bewing

Yes, it is normal. You can't reenter a spaceplane that uses MK1 parts directly from the Mun in one pass. You need to use a 62 or 63km Pe, and do several aerobraking passes. For each successive pass, you can lower your Pe by a couple km.

By default, the "top" face of a rocket is on the South side of the VAB, which is also the South side on the launchpad. It is often useful to attach some small antenna or science experiment on that side of the rocket to provide a visual reference when you are in space. You can rotate through all possible camera modes with the V key, to see if any of them do what you want.

And if you are zooming past too fast to get much benefit, even with your lowest possible Pe that you can arrange -- then you can get more of a gravity assist by burning a few dV retrograde at your Pe. It gives the CB more time to fling you gravitationally.

It is possible to create maneuver nodes that have a combination of burns in multiple axes. For example, both prograde and normal. It is also true that any maneuver node you create will require you to burn before you reach the node. One other true thing is that "prograde" (for example) moves as you burn, so if you lock prograde, then your craft has to slowly turn as you burn -- to keep pointed in the (changing) prograde direction. So, Maneuver Lock can fix all of these things. Once you create a maneuver node, the game calculates the vector direction of all the components of the burn. If you lock your craft onto that vector, and burn the exact amount of deltaV that it says, your resulting orbit will look exactly like the one that was precalculated. However, it also creates new problems. If you burn at the wrong time or too slowly, then your maneuver node gets recalculated, and the vector moves. So it's not really a stationary vector. And it can move really fast, and in unfortunate directions. Also, if you created a sloppy maneuver node, then sometimes you can get an even better resulting intercept by burning prograde instead. You can never get a better result than your precalculated maneuver by using a maneuver node lock. Target lock is super nice for docking and grabbing things. If you do it right, it can automatically keep the docking ports of both the target and your current craft pointing exactly at each other. All you have to do is apply a little forward velocity and then sit back and watch as the two vessels dock each other. However, it is often true that at the very last second before docking, the docking port magnet and SAS will fight each other and fling the two vessels violently apart. So you often want to turn off Target SAS just before the craft touch.

There are two ways to activate an engine to complete a contract. The first is by staging. The second is by going into the action menu for the engine, and click "Run Test". If you have an additional stage on the rocket, you can even test it one way, then edit the staging, and test it again using the other method. I tend to find that using the "Run Test" button works a little more often to complete contracts than staging.

Not without going into the persistent file and editing both the contract and the roster. When a tourist contract is completed, that is exactly the test it does. It assumes kerbal names are unique, and it checks the name in the contract against the names of the tourists on the craft.

Try holding down Left Ctrl when you click to bring up the launchpad's window. That is supposed to force it to display repair options. If that doesn't work, I'll look through my persistent file to let you know which number to change.

Have you ever fired the engine in the current stage? In older versions, the game needed to know the amount of thrust the engine could produce, before it could calculate your burn time. So maybe try hitting Z to go to full throttle for an instant, and then hitting X. Does it show you a burn time after that? Have you modified the throttling on the current engine during your ascent?

This is certainly an autostrut problem. Keep the number of autostruts on your craft below 5, if at all possible. Also, turn off the torque on all reaction wheels besides your first one. Turn off RCS, too.

You need to understand that the Survey Scanner only shows which biomes have ore. So, it's best to first use a probe core and Kerbnet to look at all the biomes on the CB. Memorize (or take a screenshot, or look at the wiki, or whatever) where all the biomes are. Then do the survey scan. Look at the resulting map. Now, understand that what you are looking at is a biome map, with some of the biomes set as "bright" and some as "dark", and then pixellated on a large scale. Pick a biome near the equator that has ore (it's bright) and that you can land on, and go there to do your mining.

Yeah, sorry. The standard base game doesn't have propellers -- just jet engines. It is possible (but difficult) to build bearings and then to fake up some engines to rotate things on the bearings, if you really really want to. The new props are in some downloadable content that also includes robotics that you can purchase.

To do so, you need to unlock some reasonably high tech nodes on the Electronics branch of the tech tree. To start with, you need the OKTO and/or HECS probe cores.

You are trying to do this before you've even done your ejection burn from Kerbin? I don't think it really works that way. Just do the bare minimum transfer to Jool for now. You set up your Tylo gravity braking encounter when you are doing your mid-course correction. That's the only time you will have sufficient precision to actually make an encounter work.

There are two solutions on that thread. One is old, and doesn't apply. The other is current and works perfectly. It's a little program called KML. You really ought to download it and try it.

This is a very common problem. In fact, it even has an entry in this forum's FAQ. Unfortunately, there are many causes that can all produce approximately the same bad outcome. From landing gear splaying from being overloaded, to wheelbarrowing, to fuselage flex, to insufficient yaw control authority. However, as far as I'm concerned, the most common issue that causes runway veering is "excess drag at the front of the craft". Players learn this lesson fairly early on for rockets -- to achieve stability you want low drag at the front, and high drag at the back. Otherwise your rocket will not fly straight. But most airplane designers do not realize that exactly the same issue happens with wheels on the ground. If the drag/friction at the front of the plane is too high compared to the rear landing gear, your plane will veer on the runway. The automatic fiction control presets do not take this sufficiently into account sometimes. So the fix is to go into the editor for your plane, select the front landing gear to open the menu, switch "Friction Control" to Manual, then slide the slider down to something below 50%. You may need to slide it all the way down to 0. At the same time, if you wish, you can increase the friction at the rear by 20% or 30% too. If that doesn't fix the problem, then you may need to post a copy of your plane's craft file here.

There have been maybe 18 different ways to invoke the same undocking bug in the past. Over time, many reproducible ways have been found to trigger it, those examples got reported to the devs, and the devs fixed those ones. So the undocking bug gets rarer and rarer to encounter over time. The devs need a savegame from just before you actually dock, that consistently reproduces the problem. What happens is that the moment you dock, the two docking ports get set to the wrong state, which the game remembers. After it happens, the only way to fix it is to use the KML persistence file editor tool, as reported here:

Generally not. I have seen counterexamples shown, but typically one air intake gets assigned per engine. Spamming air intakes for a single engine has been adjusted in the game to provide next-to-no benefit. Or maybe no benefit at all. It used to be a cheat that was abused a lot for high altitude flight, so the devs stomped it.

I'd be pretty certain that it's some kind of interaction with the service bay. The first thing I'd try is to move the RCS blocks farther from the service bay -- or get rid of the service bay entirely, since you don't seem to have anything in it.

It's actually really easy. The easiest way of all is just to store the KSP home directory and everything below it onto a USB stick, move the USB stick to the other computer, and copy the whole thing anywhere you like on the new computer. There is no specific directory requirement. There is no specific DRM requirement. In fact, it's best if you play KSP from a directory that is not the default Steam download directory. That way, the Steam directory is always a pure vanilla copy, if you ever need to fall back to a pure vanilla copy of the game. You current progress is stored in the persistent.sfs file in the KerbalSpaceProgram/saves/gamename directory. If you just copy that one file, you can move your current progress to any computer with a compatible version of KSP (including any necessary mods).

Because you've turned off SAS? Because you've disabled the reaction wheel in the command pod? Because you have the fuel tanks at different priorities so they end up with different amounts of fuel and the CoM is offcenter? Because you only have a ladder on one side, so the CoM is offcenter? Because you somehow mounted your engine offcenter?

To fix craft in space in the stock game there is one tool you need for everything. It's the Klaw. Send up a craft to dock with your existing craft. Have a Klaw at the tip of an arm. Have a cleverly arranged docking port or two on the arm. Dock with the Klaw. Decouple the arm. Now your craft has a docking port on it.

Generally, propellers are not synchronized. That is, they will rotate at different speeds. Which means they will produce slightly different amounts of thrust, and therefore a torque.

As I understand it, this is going to be a permanent limitation of the game. In order for the rotors to function the way they do, they can't use ModuleEngine. And only parts that use ModuleEngine can have altitude-based thrust curves. So no can do.

We can all see the pix now (congrats!), but sorry I have no info/suggestions.

Take a screenshot. Go to imgur.com, click the "New Post" button, and drag and drop your screenshot on top of their website. Wait a minute, and it will give you a URL to the image. Copy that URL to your clipboard. Come back here and "edit" your post, click the bottom of the post to move your cursor, and click the "insert image from URL" button. Paste the URL, Click "insert into post", and Submit.