Superfluous J

Is the docking port in use? you need to undock before you grab it, or it tries to grab everything "away from" the root part of the craft you're interacting with. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe you had other Kerbals around before, and now your engineer's alone. But this sounds more like the first thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

You got it. And it was possible before, but even with perfect alignment it could be finicky. now with perfect alignment and Same Vessel Interaction, it's... well it can still be finicky but it's much easier. More importantly, though, if you had docking ports on robotic arms it was SUPER easy to clip them into each other as you moved them around. At least in my experience, this would disable the two ports checking each other for docking. SVI stops that problem by stopping the clipping in the first place.

Huh I didn't know that gave you funds. You're right about those, but I don't know the cash amounts offhand so until I get them I'll leave them off. If you (or anybody out there who sees this) knows them or how to find them, Let me know.

A "surface outpost" can be anything, from a dedicated structure to a ship that just happens to have everything they're asking for on it. The most straightforward way to complete the contract is to build a ship that has everything the contract wants, and then find a way to land it all in one piece where the contract wants you to put it. Constructing one is one of the harder things in the game, mostly due to the user interface and lack of flexibility of parts. If you have infinite patience you can learn how to dock things landed (I suggest starting on Minmus' flats because they're - well - flat) and if you don't mind modding KIS/KAS and a few other mods can connect vessels together without having to line up docking ports to somewhat ridiculous exactness. If you have the Breaking Ground DLC, you could also put your docking ports on the ends of robotic arms to have a bit more flexibility in trade for a possibly more confusing UI. And then of course there's always the Claw. Land two ships, each of which is half of your "surface outpost," and drive one into the other with an open Claw.

Yeah somewhere on the first couple pages. I should put them in the first post actually.

If you want the same result without the work, you can replace the 4 outer Claws with... well anything, really, and then turn Autostrut on them to Heaviest part. As soon as you grab the asteroid, they will strut to it. Or you can use a mod that lets you strut in flight. I did that in this (fairly old but still valid) entry to the Dres Awareness Challenge.

You'll get far more and detailed instructions if you title it "KSP expert here to show you how to play correctly." Just kidding. Don't follow my advice above there, @DennisK91 More seriously, if streaming on your own isn't in the cards, watching others can be a boon. Keep with the big names until you know what you're doing. And watch out, don't watch any videos from before April 2015, as when 1.0 dropped the entire atmospheric model changed dramatically. Also watch these videos not with an eye on what to do, but an eye on why they're doing it. Find people who explain why they are launching the way they launch, why they chose such and such a time to do a burn, why they're burning that much, and so on. You can get by with rules of thumb and hacks, but when you use what you've learned to come up with your own rules of thumb and hacks ideas you'll only then REALLY experience KSP.

They may be in \ksp\Ships\* I don't know where mods tend to put things, but that's where Squad does.

Curse is the Official mod hosting site. Spacedock is the good mod hosting site. CKAN is the easiest way to find and track mods. I personally use the forums to find and track mods.

I'm including this news story because the image is fiction

From my observations, the law of diminishing returns on that makes it so that (on Normal mode at least) you can't get much more than 150,000 total (including the starter cash) before you're basically getting nothing per grant. 150k isn't enough to unlock everything. In fact it's not enough to unlock many buildings' first upgrades. And reputation is far from easy to get when you don't do any contracts.

That's why it's CRITICAL as a player to - once this starts to bother you - toss aside the game-given progression and make sure you're striving toward your own goals. For me it's been forum challenges that have kept me going.

Yeah just pull the hdd and plug it into another computer. Of course, make sure both computers are off while you're doing that. Also take this opportunity to motivate yourself to set up offsite backups. Just uploading copies of important files to a cloud account is fine. Gmail them to yourself if you don't care about security. You could have an email in your Gmail account right now with a recent save if you'd done that.

That's the problem. You need a better processor. You're using up all of one of the two cores. Buy a better processor. Which means a better motherboard probably. Which in my experience means "it's time to upgrade the whole computer." Also check out this thread. Note it's 7 years old so jump to the last pages for current things.

There is a 3rd option. It requires a bit of save file hacking. If you can find the craft in the list of VESSELs (It shouldn't be too hard, it's the only one with a single part after all) and change that part to a Mk1 command pod, your Kerbal can then get out of it. This allows you to still complete the spirit of the contract, as Squad never meant you to have to bring the part down when they wrote it. As always when save file hacking, make a backup first! I'd hate you to lose your entire save because of an error while trying to fix a minor contract.

I'm not even sure I buy that part

Yes. The only thing that I'm not 100% sure of (I'm 99.9% sure though) is that I'd never use spaces in directory names. Windows supports spaces in directory and file names the way gas stations support the selling of egg-salad sandwiches. Sure they're present, but I wouldn't touch one. But I've been copying my Steam install into different directories for years. Probably 2 dozen or more installs. The only problems I've ever had were when I failed to copy everything for random reasons.

I do not recall that at all. If they did, he flat out lied to them because there's no way he'd have actually thought that was a good ending.

I wholeheartedly agree. Assuming this is not sarcasm (hint I know it's sarcasm. I just agree with it if it wasn't) I wonder that too. What I hope they mean is a huge array of switches and sliders so we have "one mode to rule them all" where you could effectively create Science Mode, Career Mode, Sandbox, Money Only Mode, or any of thousands of variations and differences. What I expect is 3 modes that aren't the 3 we're used to but are similar in many ways.

The first time through for me was a slog as well. The second time though I just skipped every chapter with the Harkonnens in it. Much much better story. Shorter too. Related to this: The last time I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for The Two Towers and Return Of The King I read them in a kind of "movie order." I swapped between books 1 and 2, reading a chapter of each at a time. It broke up the Frodo/Sam stuff and made it not quite so much of a slog.

That's fair. We just draw the line in different places.

Sure KSC was remade, as it's a totally different place now. But the system? No that's a reskin. KSC 1 : KSC 2 :: GTA3 Liberty City : GTA4 Liberty City Kerbol System 1 : Kerbol System 2 :: Saint's Row's Stillwater City : Saint's Row 2's Stillwater City For those that don't know, the 2nd game's Stillwater had basically the same map as the first, with an extra (fairly large) area and some significant changes to another area to account for a large corporation essentially purchasing an entire neighborhood. And then of course the entire city got a facelift.

Is this true? If so, it goes against everything I learned (through trial and error) when ISRU was introduced. There are plenty of exploits, including time warp and making sure you only visit your ISRU rig in the daylight. However I've never gotten less than the necessary number of solar panels to charge up batteries and then have the ISRU unit work for any significant amount of time more than it would if you just ran it normally.

By default, parts of a ship won't bump into each other, but will just clip through each other. This is to keep your ships from exploding if you clip things on purpose, and to save processing time on collision checks. Sometimes though you WANT parts of the ship to interact with other parts. Multi-docking for example uses this.. Autostrut puts an invisible strut between parts. Disabling it on that part (which is the default for most parts) turns that off. Literally what it says. It makes attachments between parts more rigid. Think of the Falcon Heavy, with its two side boosters. In the game they would have been put on the rocket with Symmetry. Let's say instead though you put them on one by one. "Remove from Symmetry" would make the ones you put on with symmetry, behave as if you put them on one by one. This is a bigger topic than most of these, but in short when an engine runs it pulls fuel from whatever tank it can reach that has the highest fuel flow priority. If multiple tanks have the same priority, then those tanks empty at the same time.