Keome

Orbital bases are a lot easier to send up in pieces. Make several parts for different things, send them up and dock them together to make the station. Being modular like that, you can mix and match the sections. Need more fuel storage? Send up a fuel section. Need more living space? Send up a hitchhiker can. Just make sure your docking ports are all the same size, and your first core module will need some batteries and solar panels to keep it active, and maybe some fuel storage as well to keep the RCS going. My stations are usually: A core module with the command cupola, some RCS fuel, RCS thrusters. It's attached to the 6-way hub. Two sides have the long girders with solar panels. The other two sides have a fuselage section and docking ports. The bottom is just a docking port. The two side docking ports are for ships, the bottom one is for attaching the next module. There is also a docking port on top of the command cupola. A habitat module is docked to the port on top of the command cupola. It's just two hitchhiker cans with docking ports on both ends. Room for eight Kerbals, plus the one in the cupola. The bottom port is where I attach the fuel module, which is just an orange tank and a big RCS tank. Docking ports on both ends, and sometimes I add radial docking ports to the orange tank if I need more docking ports for ships. I also send one up with a Kethane converter as well. There are some addons with empty fuel tanks, to make getting an orange tank into space a lot easier, too, or just make a copy of the fuel tanks, and edit them yourself to make empty versions. Keep adding parts, you can make the station as big as needed. It just takes time to dock it all together. It's also much easier to send sections up as dockable modules instead of trying to make some massive thing you try to launch all at once.

Start off simple, just like a real space program. Build something that can take off. Work on suborbital flights complete with parachute landings. Work on flights that go higher, eventually working up to full orbital flights. Do the tutorials. Keep doing them if you have trouble. Learn to use the maneuver nodes to setup things like changing your orbit, making your orbit circular, adjusting inclination, etc. All of these things are the basics you'll need to learn before you move on to Mun landings and beyond.

I landed a rover slightly larger than that using a simple skycrane and small docking ports. I landed the skycrane, detached the rover and moved the skycrane away. The skycrane is remotely guided, so it can be landed and later used to move the rover to another spot on the Mun simply by driving the rover under the lander and redocking it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mo6zzj73akhvijn/rover1.png This is a small one Kerbal rover I made using the 1x1 meter square plate as a base. It's got an external seat, solar panels, ASAS and SAS modules, Mechjeb, headlights and enough batteries for limited darkside driving on the Mun and Minmus. A remote version can be made by adding the appropriate remote guidance module to the stack. In the version shown, it had a tendency to tip over if you braked too hard because the Kerbalnaut was a bit too chubby after eating all of the snacks.

I made a small rover built on the 1x1 meter square plate. It worked fine on Kerbin. On the Mun, I found that the Kerbalnauts ate too many snacks and the rover would nose over if I braked too hard or if I jumped up and down on the front of it. There wasn't much room to add anything else, but I managed to squeeze a small radial mounted monopropellant tank onto the back. I guess the rover will serve as a tiny fuel truck, too, but at least it won't tip over when a slightly overweight Kerbalnaut sit sin the driver's seat.

Today, I landed a crew on Minmus and then got them back home safely.

I landed my first rover using an overly complicated skycrane system that successfully deployed the rover and then landed on the Mun. Unortunately, I misjudged the skycrane landing and used way too much thrust. It's parked about 50 kilometers from the main landing site. Bob is still there, waiting for me to get him.

Checking snack levels. Finding missing parts. I'm sorry Dave ... I can't do that.

My first docking attempt (.20 version, I'm kind of new) ... I figure I better take a lot of RCS fuel. I load up the biggest tank there is. Then add a second. I want to make sure it was enough. Lots of RCS thruster blocks. I want good control. I balanced it out so that things should go right. Right? I ran out of RCS fuel.

As a new player myself, let me offer some suggestions: Start small and take steps to get started. Work on being able to get off the launchpad, and then work on getting into orbit, then a stable circular orbit. Learn to use the maneuver node. You can do a lot with it, once you get used to it. Do the tutorials, repeatedly if you need too, until you get the basics down. Takes things step by step. Racing for the Mun before you can easily get yourself into a stable orbit isn't going to help you much.