Noob question - having trouble with finding areas on kerbal

[ColdEthyl75]

Hi, I feel really stupid asking this but this my first time with the game and I can't seem to complete the observational missions on kerbal. Ive worked out how to set a navigation point for my current mission on the navball, and I can guide my craft to the point where the yellow circle is directly over where the research area is supposed to be, but when I do my crew report all I get is a comment about kerbal grassland, or kerbal coastline, or "I can see my house from here". The actual research mission never gets fulfilled. I'm tempted just to give up and focus on getting into orbit,  but I suspect the lessons these early missions are trying to teach me will become useful later on. What am I doing wrong?

[Spricigo]

 

36 minutes ago, ColdEthyl75 said:

but I suspect the lessons these early missions are trying to teach me will become useful later on

nah..its just a way to pay the bills.If the contract don't have a good cost/reward skip (or even decline) it. Of coarse ,how much you like or dislike doing some kind of contract should be considered for the cost/reward.

There is a system in place that make more likely to new contract offers being of the type you accepted/completed than the type you declined/failed, so if you just ignore those types of contract, so it may not even get offered in the future.

 

now, if you decide to give those contract another try. You need to make sure you fulfill all the conditions, make sure to read the fine print. For example: It's not unheard of people going all the way to the correct location and not being able to get to the correct altitude. For the area itself you will get messages like "you arrived at [mission area]" and "you are leaving [mission area".

 

Finally if mods are an option for you consider: 

 

 

 

[bewing]

Yeah, you are almost certainly at a bad altitude. The target waypoint for the contract is a funny-shaped teardrop hanging in  the sky. If you are too high or too low, you won't be able to find the exact spot. As spricigo said, when you are there you will see a message on your screen that you are entering the proper area. Then you have to be above or below a certain altitude, generally.

I suspect you are trying to fly a rocket to the targets? These types of "survey contracts" are really made for airplanes. So that might be the thing that's making it so hard for you.

 

 

[ColdEthyl75]

Thanks for the advice. The mission I was trying required altitude below 16000 which was definitely the case. I didn't notice any messages popping up although I could easily have missed them. Most significantly, I was indeed using a rocket so that's probably where I was having so much trouble. If these missions aren't worth doing I'll just focus on getting into orbit. Time to really study those tutorials.

[GrouchyDevotee]

Sometimes the contracts will specify both a speed and an altitude that you must hit to perform whatever observation like crew report or temperature for successful completion.