Vanamonde

I attempted an Eve accent, but I ended up sounding Jamaican. As for my ships, they didn't fare much better.

Once within visual range, position the camera so that you're looking past your ship at the target site at about a 45 degree angle. From this perspective, it is very easy to see if you're drifting right/left, falling low/overshooting. For real precision, I like to send a rover first as a location scout, then park it so that the fan of its headlights is illuminating the spot where I want to land the next ship.

I call it "pod torque" because it used to be that only capsules had it, but I was meaning to include all the reaction wheel types within that term. It's just RCS that I don't like to use for attitude control because it's not necessary, and the finite fuel supply is better saved for other purposes.

I routinely use it on big ships, and I do have a lot of patience. If a ship is going to take, say, 45 days to get to Duna, what does it matter if it takes 5 minutes to rotate 180 degrees?

Here's a written walkthrough, and a sandbox example rocket you can download to fly it with: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25029-A-moon-rocket-and-moon-trip-walkthrough-for-newbies-(21-1)

Some of the coonecting parts may not allow for automatic fuel flow. It's tricky. I'd suggest building a scaled-down version and burning the engines on the launch pad to see if it functions the way you're hoping it will. (For quite a while I had a set of screenshots of schemes that worked and didn't work, I just deleted them because nobody ever asked. )

Send a probe on a low sun orbit. There are details you can't see from a distance.

It will be an even bigger thrill when you actually land on Mun.

You can hang quite large masses off of the sides, as long as you don't get crazy with the thrust levels, such as this pair of rover-deployers on their way to Vall: Sorry, I'm not picturing what you mean about the nuke engine mount, though.

To clarify, I NEVER use RCS for attitude control, except during docking, when time is critical. Otherwise, it's too wasteful of finite fuel. Small ships don't need it, big ships can take their time rotating on feeble pod torque while in space, and you're better off using control surfaces in atmo.

RCS is only *necessary* for translation on axes other than that of the main engines. However, it's often quite useful. For example, if you are making fine-adjustments to your planetary approaches from a long way out in space (such as the half-way point of the interplanetary transit), RCS can be enough to adjust even the trajectory of very large ships, on the order of kilometers per key-stroke. Also, I like to use the mother ship's RCS tank as a reservoir from which to refuel carried vessels.

No need to be harsh, guys. We were all newbies once. Mr. Essence, if you remove the lower decoupler (so there's no obstacle between the engines and the fuel supply) that rocket will function, though you will need to replace the engines with larger ones that have enough thrust to lift that amount of weight. Stages 3 and 4 can be combined into a single stage, I believe, though I can't see where the division between them lies.

Here are walkthrough instructions and a (sandbox) example ship you can download to fly the instructions with: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25029-A-moon-rocket-and-moon-trip-walkthrough-for-newbies-(21-1)

Not free, but GOG.com has "good old games" for sale between $3 and $10. Old games are better in some ways. Not just the price, but unlike most new games, they've been properly de-bugged.

Things AND stuff? Renaissance man.

When you are more than 2.25kms from another vessel, it's not fully simulauted and is really just a point in space. When you get within that distance, the game "creates" the ship by loading it from a saved state. Sometimes when that happens, part of the ship can be generated stuck into the ground, causing it to explode. Does that sound like what's happening to you? If so, there isn't a fix for it right now, though the guys know about it and plan to fix it. Meanwhile, try parking the rover in a different spot, where the terrain might not coincide with it.

Vall has valleys surrounded by winding mountain chains, so the scenery changes as you drive around.

Welcome to the forum.

We try to be friendly, but we seem to have misplaced our pirate that used to welcome everybody.

Hello, and welcome to the forum.

It is the length of the rocket that is your main problem. If you've invented radial decouplers, I'd suggest dismantling the lowest stage and re-arranging its parts as a ring around the second stage. Some struts between the first and second stage would also help.

It doesn't take a heavy lifter to orbit Mun, or even to land and come back. Build a tiny rocket, then build a slightly larger stage under it, and then a larger stage under that. Three stages, if they're proportioned properly, can get you just about anywhere, as long as you're not planning on a return.

This is the ONLY way to build ships, and it never ceases to amaze me that some players don't do it this way. Run a test launch for each stage you add. It may take time, but you won't get halfway to Jool before you realize your staging is borked, nor smash your engine into the surface because your landing legs aren't long enough.

You're welcome. I enjoy helping other players.

I've only encountered one easter egg in .22 so far, and it was strange. I happened to fly past a Mun arch, and I was looking right at it, but at a range of just a few kilometers it simply vanished. Perhaps it was just a graphics glitch.