Zhetaan

It's in Tutorials: The problem is the location. With the correct value for g0, the delta-V for this rocket is 3273.2 m/s. With the correct values for both g0 and Isp, the delta-V is 3740.7 m/s. On Eve's surface, the specific impulse is about 57 seconds, and the delta-V is thus 666 m/s. Don't forget that Eve's sea-level pressure is five atmospheres, not one. I guessed 60 seconds from the curve in the part.cfg, (and that yields 701 m/s), but the important part is that the Skipper has no thrust at just six atmospheres. Eve is pushing past the limits of sanity for the Skipper's service range. @fozba: I strongly suggest that you choose a different engine in addition to redesigning your rocket. Alternatively, land on a mountain; the pressure drops quickly with altitude. If this is a second stage for a sea-level lifter, then I still suggest a redesign because the Skipper is better-suited to third-stage or even vacuum operations at Eve. Eve is a challenge planet and that is something that you will absolutely come to respect, one way or another. Edit: Ninja'd by @Streetwind

That would be an interesting April Fools joke. @Geonovast's solution will work for any celestial body, but in case you want to know how to figure it for an orbit that you want, as opposed to the minimum safe orbit that the game chooses, it's important to remember that the game uses the centre of the planet for its altitude reference, but internally subtracts the planetary radius to give you a sea-level altitude in the display. This means that your input for Set Orbit must include the radius. You can find it in the information panel in the Tracking Station or from the wiki (or by setting an orbit and subtracting the altitude in the flight view from the SMA value). For Duna, the radius is 320,000 metres and the atmosphere is an additional 50,000 metres, meaning that safe orbits begin at 370,000 metres. Orbits higher than about 2,100,000 metres will have unfortunate encounters with Ike, but that's well beyond low orbit.

I suppose the correct answer is 'any stage'. As @bewing mentioned, it's similar to a budget, and in the same vein that, for example, your grocery budget doesn't care whether the money you put into it is what comes out of your wallet first or last, the delta-V budget doesn't care whether the stage that provides the thrust is first or last. You may care, but that is a different factor. The numbers on the map tell the total delta-V needed for that leg of the journey. Your role is to ensure that your rocket can supply that amount over however many stages. You can do it in one stage, or you can combine several. If you do not supply enough to account for the entire mission, then the mission becomes one-way unless you change your flight plan.

@Talkingstreet: I mostly go along with what has been said already, but I will add one caveat to this: Don't forget that if any mission you plan involves a landing, then you need to include engines on that lander such that its thrust-to-weight ratio is greater than one for the body it is landing on. Remember that you can turn engines off using the part action window (meaning right-click the engine--and you can also assign action groups to do that with a button press, as well) so that you don't use your lander engines when they are not wanted.

Interesting; someone needs to update the wiki in that case.

You're actually in Career mode. Do you see that Valentina has only three stars out of five below her portrait? Kerbals start at maximum level in Science mode. I won't discount that it could be a bug, especially if you actually started in Science mode and your save somehow switched on you. But Career mode is more likely. The remedy to this, should it not be a bug, is either to restart the save or else to continue with Career mode; if it is a bug, then you may need a completely fresh install because this level of interference with the game file suggests something being badly broken. If you don't agree that that is the problem, then please show a screenshot of your KSC. We'll be able to tell immediately whether your complex is upgraded correctly, which will prove one way or the other whether it is a bug.

It depends on the use. The Mainsail is somewhat more efficient, but the Twin Boar is higher thrust, which means that for borderline cases, the Twin Boar can loft a somewhat larger payload. The Twin Boar costs less than a Mainsail+Jumbo Tank combination (17,000 versus 18,750 Funds), so that could be be worth considering. There's a comparison from several years ago that might help with this. It also includes notes on building launchers and the kinds of design parameters you'll probably want to consider, such as the best ranges for thrust-to-weight. It doesn't include anything about launch profile, though, but on the other hand, if you follow the guide and can build a rocket that is absolutely capable of reaching orbit, then you know that any problems subsequent to that are the result of pilot error and pilot error alone. That can be extremely helpful, because I know that it can drive one to total exasperation to try, and try, and try to reach orbit, only to find out that the rocket was never capable of getting there in the first place.

I've used Mk. 3 Cargo Bays for that; while I have used radial engines on them to land them in skycrane-like fashion, I also like to put extra-large landing gear on them and land them like planes on a flat bit of ground. I've also put regular engines on outriggers (or the drills on outriggers) and done things that way. For the moons, I don't usually land anything that requires Thud-level power, but I've used Twitches and, on Minmus, Spiders. I did use Thuds once for landing Ore tanks (Ore is very dense), but that was before I realised that it made more sense to convert the fuel on-site rather than transport the Ore.

Not quite, though I can see why you would think that. Career mode is not a role-playing sort of experience, but it does have additional difficulty elements. In Career mode, you begin with only a few parts and with facilities that are incapable of supporting rockets over a very limited size, mass, and number of components. There are also certain activities that you cannot do, such as EVAs and taking surface samples, until you upgrade certain facilities. In order to upgrade your capabilities and facilities, you need to complete missions (from Mission Control, which in Sandbox mode is closed) for Funds and you need to complete science experiments for Science points. Funds are money that you use to pay for your rockets and for facility upgrades (and to hire new astronauts from the Astronaut complex), and Science points are used to unlock new technologies at the Research & Development complex. There is also a third currency called Reputation that influences the value of the contracts that you are offered. As such, Career mode creates a balancing act where you need to (at least in the beginning) compare the cost of your rocket and launch to the expected reward from any contracts that you may be trying to complete with that rocket, and still manage your designs against the constraints of the bottom-tier facilities. Science mode is somewhat between Sandbox and Career modes; in it, the rocket parts are locked and you need to obtain Science points (through science experiments) to research and unlock them, but the rockets don't cost anything and the facilities are fully equipped. Thus, there is progression through the tech tree and challenges that arise from needing to complete your goals while using a limited pool of parts, but you're not also managing the money to build things. One of the features of Science mode is that you have to progress through technologies from a low-tech beginning, so you're not faced with a confusing abundance of different rocket parts at the start of the game; needing to unlock the tech gives a sense of progression from less capable rockets to more capable rockets, in addition to increased mission complexity.

Exactly this, but put another way, it's like drawing a line on a map to show your intended route. ... Well, actually, it isn't like that; it's exactly that, since it's done in Map View. You're not obligated to follow that route (and without an autopilot mod, nothing will fly that route for you), but it can help you decide both where you want to go and how you might try to get there. Aside from the replies here, if you want to learn how to get the most out of manoeuvre nodes, then there are literally dozens of tutorials about them, including the ones in KSPedia (pages 21, 22, and 33-35). Nodes are a fundamental tool in KSP. They aren't required--you can plan an interplanetary mission without them, and many people have done so (especially in the early days)--but they are extraordinarily helpful.

No. You had a lot of weirdness there. As to tipping out of control, it is possible that you don't have a stable rocket (add some fins to the bottom of it to correct that), but given the delayed response to control input, I think that you may have had a memory or processor issue in your computer. As such, I think this may be best sent to one of the tech support fora.

Indeed it is. One of those is harmless, and the other results in your ships tearing themselves apart.

Actually, don't aim higher. Shallow reentries involve lower peak temperatures, but greater overall heat, and are useful really only when you have a pressing need to manage skin temperatures more than overall heat (as one may need to do with spaceplanes). You can thoroughly cook a rocket with a shallow Eve reentry. Steep reentries involve higher thermal spikes, but a lot less overall heat; this is exactly the sort of condition that ablator-loaded heat shields are designed to manage. Edit: Ninja'd by @Snark

You can accomplish rotation in a couple of ways when in free fall in space. The first is to use RCS and monopropellant. The second is to use reaction wheels. Reaction wheels require electric charge, but your command pod normally has a small battery (it usually has reaction wheels, too; the dedicated parts are for larger rockets). The reason that you're seeing what you did was possibly because the battery is massive enough to require more power than you were producing to turn the rocket, but before you added it, the demand was less than the supply. Try adding another power generator, such as a solar panel.

You keep asking all of the simple questions that have complicated answers. Prograde hold attempts to ensure that your rocket follows a smooth transition between near-vertical and near-horizontal flight. The idea is that as you ascend, gravity warps your rocket's trajectory and pulls it down, but also as you ascend, your increasing speed in the horizontal direction keeps your nose from pointing below the horizon, and the resultant of this is that you end up in orbit before you do your very best impression of a javelin. Sometimes, it even works that way. However, it is not a 'click this button to reach orbit' control; the only thing that 'gets you into orbit' is your ability to design and fly the rocket. Prograde hold can be part of that design, but you need to activate it at the correct time, and you need to set up the rocket's flight so that it will work correctly first. In much the same way that in order to dock with another vessel, you have to rendezvous first, so, too, do you need to get the rocket on a flight path that will most benefit from prograde hold before you activate prograde hold. In your case, the fact that you had only pitched over by ten degrees suggests to me that you still had too much thrust in the vertical direction, which means that you needed to turn a few more degrees first. Most of my rockets work best when I pitch between three and five degrees from vertical before taking my hands off of the controls, but some high-thrust models need as many as ten degrees of pitch. That's not to dismiss @JoeSchmuckatelli's approach of turning hard over by fifteen degrees right away, but I tend to prefer a lighter touch. Remember that in rocketry, there are two ways to reduce thrust in a given direction: you can reduce throttle, or you can point it in a different direction. If you're using solid rocket boosters for initial launch, then reducing thrust in-flight is not an option--though you can limit it in the Vehicle Assembly Building. Of course, that also reduces your acceleration in the horizontal direction, too, and that increases inefficiencies and losses due to fighting gravity--you usually don't want that. It's also the case that prograde hold's total contribution is to help you to avoid unpleasant surprises and to assist with more difficult payloads; ideally, the rocket is designed in a way that it will fly itself to orbit whether or not you use prograde hold. Occasionally, someone in the Challenges forum posts a contest to design completely hands-free rockets: by that I mean a rocket that is designed such that you can press space to launch it, get a cup of tea, and come back to find your rocket comfortably in a stable, circular orbit. Remember that prograde hold is not necessarily always available. The various holds and locks are tied to different levels of SAS: for Pilot-type Kerbals, it's linked to their experience, and for probe cores, the level is a fixed part of the design. Prograde/Retrograde hold is a level 1 ability, so all probe cores with level 1 SAS and higher have it (that means that the RoveMate, QBE, OKTO, and Stayputnik cores are the ones that do not have it--the HECS is the first that does have it).

My first suggestion would be to check a mirror for your facial expression, but it appears that @bewing beat me to that joke. One thing that I think is important is something that arose because of your confusion in reading the navball. Attitude is the direction in which you point, but when you talk about 90 degrees being parallel to the planet's surface, you're missing some terminology. Your 90-degrees-parallel is actually zero degrees of pitch. Ninety degrees of pitch is straight up (although once you are in orbit, it is probably more appropriate to say that it is straight out). However, pitch is often considered in relative terms (pitch down three degrees from prograde, for example). I will say that, in concert with @AHHans, your rocket is extremely high-thrust off the pad. It's not enough to begin tearing pieces off or cause overheating problems, but one of the things to remember about rocket control is that fins (or, in this case, the solid rocket boosters which on this design work to a similar purpose) help stability by introducing drag at the aft of the rocket. However, drag increases with thrust. This is often a good thing, because it means that at least until it causes heating problems, the faster you go, the more stable your rocket is in its flight, but you then get new problems when you try to turn and find that your rocket is so stable that it cannot turn--or, worse, tears itself apart when you try. Your rocket is totally overpowered for reaching Kerbin orbit, but perhaps you want to do something else with it--add a solar panel and it easily has enough propellant to take a sightseeing tour of Kerbin's moons. If we assume that the rocket that you have is the rocket that you want to build, then there are a number of ways to get better performance from it. One way is to reduce the thrust of the solid rocket boosters: you can reduce that thrust by about half and still be slightly overpowered at the pad. You can do this with thrust limiters, but you can also do it by splitting the solid rocket boosters into two stages. Light one pair at launch and the second pair as the first burn out. Another choice is to improve your flight profile. You have a mostly-up path, and since you got it into space, that obviously worked, but there is nothing wrong with improvement. For a typical well-designed rocket, you should build up speed to about 100 m/s or reach an altitude of 1,000 metres, whichever comes first (and I usually try to get both at the same time), and then gently tip the rocket about three degrees to the east of straight up. Then you keep it turning gently so that you reach forty-five degrees at about 10 km and approach horizontal at about 30 km. That may seem a bit low to you, but remember that for one thing, that altitude can be adjusted, and for another, orbit is not about going up, it's about going sideways. The idea is to try to make this as smooth a motion as possible. Your rocket is overpowered enough to potentially make that difficult, but on the other hand, it's also over-fuelled enough to give you lots of room for error, which means lots of room to learn what works and what does not. However, I will say that for your rocket, you will want to turn a bit harder and earlier than I would normally recommend. The reason is because the ideal rocket only should use enough upward thrust to counter the pull of gravity, and it should put the rest to moving horizontally, because horizontal velocity is what puts you into an orbit. Since your rocket has an abundance of thrust, it can put more to horizontal velocity while still countering gravity. Lastly, I typically try to keep my apoapsis approximately 30 seconds ahead of me while in the upper atmosphere, until it reaches the target altitude. Real-life rockets usually burn all the way to circularisation. However, that is because of several reasons. One of them is the practical inability of rocket engines to be shut off and reignited an infinite number of times: for a lot of (even most) rockets, the engines are ignited once and that's it. The Titan and Saturn rockets worked this way. Even the Space Shuttle Main Engines worked this way: they were ignited by external igniters on the ground--they did not have the ability to start themselves at all. Restartable engines do exist (the SPS engine that Apollo spacecraft used in lunar orbit is one example) but they introduce a lot of engineering complexity--especially since rockets typically need to enter orbit only once. Another reason is that Earth is much larger than Kerbin. Kerbin has a radius of 600 kilometres. Earth's radius is nearly 6400 kilometres. Even though your gravity and altitude above the surface is the same, the curvature of the planet is much more pronounced in KSP, which means that you will get much shorter orbital periods. That, in turn, means that it doesn't take so much to make a circular orbit--and the difference is enough that, for the available thrust, you often end up needing to simply shut the engines off and coast to a better place to complete your burn. To actually answer your question, typically, yes, you should shut your engines off and coast. However, it has nothing to do with your altitude, but rather is tied to the altitude of the orbit that you want. If you want a 75 km orbit, then you should shut down your engines when the apoapsis reaches 75 km. If you want a 300 km orbit, then you should shut down when your apoapsis reaches 300 km. I will note that if you are still in the atmosphere when you do this, then your apoapsis will begin to drop because of air resistance slowing your ascent, but the remedy to that is to simply burn for an apoapsis slightly above what you really want--for example, perhaps 80 km when the intended final altitude is 75 km. Helping is what we do! But please don't undersell yourself: you left the dumb questions behind when you started to study rocket science.

First, welcome to the forum! Second, it sounds as though you wanted to just leave the atmosphere but instead went too far up, which resulted in you reentering at too great a speed. There are a few ways to do something about that. You mentioned adding too many stages, so you can try eliminating one of them. You can also try angling your launch so that you go more sideways than up. You may not know this yet, but it is possible to change both the amount of fuel that you carry and the amount of thrust that your engines produce. For later engines, you can change the throttle during the flight, but even for the earliest solid rocket boosters, you can adjust the thrust and initial fuel load in the Vehicle Assembly Building before you launch. As to protecting the parachutes and science, it depends on where you have them mounted. The key is to keep them out of the airstream during reentry. This often means putting science parts in a bay, but if you are careful with your speeds, then you can have them on the outside. For the parachutes, move them closer to the tip of the command pod (or to the exact tip if you're not using a radial parachute). You won't need the inflatable heat shield for a very long time. Good luck!

That is correct, but it's also important to remember that the persistent file and the craft files use the same format and language, so a problem that can corrupt a craft in the persistence can corrupt a craft in the ... craft. That would lead me to suspect something more like @AHHans suggested and that there was an update that changed or broke something in that specific craft, and considering how long you've been using it, it's possible that perhaps there was an update in there even though you said you've not updated recently. If it was an update, then I suppose it could be called a glitch rather than a bug, but either way, the only effective remedy I know is to do exactly what you did.

I would like to caution you that the intersection doesn't quite describe the period of the transfer window so much as it describes the time between transfer windows. Period of the transfer window could be mistaken to mean the transit time. Incidentally, this quantity has a name; it's called the synodic period. That is normally encountered in astronomy and is used to calculate conjunctions, but since the timing for a transfer window is arguably a conjunction with different alignment parameters, the term was used for that, as well. The reason for the increase in quantities nearer to the blank diagonal has to do with the fact that the blank diagonal relates to a planet's transfer window to itself. However, there's more to it than that. The synodic period only gives the time between transfer windows, and even then it is an approximation because it does not account for eccentricity, inclination, or other factors. It is based completely in the relationship between two bodies' orbital periods as they co-orbit about a third body: thus, for example, the Mun and Minmus also have a synodic period, as do the moons of Jool, but Ike and the Mun do not--at least, not in terms of a first-order relation. However, what this means is that the increase in synodic period as your planet of arrival approaches the planet of departure is not limited to the planet itself, but rather to anything that shares in the planet's orbit. For example, if Lagrange points were possible in this game, the 910-day synodic period for a window between Kerbin and Duna is the same for a window between Kerbin and Duna's L5--the difference is that your time of departure must change. However, there is a more interesting implication: the synodic period doesn't only increrase, but its increase approaches infinity as your planet of arrival approaches your planet of departure. Though not obvious, this should make intuitive sense: if you can imagine two planets whose orbits are mutable enough that they can be made to approach one another, then as the two planets' orbital speeds become more similar because their orbits get closer to one another, the slower each planet appears to move relative to the other. Put in a different way, if you find yourself chasing someone on a race track and you are the faster runner, then the faster the person you're chasing goes, the longer it will take you to catch up and overtake. But you must remember that the synodic period doesn't care about the actual transfer; it merely considers the time between an arbitrary alignment and the next similar alignment in terms of the orbital period and without respect to what the alignment is. This means that the period can be used to predict not only infinite time between windows for a transfer from a planet to itself (there is no 'best' time to go from Kerbin to Kerbin), but also infinite time between windows for a transfer from a planet to anything sharing its orbit. To go back to the runner analogy, if the other runner runs with your same speed, then you will never catch up; neither will the runner catch you. This has interesting implications for co-orbital bodies and simulated Lagrange points: infinite time between transfer windows does not imply that the destination is the same as the origin, but rather implies that there simply are no transfer windows from that point of departure to that destination. Stock does not have any examples of this, but Outer Planets Mod has a co-orbital set of moons in Polta and Priax. I believe that one of the popular replacement solar system planet packs has a body that is co-orbital with the starting world. The trick to travelling from one to the other is to use a phasing orbit, but on the other hand, there is no preferred, more-efficient choice of departure time, so you can go whenever you like and expect it to cost the same in fuel as at any other time.

I know that Near Future Electrical treats the Nerv reactor as a finite-lifetime nuclear reactor (that's not exactly the same as radioactive decay, but there are mods that process decay, too). I'm not running your mod loadout and so won't be able to do a proper comparison, but yes, it appears that something was saved incorrectly or otherwise didn't work right. Unfortunately, with the way that the saves work, these errors tend to perpetuate rather than self-correct. Your solution may have been the only viable one.

Both? It doesn't confer any special abilities or composition (you don't get any extra-energetic fuel from the strangely-glowing rocks, for example), but whether the visual effect is is significant depends, I think, on how much you like the story behind Magic Boulder's history. It is indeed a magic boulder, but since there seems to be some confusion about both the origins and the nature of the rocks, I thought to add a bit of history for clarity: Originally, Magic Boulder was a rock at Ike in a very polar, very low orbit. It was not ninety degrees and it was not advertised (it did not show up in the Tracking Station, for example), which meant that just about the only way to find it was to land at Ike and watch the sky for a while--this happened by chance more often than you might think, because Ike, being tidally locked to Duna but in a both slightly elliptic and slightly inclined orbit, offers a chance to study something called libration, which is the 'wobble' that you see when tidally locked bodies don't have circular, equatorial orbits. Magic Boulder had a Monolith on it and glowing green bits exposed through its crust, but the current Magic Asteroids have no Monoliths and come in many colours. I have seen green, blue, orange, red, yellow, and white. I have heard of pink and purple, but have not seen them for myself. The other interesting characteristic of Magic Boulder was that it had a broken collision mesh, which meant that what visually appeared to be its surface was simply an illusion to the game, and you could fly through it--except that what the game considered the actual surface had no visual indicator, so on approaching Magic Boulder, you could possibly fly through its surface, or else randomly explode by collision with what appeared to be nothing at all. The 'randomly explode' part was easily the most interesting thing about it, because that showed that the collision mesh was not merely misaligned with the visual surface (you can land on an invisible surface without issue so long as you do not crash into it--though this is admittedly tricky to do), but rather that the 'surface' generated was, in places, instantly lethal to contact. Also, Magic Boulder is the official name--or, at least, that's the name used for it in the game's files, so it's as official as it gets for an unannounced Easter Egg. Note that the forum convention is (or was, I suppose) to always capitalise the words and treat it as a proper name; one does not speak of approaching the Magic Boulder any more than one speaks of landing on the Duna. This convention is reinforced, perhaps, by the forum's insistence on ascribing a sense of intent to the random mesh problems ('Magic Boulder ate my ship!', for example). Many people believe that Magic Boulder went away with the Asteroid Redirect Mission update (alpha version 0.23.5), but it was missing for some time before that. I am not in a position to say anything about the developers' motives, but my understanding is that it was removed by accident; its code, as anyone who has actually encountered the thing knows, was a bit weird. The story goes that since the Tracking Station will automatically show anything that is either a vessel or a celestial body, Magic Boulder could not be either of those, but some of the updates to the game in version 0.19 meant that the game would refuse to load anything that was not either a vessel or a celestial body. Not being a coder, myself, I can only say that it sounds plausible, but I lack both the professional expertise and the insider knowledge to verify it. I do know that current asteroids (meaning the post-alpha 0.23.5 asteroids with which we are presently familiar) are technically regarded as vessel parts, which is why you can dock to them and move them about, and, presumably, why they show up in the Tracking Station. It is also true that other planets were added in alpha version 0.17, so Magic Boulder was not in the game for very long. Assuming the wiki is correct--I certainly don't remember the dates--version 0.17 was released on 19 Sep 2012, and version 0.19 was released on 16 Mar 2013, so it would have been in the game for not quite six months.

If it's not a bug, then the only other possibility that comes to mind is that one of your mods treats the Nerv's nuclear component as subject to radioactive decay, thus giving the engine a finite service lifetime. Otherwise, you may need to get into your persistent file to obtain more information.

Once you have rendezvous, you don't need a lot of monopropellant, and often you can get by with just the on-board tank in the command pod. Remember that docking is a lot like controlling a Kerbal on an EVA; you usually don't want to thrust hard and brake hard, but rather to use gentle taps and essentially drift to the docking port. It doesn't take much monopropellant to move forward at .3 m/s, and provided that you are aligned, you don't need any monopropellant to stop because you'll dock, instead. Definitely don't overlook this. It's called fine-control mode, and it can save a lot of frustration. You can tell that you are in fine-control mode when the pointers for pitch, roll, and yaw in the lower left corner of the screen turn from orange to blue.

Hello! It's good to see that you're not giving up. I don't know whether this will make you feel any better, but consider this: you got the game for forty dollars; NASA had to figure this stuff out, when corrected for inflation, at over seven hundred million dollars per launch (and with no quicksaves, either!). I looked at the image you posted: I have some advice for your next step: Keep in mind that there's no hurry; it costs nothing to take things slowly, because KSP rewards you for doing things correctly, not quickly. I don't know how much of a gamer you are, but I've noticed that a lot (perhaps most) of the frustration faced by more casual gamers trying to play KSP is caused by the fact that video games prefer to increase the difficulty by requiring you to perform tasks more quickly or with more precise timing--see, for example, the speedrun as a demonstration of skill. That kind of thinking won't work here; KSP has very few situations that require quick reactions. Instead, it presents the difficulty exactly as it is, and does not forgive you for making mistakes. It's definitely an adjustment. Remember that your camera view is two-dimensional and there's no sense of three-dimensional perspective, so once you have your docking ports aligned, be certain to move the camera to see whether you're aligned in all directions. Also note that docking ports work best at a closing velocity of less than three tenths of a metre per second--that's .3 m/s or point three. If you find that the station is drifting away from you, then remember that when you put the navball in Target mode, your prograde and retrograde markers show the direction of your relative velocity to the station. This means that you can zero your velocity with a retrograde burn to stop the drift (though at this range, you're better off using RCS thrusters instead; you don't want to burn off parts of your station!). You'll never make the drift exactly zero, but you can reduce it enough to give yourself time to dock. If you find the station's docking port rotating away from you every time you get it lined up to your ship's port, that's because you're in a low-enough orbit that the curve of it is causing fast-enough relative rotation to cause a misalignment before you can close and dock. To fix that, point the station's port in the normal direction and dock with it that way. Good luck!

DeepFreeze has a compatibility issue with Kerbalism. Don't forget to uncheck the 'Use Background Processing' option in the difficulty settings, or else you'll have problems.