I've recently found myself re-addicted to Kerbal Space Program. After replaying the tutorial, and after playing Children of a Dead Earth, I now understand orbital mechanics a lot better. KSP's tutorials are honestly kind of crappy. Children of a Dead Earth taught me some of the most basic things about orbital mechanics, and the lessons were very applicable to KSP. My first manned Mun mission used a very heavy lander with tons of experiments and stuff. However, it didn't have enough fuel to make it back to Kerbin. With the last of my delta-V, I was able to get it into an orbit above the Mun with an apoapsis of 10 kilometers and a periapsis of 32 kilometers. It was really low on fuel, like 300 to 400 m/s of delta-V remaining, but it was orbiting, just kinda skimming the mountaintops. So, I was like, yeah, I can work with this.
I sent a robot ship with a 3-man reentry pod to synchronize with that extremely low orbit, and since I didn't have any contact with the dark side of the Mun, I carefully plotted my maneuvers such that they took place when there was line-of-sight with Kerbin. Then, as soon as I'd matched this extremely low, damn near ridge-skimming orbit, I had the three kerbals on the stranded craft jetpack over to the drone ship, one at a time. I even had them recover the experiments from the experiment box. Then, the now fully manned drone ship returned to Kerbin and deployed the reentry pod. There was some real Bruce Willis shit going on here.
On subsequent manned missions, I've had tons of surplus delta-V on my Mun landers. I built a monster rocket with like 8000+ delta-V in a vacuum, and the lander part is like 3000. So, the lander actually has enough fuel to land on the Mun, take off again and reposition a few kilometers, and then land again, and then take off, break orbit with the Mun, and reenter Kerbin. I like picking up some contracts before I go, because the rocket is kind of a little bit on the more expensive side at 75k. My current lander design is kind of top-heavy because it's meant to fit in a somewhat narrow fairing for better aerodynamics on liftoff. If it lands on any sort of incline, it wants to tip over immediately. It actually has enough reaction wheel power to tip itself back upright, though.
Career mode is really stingy with the parts. A lot of the crucial stuff is locked away behind the mid-high tiers. You don't even get docking ports until you're halfway through the tech tree. Kind of annoying, but hey, who needs docking when you can spacewalk? The jetpack that kerbals are equipped with by default is really underrated. Because of how light kerbals are and how much fuel it carries, it has a delta-V of 600 meters per second. It can seriously alter their orbit. People have had their kerbals jump out of their spacecraft, land on Minmus, and then return to orbit with it.
Some good KSP-tubers to watch are Scott Manley, Stratzenblitz, and beaucoupzero. No drama, just fun. Scott Manley does a lot of excellent space exploration history stuff and uses KSP for visualizations of it. Stratzenblitz pushes the stock parts of KSP to their absolute limit, with a rig that must clearly be a fucking Cray in a basement somewhere. Beaucoupzero makes some of the best-looking modded ships in existence; they're basically works of art.
