Finally landed on the mun. Then promptly tipped the ship. I end up bunny-hopping over the surface, trying to get the retro-grade to STAY on top. 
Congrats!!! My first Mun landing consisted of a suicide burn with just enough fuel to destroy my entire lander except the landing pod at the top. The rescue mission was much more successful but I was just happy enough to hit the mun and live!!
One of my more exciting Mun Landings consisted of biome hopping for science, however my lander was designed to redock with the orbiter and refuel before hopping. I thought I could get away with it at one point but I couldnāt. I only had enough fuel to make about half of orbital speedā¦I didnāt want to send a rescue mission so I adjusted the inclination of my orbiter to fly somewhat over where Jeb was. When the orbiter was near I took off and when I had exhausted all my fuel Jeb hopped out and rendezvoused with the orbiter via jetpack! It was an exciting mission. The science was lost though 
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I should say the ship tipped, then blew up. No rescue flights necessary.
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VICTORY!!!
I do have two questions, though: First, is this:
I made a safe landing (with no fuel left!!!). However, the ship is still out there, in the middle of nowhere. I selected the ārecoveryā button, but nothing happened. The pilot made it back, but not the rocket. Apparently, nobody wanted to run to the petrol stationā¦ So now it says ātwo flights in progressā. How do I get the ship back home?
I have two flights, because I launched a simple satellite that does absolutely nothing except measure the temperature (cold) and atmospheric pressure (there is none) around Kerben, and beam it back to the space center. Iāve attached a seismometer, but curiously, space is not prone to earthquakes.
The second question involves a third flight I was attempting before running into problems. I made a rocket designed to land a probe on the Mun. However, especially after warping, the engine no longer engages. It works fine, I warp a little, and I canāt use it anymore. Iāve attached batteries to no avail, so I donāt think itās electrical related. So why canāt my rockets fire?
EDIT: Okay, I figured out the first problem.
However, the second problem is really, really causing me to loath this game. Iāve just spent a few hours literally performing the same maneuvers over and over again, only to have KSP randomly decide to take away all control of the craft from me. It doesnāt make any sense, and I canāt find out why on kerbel itās doing that. That and the lack of any real save feature is causing a growing amount of discontent.
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Congrats again!! Nice ship 
So you figured out how to recover the craft? You can do it from the tracking center or from hovering over the altitimeter with the ship selected as your active vessel and ārecoverā
What that sounds like is that, although you have batteries, it is constantly draining for one reason or another, and after a large time warp you have ran out of electricity. When you canāt use the probe, check your resources, is your electricity empty? If so, try attaching solar panels or an RTG so that you can always produce some power to stay in control of your probe. If you use the panels that have to be extendedā¦donāt forget to extend them before you time warp! It sounds simple but you wouldnāt believe how often that happens. If itās not that, try posting a screenshot of your probe(with resources tab down) when it doesnāt work and Iāll try and figure it out.
There is a save feature! You can hit f5 to quicksave before you might do anything silly like landing or reentry. If it doesnāt go as planned you can press and hold f9 back to your quicksave point. I hope that solves a lot of your frustration! I try to play without quicksave as much as possible though because plaything through mistakes sometimes(and only sometimes) makes things more exciting. Also it should autosave anytime you move back to the space center but this will not override your āquicksave point.ā It will however be what is loaded back if you should exit ksp, and you will lose your quicksave if you do exit.
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TLDR; Go bonkers on batteries. Got it. Iāll see what happens.
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Many batteries are awesomeā¦ as long as you can recharge them! For Science!
On another note, I just reinstalled the game and went 
at the cargo bays for spaceplanes! At last I can make a crappy spaceplane design BUT ONE THAT CARRIES THINGS! Wooop.
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Okay, Iāve attached four battery packs and three 2X3 solar cells. And the cells seem to have solved my problem. So now I have a probe that measures the temperature on the Mun (pic incoming) . I have a barometer, but it says I canāt use it. When can I use a barometer?
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Barometer requires an atmosphere of some sort to work.
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Nice! Itās a cute little thing
What a mission! With the immediate need for more science the KK came up with a relatively simple mission - a mun flyby. At once, the engineers got designing and reengineered the DodoBird. The DodoBirdV2 has increased range capabilities via an extra fuel tank and more life support. In addition to this huge improvement, the kingeneers also rebalanced the landing gear, and added a new advanced technology - Airbrakes! They figured that airbrakes will help immensely in reentry procedures. I present the DodoBirdV2!
This time, it was Bob and Bill at the wheel. Jebediah is still orbiting in the station command module awaiting actual science. Unlike Jeb, these two were actually able to make it to mach 3.5 where we switched from airbreathing jets to our rockets without blowing up the jets first.
Once in orbit, Bill checked out the heat tiles to make sure everything would be okay when they finally re-entered again some two days later.
When the inspection was over, the two plotted their Mun intercept course, a free-return flyby. Although the two brave kerbals had over 1500 m/s in dV left, they felt it would not only be safer, but easier to do it this way. Iām lazy.
The insertion burn!
I forgot to upload the screenshot but on the way to the Mun, Kerbin eclipsed Kerbol! While this may not seem like a big deal, this poor kerbals require electricity to liveā¦it was a few harrowing moments while we crossed Kerbins shadow and back into the lifebearing sunlight.
Itās shots like these why I love this game
Aside from the fact that the DodoBird wasnāt on a perfectly equitorial return trajectory, reentry went just fine.
The pilots ended up about 1/8 of the planet away from KSC, but thats okay. Thanks to actually not blowing up the jet engines, they were able to fly back in hypersonic flight.
Finally KSC was in sight and Bill lined up the landing strip. They came in a little hot only dropped out of supersonic speed less than half a kilometer away from the strip. The landing went smoother than expected and the only explosions were, unsurprisingly, the engines yet again. KK has vowed to find a set of pilots who wonāt blow up their precious engines. Those things cost roots!
I forgot to take a screenie of the lack of enginesā¦I was a bit busy during landing and forgot to afterwards. Hope you guys enjoyā¦+300 science for me! The ship total cost 46000 roots to launch, and I recovered everything but fuel and the 2 engines for 44000 so itās not too shabby!
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Are there any mods you guys recommend? Especially mods for stuff like orbital manuoevres, which Iāve always found particularly tricky to get right
Two questions:
First, why do my spent rockets usually explode after I eject them?
Second, what are my rover delivery options?
These are the mods I always use:
Deadly Reentry (Atmospheric heating + damage)
Ferram Aerospace Research (Hugely better aerodynamics)
Procedural Fairings (What it sounds like)
Real Chute (Configurable parachutes)
Remote Tech (Requires communication network for unmanned vehicles + optionally adds coms lag)
TAC Life Support (You have to consider life support for Kerbals)
MechJeb (Flight computer for orbital manoeuvres etc)
There are others such as Haystack, Kerbal Alarm Clock, Chatterer, Ship Manifest and Infernal Robotics which are secondary but staples none the less.
The next stage blasts it with fiery exhaust?
Check out the Procedural Fairings mod. The inline fairings are useful if you want a return stage on top of the rover.
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Okay, thanks.
I have another question: Lately Iāve been trying to land a simple rover on the mun. However, landing that thing is much tougher than it looks. Even though I do my best to line the retrograde with the vertical, it ends up flying all over the place, and I bunny-hop , and usually end up hitting the ground far to hard. Any tips for mun landing in general? A mod with an auto-pilot specifically for landing or something? Thanks
MechJeb has a landing autopilot but Iāve never used it and never would.
My advice is rotate your craft so that you can adjust your attitude with a+d and your yaw with w+s or the other way around.
Burn retrograde to a near halt so youāre falling straight down. You can then adjust your throttle to maintain a hover or slow descent (MechJebās Smart Ass is good for this) and use wsad to cancel out lateral movement and select a landing site.
Ideally you time your retrograde burn to bring you to a halt just a few 10s of meters above your landing siteā¦ otherwise you need to waste fuel slowing your vertical decent separately from your retrograde.
It really depends on what youāre looking for. Hrobertson took the basics that I would recommend. If orbital maneuvers are your weakness I would also suggest precisenode. It lets you edit your node parameters manually and in smaller increments which helps a ton sometimes.
I also have to second DR, FAR as absolutely necessaryā¦at the least FAR. The stock aerodynamics makes absolutely no sense and FAR alone will improve your gameplayā¦if you get it though you should also have pFairings to reduce drag.
A few others I canāt live without(there are way too many):
-B9 - for the beautiful plane parts and cargobays!!!
-RCS build aid - tells you if your craft will have any unwanted translation/rotation when firing engines or rcs. SUPER HELPFUL
-Kerbal Alarm clock is also super useful because itāll set alarms for SOI changes or any burns you set to make which helps out a lot when running multiple missions at once.
-In addition to pFairings there is also pWings which I find indispensable when building larger spaceplanes
-Infernal robotics and KAS(Kerbal Attachment System) are both very cool by themselves.
KAS lets you grab and attach stuff on your ships as well as fuel lines and what not. It helps for larger ships built in orbit because you can install struts.
-Oh, EVE(Environmental Visual Enhancements) I use Astronomers pack, but even the base looks absolutely beautiful and changes the solar system.
In regards to mechjeb - I used it for about 4 days when first learning KSP to see how it did things. Once I figured out what it was doing I dropped it and switched to Kerbal Engineer for information only. Itās the window with the green text in my screenshots above. I use many many others and if youāre looking for something in particular they probably have it.
Hrobertson, I believe crew manifestās went basically stock in .25 so it may not be entirely necessary any more. I donāt know though I never used it.
For future reference, how do I quote multiple people in 1 post?
Ark - hrobertson pretty much explained it already, but there are two trains of thought in landing.
The first is to completely null out your horizontal velocity to 0 so you fall straight down(as hrobertson said) and then just keep an eye on your vertical and slow down when you near the surface.
The second is to do a suicide burn, which is more effficient, where you just burn retrograde on your suborbital trajectory and just follow the marker. Done right it will land youā¦but itās not quite as simple at first.
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The landing was a catastrophe, but the rover survived!
I never even used that top partā¦
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