king of nowhere

in addition to the guides, there could also be problems in your vessels. make sure that your docking ports are compatible and mounted correctly, that there are no parts that interfere with docking, that you have control over the ships. if you still have problems, you'll need to tell us exactly what your problem is; "I can't dock" is way too generic to give a proper diagnosis

screenshots are important whenever you ask something here. "my vessel does not work as intended" could be due to dozens of different problems. for us to identify which one is the true problem, we need as much information as you can get.

your burn is too long and you start it too late. if the burn goes too long, you will reach apoapsis and then start going down. and since you are taking a very steep ascent, you go down fast. you need to ensure to finish your burn at apoapsis, hence you should start the circularization burn earlier. you should also make a much stronger gravity turn, because the way you are doing it, orbiting is a lot more difficult. you should be at least at 1500 m/s when coasting to apoapsis, possibly more. if you still make a mistake and end up with a low periapsis in front of you - your periapsis is in front of you, like in figure 4 and 5 - you can burn radial (away from the planet) and fix things. if you keep burning prograde, what happens is that you also raise apoapsis, which is why your apoapsis went way up in your last successful attempt. in general, if you burn prograde at periapsis, you raise apoapsis. if you burn at apoapsis, you raise periapsis. but if you burn in any other place - which is what you are doing, because your trajectory is so steep that you are only near apoapsis for a very short time and your burn is longer - you are going to raise both apoapsis and periapsis. so what happens to you is that you pass apoapsis while still burning, you move forward, and from then on your burn is used to raise both periapsis and apoapsis. and the further you go from apoapsis, the more your burn is used to raise apoapsis instead of periapsis. eventually you get to the point where you have a 500 km apoapsis and still a 40 km periapsis. and by now you're so close to periapsis that burning prograde does little good. this is why, in contradiction with what suggested by @James Kerman, i recommend finishing the circularization burn slightly before apoapsis (his advice still applies to most maneuvers). it's a lot easier to recover from errors like that. i set up for a 65 km apoapsis, and then burn prograde a minute or two before that. burning before apoapsis will also raise apoapsis, so i will finish out of the atmosphere once the maneuver is done. the advantage of this is that burning before apoapsis is going to retard your apoapsis. you look at the corner of the screen where is your time to apoapsis, and you will see that at some point, the countdown will revert and the time to apoapsis will start going up. at this point i stop the burn. wait a bit, then burn again. apoapsis is getting closer, closer.... the moment it starts getting further, i stop the burn and wait a bit more. until i enter orbit 10 seconds from apoapsis or so. very self-correcting. another way is to use a radial component. to orbit you burn prograde, which means parallel to the planetary surface. but you can also burn radial, which means perpendicular to the planet surface, in this case pointing upwards. it has the effect of raising orbit in front of you, but lowering it behind you. so, you are at apoapsis, and now you'll fall down towards periapsis; but if you burn a bit above prograde, you can raise orbit in front of you as fast as you are falling, therefore staying at apoapsis indefinitely. and it's not even expensive, it's only a small deviation over prograde; in fact, i think it's one of the most effective ways, though the main difference is for a proper gravity turn (again, i reinstate, you could save at least 500 m/s by making a better gravity turn). anyway, the way to do that is to press alt-f12, go to physics, then aerodinamics, then display aerodinamic window in user interface. it will open a window will a lot of aerodinamic data, which will be of little use to you because you're in near vacuum anyway, but one of those data is ascent speed. before apoapsis, you are moving up, so ascent speed is positive. after apoapsis you go down, ascent speed negative. when you reach apoapsis and ascent speed goes down in the negative, point your nose a bit above prograde, and ascent speed will start increase again. gradually it will become positive again, as apoapsis is again before you. you can go back to burning prograde at this point, or perhaps you can even burn downward if needed to compensate for too much ascent speed. anyway, by pointing your nose just above prograde and making small corrections, you can stay at the same altitude during all the circularization burn. this is also a very self-correcting technique. in fact, making the circularizaton with a maneuver node is a very uncomfortable way of circularizing. i have no idea why some people prefer it, cosine losses are going to mess you up. i always use one of the two self-correcting techniques i described above. p.s. your rocket has extremely high values of twr, especially for the upper stages. you could be a lot more efficient by using smaller engines, you'd cut down on your dry mass a lot. of course, with lower twr ascent is more difficult, so you should improve on that before lowering twr.

nope, no idea. the commnet table has always been adequate for my purposes

yes, it relays just like in a normal game. it doesn't have to be pointed in any specific direction. though two hg-5 increase the range, just like in the normal game. of course, since you're mentioning hg-5 which is the weakest antenna, perhaps (if it's not the bug i mentioned) it's just too weak for your purposes? in case you're not aware, you can check in this page the antenna ranges: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet in particular, if your probes have no antenna of their own (so they are limited to their own probe core at 5k), the second table shows that they can only communicate with an HG-5 antenna (rated 5M) when within 150 km, a very close range. if they have a regular basic antenna (rated 500 k), then they can communicate up to 1600 km; if your relay satellites are higher than that, then they are too far for the probes and it's normal that they have no signal

same as in the normal game. antenna power and type are not changed at all.

they don't work for orbital reentry because they burn, but they would work otherwise. i found that extending the landing gear is an effective airbrake, and a lot more heat resistant

an impact like that would probably sterilize the surface completely. nothing would survive, except maybe some bacteria. anyway, life arose from a lifeless planet already. i'm sure it could do it again after such an event.

yes, i registered a bug there. sometimes you lose contact with a probe because it doesn't see a relay. switching control to the relay that was not being seen, then back to the probe, was generally enough to restore control. in my case, though, i couldn't do it because my probe was inside the atmosphere of titan, so i just had to disable commnet in the difficulty options.

as far as i know, it is. it's been there forever. you can disable habitat by editing the save file, though. i don't remember the details, but there was somewhere in the data a line that was like "enable habitat" or something similar.

yeah, agree on the bug thing. there's no way something can pass with a periapsis of 24 km and not get captured.

.... this makes no sense at all. here I survive a reentry at 8 km/s with a pod very similar to your own and here at 9.7 km/s. this pod was a bit sturdier thanks to the mk3 crew pod this is the one where 1 km periapsis made the difference between exploding and surviving. as you can see, a 30 km periapsis was already enough to slow down and get captured from 10 km/s. by the way, those heat shields are not maxxed out. i discovered in the first landing that half the ablator is not even consumed, so i removed half the ablator from subsequent pods to make them lighter. how is it possible that your pod at half that speed is not slowed down enough? it should be an easy reentry. wait, last chance: that pod that survived at 21 km, were you controlling it? or were you using some other vessel at the time? because, as I said previously, if you are not controlling directly the pod, it won't register the atmosphere at all. it will just pass by as if it was all space. this is the only way I can think of that your pod could both survive at 21 km and remain in an escape trajectory. or perhaps you were time warping hard? happens occasionally that the game does not stop time warp and this messes up with the atmosphere, skipping most of it. if it's none of those things, I'd conclude it's a bug of some sort.

those kind of reentry pods are the most resistant available. the mk2 lander pod can be a weakness, but you say it doesn't explode first, so it is fine against my every prediction. but i see the problem: 21 km periapsis. way too low here. you get inside the denser atmosphere too fast. high speed reentry is a delicate balance, you have to stay as high as possible in the atmosphere to reduce heating, while still be deep enough to get captured. if the height required to get captured is lower than the height at which you explode, there's when you can't get a capture. I once managed to save a high speed reentry by raising periapsis by a single km. I suggest trying with 35 km periapsis first. that should be enough to capture safely. if you still explode, try 36 km, and so on until you don't explode. if that minimum level to not explode is not low enough for capture you're screwed, but it really should not be your case. in fact, eyeballing it i'd say the smallest pod should be fine anywhere between 30 and 40 km. the one with the lander can may be harder to land

to expand on that: you can only control one object at a time, and a ship going deep into the atmosphere and outside of physical range of the vessel you're controlling is authomatically deleted. if it's not deep enough to be deleted, it will just move on without braking. in both cases, you lose it. so you must separate your two pods and ensure they enter atmosphere at 20 minutes distance from each other. if you can't find the problem, post pictures of your crew pods. 5 km/s is survivable, maybe there is some problem in the design

the mission generally specifies additional conditions. open the mission menu and you should see, for example, the altitude requirements for "flying over" as for the mun stone, i'm not sure but i suspect maybe it wasn't stored properly and got discarded instead

you must ignite the engine as the test. if the engine was already ignited, then it won't count for passing the test. i can't really tell from your images, but my impression is that you was already using the poodle and terrier - as evidenced by the fuel being partially empty. this won't do; you have to activate them when you have the conditions for the test, not before. if it's not that, then i have no idea

Part 14: Making fuel in hell A'Twin goes to the binary system of Pluto and Charon, named after gods of the underworld. The names prove accurate, because the bugs involved in refueling were staggering. Pluto and Charon seen from the cupola 14.1) Going to Pluto is easy, leaving Uranus is hard 14.2) Forever a planet in our hearts 14.3) I'm Charon, and I'll ferry you to hell Bugs compilation updated

it's interesting that nobody is just doing a grand tour anymore. every single entry present here is made with a lot of additional quirks.

is this challenge even active anymore? i completed my nanodiamond over 6 months ago, but I never got an acknowledgement

of course, one could still run a grand tour with a much smaller and simpler ship. even counting the big landers for the eve-like planets, it should still be within less 300 parts. but then, most of the times a grand tour is nothing but a thinly-veiled excuse to go wild on ship design.

eve lander - and by that we assume it's an eve ascent vehicle, since you have a crew and supposedly you want to bring him back - is still extremely vague. an optimized lander can be as light as 50 tons. an optimized lander using propellers to clear the atmosphere can be even lighter. an unoptimized lander can easily reach 500 tons. or it could be an ssto with propellers, vectors and nuclear engines, the most common design i saw is in the 200 tons range. since apparently you already have a specific design, and it should work - stock isru is not hard - and it doesn't, you could post pictures of it and we could see what's the problem. Is your one kerbal on board an engineer? because if you don't have an engineer, then it's going to take years regardless of anything else you do. Also, assuming you are not extremely good at making eve ascent vehicles and your lander is over 100 tons, would it be viable to use a large convert-o-tron? it is a lot more efficient, and it only requires your rocket to be 3% heavier. and you drop it before take off, so it doesn't interfere with ascent anyway.

the 1.5 unit is intrinsecally inefficient, it wastes 90% of the mined ore. for this, i'm not sure fuel cells would work. anyway, I'm having troubles understanding your problem. mostly because I have no idea what you would consider a "reasonable time frame" or a "moderately sized lander", and why you can't just add some solar panels if that is your problem. There's also the engineer limitation. isru works awfully slowly without an engineer on board, while it works very fast with one. a 1.5 m convert-o-tron properly supplied and with a level 5 engineer can make roughly 1 ton of fuel per day; without an engineer, speed is 1/20th of that. so if your "moderately sized" lander used a jumbo fuel tank (32 tons) and you have no engineer on board, it will take over 1 year and there's nothing to do about it except use an engineer or use the bigger convert-o-tron. Even a level 0 engineer already quintuplicates efficiency compared to no engineer. also, if you're relying on solar panels and you're trying to mine eeloo, of course it won't be efficient. I suggest rtgs in that case. here's a link to a rover with the small convert-o-tron. it's got 30 tons of fuel, which it can replenish in 30-50 days depending on ore concentration and level of the engineer on board. if you look at it - and ignore all the rover apparatus and focus on the isru part - you will see it's extremely simple; a convert-o-tron, two radiator panels, two small drills. the rover solar panels are enough all the way out to duna.

I've always seen the term used in the forum to refer to inefficiency due to a slow burn where prograde is not aligned with the direction of the burn. If it's a mistake, it's a mistake of the whole forum

I read that the orion capsule made an 18 minute burn to a trans lunar injection. 18 minutes is very long, the ship moves along an 80 degrees angle in that time, making cosine losses rather high. As we know, the efficient way to make long burns is to split them into several apoapsis raising over several orbits. Anyone knows why nasa did not try it? Is this some kind of technical concern with the engine that can only be ignited a limited number of times, or what else?

actually, this is a trick I myself only learned recently, and the physics behind it is a bit complicated. But it goes like that. when you take a gravity assist, you never change your speed relative to the target body. you chain up two consecutive gravity assists with a resonant orbit, second assist you're going to have the same intercept speed you had the first time. On the orbit itself, you lowered both apoapsis and periapsis, which resulted in a less-than-ideal Hohmann intercept, which resulted in having the same intercept speed despite the lower apoapsis. Or maybe you gained some inclination. But! now that you are in a new orbit with lower apoapsis and periapsis, you can raise periapsis with a burn in solar orbit. and since your periapsis was only lowered by a small amount, this burn is cheap. and at this point you lowered your periapsis a lot, you have the same periapsis for an ideal hohmann transfer, and you spent less fuel than if you had just lowered apoapsis with rockets. so, you cannot change your speed relative to the planet you are using for the assist, but you can set yourself in a trajectory where there is a sequence of burns resulting in a cheaper capture. there are two limits. the first is, indeed, speed relative to parent body. if you are moving very slowly compared to your target, you'll end up ejecting very slowly too. so, for example, if you want to go to jool using a gravity assist from duna, you cannot do it by taking a normal hohmann transfer, because you'll arrive to duna with 600 m/s intercept speed, and to reach jool from duna you need 1 km/s ejection speed, so you are too slow compared to duna to reach jool. you need to use a different trajectory resulting in a higher speed relative to duna. the second limit is the gravity of the body. predictably, a smaller body gives a smaller gravity assist. for this reason you can gravity capture on jool using tylo or laythe, but you can't do it with vall. and a flyby of bop or pol will leave your orbit almost unchanged. I can't give any hard data on this; by experience, I know that with mun you can gain beteen 50 and 100 m/s, with tylo/laythe you can gain around 500 m/s, with kerbin a bit more. Still, when I wanted to make a duna-kerbin-eve assist, one single kerbin flyby wasn't enough and I had to eject into resonant orbits and make, like, three assists. And I had to use mun in one of them to increase my velocity relative to kerbin, otherwise i didn't have enough speed to reach eve. of course i'm talking here of going as close to the surface as you can. if you pass more distant, you get less change. if you could pass underground, you could get a huge deltaV even from a small moon, unfortunately there's that pesky surface along the way.