king of nowhere

it doesn't either

well, it doesn't do it for me. i get the numbers, yes, of course. but it doesn't show markers on the map. I don't know why our games work different

gilly has a green monolith, same as everywhere else. the wiki has a list of anomalies, so for places with lots of anomalies you can check the position of those you find against those already known, and you'll find the green monolith

I just realized, I nominate the engine plates. The engine plates only apparent function is to allow you to put a small engine in a large rocket without changing the size of the rocket, avoiding aerodinamic problems. Great! Very useful, actually. Except that those damn things are so heavy, you may as well put in a bigger engine instead. They end up gaining nothing. It's not like you can get rid of them afterwards either.

nono, I am doing a caveman right now, I would know if the Ap and Pe values were visible. And they would make my life a lot simpler. Anyway, for the OP, the answer is the same: must upgrade tracking station

https://kerbalx.com/king_of_nowhere/Recycling-Point-Express-RPE here is a miner/tanker perfectly capable of mining fuel on mun and bringing it around, while being relatively small (the orbiter is 80 tons fully loaded). it also has a very stable launch system, included in the description, no need to steer. And it's not like it's any more aerodinamic than your stuff. Dream big? Dream big? Somebody is mentioning my old mothership? it needed 28 mammoths for the mothership alone, plus many others for all the other docked ships. its successor, A'Tuin, needed something around 50 mammoths instead.

Ok, then we discovered the big problem. You are spending a lot more fuel than you should on your launches. Ideally, you should have TWR between 1.5 and 2. The reason is, while you are firing your rockets and barely lifting, you are wasting a huge amount of fuel. You'll see your first stage already is half empty and you barely gained 50 m7s of speed. The more thrust at start, the better - the only practical problem is when the engine mass starts getting too much, or when you accelerate too much too early and it causes aerodinamic problems. In fact, you often put fast-burning boosters just to increase thrust in the first minute of flight. Even if you're launching slowly to reduce aerodinamic problems, you want to go fast at first. I am launching a big flat surface right now, and the best flight profile is to accelerate at full thrust (TWR 2) until the craft reaches 180 m/s, and only then throttle down and stabilize speed. And - provided you're not having huge aerodinamic issues - you should turn early. You reach orbit by gaining lateral speed; all that vertical burn? that's wasted fuel. You can't help it, because you have to get out of the atmosphere, but the less you burn vertically, the better. On airless bodies, an efficient launch entails pointing just enough above the horizon that you don't smash into the nearest hills. So, as others have said, at 10 km altitude you should be inclined by around 45 degrees. This also needs some thrust to work, or your rocket will just lay down. On the downside, I just told you to launch at low speed and go straight up to reduce aerodinamic problems. If you were already doing that, then those problems are even worse than we thought. I'd be real curious to try your rocket, no idea why it doesn't work on my pc

ok. then you're not somebody who just started and is stumbling on the early roadblocks. you already figured out a lot of stuff, and you're trying to do very difficult stuff. What can I say, it's part of this game. It took me weeks to get my most ambitious projects to work. I can't open the vehicle in the VAB, says it's incompatible with this version (1.12, unmodded). But I can give some general pieces of advice: 1) as @Geonovast said, you can pull your payload instead of pushing it, and that's stable. I launched some unbelievable crap this way myself too. 2) when ships have big aerodinamic problems, you can avoid gravity turning, and just go straight up until the atmosphere is thin enough. If you flip anyway, slow down too; if you climb vertical and slowly, you'll never flip. Of course, this will suck a lot more deltaV, but I see you're not afraid of making a bigger rocket.... 3) that spherical crew pod, that's extremely draggy. No idea why, it doesn't look bad, but it's worse than a flat tank. swap it for a normal Mk1, and it's likely to improve a lot

can't be 2000000 tons. you have 5 mammoths, those will lift at most 1500 tons. but the biggest joke is that you're trying to launch that ridiculous stuff with 90 hours of gameplay under your belt. I had well over 1000 hours before I could tackle that kind of stuff

so, when you mentioned that you couldn't get enough fuel for a rocket "bigger than a cockroach", i assumed you were using minimalistic rockets with a small command pod and nothing else. that you were launching 20-30 tons rockets. You are launching stuff with multiple mammoths.... you should be able to put into orbit many tens of tons with each launch. Maybe you are just trying to put too much payload into orbit anyway? do you do the gravity turn manuever? especially with rockets so big, you should start turning eastward at around 50 m/s, and reach 45° inclination around 500 m/s for maximum efficiency. even if you botch it somewhat, though, it's not a big deal, you lose 100-200 m/s maximum. You need to botch it badly to lose more. Another thing to check is the TWR: if it's too low (say, 1.2 or something similar) the rocket will lift very slowly, and you'll lose a lot of fuel hovering there (it's called gravity drag). But, most important, I see that the Trüffelschwein 1 only has 2400 m/s before the fairing is removed. Assuming the fairing contains your payload, of course you can't orbit, it should need 3400 m/s on a well-optimized launch. The 5 flips because you have a huge payload with terrible aerodinamics. It would need a huge fairing, but it's still very draggy. Really, that kind of very large payload is a nightmare. I launched one that big a couple months ago, and it took me a day of trying, and i'm good at this game. So perhaps what I can suggest is, take things more calmly, you are trying to put the cart before the horses. Get good with simple ships first. Try maybe with basic designs like this before you try the really huge stuff. Huge stuff is way more difficult. From what I can see, you started the game and immediately went for the biggest, most showy stuff. It's like someone trying to learn to drive and picking the fastest racing car.

and using robotic parts to dock is likely to destroy your craft in some bug. i stopped using robotic arms for docking after it happened to me.

this is your first post into the forum. You will find out that, if you ask for stuff here, there will be people piling up to answer you in full. yes, the game has a steep learning curve - rocket science is difficult, not much to do about it - and the tutorials aren't enough. Myself, I found that the best way to learn is to spam this subforum for answers until you learn. Now, you did not ask for anything specific, but you underlined several problems, and I'll try to give some answers. First, since you often run out of fuel, you should meet the deltaV map. it details how much fuel you should need to go somewhere For example, to land on Mun you should need 3400 m/s to orbit kerbin, plus 860 to get a Mun intercept, plus 280 to circularize around Mun, plus 580 to land. Once you landed, you'll need another 580 to return to orbit, plus 280 to leave Mun and get a Kerbin orbit with a periapsis inside the atmosphere, and once you're in the atmosphere you can aerobrake the rest of the way. So, 4980 m/s total. 5500 m/s should be a reasonable target, including some extra for safety. If you need a lot more than that, something is inefficient. Maybe your Mun descent is inefficient, or maybe your Kerbin orbit (note: if you orbit by flying straight up and then straight laterally, and you spend over 4 km/s that way, you should look up gravity turn), or perhaps you botched some orbital manuever. Anyway, that's the first step to calculating how much deltaV you should plan. Second, fuel budget is always tight in space. If you want to have a bigger lander, you'll need a proportionally bigger rocket. I have no idea what you are trying to launch, but maybe if you can't get enough fuel on Mun and you're not being inefficient you just need a bigger rocket in the first place. Third, if your rocket flips, then aerodinamics are NOT fine. By definition, if they are fine, then your rocket won't flip. A particularly well-built rocket will reach orbit steering itself without even SAS activated. It may look fine, I concede that. Anyway, you need low drag in front, and more drag in the bottom. If you post a picture, we are more than likely to be able to figure out the problem. As a general rule of thumb, if you want to know why a certain vehicle is not working, you should post a few pictures of it here (imgur is an excellent free hosting site) and ask.

not sure why you think that rescuing a crew in elliptic orbit would be harder than rescuing a crew on the surface of eve itself. elliptic orbits are easy to deal with a bit of practice. the trick is that around apoapsis you are going veeeryyyy slooooow, so you will spend many days near the same place. So don't bother matching orbital planes or anything. send another probe in another elliptic orbit around eve (all you have to do is make the capture burn without circularizing), then when you are near your own apoapsis make a radial/normal burn to go touch the target vehicle's apoapsis. from there, refine a close encounter. normal/radial burns are normally very expensive, but since you'll be going very slow at apoapsis, it will actually be cheap. should require no more than 400 m/s from another elliptic orbit around eve. against the 8000 for eve surface

nitrogen is glitchy. nitrogen is mostly needed to keep pressurized environments. without nitrogen, nothing bad will happen immediately, but your kerbals will get a lot more stress, and a lot more breakdowns. You see it only in very long missions, though. nitrogen is also needed to run greenhouses (to make ammonia for them) and to make monopropellant, but for most crafts, you only need pressure. and the amount of nitrogen consumed for that is tiny, so a single nitrogen tank will last for decades. but when you go eva with an astronaut, you lose nitrogen. I'm not clear on the details, but it definitely looks like some bug, because in some cases you lose more than in others. You can tell some losses are intended because the game says something like "eva available" somewhere. just bring an extra nitrogen tank and it will be enough to cover eva losses. if your problem persists, try to shut down every single pressure control unit in your station before going eva. by the way, regarding internal pressure, be advised that a single unpressurized part (they are written as unpressurized in the vab menu) will make the whole station unpressurized, and will cause a lot of extra stress and problems. i had my 4000-ton megaship that was basically a spacefaring luxury resort, and the astronauts kept getting stressed anyway, because there was a single Mk1 pod in one of the landers, and those are unpressurized. when that got detached, astronauts stopped having stress issues almost by magic.

tidal heating is not enough to justify liquid water on the surface at that distance from kerbol. it could be much warmer than it should be for its distance from the sun; it could be as "warm" as duna. it could still have geysers, cryovolcanoes, and thermal pools. warm rivers coming out from those. but a whole ocean? seems a bit too much, even under the most favorable assumptions

Expanding on that, as you're stuck on minmus ground, you don't even need your ship: you can send your kerbal in EVA and use its own jetpack to orbit Minmus. that moonlet is small enough that you only need 180 m/s for it, a jetpack has some 500 m/s. so the rescue mission won't even need to land. But, speaking of deltaV: you say your capsule has "20 units of fuel"; that doesn't tell us much. Depending on how big is your craft, you may even be able to return it to kerbin. What you need to look is the deltaV. How much deltaV do your ship has? it only needs 330 m/s, and it could return to kerbin on its own. If your pod is lightweight, your 200 kg of fuel may be enough for it.

Part 5: if you believe, they put a kerbal on Mun First manned Mun landing

Part 4: an end, and a beginning Getting all the Minmus biomes. Val is lost in an accident, Liliana takes her place

Do you plan your missions in advance? I never run out of fuel because I plan the missions calculating how much deltaV I will need, and bring the fuel accordingly, with some extra. If I make a Tylo lander, I know it takes 2300 m/s to land, so I want at least 2500 m/s on the descent stage and as much in the ascent stage. For more complex missions, I adapt the mission to the fuel budget. My jool explorer needs 1800 m/s to return back, but it only has 1400 m/s? My mothership must go from Ike surface to Moho and back, which requires normally at least 8000 m/s, and it has only 6000 m/s? I look for gravity assists to achieve the mission with less fuel. My early game Minmus lander had an inefficient ascent, so that it reached Minmus with less fuel than it should have? I abort the landing and return to Kerbin, rather than getting stuck out of fuel. You should never, ever run out of fuel. if you do, you weren't watching the fuel level. You plan the mission, you know how much fuel you need, you bring enough. Something goes wrong, you spend more fuel than anticiapted, you change the mission accordingly to salvage what you can. In all the videos you watch, they planned the mission, and tried it, and rehearsed it, until they verified that all worked correctly. You don't think they'd just sit down and put together a complex mission from scrap and it would work flawlessy from the first try?

I am considering finishing my current caveman challenge with a jool 5 (still a few weeks before that point, though) being caveman, i cannot go eva and plant flags. I know, I can make the whole trip with a kerbal on a ladder, there is a precedent for that. but i don't like it, i prefer to have a real command pod. i also think it's a bigger challenge; a kerbal on a ladder is a much smaller weight. this would go against the rule that I must plant a flag; I suppose an exception would be made for this case?

no, they cannot be restored. Not even the lab can restore them; but the lab can have those experiments incorporated, so that the lab itself becomes the science jr - in addition to its other functionalities. It still gets depleted after a while, but if you change its experiment - something you need a level 5 scientist to do - it can be sort of restored. I'm not exactly clear on how it works. Anyway, especially given how heavy is a lab, I suggest that you bring 9 science jr attached on the end of your base, and then you use eva construction to swap them on your lander. much cheaper. speaking of landers, remember to give it some redundant engines, and to bring some spare engines to swap in eva construction in case of need. it would be a tragedy if you lost the crew because the engine fails mid-descent. they are science experiments. they unlock the capability to run additional science experiments on the part. the hitchhicker container, once you research a certain tech, gains the radiation decontamination unit (RDU). To use it, you put a kerbal inside the hitchicker container, right click on the part, and you will have the option "RDU: heal [NAME]". It only heals one kerbal at a time, by roughly 1% radiation damage every four days. In the process, it consumes oxygen and produces CO2. The amounts are small, though, and if you have the right chemical plants you can revert this reaction almost entirely. Or you can use that CO2 to grow plants in a greenhouse. they upgrade authomatically. I don't think they apply to older parts that you already launched, though I'm not sure

i don't understand much of what you meant, but i am running a caveman challenge, can't use mods. if i could use mods, then i'd not be running a caveman, and i could use a rovemate with 100% detection

well, that rocket is still pointed towards the sky, it can still launch just fine. I'd say, mission successful

Started a caveman challenge, so I went from piloting a kiloton ship with crazy technology on extended grand tours, to piloting godawful pieces of junk and try to land on mun and do other things that most of us learned to do easily in the first weeks. Highlights include landing on Mun a probe without reaction wheels - I'd use rocket gimbal to "control" attitude, or at least try to. And I did recover one who fell down by skidding on the ground until it got enough speed to turn upright. I do believe I should change the probe's designation to "rocket-powered sled" I can't believe it worked! Those things are a nightmare to pilot through descent. I launched 5 of them, and only 2 returned safely. Including the sled. If you hit a slope, they won't stay upright, and the lack of control means it's almost impossible to recover after an aborted landing. It would help if I could get a wider base, but hey, those are the pieces I have available at the moment... Another highlight included rolling a rocket on the ground to reach a location I needed to fulfill a contract, I couldn't spare any more fuel for suborbital jumps. But hey, who needs rover wheels when you have a perfectly spherical object already? On the down side, I killed Val in a stupid accident in an easy routine suborbital flight . the capsule turned, and it's got very little drag when it's like that, and even though i tried to use the cargo bay as an airbrake and to turn around with SAS to try and increase drag, I couldn't slow down enough for the parabrake to engage

Caveman challenge. I land on Minmus. then check on contracts to see if i can take the chance for some money, they ask to make an experiment nearby. good pay, and my lander had enough fuel for a couple of suborbital jumps. But it was one of those contracts that keep spawning measurements. My extra fuel run out, and I still had a couple places to visit. So I laid the rocket on the ground and used its reaction wheels to roll to the destination. I did cover a few kilometers this way