bewing

Correct. It's not a relay antenna. Only the ones that start RA-XX are relays, plus the HG-5.

Yeah, something is messed up with your game. It's either a problem with a mod, or your game is slightly corrupted and needs to be 'verified'. Do you know how to do a Steam File Validation? I'm not sure whether your KER mod could cause this. Did you copy this craft from a previous install of KSP? Or did you build it fresh in your current version?

With the default settings, no comms means partial (limited) control. Which means that only SAS works. What color is your CommNet indicator? Yellow or red? I'm thinking that you may have gotten a slightly corrupted download on your game, and you may need to do a Steam File Validation.

No, if you see it land and not explode, then it landed. And it will stay landed. There should be a permanent marker for it on the KSC screen until you recover it, and there should also be a marker in the Tracking Station if you have "debris" tracking turned on. There is a setting in the settings about deleting debris once the amount of debris gets to be "too many", though. Maybe you have a lot of debris, or maybe you have that setting turned way down?

Does this habitation module (from a mod, I assume?) have any doors on it at all? If it has no doors, then you are mostly SOL. Your only option then is to use a klaw to actually dock with it. If it does have a door, then when you use [ or ] to focus the module, you can probably double click on the door and you will get an EVA option that way.

@AeroGav likes to do horizontal landings on Minmus. I know he's linked to videos of it before. You get down very close to the surface of the flats, pointed retrograde. Burn the main engines until your velocity is around 30 m/s. Then turn back around and use vernors to soften your impact.

I agree with the others. Landing a lot of mass on Eve is pretty trivial. Parachutes are highly effective. Go ahead and triple up on the experiments -- there is no way around the "reset" problem for Goos and SciJr's.

Depending on your settings, once you decouple the thruster, it should be in "Limited control mode". Which means you should still have some control over it, even if you have no radio reception at all. After decoupling, do Z and X still work to control thrust? Does SAS still activate? Does the CommNet signal bar turn yellow?

Welcome to the forums. The specific answer is "yes, if you recover the debris, then you will definitely get the science (and funds)." However, as the others have mostly pointed out -- debris falling through the atmosphere gets autodeleted if you are not watching it fall. The rule for reentry is that you must remain focused on the craft as it falls through the 25km altitude, and then watch it fall all the way until it stops on the ground. Otherwise it will be deleted and you will lose it. Even if it has kerbals inside. Yep. With the above caveat about autodeletion and focusing on the craft during reentry. It only disappears if it's on the runway or the launchpad. Those get cleaned up so that you can launch again -- if you have that option turned on in the settings. Debris that gets cleaned up off the runway or launchpad gives you a full refund on the value of the part. However, if any debris lands anywhere else, you must recover it manually. If it doesn't show up on the map, then it didn't land successfully. But yes, you can recover spent stages for funds in the stock game if you are willing to watch the stage as it falls safely all the way to the ground. _______ The game works this way because it is computationally "expensive" to model terrain, physics, and especially atmospheric physics. So those things are only modeled for the craft that has focus. Which means that any other craft that's outside the "physics bubble" is only modeled for gravity. Since there is no terrain or air modeled around any unfocused craft, the game simply assumes that anything that gets to too low of an altitude will crash into the ground and be destroyed.

I'm not sure if you need the DLC or not, for it to exist in the game. However, it has a radio antenna so you can follow the line back to the source. It is in the Great Desert, one continent west of KSC. If you know where the Desert Temple is, the Dessert Airfield is about 15km due west of the Temple.

There's something called "absolute mode rotation". If you use symmetry and absolute mode, it's literally impossible for the mounting or orientation of the engines to be off at all. Even if you are attaching to a round surface.

Is your reentry precisely locked on prograde all the way down? And what's wrong with being at 600m/s at 7km altitude? That's a perfectly nice speed for that altitude for a spaceplane.

He was talking about radial mounted engines, and the way you place them is to use 2X symmetry. You are familiar with using symmetry for building rockets in the VAB?

I gotta agree with the others here. The only reason why your two stages would smush together like that is if your bottom stage is still under high thrust after you decouple. That's always a very bad idea in general. X to kill thrust, space to decouple, Z to restore thrust to your lander only. It only takes a fraction of a second to do.

If you wait for your Duna window, and then wait a few days more for the Mün to line up properly, then you can do a slingshot like this and save a few hundred m/s of dV.