Pecan

No - you rebelled too early and were disqualified. This time around only 70 countries are taking part, which is why you didn't notice. You do know there are more than 70 other countries in the world, right? You know there are other countries? You know the "world series" is a joke?

Sandbox! KSP is a great game and getting better all the time. Engines almost got sensible (actually I think this rebalance is as good as it's worth getting) :-) You can do difficult missions in a logical order and progress through the system as your skills and ability improve. I haven't tried the new tutorials yet so I can't comment on them. Career? Well, yes, if you don't have any idea what you want to do, I suppose you might as well follow someone else's game ^^. Science - you're kidding right? Good of Squad to keep it in there for <deleted> the people who need it.

My ex-wife sent me three texts in rapid succession: 1. If only Ivor Cutler was alive 2. Where's Rab C. Nesbit? 3. Vote no.

No, No - don't quote me that way - I hate these pointless speculation threads. I was pointing people at the dev notes. Anything else your crystal balls may tell you is ... sorry to break it to you ... ........ (testing here to see what the censors make of the word for 'heretical priests')

A picture makes many things clear - you have fuel lines running in both directions between the radial tanks. That's creating a loop straight away and throwing things out. You only want fuel lines in one direction.

FTW! You 'da man :-) I can't see myself wanting to get more than that into orbit for a while! (Or ever, to be honest, but it's still impressive). Your comments on the differences between building and flying rocket vs spaceplane SSTOs would also be interesting.

There's nothing stopping someone playing stock career from building and testing vehicles in a parallel sandbox save before continuing in career. In reality, in as much as it corresponds to KSP, many simulations are run on prototypes before anyone even tries to build them so why make all your mistakes the expensive way? Similarly for KER/MJ/VOID informational mods - what's the difference between using those to tell you your deltaV, or whatever, and using a spreadsheet?

Getting LOADS of them today, yes. :-( Join the gang = http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84869-502-Error-Ocurrance-List

Yep - LOADS today. And the joke's on the hosts because they actually started at 5:09 local time, so there ^^. (It's alright, I know this is just being silly).

Haven't tried anything specifically for Mun - this works as a lander for everywhere up to Duna cost 3,620, 2,731m/s deltaV - it can almost take itself to Mun and back.

Your videos and work on spaceplanes in general is great. I'm aproaching the same sort of things from the other (rocket) side and have only recently started looking at reusability, for the obvious 0.24 reason. 40t-payload SSTO, a lot quicker and easier to get into orbit, obviously burns a lot of fuel doing it (the 4 radial towers - centre one is the payload) but otherwise 100% recoverable.

New models and reworking the Mk line according to the devnotes.

Oh good - looking forward to what you come up with. I shall probably copy them shamelessly ^^. Incidentally - a SSTO that goes much beyond orbit is a mistake ;-) What with it meaning Single Stage To Orbit and all that. Beyond orbit, what's the point in carrying around all those wings, landing gear and jets? Arguably useful for other planets/moons with an atmosphere and particularly fun for Laythe, of course, otherwise - SSTO then detach vacuum transfer/landing stage to carry out the mission and return. Dock and land later. ETA: Er, yes, I might just be being bloody awkward here but I want to encourage people - especially beginners - to look at the cheap and easy possibilities of non-plane SSTOs and designing for different mission stages. Launch-to-orbit is, after all, a very particular challenge.

WAAAAAYYYYYY TOOOOOO BIIIIIGGGGGG!! Start small. Section 3 of Chapter 2 of my tutorial has a small, easy to fly plane if you'd like to try it - the .craft download link is at the start of the chapter. If you want a simple splaceplane there is one in Section 4 of Chapter 6. The actual spaceplanes I use in the campaign are in Section 5 of Chapter 4 and Section 5 of Chapter 7. Amongst the problems yours has: No control surfaces that I can see - elevators, ailerons, etc. - so it depends entirely on lift without pitching nose-up to take off. Just as well because those long rockets at the back will always hit the ground on landing/take-off unless you stay completely flat. You have just a huge amount of fuel, engines and rockets.

Do you really mean you think spacebar is logical and sensible but throttle isn't? While it's unarguably true that people don't read nearly as much as they should the throttle is explained in the flight basics tutorial as well as the keybindings, wiki, etc. etc. This is not about "boohoo, you have to press 'X'", we have to increase throttle anyway, it's about "50% is a lousy default that can only cause problems". 50% throttle is not 'accessible', it's just wrong for everyone, the way to make software accessible is to provide instruction, pop-up hints and other tools. Be serious.

No, no, it's a really GREAT feature - apparently, it makes failing easier for beginners. There seems to be no other point to it :-( http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87358-Setting-the-throttle-to-zero-at-launch-by-default

No, you're not missing anything at all. Apart from the very first entry in the FAQ: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87518-21-Jul-KSP-First-Contract-%28v0-24%29-Frequently-Asked-Questions And - just from the last couple of pages - exactly the same questions by other people who also missed everything that had already been written: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87313-How-to-complete-stranded-kerbal-mission-%28-24%29 http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/86495-How-do-I-complete-a-rescue-contract http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87434-How-to-rescue-somebody-who-s-in-orbit-over-Kerbin-with-only-his-spacesuit

Yes, that's always been my point too - I wouldn't trust an airliner that didn't have an autopilot, let alone a space mission. Any director of a space programme that wanted every calculation done by hand would be similarly suspect. Your "Not really" confused me, as I was talking about what Squad have said, not what I believe to be best. R4ptor, in particular, appears to believe anything automated or non-stock is 'cheating', and yet here is asking for an extremely complex, out-of-context, solution just to make things easier. Hence my original comments that even if we had such folding, storable, rovers he wouldn't use them.

Why are all your SSTOs spaceplanes?

My advice would be to avoid career and science until you know what you're doing. Why limit yourself in parts and cost when you're just trying to find out how to fly something, anything, to orbit and get used to the interface? The career/science tech-tree is awful for beginners so just play sandbox until you know how to put a rocket together, how to get it into orbit, what the manoeuvre nodes do and how they work. THEN you can start crashing and exploding with relish!

Why haven't I posted here yet? SCANSat is possibly my favourite mod. It's the reason for my tutorial! Anyway, just to say that I never really got SCANSat working properly with RPM in the old versions. This time everything's perfect - thanks for that :-)

*Applause* a masterly demonstration there. [You might want to check MJ again though. While your main point is true, it's much better at docking now, doesn't blast RCS all the time].

a) ON Mun, around Mun or just 'Mun altitude orbit'? Return to where? Assuming you're landed on Mun this deltaV map shows it will take a minimum of 580 (to re-orbit) + 230 + 80 = 890m/s. As the others have said, you should give yourself something like 10% margin for error, so call that 979 and round it up to ... well, what do you know, about 1,000m/s, just like the others said :-)

First get to orbit :-) 'Sub-orbital' covers a lot of ground (as it were) but from everything that then went wrong I'm assuming you were a) still in atmosphere and, probably past apoapsis (high point of flight). Basically, you'd got 'high' but not really into space - then rushed at Mun while you were more or less already falling out of the sky. 1. Get a stable orbit - apoapsis and periapsis (low point of orbit) both above 69km, preferably around 75km and roughly equal. 2. Change plane to match Mun (0 degrees equatorial orbit). 3. Perform a Hohmann transfer to intercept Mun.

This deltaV map (http://i.imgur.com/NKZhU57.png), which is the one I use, shows you need 580m/s to get into low orbit around Mun and another 230 + 80 to return - for a total of 890m/s. As palioxis says you need to be leaving Mun opposite to its direction of travel; you are slowing your Kerbin orbital speed and thus fall to a lower altitude around it. Concentrate on getting the periapsis into Kerbin's atmosphere (69km or lower, preferably about 20-40km). When you fall into the atmosphere 'aerobraking' will degrade your orbit even more, lowering the apoapsis a lot and the periapsis a bit. It might take several orbits but as long as you're entering the atmosphere each time you will, eventually, hit the ground.