Maneuver burns and Scientist multiplier questions

[Montag]

Let's say you have a maneuver node that is a prograde burn with a duration of 3 minutes. You start your burn slightly earlier than 1 minute 30 seconds to compensate for throttle up. Should you being burning pure prograde the whole time or should you be burning to the maneuver target (blue crosshair) the whole time?

From a LKO, how long of a burn time would you go before splitting it across multiple orbit pass burns?

How does the Scientist experience level multiplier effects work? Does he just need to be in the vessel when you transmit or recover? Does he need to be the one that conducts the EVA, take the surface sample, or take data from a goo or science jr? Does he only need to be present for a crew report? Can this be exploited by just swapping out the crew at re-entry? I am not looking to game the system, just wanting to understand it.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

Let's say you have a maneuver node that is a prograde burn with a duration of 3 minutes. You start your burn slightly earlier than 1 minute 30 seconds to compensate for throttle up. Should you being burning pure prograde the whole time or should you be burning to the maneuver target (blue crosshair) the whole time?

From a LKO, how long of a burn time would you go before splitting it across multiple orbit pass burns?

I'll take the 1st 2,

1. the blue reticle. it compensates for your position.

2. 10 minutes. unless its your final interplanetary burn. ( See the tutorial in my sig,)

[nekogod]

You start your burn slightly earlier than 1 minute 30 seconds to compensate for throttle up.

Pressing Z gets you instant throttle up. Technically you should start the burn slightly after 1m30s, even pressing shift to throttle gradually. This is because your TWR increases as you burn fuel, whereas maneuver node burn times are calculated using current weight and do not account for the increase in acceleration. So a 3 minute burn for 720m/s actually becomes something like 2m40s because at the start of the burn you might be able to accelerate at 4m/s^2 but by the end of the burn you might be up to 5m/s^2