bewing

The altimeter shows you the altitude above "sea level" on every celestial body, not "altitude above terrain". On CBs that have no ocean, the sea level altitude is just an arbitrary reference. There are several ways in stock to approximately calculate the altitude of the terrain (using Kerbnet, IVA mode, or a maneuver node), or you can use a mod. But yes, in general it can be quite difficult to land in the dark. You can attach spotlights to your craft, or you can increase the brightness of your screen, or you can just always try to land when you have sunlight.

#2 is almost always the lowest dV, but the exact answer depends on your TWR. However, the deltaV difference between #2 and #1 is not large, #1 is definitely faster to get to your destination, #1 is easier if you do not have manuever nodes unlocked, and #1 is easier if you do not have the "prograde hold" SAS mode available yet.

Can't in stock.

Heatshields probably don't work quite the way you think. In order to operate at all, they have to get really hot. And then some of that heat gets conducted to the nearby parts. So heatshields protect against extreme heat, but they basically do nothing against moderate heat. Additionally, a heatshield takes a little bit of time to warm up and get operational, shall we say. So for just returning from orbit around Kerbin, a service bay is probably a better deal for you. You don't really need a heatshield until you are returning from the Mun, and you don't need any ablative on the heatshield until you are going interplanetary.

Actually, steam has been doing a somewhat poor job of downloading the new version accurately. There's a fairly high chance that at least one of your files did not download right yesterday.

Yeah, for doing engine tests, clicking the "run test" button when all the checkmarks are green will always complete the contract. If it doesn't, then it's either a mod problem or you need to validate your download of the game to check for bad files.

Welcome to the forums, yeem. Those wheels are generally not capable of handling that much weight. Those ones max out at about 7 tonnes, iirc, for a tricycle arrangement. For fancier designs like yours, you are going to need the next higher tech version of a landing gear.

Which version? Have you validated your files?

Heh. ^That's total overkill.

Adding more SRBs to the sides won't make it longer or harm stability. Another thing you can do is put hammers underneath your thumpers, that stage first. You can get rid of the drogue chutes on your SRBs -- unfortunately in the current game they won't help you any. If you put your SRBs in 4-way symmetry, then you can attach the steering fins to your SRBs instead of your central core. That way, the fins will stage off once you are above the thick part of the atmosphere and reduce your total weight.

Tried an experiment putting drogue chutes really close to (but not on) a shielded docking port. The docking worked fine. So I'm pretty certain it's not the drogue chutes. But the point about any clipped parts near the docking port is extremely valid.

If you watch the video, it's pretty clear that it's not a collider problem in this case. The two docking ports are sticking nicely out beyond everything else. It definitely looks like some kind of problem with the port "magnetism". The question is why?

There certainly was such a bug with that part that I recall very clearly, but I was pretty certain it had gotten fixed in version 1.4.5. What version are you running?

Do you have an unmodded copy of the game stored somewhere on your machine? It looked like there was "negative magnetism" forcing the two docking ports apart? I'm going to blame that on one of your mods.

Saving a little fuel for touchdown really is important for landing heavy stuff with engines attached -- parachutes can only do so much. So I think it would be wise for you to look into other ways of surviving heat than just burning your engines during reentry. During ascent, you want low drag. During descent, you want high drag. So you want your aero drag to change before descent. The best way I've found to do that is with aero control surfaces and their "deploy" function. If, for example, you have two sets of two control surfaces and you set them to deploy in opposite directions -- that creates a tremendous amount of drag, without creating a lot of roll torque. There are other parts that also change their drag when deployed -- wheels, legs, cargo bays, and service bays were mentioned above. Airbrakes are not your only choice and I do not think they are your best choice, either. As said above, putting some little wings near your empty CoM is another good method. During launch they create very little drag, but during descent you can point your craft in a "bad" direction to create a lot more drag. With the wings near the CoM, it doesn't take much control authority to hold your craft in that draggy orientation for a long time. Another method is to deliberately tumble your craft. This distributes the heat some, and puts your craft into a draggy orientation for 50% of the time. (Which is a lot better than nothing.)

Yeah, tapping F will do that. But I find that Radial Out works better when you are touching down, because if you bounce and tip over a little then Radial Out will try to stand you back up again and Hold won't.

The game is currently designed so that there is a period of grinding at any level of money/science modifiers. The modifiers only change how long you need to spend grinding. There is no setting that is "realistic", because the money/science aspect of the game is not realistic. So you need to set the modifiers according to how patient you are. If you don't mind spending a long time trying to make money, then set the modifier down to about 50%, but I wouldn't go lower than that until you are an expert. If you already know where all the easy science data can be found, then again a 50% modifier might be good. But there are many tricks for finding science. If you don't know any of the tricks, then I'd stick to the beginner level of 100%.

And I find the midcourse correction thing to be very easy. Look at your target orbit crossing, and ask "am I early or late, or too far North, South, East, or West?" Then make a tiny burn in the opposite direction by hand, until they line up.

Yeah, I raised exactly this as a request to the devs at least a year and a half ago -- no movement on it yet.

Because it requires a lot less fuel/deltaV, because you are going a lot slower. And actually, the SOI sizes are about the same. A bit over 2000 km for both.

Two reasons: the vostok pods are bigger than the MK1 pods, and probably have more drag. So you are increasing the drag at the front end of your rocket -- and high drag at the front end makes your rocket unstable. Additionally, one of the things that makes the MK1 design easier to fly is that it has a built-in "reaction wheel". Reaction wheels increase the amount of steering forces your rocket has available. We call it "control authority". Vostok pods do not have any built-in reaction wheels. To fly a vostok-based design, you either need RCS thrusters (which you need to unlock on your tech tree), or you need to add a reaction wheel.

Lock retro until you are 30 meters or so above the surface and still moving down at 5 m/s or so. Then switch to Lock Radial Out. There is no assignable key for it, unfortunately. Also, this "burn past zero" problem generally means that you have the thrust on your engines turned up too high. Try turning the thrust limiter down to 20 or 30 percent after you eliminate most of your horizontal orbital velocity to give yourself more control during landing.

Either build a proper airplane for the first time and explore Kerbin's surface, or build a little rover and explore the KSC campus (IIRC there are 31 minibiomes on the KSC campus that all give science points -- it takes an hour to gather them all but it's worth hundreds of points), or do a low flyby of the Mun (below 60km). A low Mun flyby works best if you've upgraded the Astronaut Complex once, so that you can EVA over each Munar biome.

And anyway, autostruts are always easier than struts to "attach" (since you only have to click a button).

The basic answer is that zero orbital speed is not the same as zero surface speed. Or, in other words, "straight down" has two possible meanings. If you burn to zero orbital velocity, then you really do fall straight toward the center of the CB. However, the surface is continually moving underneath you -- so you miss your landing spot by a ways every time. You would have to know how many seconds the landing would take, and lead your landing point by the surface velocity multiplied by the time -- and then cancel your negative surface velocity just before you land. OTOH, if (in orbit) you burn to zero surface velocity, then you still have a horizontal component to your velocity in the grand scheme of things (because the surface is moving horizontally). At that point you need to understand what the navball means by zero surface speed. Let's say you're on a CB with the equator rotating at 175 m/s, and a radius of 600km. If you are sitting on the equator at zero surface velocity and switch to orbital navball mode -- it will say 175m/s. If you are orbiting at an altitude of 3463330m (keosynch) and you check your surface velocity, it will also say zero -- however, your orbital velocity will be 1009.8 m/s. So what the navball means by "zero surface velocity" is the velocity you need at your current altitude in order to stay over a particular spot. But the velocity is a function of altitude. The higher you are the faster you need to be going, in order to achieve "zero surface velocity". If you have that horizontal velocity, and then you teleport down to the surface -- you will be going somewhat too fast compared to the actual surface. And then you have to cancel out your positive surface velocity just before you land. So basically there is a small fundamental problem with this landing method. If you come to a stop with respect to the surface while you are in orbit -- then you are starting over the right spot, but your horizontal speed is a bit too high and you will land east of your target. If you slow to the correct surface speed or slower, then the surface will rotate under you while you descend -- and you will end up west of the spot you are hovering above. However, these effects are small for a slowly rotating CB such as the Mun. On the third hand, landing on a precise spot by hand is always inefficient. So this is actually a pretty good method without going to the full "push the retrograde marker on top of the anti-target marker" method, or a mod.