king of nowhere

My last mission, a caveman run, required dropping pods all over Kerbin to collect science from biomes. Often, I would land near mountains; Kerbin is one of the few planets with real mountains. And I love mountains. So I devised a mission to climb as many of them as possible with a rover. Most people, when circumnavigating Kerbin, go around mountain chains. They miss all the fun. Part 1: Starting the mission First part of the mission is to pick a rover. Then I have to decide an itinerary. The first part of the chosen path

you were already reviewed and added to the scoreboard. sorry if i am not impressed by the size, i am used to flying significantly bigger stuff.

most of its mass is in the tail, so i'm not really surprised. i had planes with the same issue, and sometimes some atmospheres are less forgiving than others.

ok, but i meant, pictures about what goes wrong. trying to figure out what's the source of the instability

can you share pictures?

something is wrong with it, yes, but this is trying to figure out what is wrong. you say that you lose stability at low speed, and i'm saying that it may be the result of the plane getting bent out of shape, which confuses SAS to no end. just a maybe

As i said, that can happen if sas overcompensates. Sometimes reducing engine gimbaling helps. Or it could be that the plane is getting bent, this screws up sas. Else, i really have no idea. If you landed those other planes "years ago", some updates changed some things, including sas and rigidity, and may result in finely tuned planes no longer being functional.

if they can do tail landings on kerbin, then they should work. that's a much better test for landing than mun or ike. still, just because you flew other, different planes on duna, it doesn't mean those specific planes you are trying to land now will work the same. i suspect the most recent ones will be bigger, for start. regardless, i've never heard of a planet being bugged - except for the ground contact bug that occasionally comes with kerbalism. bugged vehicles, all the time, but you tried four of them. it's much, much more likely it's faulty engineering anyway. sometimes things react differently in different gravity. i once had a lander for tylo, i tested it on kerbin, it could slam the ground at 10 m/s and survive. I went to tylo, i touched the ground at 3 m/s, it exploded. i couldn't get it to not explode on tylo, no matter how softly i touched down. i tried retracting the landing legs, and then it worked perfectly. things just get this weird occasionally.

... what works on mun doesn't work on duna, and your first idea is "it's a bug" - rather than "i need better tests"? duna has over twice the gravity of mun, three times that of ike. it has an atmosphere, affecting aerodynamics. you can't just "test something on mun" and assume it's going to work on duna. the higher gravity requires different solutions. besides, regarding your concept of "land by tail, slam down with the wheels", i tried it, there's a good chance the plane is going to break apart when the wheels touch the ground. I made it to work, but it required a lot of save-scumming. i assume you are trying to play without reloading, because you sent 4 planes instead of just reloading until you manage to land the first one. if that's the case, i advise against the tail landing; too unreliable to make it work without save scumming. I absolutely advise trying it without testing in situ with alt-f12 (something you also seem opposed to doing). you are certainly not going to do it with only 4 testing iterations, which is what you actually had. "instability" may be caused by many different things; my experience is that sometimes ships are unstable during the last phases of landing if the sas overcompensates, turning tiny deviations into huge ones. it may be caused by the higher gravity forcing more thrust, by the wings creating aerodinamic forces getting in the way, or by the ship getting bent under the higher gravity /aerodinamic forces, which confuses the SAS to no end.

hard to say without knowing the details, it may just be that those planes are unsuited to duna. have you tried landing anything else? use the f12 menu to test and see if other stuff works

difficulty level influences cost too. that's all i can give

you can't replicate the mobile winglets (putting wings on robotic parts will break them eventually), but you can compensate with reaction wheels, maybe. to execute the belly flop, you need strong gimbaling; the vector engine is by far the one with the most gimbaling available. that's the most advice I can give. shouldn't be impossible to do.

you know, instead of the half dozen windows from the various mods, it would have been a lot more informative to simply open the deltaV tab on the left to show twr, starting and final mass.

RDU should be installed by default on the hitchhicker module, so you should have it. if you don't have it, don't see it in the processes (still in the kerbalism window), then sometimes reloading works. if reloading does not work, then you may be able to edit the save file; open it with notepad, look for your craft, see if you can find the rdu and disable it. of course, keep a spare save in case you mess it up. if that doesn't work either, you can just send up another mission - you are still in kerbin orbit, easy to reach - and install some extra solar panels and batteries on that ship, so that it can take the extra expenditure. really, kerbalism is full of bugs. in my latest grand tour with it, i counted 47 different bugs. trying to fix them all is hopeless. if it doesn't crash the game, then just find a workaround.

if you are using kerbalism, then you can hover your mouse over the electricity consumption in the kerbalism window on the top right corner of the screen, and it will say what's consuming electricity. my best bet is some science experiment: many science experiments with kerbalism last days or months, and they require electricity - sometimes other resources. my second best bet is radiation decontamination unit; it draws some electricity, and it also consumes some oxygen.