Career science craft.

[Dimetime35c]

What's the best way to build a science craft in career mode? I have unlocked the 3 man capsule and and that's the furthest I've unlocked to. What's the best way to make a craft that will get the most science?

[CalculusWarrior]

Science parts of course! And also creating a craft which can travel to far-reaching places in the Kerbol system. Simply stick as many science parts on your ship as possible (or at least on your lander) and fly off to a planet/moon you haven't visited yet. If you have docking and bring a lander along, land a couple kerbals (or even just one) on the body, gather science through their right-click menus on EVA, use crew reports, and also your science parts, like all the instruments and the Goo. Then, instead of transmitting it all, use your kerbals to take the experiments out of the parts and transfer them back into the command module, which can detach and return to Kerbin safely without any fancy return system. When you recover the pod, you should have tons of science!

[katateochi]

As CalculusWarrior said you need all the science sensors to really maximize what you can get from each mission. A lot of folk go for getting to the further away planets because there are lot of points to be had in a single place. But I feel (from a kinda roll playing point) that going to the far out planets before you have all the tech seems a little wrong/backwards. You can get everything unlocked with a series of Mun missions, either with a complex single craft or a series of simpler craft.

To maximise what one single craft can return I think you want a craft that has several sub sections that can split off and go to different science locations, then regroup and return home. For example, you could go to Jool and then fire a probe at each of its moons, then return the probes to their mother ship and return home with the results. Thou in the case of Tylo its prob easier to just transmit the data and scrap the probe rather than trying to take off from that monster's surface!

Or you can have something that can land at each of the biomes on Mun. I used a large craft to put a lab, a load of spare fuel and a lander in orbit around Mun, then used a lander to make shuttle runs to the 15 different biomes. Each time the lander would return to the lab, refuel and have the lab clear out its experiments, store the results and refuel the lander. Then it was a case of rinse and repeat. I found it a fun way of doing it because it required doing lots of rendezvous and docking, lots of landings and I returned with 1 pod absolutely crammed full of science. It was a hard craft to design because of the amount of spare fuel I needed to bring with me to refuel the lander, so that was fun too.

You could just send 15 individual missions to Mun using a simpler craft that was just designed to land in one spot and then return home, but that doesn't really answer your goal of have a single craft that can maximise what it can get.