bewing

Hmmm. Looks a bit like a bug, but with all those mods you are running, it's not really a valid bug test. It has to happen on a vanilla install to be looked into as a valid bug.

The part of the rover that you are trying to connect to the ship needs to be the root part. Use the reroot tool, click on the rover, then click on the part that you want to use for the connector.

I think mystifeid's solution is basically the right one. Sit the rover on top of your rocket in whatever orientation you like best. Don't use a fairing because it would be too big. Launch it straight up, fairly slowly -- with a lot of aerodynamic attitude control on your rocket, plus a decent amount of gimbal. The aero control surfaces will keep the rocket flying properly up to maybe 12km. The rocket will probably continue to try to flip up to about 30km, and that's what you need the gimbal for -- to keep the rocket flying straight between 12 and 30km. Now, I am in the camp of people who like to launch directly to my target without going into orbit first. I assume your target is the Mun. So I say, lead it by about 60 degrees and just go straight up until you get to the Mun. Landing is definitely trickier with a big fat rover on the front end. Usually you can wait to decouple it until you are landed. It will tumble down to the surface, but that usually won't damage anything. Trying to drop it from an altitude is much trickier.

Also, it seems to happen sometimes that creating a quicksave and then reloading that quicksave will suddenly make the contract complete.

If the ground stations are turned on, then antennas on your station will only be for decoration. So pick the prettiest ones. Ground station antennas are always better than anything you can launch into space.

Are you playing with the Kerbin ground stations turned off?

See, the question still isn't specific enough. If you add monoprop before launch from kerbin, it's certainly not worth it -- every Kg of monoprop costs you 10 times that much fuel to get the monoprop to LKO, and monoprop is sucky fuel. If you add the monoprop in LKO from a tanker or station, it's still not worth it because you have to burn so much LF to push the monoprop out to Moho. If the monoprop appears by magic in your tanks on the way to Moho then yes it's totally worth it to burn it, because it's fuel and burning fuel gets you into orbit at Moho, and you want to burn the worst fuel first. So it's not really an oberth question, because no matter what -- you'd be burning the monoprop before you get anywhere near Moho Pe.

Did you actually hit the R key to activate the RCS thrusters? Usually RCS is an extremely powerful and fast way to rotate your craft. RCS often overcompensates. Reaction wheels are usually slow to do their job -- however, that's usually a benefit. It gives you a lot of fine control, especially if you are trying to change orientation by hand. The SAS system uses a very generic algorithm for spinning a ship. If you want to go from prograde to retrograde and your ship turns slowly, then often the best thing to do is turn off SAS and pick a key such as D. Mash the D key until your ship has spun about a quarter of the way around. Let go, and wait until it spins another halfway by itself. Then turn on SAS and select the proper prograde/retrograde, and the SAS system will finish doing the turn itself. Or you can begin the slowing process yourself, since you know which key to mash to slow down again.

You get the worst rendezvous burn times when you are going up and your target is coming down. So, in general, it's best to arrange your rendezvous near your target's Ap or Pe. As Vandemonde says -- an orbital object is coming at around 2km per second. You can figure at least 100 seconds for you to get up to a reasonable altitude with a rocket. So that's 200km that your target will move. So you need to know how far 200km is from KSC. Timing the launch of your rendezvous ship does not directly reduce the deltaV cost. You can sit in LKO and wait for several hundred orbits until things line up properly before you do your rendezvous burn. However, most people are not that patient. Trying to hurry things along definitely uses up a lot more fuel. Yes, that's exactly correct.

Welcome to the forums. For odd problems like that, often doing a quicksave and then reloading the save will clear it up.

Mr. Cheesecake is right. But there are probably also backup copies of your savegame (persistent.sfs) saved in your Backups directory that don't need to edit.

You have to scroll your map view out a ways, so that you can maybe see duna along with kerbin. There should be a lot of ? symbols all over the map view, as said above.

The Unity game engine has a bug that causes joints between parts to be too bendy. Autostruts are a "temporary" gift kludge from the devs that give you a way to rigidify your vessels in flight. You get them at the same time as you get regular struts on the tech tree, as long as you have "advanced tweakables" enabled in the settings. However, certain kinds of autostruts can be dangerous if misused -- especially if you use a lot of them. An autostrut is just a massless, dragless, zero cost regular strut that you can add in flight. From a selected part they can extend to one of several selectable endpoints. Grandparent autostruts are safest. Root and "heaviest" autostruts can change their endpoints automatically if the vessel's stats change -- like during a docking. Having an autostrut change its endpoint suddenly can be a violent process. Having many dozen autostruts do it simultaneously can easily destroy your ship. So it's best to keep the number of autostruts low, and sometimes it can be a good idea to disable them before doing a docking. If you do the physics calculation and assume a perfectly rigid vessel -- then it turns out that the answer is that you can put them anywhere and the results are the same. In general in the game that's true enough. But because physics is calculated sequentially and the SAS system can do some funny games with reaction wheels -- it's best to have the active reaction wheels near to each other, and to deactivate all the distant ones. Otherwise you can get harmonic vibrations that can destroy your ship.

Usually this error happens when you change the terrain detail level in the main settings. Try changing it to either "low" or "high" -- and suddenly your base and vessels may be back above the surface when you load the scene.

What version of the game are you running?

Just to rule it out: the Kerbal isn't on the surface of some celestial body? And the Kerbal has used up every last drop of jetpack fuel? None left at all?

Welcome to the forums. Assuming you use Windows, when you download the craft file it will end up in your Downloads folder. Then you have to know where your KSP game is stored. Assuming you got it from Steam, it'll probably be under something like C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Kerbal Space Program. Underneath that directory is "saves/TheNameOfYourCurrentGame/Ships/ and then a SPH and VAB directory. Copy your downloaded craft files to whichever of the two is appropriate.

This may be your problem. I think you mean a heatshield. You only need one at most -- 4 is too many. They are very heavy. They have a lot of stuff on them called "ablative", that you do not need. Ablative is also very heavy, but it can be removed when you build your craft. If I'm wrong and you don't mean a heatshield, then the only other thing you could mean is a radiator panel? You do not need those at all. They are also very heavy, and are not useful on a trip to the Mun.

Probe cores and activated parachutes and even Kerbals don't matter. If your focused craft is outside physics range of anything when that thing goes below 25km altitude on Kerbin, it will be deleted. Physics range in the atmosphere is around 25km. Additionally, while you are in the atmosphere, you can't change focus. If you want your spent stages to land -- you have to either use mods, or follow them all the way to the ground.

The place where the extra monoprop costs you more is when you are leaving Kerbin, because you are thrusting that much extra mass. Once you are at moho, you always want to burn your lowest Isp fuel "first" -- which means yes, burn as much of it as you conveniently can during your insertion burn. You've already spent the deltaV to get the extra fuel to moho. Burning it up to get a maximally efficient insertion is basically free at that point.

Do you have any extra room for LF, or are your LF tanks topped up? 1kg of LF is worth more than 1kg of monoprop all the way through your trip.

OK, tested and confirmed. The important missing repro step is that your root part is always on the part of the craft that the kerbal is not in. If you reroot your craft so that the root stays with the kerbals as you decouple, then the chutes do not deploy.

The problem is that you're totally wrong about that bug. Either you are missing some very important repro step, or there is no such bug -- because I can't repro it at all.

https://pastebin.com/raw/M4XqVyX4 In V1.4.5 the wheels pull a little to the left when it's rolling. Action 2 to deploy the hydrofoils. Action 3 to put the hydrofoils into flight mode. Best to take off before getting much over 400 m/s. Above that, small vibrations while still on the water will cause RUDding.

I don't think I agree with Gaarst. Maybe look at this one: In the water, you get roll stability with a wide stance. You get yaw stability by having more drag at the back than at the front. And you get pitch stability by having your elevon hydrofoils at the front producing lift, and using flat wing parts at the back as passive foils. If the front comes up out of the water, then the front loses all its lift and comes back down. If the front drops a little then more of the foil is underwater -- you gain a ton of lift, and the front rises back up again. (I posted my fixed up 1.4.5 version of that craft on Steam as the Perigo_Spase_Bote, IIRC.)