Biggen

I have a reaction wheel on the Klaw craft. If I limit the thrust it seems to be able to hold steady better. I'll have to play around with it. I grabbed the lander can on its edge so it's hard to figure out where the COM is on it.

Got a rescue contract in Minimus Orbit. It was for a stranded kerbal and his scrap. So I built a craft using a Klaw (no RCS), motored over to Minimus and captured him. Was thinking, "Damn, that was easy." Plotted a return trip back, fired my engines, and then promptly went into an uncontrolled spin that ended up sending me on a crash course to Minimus. I found out I can't steer at all and am not able to get out of Minimus orbit and head back to Kerbin. Looking online at people using the claw when grabbing asteroids, they right click the asteroid and select "Center of Mass". However, when I right-click the craft I captured (it is a lander can) I have no such option to select. Am I doing something wrong? How the hell are you supposed to steer this fat cow with a 3 ton lander can strapped to the front of your ship?

Thanks guys. I was coming into Eve around ~4000m/s when I hit the upper atmosphere. I tried going in retrograde, but the engine couldn't handle the heat. I then did an attempt prograde and the AE-FF2 fairing took the heat better but it was redlining and I didn't bleed of enough speed to make a difference anyway. I was packing 4 active small radiators and they didn't do jack to stop the heating. They still exploded (actually the fuel tank they were sitting on) around 15% cooling capacity. If I did Eve again, I would maybe burn half retro and maybe half radial. I would think that would help bleed off speed while keeping the Pe at approximately the same height. Although, end in the end, I don't know if it makes any difference as far as delta v efficiency doing something like this way than just doing a full retro burn at Pe to get a capture. I'll also remember to get a really high capture orbit next time and do the normal/antinormal burn at their highest point to conserve fuel. I like these sat contracts. I'm flinging RA-100's all over the solar system every time I do a sat contract so hopefully that will help me with a stable relay network down the line. It's also teaching me better maneuver nodes and encounter techniques which is also a plus.

So I've been mostly doing sat contracts recently trying to get better at using nodes. I took a contract up for Eve and got my probe there successfully. I thought I could aerocapture the probe but that turned out to be a HUGE mistake as the probe basically begins to explode at around 81KM with no airspeed even being bled off yet. My craft was still accelerating while disintegrating. I'm not sure I understand the physics of this, however. How can the atmosphere generate enough heat due to friction to explode a ship but not slow it down?? Anyway, back on topic, I ended up reloading and getting into orbit with a regular retroburn. After I was in a parking orbit I was off 45 degrees from the inclination needed for the sat contract. It's a good thing I brought a ton of fuel as I still had ~2500m/s delta v in the tank after the parking orbit because it took another ~2300m/s to adjust my orbit at the AN/DN to get to the correct inclination to satisfy the contract. So my question is this, how can I adjust to the proper inclination of the sat contract orbit before I get into parking orbit of the planet? I fiddled around with attempting to eyeball it when I was doing my mid-course burn to Eve, but I couldn't get my orbit to cooperate with the required sat contract orbit. It seems that the orbit bends "funny" and I can't get both the beginning/ending SOI "legs" to wrap the way I need it to during a mid-course burn. Surely there is a way to do this BEFORE getting into orbit of a planet.

Oh its in the difficult tab. I looked for it earlier in settings and couldnt find it. Thanks guys!

So I'm halfway to my 1st trip to Duna with a single Engineer piloting the craft and I go to add a new maneuver node and I find I'm locked out. After some reading, I did't realize you either needed (a) a real pilot or (b) a communication link back to KSC. I'm well outside of comm link as I don't have any of the really big relay antennas unlocked yet to setup my relay network. So, how can I get around this for this particular mission? Is there a way to remove this restriction to allow my mission to continue with maneuver nodes?