king of nowhere

Part 12: Craters The circumnavigation continues, stumbling upon a truly gigantic crater and some smaller, but still noteworthy ones. At over 12 km from top to bottom, this is by far the biggest cliff in the OPM system that I am aware of. I'd like to give it an impressive name, but I run out of them on Wal

it's not normal, indeed. could be a bug or glitch, possibly related to the mods

if you are interested in ... creative solutions, you could edit the save file to fix the engine. then, for fairness, keep the engine shut down. you have to look among the part list on the ship for something looking like "broken = yes"

yeah, it keeps making smoke. it doesn't do anything, thoug. it's only a visual issue

very simple, when you get close enough to your target (not sure what is the exact distance) the game authomatically switches from orbit to target. just in the same way that when you pass a certain altitude it authomatically switches from surface to orbit. i'm not sure if you can disable it from the options, but you can just click on the speed gauge over the navball to change the speed between surface, orbit and target.

the radiation belt really moves. the one at jool oscillates around its axis, and its axis rotate slowly to always pull away from the sun. not sure aboout the other belts, the one at jool is the only one of consequence. not sure if you meant that. if you are not using time warp and you see the belt moving, that's not what's supposed to be

I've seen the radiators pop red when I was not doing any isru and was farther than eeloo. heat management has some bugs.

interesting that you had to use more engines to remain stuck on the ground than you did use accelerating. I'm also amazed that the wheels didn't break

you find all the informatiion on antennas on the wiki page: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet in particular, an hg-5 antenna can act as a relay for a probe core (no antennas) only at 158 km, according to the table. a bit more since you have 2 hg-2, anyway in that picture the distance should be around 300 km, out of range. you should see communication as they get closer. early game antennas are poor.

the cargo bay is very strong, in those cases it looks like what failed is the attachment between cargo bay and crew pod. i had no similar problem when i made a rover with mk3 parts, but in any case autostrutting should help.

I started as a full career, went as far as part 6, realized my jool mission was faulty, lost interest. then i reloaded back to after part 1 - after I had farmed most of the science and money, but before I launched any interplanetary mission - and went for just a jool 5 intead. if you mean understanding the maneuvers, the basic principle is to figure out where, more or less, your target will be in the time you'll get there, then make a big burn pointed in that direction. as I was often fast enough to have minimal influence from the local gravity field, it was quite akin to aiming a bullet.

kerbalism. kerbalism is a mod that focuses on realism and adds a bunch of additional challenges to the game: - life support; kerbals need food, oxygen, water, potentially nitrogen. you can set up complex combinations of chemical plants to recycle as much of that as possible. - radiations; solar storms hit at random times, and some planets have radiation belts. you can protect against solar storms by putting other parts between the sun and the ship, and you can mitigate the effect of radiations with shielding (very heavy), but you can't spend more than a few days close to jool even with the best shielding - parts failure; most parts have a chance to malfunction over time - or with repeated use in the case of engines. making them high quality (heavier) mitigates the problem. an engineer in eva can inspect the part and refurbish them. awesome at first, but it becomes boring when you have to keep flying around the ship to inspect everything. redundancy and contingency plans for broken parts are recommended. can be deactivated. - stress; kerbals will get stressed during long missions. when they get too stressed, they may do something dumb - like breaking something, or losing life support resources. can be mitigated by giving them luxuries, like more living space, a cupola, plants, etc. - semi-realistic resource utilizaton; forget planting a drill in the ground and getting fuel for free. you have to extract carbon and water and turn them into fuel by using lots of energy, and it's a slow process. I used 600 tons of mining equipment to get 3000 tons of fuel in a few years (3 to 15 depending on ore/water content of the biome), and during those years parts may break. Also, you need the right resource combination in a biome to refuel. Mining fuel is possible, but it does have a significant cost on the mission. you can still use the regular stock isru if you prefer. I did 4 grand tours with this mod, and others. if you are interested in more information, the links to the reports are in my signature. i totally recommend the experience; building a ship that can handle life support for decades, survive multiple parts failure, and carry around the heavy mining industry is a unique challenge. i also recommend caution; having to take frequent stops to service all the aging parts slows down the mission. adding redundancy imposes a bigger ships, with resulting lag. So the missions are a lot longer. it took me some 3 real life months to complete the grand tours in the stock system, 6 months with the outer planets mod, 9 months with real solar system. try at your own peril.

the problem in every grand tour, especially with a system expanded beyond stock. i found that parts breaking up and radiations help keeping things fresh. on the downside, they mutliply lag.

Another Jool 5 with a bizzarre premise: a speedrun. the objective was to start a new career, and make a Jool 5 as early as possible. Actually it started as an attempt to land everywhere and return in a speedrun fashion, but after I stumbled on that, I reloaded and decided to focus on just the Jool 5. So all the parts between 2 and 7 (included) are not part of this continuity. the actual jool 5 challenge includes part 1, 8 and following. I took 6 days to gather the science and money to launch the mission, 219 days to reach Jool, 12 days at Jool to land on all the moon, and 145 days to return, ending on day 383

you can move the stuff between stages by clicking and dragging. so you ahve to manually move the engines to the first stage and the parachute to the last stage.

Part 13: The straight way back La coscienza di xenon returns on Kerbin in day 383, establishing a new one-of-its-kind record.

Part 12: Why do I always have to salvage missions by the skin of their teeth? There were some... unexpected complications in the rendez-vous around Vall. After lots of distress, everything works, the crew is rescued, the last landing is performed, and La coscienza di xenon is ready to return. Of course, I landed Val on Vall

Part 11: First landings, first hiccups The Laythe lander succeeds despite some bugs, but La coscienza di xenon has too low thrust to get away from Laythe effectively, forcing some reevaluation. Meanwhile, Bop, Pol and Tylo landings proceed as planned.

Part 10: Spreading out The various landers are launched towards their destinations. Some complexity was caused by having to make sure the long burns didn't overlap. Day 226: The various landers each rushing to its destination

Part 9: Gotta go even faster! Going to Jool in 218 days. Yes, it's a long time , but the planetary alignment is unfavorable. The last maneuver to Jool

Part 8: Up with challenges, down with burocracy! The challenge is revamped, with a modified objective: instead of landing everywhere, a single Jool 5. La coscienza di xenon, ready to launch

iirc, it should be 25 km, as long as you're not in physical range

no idea, but i always used electric rotors. which consume a pittance and are basically endless with just a few rtgs

if there is, i'm not aware of any. still, having to press T or R doesn't seem like a big deal

Part 11: Introducing Priax Starting the circumnavigation of Priax, to the north pole.