bewing

You need to have a "vessel" to start with. You can't build a vessel starting from nothing. You need to have one part laying on the ground before you can start adding to it. Which means you need to decouple it from your craft, using staging (not construction mode). After that, you should be able to take cargo storage parts and weld them onto whatever is laying on the ground. Then hopefully you can remove that starting part, and store it away again. The only problem I see is that the part you start with will be the root part, so I don't know if you will be able to remove it again. I would suggest the two antennas. Have them on your craft, with decouplers, set to zero decoupling force. Decouple them, and use one of them as the basis of your rover.

If you are in career mode, I have seen a bug where a part that has just been unlocked in the VAB/SPH cannot be put into a container. You may need to exit to the space center, and then enter the building again.

Assuming a "range modifier" of 1.0, the range between those two antennas should be 3 million meters. So yeah, if you don't have signal, the problem has to be something else.

Yes, it's a bit of silly humor that you can climb all the flags. Once they fall over, then you can only walk on them and kick them around.

Plant the flag. If it falls, leave it there. Standing up, or laying down, it works the same. No need to be OCD about it.

Actually, you would on the consoles. Look at your Pitch/Roll/Yaw indicators. What color are they? If they are pink, then Trim has been set. This is a console feature that the PC version doesn't have, AFAIK. Trim is like having a continuous input on one axis. So it definitely causes spinning.

SRBs are super cheap, have lots of thrust, and work well in thick atmosphere. So they are the greatest thing you can have for the first part of your rocket. If you can steer them properly, then longer-burning SRBs are almost always better. And steering them properly is generally pretty easy.

There's a button combo for resetting trim, which should be in the onscreen help.

It sounds more like one of your controller's joysticks is not calibrated properly, so that it is sending out a constant "rotate" input. Do you have a second controller you could try?

It reacquires the files before it even gives you the message. So no, it's already fixed and you don't need to be worried at all.

Maybe in the next patch release it might be possible. However, for now in stock, you must dock the two vessels together (into a single vessel) before you can do a fuel transfer. So (depending on your settings) you may need some fuel ducts along with a klaw or mini-klaw, or you can weld docking ports onto one or both of your vessels and then remove the docking ports when you are done.

I suspect it's an infinite number. The game is smart enough not to let you off that easy.

Flags falling over isn't all that annoying. They still remain fully functional. Same with deployable experiments. But having a flag fall over is a "part failure" which means it's a normal priority bug. Which means it'll almost certainly get fixed in the next patch update. Whenever that is.

Laythe tends to be much worse than Kerbin for heating -- for one kinda sad reason. The interesting biomes are so far apart that you end up being tempted to remain hypersonic in the very high atmosphere for a very long time, gliding to your destination. There is no real way to "heatshield" a spaceplane. The only thing you can do is to use parts with a very high heat tolerance. Test your plane with a practical reentry profile, see what parts overheat, then look for heat-resistant alternates. Using SAS is pretty vital, because you need to maintain a stall attitude for most of your reentry. You need to do this to increase your drag, in order to bleed off most of your reentry speed. Get your speed down to 900 to 1200 m/s as fast as you reasonable can, and then your plane won't blow up. A 90 degree AoA is the smartest thing to do, if your reaction wheels can hold you there. Maintain the highest AoA that you can, until all the plasma effects disappear.

You're not missing anything. If you got your game from steam, then it's best to do a file verification just to make sure nothing's corrupted. Other than that, it's a bug. So make a savegame with a memorable name, like flag_bug, or something. And then either create a bug report, or pm me for my email address, and I'll pass it on to the devs for you.

Spricigo got it right. Those items can be stacked in a single cargo slot.

There's a youtube video on how to do it, by Scott Manley, as I recall. You can do it if you can target it. You need to push your Retrograde marker on top of your Antitarget marker on your navball (target mode), just like you would if you were doing a docking.

It's exactly as you said, tourists follow where you've already been. They are handy for two things: getting some extra money in the early game, and for having an excuse to return to places where you've already been -- to pick up a rescue victim, for example. However, tourist contracts are much less lucrative than just about any other contract type over the long term. Especially since you don't get any advance payments on the contracts. And taking tourists into solar orbit and back again takes a very long time -- so you sit around forever waiting to get the bulk of the contract payment. It is, of course, significantly worse after you visit Eve or Duna and then tourists want to start going there. Note that to get 3 stars, it's easier to plant a flag on Minmus, enter solar orbit, do one quick orbit of the Mun, and then return to Kerbin (or have a science lab in Mun orbit, and level your Kerbals up there!).

If the contract says "in flight", that means in the atmosphere. If it says "suborbital", that means it has to happen while the craft is above the atmosphere. If it says "in orbit", then the craft's Pe needs to be above 70km when it happens.

It's really hard. I tend to use a flea SRB, attached to the very lightest crew cabin I can find. Using a hammer SRB with most of the fuel removed might work even better. But the basic point is, you have to maximize short-term thrust, and minimize mass. Then you need to make sure that you have a plan for surviving reentry.

Generally, it's because your control point for the rover got reset. The control point has to be pointing in the "forward" direction. If it's pointing up or down or some other stupid direction, your rover will have steering issues. You can tell what direction your control point is facing by looking at your navball. The center of your navball should be pointing at the horizon, in your direction of travel.

The vostok pods have no reaction wheels. Once your swivels decouple, you will have no direction control whatsoever, so it's gonna crash at some point, no matter what. But the thing you are probably getting messed up by this time is drag. If your rocket flips, it means the front end is too draggy for your control surfaces/devices to overcome. I don't know which part is causing the worst of the drag. It used to be that the vostok pods had extremely low drag, but they got modified by hand -- so I don't know how bad they are now. Unlocking basic aerodynamics would get you tailfins, which are some of the best control surfaces. But they only work up to maybe 25km (while there is enough air for aerodynamics to have an effect).

There is an ascending or descending node outside Duna's SOI. That is the only place you can burn to achieve a zero inclination. Can the game show you where that is? No. Sometimes, you can figure out approximately where it is with your eyeballs. But for an inclination of less than a degree, you're out of luck. The only remaining thing you can do is adjust your inclination the normal way, after you've entered the SOI.

Your LAN is set by which moment you cross the SOI boundary. You can only adjust that arrival time at the Mun by a few hours, out of a 6 day orbit. So, generally it's not something that you can have much control over. And trying to control it is very fuel-inefficient. It's much easier to just adjust your LAN after arrival, by leaving yourself with a very high Ap after your capture burn, and making sure the Ap is near your ascending or descending node for your target orbit. For adjusting inclination at your arrival, that's done by adjusting how far above/below the equator you are when you cross the SOI boundary. This means you need to either be in a non-equatorial orbit when you leave Kerbin, or you need to do a normal/antinormal burn as a mid-course correction. KSP does not give you any tools to do this except for your eye, your patched conic, and the Mun's orbital path.

AHHans gave a great answer to all your questions. When it comes to docking large, ungainly craft -- there are some little tricks you can do, but generally (as he said), the answer is that you just have to accept the fact that you need to do it slowly and carefully. Which means it's going to take a long time. Which means that if you have more than two ships involved, the other ones are going to drift away. And ships that drift away accelerate away faster and faster. The faster you can learn to dock, the less distance other ships will drift away. Do you want little tips and tricks for docking large ships? Mostly it's a matter of practice. Zero your velocity at 30 meters, not 50 to 75. Let other ships drift to most of a km distance, then turn them around and give them 1 m/s toward their targets. That'll give you most of 1000 seconds to dock other craft first. Which is usually enough. Separate the controls for your rotation from your translation, definitely! Move your fuel toward your CoM -- this will help large ships rotate much faster. I find a .3 to .5 m/s closing rate to work nicely for the final docking. It's slow enough that the magnets get a good grab. Target the docking port, then spend most of your time keeping your nose right on the target marker on your navball. The magnets will do the rest of the work, provided you are going slow enough and you turn off your SAS when you touch. Make sure to turn off your SAS when you touch!