Superfluous J

I hope you some day get the game (or KSP2) and come back whenever you're aching for some more conversation!

Let me stop you right there.

Years ago I made a "Rendezvous, Approach, and Dock" tutorial in 3 parts. Give them a try, especially the 1st one which is where you're stuck right now.

If you're either low enough of eccentric enough, a properly timed retrograde decoupling can do it

However if the ship has no power and only probe cores and the chutes are active AND you follow the ship down through the atmosphere, the chutes will trigger.

In my experience Tylo is better, but Laythe works fine as well. Tylo has more mass so can affect your path more. Laythe is moving faster so it's easier to use it to bleed speed.

The less fuel you take to space, the less your final dV and the lower your score.

If you royally mess up you can alt-f4 and exit the game and just reload it. The game is saved every few (5? 10?) minutes and also on every scene change, so you'll only lose some progress and not whatever your mistake cost you. Unless you alt-f4 in the middle of a quicksave. No idea what happens then but hey we have rolling backups so go for it

Just tried it. Yeah I would ignore all that THROTTLE DOWN and THROTTLE UP stuff. It's way too picky. Just make sure you can come to a full stop in a second or two in an emergency and make sure you're coming down vertical at the end on a flat area. In the tutorial window, the vertical altitude always seemed correct to me. Not sure what's going on in your game.

I'm going to try this tutorial in a bit to see what it does (I've never done one. They didn't exist when I started) but you can click the "waves" button up at the top of the screen where the altitude readout is and it'll change to a "mountains" button to give you your ground altitude. Use that. Also, watch your ship's shadow as you get close to the ground to get an a more intuitive sense of where you are and how fast you're moving. Also, don't get tricked into watching your ship when turning, the Navball is oriented to the ship, always. The ship on the screen is oriented to whatever direction it happens to be facing, which may not match your keyboard. Finally, poor reactions and atrocious piloting is merely an indicator that you're Human. I crashed dozens of ships on the Mun before I had a successful there-and-back, and I've crashed hundreds more since (mostly when I try something stupid these days). Keep at it. A nice solid landing is a thing of beauty and the hardships will only make it more beautiful when you get it.

I didn't say you shouldn't go there. I said if you're going and want correct information when you get there pony up the... what is it $75,000? ...on the upgrade. You already have the Mission Control upgrade so you'll also get maneuver nodes. Really it's a no-brainer that the game actually told you about when you upgraded Mission Control.

docking ports are huge offenders when it comes to part count. An open docking port is constantly checking if there are any nearby ports to connect to. If your station has a lot of docking ports then that could be causing the yellow timer.

I've not decided on challenge #2 yet but my first is "The Test," a very quick and interesting challenge that was bogged down by a bad name and some undeserved but (I expect) intended-to-be-fun in-your-face wording about if you were "good enough" to complete it. The really interesting part of "The Test" was that you got ONE CHANCE. In your entire life. No saves, no reverts, no retries, EVER. If you succeed, you win. If you fail, you don't and never take the challenge again. Also, I beat it

That boundary is not arbitrary, it is determined by the relative masses of Kerbin and Mun. If Kerbin didn't exist Mun's SOI would be much larger inside Kerbol's SOI. You'd still hit it and the non-patched-conics orbit wouldn't show it, but it'd be bigger nonetheless. I'm not arguing semantics here, it's an important point. These things are natural consequences of the patched conics system. The very system that the lowest tracking station has no information about. I'm disagreeing that it is "dastardly", yes. And that brand new players should go to Mun before they have patched conics unlocked, doubly so. The game could tell players more, sure, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a single place in the game where that's not true. Including the tutorials and those little "Here's the VAB" blurbs upon first entry.

Very cool! Removing the biggest barrier to the Elcano challenge and flying low everywhere is genius.

Because more people would rather have KSP2 sans multiplayer than it to not be released before the heat death of the universe.

You also built a time machine and took us back to 2014 Nothing wrong with it in this least but I wonder what you were doing so deep in the archives... Anyway besides the pic in my signature, the dumbest thing I think I ever made was my first Jool 5 ship. *shudders*

I don't see anybody getting haughty, I just see people disagreeing with you. As I do. A level one tracking station does not show patched conics. There are conics that would orbit the Mun if Kerbin was not present, and without patched conics those will appear as orbits of Mun. It's one of the many, many reasons I think career is for veterans and Science mode is the real beginner's game. (Caveat for veterans who prefer science mode)

I didn't throttle down until Ap time broke 1 minute

I tried to do my "30 at 30" launch which has about a dozen steps but basically I slowly bring the nose down in such a way that when my Ap is 30km, my angle is 30 degrees. I say "tried" because KerbalX is moar boostery than my normal ships (I like 1.3twr) and it was hard to keep it going smoothly down. I also throttled down when my time to Ap hit 1 minute, to keep it near that 1 minute time until about an Ap of 60 or so, at which point I just locked it to prograde and let it go at about 1/4 throttle until the Ap was 81 (oops). At that AP, I did a small burn to circularize at 80x81km. My ship in that orbit had 2553+761 = 3314m/s left. Consider this my first attempt. I did it a 2nd time with a much better launch profile and had 2553+807 = 3361 m/s left, which I'm pretty happy with all things considered, so I'll call that my best score. I'm not going to beat a kOS script so hey . The craft has 6662m/s of vacuum dV in the VAB so that means I did it in 3301 m/s. (One question, why fuel AND dV? As the ship is the same for everybody, surely one (the easier one, dV) should be all that's needed)

I don't know about strictly easier, but it's a fun hard, as opposed to Eve being a slog.

I was thinking the same thing. If there is no multiplayer, there will be 1000 threads about how much that sucks. If there is multiplayer, there will be 1000 threads about how much something else sucks.

They said so. And I was not in any of the meetings so can't say if they were telling the truth or not, because I don't work there. And I spoke a bit tersely. I meant they can't optimize KSP's code for KSP2. Not that they can't optimize their own code. Of course they can do that. Not that I know that first hand or anything....

They can't optimize anything as they're (reportedly) writing it from scratch.

AWESOME. Also, This is the first thing I've seen in months that's made me want to play KSP again before KSP2 comes out.