bewing

Of course you can. A bit of clipping here, a bit of clipping there. It works.

The runway is perfectly flat. That is, it does not follow the curve of the surface of the planet. So things will tend to roll toward the center of the runway. But they tend to do it fairly slowly -- at most a few m/s at a time. Planes on the grass do not accelerate by themselves, unless there is a problem with the installation of the game. But if your kerbals are happy for now, that's good enough. And welcome to the forums!

The other mod that allows the recovery of stages that have parachutes attached is called Stage Recovery. Besides that, parachutes never open unless they are on the focused vessel, or within physics range (25km) of the focused vessel. So just putting on a parachute is not enough, if you don't watch it come down. If an unfocused object is outside physics range and goes below about 25km, it will be autodeleted.

KSP uses a game engine called Unity. Unity uses a physics library called PhysX. Inside PhysX is a bug in their spring equation that makes wheels and landing legs (anything with a "suspension") bounce. Usually it is controllable with some tweaks in your craft design. Unfortunately, we can't fix it since the Unity/PhysX sourcecode is not public. Planes in 1.4.4 usually bounce like that if the wheels are loaded very heavily. Try removing some fuel and the bouncing may go away. That really has to mean that one of your engines is still on. Or you landed on a hill.

If you are playing at regular difficulty, then you probably still have partial control of it. Is the commnet probe icon yellow? If so, it's still controllable enough to use for most purposes. Many ways to regain control, actually. Easiest to increase the level of your tracking station -- with increased level, it gets increased range. Second is to go into the Difficulty Settings and turn off "Enable Comm Network". Third is to send out a relay sat, close enough to get a signal from your probe. Fourth is to go attach a new antenna or even more stuff to your probe with a klaw. To get remote pilot control to your probe, it's already necessary to have a relay antenna within range of it -- which will automatically get you into method #3.

Huh. The first time I loaded this thread, it didn't show that part.

He didn't say it worked. But yeah, it tends to be Nvidia Geforce Experience that eats the Alt-F12 hotkey, and yes, you can remap it there. So check what kind of video card you have in the thing.

If you leave the friction on the front wheels set to a low number, then you can "steer" using your rudder.

Heh. Three aspects to the concept of "slow down". 1) Don't be in a hurry. You have a lot of speed to bleed off and it takes a long time. 2) Get your horizontal speed below 60 m/s, and then get it even lower than that. 3) Get your vertical speed to almost nothing. Make sure you are flying level, 5 meters above the surface just before touchdown -- and then every 1 meter drop try to fight the prograde marker back up to level again.

In every one of those shots that shows the An and Dn, it has a value of 180 (or -180). That number has to be zero for the contract to complete. If it's 180, it means you are going the wrong direction around the orbit. The number is measured from the desired orbit, relative to the ship you currently have in focus. Now, I know you said you have the two ships going in opposite directions around the sun. If those pix really are from shots of both satellites, then I'm gonna have to say sorry, but I don't believe you. You may want to focus each ship, and then look closely at the An and Dn values. If they all say 180, then you may want to timewarp good and fast for a while. If the two ships really are in opposite orbits, they should get closer to each other and then pass. I bet they won't. I bet they are both going in the wrong direction around the sun together.

Welcome to the forums. Typically with newbies, this is a problem with going the wrong direction around your orbit. But it looks like you've covered that. If you hover over the An and Dn tags on the target orbit, do they say 0 degrees? The next common problem is getting the Ap and Pe of your orbit aligned with the requested one, so that the tags are on top of each other. So the next thing we always do is ask for a picture of your orbit. Which is a lot harder in your case, being on an xbox. But we'd be happy with a picture taken from your phone. You need to use an image hosting service (such as imgur) to actually post it. There are instructions in the FAQ on this forum.

Any story behind that is lost in the dim mists of time, at this point. (Well, except for the fact that adding that South Complex minibiome raised the total number of Kerbin biomes at the time to 42. I assume that was cosmologically significant.)

Test the mass of your vessel.

No, all you should need to do is touch it. Depending on the version of the game, you may need to maintain contact with it.

The biomes at the buildings at KSC are collectively labeled "minibiomes". To get experiments done at the building minibiomes, you have to touch the building. There are also "area" minibiomes, where you only have to be driving across the minibiome -- and you do not have to touch anything to get those. The generic "Research and Development" area biome is one of those.

Welcome to the forums. You may not quite be understanding the meaning of the words in the contract. The words mean, "Use any method you like to get to an altitude between 62km and 70km. When you are there, use any method you like to get your Surface speed to between 60m/s and 210m/s. When you have both of those things at the same time, activate or test a Flea SRB on your ship." Beyond that, there are things called "haul" contracts, and "test" contracts. For a "haul" contract, you don't even have to test/activate the engine. You have to look at the wording of the contract to see if it uses the word "haul". Basically, the deal is that Flea boosters are not meant to get you that high. So you use a different booster to get you up there, and then you light the flea. When it comes to carefully controlling your speed, liquid engines are best. So you unlock the Swivel engine, and some of the little liquid fuel tanks. Build a rocket with those. Put a flea engine near the top. Take all the fuel out of the flea engine, probably -- because actually lighting the engine makes the trip much more complicated. Launch straight up until you are at 62km. Turn around and burn until your speed goes below 210m/s. Then activate the Flea using either staging or with the context menu. Have lots of parachutes on your ship, and let it float back down to the ground (making sure that you aren't going too fast for your parachutes to open).

I put the kerbal on EVA in the cargo bay. I board the seat. I take the cargo bay most of the way to Mach 1 at sea level. There is no big drag arrow on the kerbal. The aero data reports 0 drag on the kerbal. I see no bug. We need repro steps, or more details. Are you perhaps sticking the seat directly to the side of the cargo bay?

What celestial body are you on? Aren't you willing to just fly up to the tank and click on it while it's close?

The equilateral or right angle ones from MH won't work for you? To get them a different shape, you need to completely rebuild the meshes.

Once you are going more than 30 m/s, there is no real difference in base effective speed. Any intake will work. The only time that makes a difference is taxiing. Try putting a small circular intake to feed a wheesley, and you will see. The main difference between the intakes is at very high speed. The intakes choke off at different max speeds. Somebody did some graphs of intake performance with speed, a year or two ago -- your best bet is to search for that. Or to just try it yourself.

Yes, or. You only need one of those 4 thingies as the control point for your ship. As Laie said, pilot means pilot. The Kerbal has to be a pilot. If it's not a pilot, then it won't work. The pilot is the one who drives the rover, while the other pilot or probe core controls the main vessel. But once it has an advanced probe core, it should not need any command module. Just a pilot kerbal in a crew cabin should be enough -- assuming you don't want to EVA your pilot, or you have some clever way to get them out.

How much mass can you get off the ground with your props? That's the crucial question for SSTO. Next question is how high can you get it, but that's less important. Once you're off the ground, you just need enough rocket TWR and fuel to get to orbit. Your craft should be either MK1 or MK3. Note that the rest of us don't usually bother with stock props, so it's unlikely that any of us have a prop SSTO on hand. So you might want to supply the craft file for your prop plane, and we can modify it so that it SSTOs.

And the controlling vessel needs to have a relay antenna.

You want this to be stock? Or using modded propellers? It has to take off using the propellers?

In general, I think the main issue is going to be that your nose has somewhat higher drag than the back end (because the back end is occluded to some degree). So I'd be trying to take some wing off the front, and moving it to the back, I think. This would change the CoL and require some redesign -- but I think it would change the drag characteristics enough to make a difference.