painking

Encounters at Apoapsis. Moho is terribly close to the sun, and hitting it at periapsis means you're going at it as fast as anyone ever needs to be in this game, resulting in a massive deceleration burn. My first trip to Moho resulted in an 8K dV burn to get into any kind of orbit around it, let alone something at a reasonably low altitude and inclination.

Replace the center Mainsail engine with a Skipper, since 6 of them are more than enough thrust. It's higher lSP should give you enough fuel leftover to get into a circular orbit. Also, gravity turns if you aren't doing them yet.

Gotta be real precise with it. Make sure you target the thing you're landing near and burn accordingly. If you're about to pass over it just kill off all of your horizontal velocity and try to maneuver closer to it as you descend. Your descent profile should essentially be the exact same as the first one that landed the thing there, so it's all about consistency really.

Possibly A terrain bug. I landed on the dark side of the Mun once, but my solar panels were facing downwards through the moon and apparently had direct sunlight.

So why is the water landing important? If you're trying to land on one of the small isles you could always cut the chutes once they've slowed you down enough, do whatever burns you need to do to push yourself to shore and then land like you would on a non-atmospheric body.

A fuel tank will always supply fuel to any engine connected to it either directly or via fuel lines. If you want you could use the fuel tank as a structural piece for your space station, empty or otherwise, and use it to refuel ships that need more fuel for their interplanetary travels. Does that answer your question? Cause I don't think I read it right.

Getting an orbit to be -exactly- circular is damn near impossible, even mechjeb can't do it. Getting them to within tens of meters is usually the most anyone will bother with, even with geostationary orbits since they'll still have their orbital period to measure by. You could try with xenon engines, but even then, the orbit will probably have some tiny tiny amount of eccentricity.

That should get the mun no problem if you just swap out that Poodle for a Skipper. In fact, swap your main asparagus engine to a skipper as well, you've got more than enough lift power with 6 Mainsails. The skipper is also more efficient and should be able to perform the circularization burn no problem, and if it runs out of fuel, the the next stage's Skipper will finish the job.

We'll need a picture of the craft if you want help on that regard. It may be that your launch stage doesn't have enough fuel to get it up there and also circularize or at least get the majority of the circularization done.

Check your flight log and see if there's anything that broke along the way up. Also try jettisoning the side fairings individually by right clicking the engine and selecting the jettison option. Also try a different engine and see if that changes anything.

It's not efficient to carry Kethane everywhere you go. You mine it out of the ground via time warp, and deliver it to an orbital fuel station to convert into LFO and monoprop and what not for various ships. If you want to go for a reusable craft program then Kethane lets you refuel interplanetary vessels and fuel depots without ever having to launch another ship from Kerbin.

If one of them is going faster and they're on the exact same orbit then eventually they will one day intersect and you can use whichever one has fueled engines to slow/increase relative velocity enough to dock. Other wise you'll need to perform rendezvousing maneuvers, which typically involve increasing/decreasing the size of your orbit so you're moving at the same orbital velocity as the other craft by the time you two meet up.

I sunk a probe into Jool once. It fell through the floor, and continued orbiting around what I assumed to be it's center of gravity. It then exploded several times over, with my probe body conveniently being the last piece so I could retain a modicum of control.

I would very much like coordinates for that location.

They're probes. They're light and it's fun to pretend so we send probes on scouting missions and mapping planets and what not, even though we could do the same with kerbals on board. If you have the remote tech plugin you'll need to set up a systems of communications via probes to relay commands to further away probes. And once career mode hits probes will be very abundant, considering how cheap they are, compared to command pods.