Total n00b reporting for duty!

[Anomalous]

I've been playing KSP for about 2 months, the Beta release has proven to be an excellent progression in gameplay (in my opinion).

My main interest right now is building aircraft to remain on Kerbin and do the various survey missions. I started with a high speed vehicle which dropped a cluster of instruments, but without mods the pod just disappears. So I moved on to perfecting my piloting so I can land anywhere. I'm working on a simple 2 engine jet with big wings and lots of fuel that can glide at low speeds and land in some pretty rough terrain...will be more capable as my flying improves.

Next I want to develop a rover/delivery system for the survey missions on the Mun/Minmus...thinking about picking the brains of a few obviously talented builders on this forum to maybe learn a thing or two about a thing or two...

Running a vanilla install. With the .25 version I was running MechJeb, but since moving to the .90 release I haven't updated the MechJeb files and seem to be doing just fine on my own! I plan on sharing some shots of my less-than-impressive crafts in a few hours...

[Vanamonde]

I find those missions, with limited parts, harder than space flight. Welcome to the forum.

[Pecan]

Rovers can do 40-50mph ... except that they have a great tendency to bounce around and crash if you try it for long. Even at that speed it also tends to take a loooong time to get between different places. Although pretty cool for short-range work you're usually better-off using a 'hopper' design that flies to the next destination on a sub-orbital trajectory, or even re-establishes orbit. This is especially true on low-gravity bodies, like Minmus, where rovers are particularly hard to control but it takes very little deltaV to 'hop'.