both. it''s a glitch, but can be prevented with design
as far as i can tell, the problem is landing legs. the ship is bouncing on them too hard. the ship works on kerbin, but eve has higher gravity. the ship weight is pressing down hard against the landing legs, causing malfunctions. i have encountered a similar problem.
possible solutions:
- try to add landing legs
- try to tamper with spring values in the landing legs
- try to use a different model of landing legs (i only had this problem with that specific model)
if you can find a solution, please tell me which one it was, since i had the same problem myself
so, you have your ship you want to reach in orbit.
you start by sending your new ship in an orbit inside it, touching it on a point. if your target is on a 80x80 orbit, you want to be on a 80x75 orbit. of course, fix the orbital plane first (there are ways to skip this, and they save a little bit of fuel, but are harder)
so, the smaller an orbit is, the shorter it takes. the ship in the smaller orbit will slowly gain on the other one. this will let you reach a ship ahead of you - i generally target for this situation when i lauch for a rendez-vous. if instead you are ahead of your target and you need it to catch up, just increase your orbit a bit, still touching your target. in this example, an 80x85 will do.
here is an example. i am commanding the space station and want to reach the plane. i am a bit ahead of it, so i put myself in a slightly larger orbit, so the plane will reach me in a few orbits.
keep this difference small, the greater the difference in the orbits, the more fuel you'll have to use to equalize the two vessel's speed
ok, so here we see the orange marker for the next close encounter. the plane will still be behind me. we set up a manuever node just after the close encounter
now that we set up the manuever node, the game calculates the closest approach after the node. this means in the next orbit. so in the next orbit the plane will be closer, but still behind us. so we right-click on the manuever node and shift it ahead by one orbit
now the manuever node is 2 orbits from now, and it says that in the third orbit, the plane will be slightly ahead of us.
that's just what we want! now we only have to make sure that instead of being ahead of us, it just reaches us perfectly.
to do so, we must accelerate just a bit, enough to cover those 29 km that the plane will have made past our position.
and to accelerate, we need to burn retrograde. our orbit gets smaller, and we accelerate and gradually catch up to the plane again, until we have a near perfect encounter
you don't even need a manuever node; just burn retrograde very slowly, and you'll see the close encounter marker gradually shift.
i hope that was helpful. the key is to have the two orbits intersect in one point, and then burn in that point, prograde or retrograde depending on whether you need to go slower or faster.
easy enough. you open the file, there you have a list of parts. parts that can store stuff that can be consumed (fuel, ore, electricity) have a "resource" tab. there you can set your value as you will. under the spoiler you will find such a part, with the relevant resource parts highlighted.
what's actually difficult is figuring out on which tank you are actually removing resources. it may be more convenient to empty all of them and refill manually those you want filled
