M700 Survey Scanner

[Garbarrage]

Hi, I'm pretty new to KSP. Been watching loads of handy tutorials on YouTube without which I'd be still trying to get off the landing pad. I'm slowly getting my head around the game. Recently installed MechJeb and expect that I'll be getting to grips with it faster now that I don't have to worry about overshooting my maneuver nodes while time warping.

Anyway, I've been trying to go mining on the Mun. I've so far managed to strand a pilot there, and mounted a successful rescue. safely returning Danrick Kermin to Kerbal (although I may have killed 6 Kerbals in the process), so I've got the whole Hohmann Transfer thing down. I've managed to achieve a polar orbit without the aid of MechJeb. I got my probe with the M700 Survey Scanner to what I believed was a polar orbit. I tried to run a scan, and was told that I must be in a stable polar orbit of between 25km and 1km.

Hmmm... I decided that maybe my orbit wasn't exactly polar, and may have been off by a couple of degrees. I'm not really too sure how to check. So, this prompted me to install MechJeb, which I used to achieve an orbit of exactly 90 degrees.

Polar orbit.... check

Stable.... check

20km is between 25km and 1km... check.

The scanner is still telling me that I must be in a stable polar orbit of between 25km and 1km to perform a scan. Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong?

[Aegolius13]

Are you sure it says 1km?  That would be... underground on all but the lowest parts of the Mun.  I suspect 25km is the minimum, and some bigger number (1mm?) is the maximum.  So maybe try expanding your orbit (burn prograde wherever), circularize, then try the scanner again.

[Garbarrage]

That's done it. I knew I was missing something simple. 

Wow this game is hard. Really easy to lose hours problem solving. I've not had that level of engagement with a game before.

Now to figure out how to get a mining rig there.

Thanks for the reply.

[bewing]

Tremendous amounts to learn, yes. An extreme amount of detail to process the first few times. But then it gets a lot easier. -- It's not exactly the game that's hard, though. It's doing a pretty good job of simulating reality, and the real world is in fact fairly complex like this.