bewing

In general, on Kerbin, those contracts are intended to be completed with airplanes. It's a way for the game to encourage you to build airplanes. The "in flight below" contracts with nearby waypoints can be completed easily with basic airplanes. "Below" with distant waypoints encourages you to build fast airplanes. "In flight above" contracts encourage you to build high-altitude airplanes -- generally using panther (or better) engines. However, if you are clever with your engineering then you can easily complete high-altitude contracts within a few hundred km of KSC with basic tech.

Depends on what you mean by "later". They unlock at the same time as regular struts, with the "Advanced Construction" tree node.

Generally this is a problem in slightly older versions of KSP. The problem of "putting vessels to ground" is surprisingly hard, mathematically, when the terrain can be arbitrarily rugged. But the most recent versions of KSP tend to be much better about it. So, that's my first guess -- you are using a slightly older version of the game, and upgrading to the current version will mostly fix your problem.

Scientists can collect data, reset experiments, and transfer data on EVA between anything that acts as a science container. Miniscience Containers cannot reset experiments, but they can gather copies of experiments from anywhere on a craft into themselves, using the "Collect Data" button.

When you blow the shell on a fairing, if the wheels are too close to the shell, they get destroyed. You understand that when you click between different SAS modes, that SAS uses the reaction wheels to turn your craft around? You understand that when you hit WASD, that also uses the reaction wheels to rotate your craft? Clicking that button disables either SAS or WASD from using the reaction wheels. On minmus, sometimes just turning SAS to "Radial Out" can cause a vessel to stand up all by itself. Sometimes, doing that and then having a kerbal push themselves under your vessel and then jump will give your craft enough of a boost for it to stand up. Or, extending the landing legs, then retracting them, then immediately setting SAS to Radial Out works. If you don't have Radial Out as an SAS mode, then sometimes you have to do it yourself with WASD. You probably want your lander to rock upwards onto its nose, and then fall back down to start it rotating in the correct direction.

This is often caused by the probe core not pointing in the correct direction on the craft. It needs to point forwards. If this is the problem it's easiest to see by looking at your navball when your rover is sitting on its wheels. The navball should be half blue and half brown, and should be pointing at the correct compass heading as the nose of your rover. If the probe core is pointing in the wrong direction, then wheel commands will be interpreted wrong. Another possibility is that you have a lot of reaction wheel torque available, and you have not separated the "drive a rover" commands from the reaction wheel "rotate vessel" commands. By default, both are assigned to the WASD keys. You really don't want that. It's very inconvenient to have your rover try to spin and flip every time you tell it to just go forward. I moved my rover driving commands to the Home/End/Delete/PgDwn keys.

This is not with FAR aerodynamics installed, right? I think the canards are the problem. They need to be built with parts that provide more lift and therefore much less incidence. Or you need to add dedicated lifting winglets to the front end. The instability has nothing to do with CoL. The problem is your Center of Pressure/Drag moving in front of the CoM when your canards deploy upward. Your canards are 100% control surfaces, and therefore have relatively low lift. But very high drag, which increases quadratically with incidence + deployment angle. The drag from the canards, multiplied by the radial arm of the distance to the CoM gives a lot of random torque to the craft. But you have a lot of control in both roll and pitch -- so those don't cause you problems.

Welcome to the forums. Just to repeat what the others have said already -- your Navball does not show absolute coordinates. The coordinates are relative to the surface of whatever celestial body's Sphere of Influence that you are in. "East" for the Mun is in a completely different direction than East for Kerbin, almost all the time. And as you move along your orbits, things like "radial out" end up pointing in completely different directions for the Mun, or for Kerbin. You can see on your map that there is a marker to show the moment you change from being in the Mun's SOI, to being in Kerbin's SOI. At that moment, your navball will completely change direction from being in a Mun-relative coordinate system, to being in a Kerbin-relative coordinate system. This is almost certainly what you are seeing. The physics in KSP is very good.

Once you grab the nosecone out of the part bin, you use rotation on it until it is pointed the opposite direction from the "typical" direction. Try hitting S twice -- that should do it. Then hold down your left Alt key while you try to attach it to the bottom of your fuel tank (you should probably have symmetry turned on, too!).

Yup. Non-pilots give you random steering capability, as well as feathered throttle capability.

That's what I meant all right.

On the console, everything that is settable is in either the miniSettings or the Main Settings or the Debug menu. If you can't turn it off in any of those places, then you simply can't turn it off.

The only time I aerobrake is when I'm bringing a full fuel tanker to LKO from my Minmus refinery. Because it's bloody heavy, and the whole point is to have as much fuel remaining as possible.

Welcome to the forums. In the current version, there are no contracts for reaching particular altitudes. If I recall correctly, such contracts did exist many versions ago. However, in the current versions there are still things called "World's First Achievements", which you get money and reputation for completing. In your messaging app, there is usually a message about all the World's First things that you recently accomplished -- and it tells you how much money and stuff you got for doing it.

Are you running the KIS mod?

Yes, Bob can switch the modes on the probe core to allow all the probe core's modes. If there is a working comm connection back to KSC, then KSC can program maneuver nodes for the vessel. Bob can also feather the throttle during those moments when the probe core cannot.

Your signature says that you are running 1.3.1? The newer versions of KSP do a better job of spawning objects so they don't fall much. Obviously you have a lot of mods, but upgrading your version is one possible answer to your problem. Another possible solution is to change your Terrain Detail level in your settings. Doing that changes the slopes and altitudes of all the hillsides. So your object may not fall so far, and the hill may not be as steep. Otherwise, yeah, you are probably out of luck on that contract.

1. Same vessel interaction: Between about version 1.2.0 and version 1.7.0, no two parts belonging to a single craft could collide with each other. If they could move, they would just phase through each other. If they were clipped into each other, they would not collide. As soon as you decouple, however, one craft becomes two craft -- and any parts that clip between the two craft would immediately collide, often with explosive consequences. All this was done to allow artistic clipping to make vessels look cute, and to prevent explosions between parts that were a little too close together, even if they visually seemed to be slightly separated. So, what Breaking Ground (and the current version) do is change that all slightly. Breaking Ground movable joints and robotics allow parts of the ship to bend back and interact with the rest of the craft. So the previous unbreakable rule of "no parts on the same craft are allowed to collide" has changed. Parts that are on opposite sides of a robotics joints can now collide. Just so long as you initially store your robotics parts in a safe way, this new rule about self-collisions should never destroy your craft. 2. Sometimes, you want to look at the "hidden" opposite side of your navball. Now you can, with a click. 3. When you build your rocket, you can set the "priority" of the order that you want your fuel tanks to drain. The system automatically sets pretty good default guesses, that will work in almost all cases. But if you want to do something like an asparagus launcher -- using priorities can make it simpler than adding a dozen fuel ducts. Priorities are numeric, and the tanks with the highest numeric priority drain first, provided there is a path for the fuel to flow between the tank and any operational engine. You have to turn on Advanced Tweakables in the Settings before the fuel priorities can be modified.

1880 m/s is plenty to get an Ap over 70km, if you launch straight up and your TWR is near or above 2. For launching straight up, you want a high TWR. Also if you launch straight up, then you know you will come back down very near KSC for a good high recovery percentage. It's silly to launch downrange if all you want is to break out of the atmosphere. It takes more dV to go downrange too.

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.