bewing

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.

Welcome to the forums! No, the "target" that is shown in the tutorials was specially hand-coded into the tutorial to make the tutorial easy. Sorry, but actually landing a craft on the Mun is supposed to be harder than it is in the tutorial. The tutorial is just supposed to show you the basic technique that you should use. In general, when actually landing on the Mun, you have to do four things. The first is to get to a fairly low altitude while still at almost orbital velocity. This minimizes the time that it takes to actually land. The more time you take, the more fuel you will have to burn -- because gravity pulls down the same amount every second, so the more seconds it takes, the more gravity you have to fight. The second step is spotting a good landing site, as the terrain zooms past. The third step is killing nearly all your orbital velocity as fast as you can, by locking SAS to "Retrograde" in Surface mode on your Navball, and burning really hard. And the fourth step is to actually touch down gently. An advanced technique is to calculate and use something called a "Suicide burn". Or, you can just make sure to keep your velocity down to something reasonable (like 60 m/s) and then burn hard just before you land. All that is still usually done while SAS is in "retrograde" mode -- but sometimes using "Radial Out" mode is also good. If you use retrograde mode, make sure your downward velocity always stays higher than 1 m/s.

Yes, you do have to separately download a parts pack, and it is generally the responsibility of the person who posts the craft to specifically state where non-stock parts come from for the craft. (Most mods or DLC content is referred to by abbreviations, however.)

That is an extremely common issue when trying to rendezvous. And there are lots of tutorials on this forum about that last rendezvous step, and lots more on youtube about how to fix it. I'm sure some of the other guys will post links to their favorites. For an advanced player, the answer is to put the Navball into Target mode, and then "push the prograde marker around on the Navball." If you want to try that method, you probably need to turn on RCS, then use your IJKL keys and see how each key moves your prograde marker when you hit them, after pointing your nose at the target. The total newbie method to fix the problem is to stop when the target distance isn't decreasing anymore. How do you stop? Put your Navball into Target mode, and then turn your rocket around backwards by clicking SAS to "retrograde". Then gently burn your main engines until your Navball speed goes to zero. When your Navball is in Target mode, the speed that is shown is the "vector difference" between the two vessels. If that is zero, it means the two vessels are stopped relative to each other. Once you are stopped, then point your nose at the target ship, give it a little gas to get up to 4 or 5 m/s, and you will get a lot closer. But you will still miss, and you will need to turn around again, and stop again, and repeat.

Well, it's gonna be bad. Mostly likely, you will fail the contract. Do you have a vast overabundance of deltaV on this rescue ship? You're probably going to want to use a gravity assist to get you to a good high speed. Forget about a Hohmann transfer. Obviously, you need to get there in less than 10 years. Which means you need to travel at twice the optimal speed. And then back again.

On the basic theory that inclination changes cost almost nothing when you're going slow, I always intercept my asteroids at the outer edge of Kerbin's SOI. I don't bother with inclination or an orbit at all. Just spend 30 days or so flying out to where the asteroid's orbit pierces the SOI. If I get there early, I burn to a stop and start very slowly falling toward Kerbin. Make sure I have a close flyby with the asteroid. Then burn like crazy as it gets near. I always have a drill and converter on my asteroid catchers -- so I don't bother worrying about fuel.

As Zhetaan said, there is a hidden thing in KSP called an "autodeletion altitude". Each celestial body has one. The game does not keep the terrain loaded for any celestial body except the one you are orbiting. So there is no way for the game to really tell when a non-focused craft crashes into the terrain of some CB. This autodeletion altitude is a simple replacement for checking if things crash. On the Mun, I think the autodeletion altitude is 8km. So if the Pe of your station was below 8km at the Mun, then that's almost certainly what happened to it. You can hit your F3 key to get a report of all events that occurred recently. If your craft was autodeleted, it will say "station crashed into terrain". If that's not what caused it, then Zhetaan gave you a lot of other very good possibilities.

Have a probe core on your craft, bring up Kerbnet, find the spot on the Kerbnet map, move the reticle to that point, give it a nice name, and click the "waypoint" button. It does create a nav point.

The contract will tell you what experiment you need to run. The waypoint marker will also be different depending on which experiment you need to run. No, it is not always the "crew report". The contract will also specify an altitude. I usually find that it's best to be within about 6 or 7km of the specified altitude, but I've never proven to myself that being near the specified altitude really makes a difference.

It's been seen before, but nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it happen repeatably so that it can be fixed. It tends to be pretty easy to clear away the haze.

If you feel that you are simply unable to build the craft that you want while using stock-sized parts, then yes, downloading that one mod is one other route to go. Alternately, there are other mods that provide parts that may already be exactly what you want, without providing the "scaling" feature that you asked about. But deciding to stick with only stock parts places some limits on what you can get away with constructing. On the other hand, getting around those limits, and building what you want in spite of the limits, is another form of creativity that the game encourages. If you can manage to do it, because that obviously makes it a lot harder.

When you exit out of a particular game, you go to a screen with the Tutorials, and a "Back" choice. Choose "Back", and that gets you to the Main Menu. Select "Settings" from there. It's different from the other Settings screens.

It's a mod called Tweakscale.

And most players don't consider it to be cheating at all. In some sense, that's what sandbox mode is for -- designing and testing craft. Once you have designed and tested something that works, of course you copy it over into your career mode game. The game is not built to force you to redesign everything from scratch, every time you start a new game.

Nope, you need to get to within 2.2km before you use [ or ] to "activate" the kerbal in the stranded craft.

If you are close to it, you can still "target" the station section by doubleclicking on it. You can still dock with it. In map mode, you can select "filters" from a dropdown menu at the top-center of your screen. Obviously, your "debris" filter is turned on at this moment. Click on the debris filter (the first icon) to turn the filter off, and all your debris will become selectable and trackable. As boyster said, in the Tracking Station you can change the craft type of this partial station of yours to either "station" or "probe" or anything else other than debris, and fix your problem. The Tracking Station also has a debris filter. If you turn it off, then you can see and terminate all debris -- but that should be your last resort, since your problem is easily fixable otherwise.

You can aerobrake in one pass from Minmus if you use the max temp rated spaceplane parts exclusively. But there is no way in hell you can aerobrake from interplanetary speeds without robotically-deployed heatshields.