bewing

Have you validated your files since your last game update from steam?

I still say your mental error here is giving too much physical credibility to the game's aero modeling.

It's a setting in Career mode, if you have the DLC. Generally, once your VAB/SPH have been upgraded, you can launch from Woomerang/Dessert/or the Island Airfield. What happens is that a dropdown appears underneath the Launch button, allowing the extra options.

Well, you don't really have to quickly align prograde with the target, exactly. You burn a couple times to get it close, certainly -- while you are inbound. Then you align retrograde. If you burn to 0.0m/s retrograde in target mode, that means you are stopped relative to your target. So as you are drifting past your target, you do that burn. Now you are stopped. Now you point straight at the target and give it a little juice. You will probably still miss the second time, unless you were less than 30 meters apart, or unless you use RCS to correct small errors in your aim. But once you stop relative to your target, you've got all the time in the world to do your alignment.

In the real world, it would probably either be coriolis forces or whichever direction the wind is blowing. In KSP, it's probably more like "whichever direction gets calculated first".

You cannot use SAS to lock the kerbal to point prograde etc. Kerbals on EVA do not have SAS. What you can do, though, is adjust the camera so that it is pointing prograde etc according to the navball and then hit your spacebar. When you hit the spacebar it forces your kerbal to point as close as possible in the direction the camera is pointing. A kerbal's helmet on EVA always points due north, however -- so there are many times when a kerbal cannot completely turn to point in exactly the direction the camera is facing.

OK, Mr. GoatRider makes a good point. Can you describe exactly precisely what you mean my "partial control"? (Or post a pic.)

Alternate = Hit ESC to invoke the pause menu, then click "version info" at the bottom. I don't know of any way to remap it without using a game controller. If your laptop has an Nvidia graphics package, then there is probably a popup application stealing the Alt-Fx keystrokes for doing graphics setting changes. It's possible to remap or turn off the key capture in that app, and then they will be passed through to KSP.

Welcome to the forums. What you are describing should be impossible -- which generally means you have a corrupted file somewhere. Steam has been having some problems with download reliability recently. So I'd highly recommend doing a steam file validation on your game and then test again.

Steam has been having some problems with download reliability recently. This is exactly the kind of problem I'd expect to see if one of your files was corrupted. So I'd highly recommend doing a steam file validation on your game and then test the part again. I built exactly what you said, and I can turn the shroud off in the VAB.

But if using the maneuver indicator is too hard, then you can just treat maneuver nodes as being approximate. Forget about any other direction than prograde (or retrograde during landing), and lock your SAS on prograde/retrograde during your burn. You only need to use the manuever node to tell you when to start burning. Then you cancel the maneuver node and complete the rest of the burn by eye. Get your orbit close enough to make you happy, and then do an ajustment burn when you are halfway to your destination.

Welcome to the forums. Yes, you can sort-of. It's not exactly the same button mapping as on the console. And you need to use a USB cord on the controller I think -- I don't think there's an easy way to make the controller's bluetooth work on PC. One caveat though -- for some nutty reason, many older versions of Windows (Win7) do not have any drivers available that will recognize and run a new xbox controller. When you have an xbox controller plugged into a usb port and you load the game through steam, there is something called the Steam Controller driver that gets loaded. The Steam Controller can use an xbox controller or a PS4 controller as a substitute. It's a little tricky to activate, though. There's a little icon on the Steam Client that looks like a controller. Click that and you get into the controller setup. You have to activate it there, and it should show you all the game controllers that are hooked to your PC for you to select one. Once you've done all that, there should be a couple button mapping presets available. One should act a lot like the Cursor Preset on the console. The other one should have pretty much every single function in the PC version mapped to somewhere on the controller. The mappings can't be exact, because there is only one "modifier" button available (instead of 2 on the xbox) and no radial menus. One nice thing is that using the Steam Controller setup, you can completely customize your button mappings to suit yourself, and save it as a new configuration. Each button that you press gets converted into a keyboard keystroke -- so it's not possible to use the controller to do anything you can't do with the keyboard.

They combine if they've been placed according to symmetry. So the most that will ever combine at a time is 8. But this looks like a rover that was built in the SPH? So max symmetry there is only 2. Just switching focus from one stage to another and back again in the staging stack will combine all the ones that are combinable. However, to solve your real problem, if you click on the staging stack then it will scroll with the scroll wheel, or you can grab the entire craft below a decoupler and detach it. That will "ghost" the entire bottom half of the ship -- but it makes all the stages of the upper half much easier to access. But you are going to have to grab the engines one at a time anyway, to move them out of that stage. And as you move each one out, you will see one more of them to grab.

In your Advanced Difficulty Options: what's your Range Modifier, your DSN Modifier, do you have the Extra Ground Stations turned on, did you set Require Signal for Control, do you have relay sats around Kerbin (and what is their power rating), and what level is your Tracking Station?

If tweaking your design doesn't work in the end, there is one other option. A rocket is significantly more stable flying straight up. So if you forget about your gravity turn until you are above 36km or so, you may be able to keep your final design. It won't be as efficient to get into orbit, but sometimes efficiency loses out to just making something work.

I always start a new save, but reuse all my craft files.

To embed an image, you have to link directly to the image -- not to a webpage that mostly shows the image. Then put the link to the image into the "insert other media/URL" box. Getting the URL for the image itself depends on your browser, but mostly you can right click on the image and there should be something there to get you the direct link.

No, the theoretical maximum is twice the orbital velocity. ie. 1080 m/s. But 500 m/s is fairly typical, as Mr. Horseman says. Burning retrograde by few m/s at your Mun Pe can get you a lot closer to the theoretical max.

Welcome to the forums. Antennas may look like they point in a specific direction, but they really don't. At the top of your image, where it shows the number of "bars" of signal that you have -- notice how you have zero bars? You can't "see" Kerbin from where your ship is currently sitting (you do not have LOS). Which is a problem, because the Mun is tidally locked to Kerbin -- so that spot on the Mun will never be able to see Kerbin over the horizon. To make this work, you need to launch a relay sat. The relay sat will need to have a few HG-5 antennas on it, or some other relay antenna that's better than an HG-5. And you need to place the satellite somewhere that you will be able to see it from where your Lab is sitting on the surface.

Have an actual pilot onboard to avoid Limited Control mode.

KSP is based on a game engine called Unity. But "joints" in unity have some problems/bugs. They are too flexible, and vibrations do not ever damp down. So the devs gave us all a temporary kludge of these autostrut things until unity gets fixed. Autostruts are struts that are zero cost, massless, dragless, and are really easy to connect. They have one drawback related to your points 1&2. 1 & 2: Yes, all the autostruts on your craft dynamically recalculate/change their endpoints in flight whenever the make-up of your craft changes through docking, damage, fuel use, or decoupling. However, the disconnect/reconnect process on an autostrut is a very forceful and violent process. So you want to prevent this from happening to your autostruts if at all possible. You prevent it from happening by turning off most/all of your autostruts before you dock/decouple/or when the "heaviest" part on your craft is about to change. Then you turn them back on again once the event is over. 3: Just as you would expect, "Root" creates a strut between the CoM of your current part to the Root part (usually the first part that you placed) of your craft. Heaviest does ditto with the currently most massive part on your craft. If you have a bunch of parts that are equally massive, it just picks one randomly. Root and Heaviest autostruts can be very long, and these long autostruts can either be a godsend or a fatal flaw in your craft. You have to know what you are doing. The "grandparent" part is basically two parts toward the root from your current part. Grandparent autostruts tend to be quite short and they never disconnect/reconnect, and for that reason they are very safe to use. In the Debug menu (Physics tab, iirc), there is a button you can activate: "visualize autostruts" -- it draws lines between each of the parts that are connected by autostruts. So if you'd rather see the autostruts instead of reading a bunch of words, try that. 4. Replace. Grandparent autostruts are better than EAS struts in almost every way. Someday, in some future version, the devs may get rid of them -- but for now they are a nice gift to the players. The only time an EAS strut is better is when you want to connect your current part to someplace really strange. 5. Very effective. Space stations, extremely long rockets, and big surface bases tend to build up large destructive oscillations -- especially if you have reaction wheels active and you turn on SAS. Using a lot of grandparent autostruts can easily rigidize any of these craft in space or on a CB. Just follow two main rules: Be very careful with your autostruts before doing any docking or decoupling, and minimize the number of really long autostruts (let's say a maximum of 5 long ones per craft).

Style points.

But then again, the lack of a node on the bottom is a huge drawback, that I think is worth several thousand funds at least.

Using elevons as airbrakes uses the "deploy" function in the PAW (yes, the right click menu). If it deploys in the wrong direction, click the "invert deploy direction" button.

It is doable, theoretically. The easiest way is to mine the asteroid first. After you take all the ore out, an asteroid slows down really fast. It's also doable with an intact asteroid, but you need a lot more aerodynamics on your craft than you have. Wings & fins will slow even a very massive craft.