other vessel has a MapTraq it can see all the data mapped by all the sensors in the SOI.

Enjoy the rest of your life, I'm sure we all hope you find time to return to KSP in the future. Thanks for all your mods and for the last-minute effort you've put into them.

VAB is an option on the landing assistance window. For the runway trying planting a flag on the 'taxiway' from the SPH and set that as target for landing ;-0 (Don't put it ON the runway or KSP will complain whenever you want something to take off from there). Flags marking the beginning of and approach to the runway also make good targets for planes coming in to land. ETA: Oh, and MJ is working fine for me in 0.24.2 with 24 mods.

Hooray! The thing is, it doesn't add anything you have to do, but it doesn't give information away 'for free' either. Ignore it, map slopes with it, find 'anomalies' with it, identify them (within 2km), stop for a photo-opportunity - each step is up to you. The mapping sensor parts are only 0.03t each so they're not a chore to put into orbit and they add a reason for using satellites. What's not to like? :-)

1. imgur does for me too. 2. Not in stock KSP. Squad think giving us the numbers would take the fun out of it. 80%+ of players think giving us the numbers would save having to copy everything to a spreadsheet by hand. Most people intall one or more of the mods: Kerbal Engineer Redux (known as KER), VOID (whose real name is too long to type ^^), MechJeb (MJ, also an autopilot if you wish to use it for that). 3. As has been mentioned a) if you're going much too fast you'll see white, then red, atmospheric effects around your vehicle as the air heats up, eventually to plasma. You'll also see this on re-entry although there is no danger of burning-up in stock KSP. 4. Every vehicle needs a probe core or command pod to control it. If you want it back from orbit you need to provide enough fuel for it to de-orbit, but that doesn't take much. 5. Lots of vehicles in my tutorial ^^. Start small and, especially, light. More mass means MUCH more complicated, especially at launch.

Starting KSP and getting on the forums is a good accomplishment to begin with :-) Read the wiki. Read the tutorials. Watch the videos. Ask questions about particular things you don't understand. Try my tutorial if you want ship designs.

This is not an issue with this mod, as such, but one that many are experiencing. KSP itself is detecting the click 'through' the button you thought you were clicking on. So, if the VAB is behind that button KSP thinks you just clicked to go to the VAB. If the SPH is behind it, it thinks you clicked that, etc. etc. @ MOARdV: if you're interested - in the CactEye mod thread Rubber Ducky is inviting PMs from any modder who wants to take this one over.

Why not change your focus? Double-click a planet to focus on it, backspace returns to your currently-active ship (NB: OK in map mode but means 'abort' action group in flight). Tab cycles through all objects, if you've got the patience. See the key-bindings on the wiki for others.

1. Right click on SAS and/or pods and click to (toggle) disable torque. You can set this up to use an action group in the VAB/SPH so you don't have to click each one individually. For RCS you can similarly disable thrusters (right-click and disable) but you will have to do each one. 2. To disable use of the monopropellant on the rover - right click the tank/pod that contains it and click the green symbol to the right of the current/total amount. It will change to a red symbol and indicates that nothing will be taken from this tank. Click again to re-enable flow. On fuel + oxidiser tanks you need to do this for each resource separately. This is also a handy thing to do with a pod's battery as it means you will always have some charge stored to deploy solar panels or similar (if you forgot).

Maybe. The first rule of Easter Eggs is you don't talk about Easter Eggs. Red Iron Crown said everything else I would (again). SCANSat is fun in itself.

And mike - you misunderstand me, I was wondering how cool it would be if Squad's next game was a "build and fly your own" flight-sim. It was a 'nice idea, this could become a whole game in itself' post.

I'm not really interested in more planets just for the sake of them. We have big ones, small ones, ones that are easy to reach, ones that are hard to reach. Another one wouldn't actually add anything new as far as I can see, just one more place to take the same ships to do the same jobs.

Anything that isn't intended to dock, I tweak the monopropellant out of the pod(s). Anything that is intended to dock, I just use the monopropellant in the pod(s) and add thrusters, usually only 4. "Intended to dock" almost always implies "with a spacestation" for me, so often it isn't practical to re-orientate the target for straight-in docking.

Yes, it is illegal. Giving you a copy would be "redistributing" it, even if it's just to one person. Making a copy of a copyrighted DVD to give to your friend is still making an illegal copy! (but, no, I'm not a mod)

Oookay - KSP is a futuristic space simulator with few stock decent-looking aircraft parts and no piston engines ... and you want to reproduce historical non-space craft that look like aircraft with piston engines. I have to ask, "Is this because there aren't (m)any games that let you build your own aircraft?" Squad is, apparently, considering other games after KSP ... see where this is going?

I should point out that the answer has given the required deltaV, not the required fuel - which is what the OP originally asked. To obtain a solution to that reverse the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, now you know your engines' ISP, g, dry mass and deltaV.

Kasuha did Kerbin-Eve-Land-Orbit-Kerbin-Land-Orbit-Eve-Land-Orbit-Kerbin-Land in a single launch ^^. Not something the rest of us are up for though, I think. @Jeb - in addition to Longbow's comments: You can time-warp in the tracking centre or KSC scene as well. Landing on and re-orbiting from Moho isn't too bad - easier than Duna - of Jool's moons only Tylo (highest gravity with no atmosphere for braking/parachutes) and Laythe (only oxygen atmosphere outside Kerbin - makes jets, and therefore spaceplanes, useful) require more deltaV. Getting TO Moho, and particularly stopping once you do get there is the hard part. The deltaV map Longbow linked to is your best tool, along with the transfer window planner you say you're already using. Building in orbit gives you much greater flexibility and reusability but, as noted above, there isn't anything in KSP you can't do in a single launch - it just requires very big, complex and well-designed vehicles. Apart from that docking and assembling in orbit is pretty good fun on its own :-) A lander capable of getting back into Eve orbit is quite a challenge - one that can go back to Kerbin and land afterwards is asking a lot, but can be done. In general it's all possible depending on how you want to play things. There are a lot of people who almost only ever do single-mission, single-launch ships whereas I prefer reusable launch vehicles, space-stations, transfer vehicles and lander/re-orbiters.