RoverDude

Four hours a day.

Your morning teaser....

Fairings are part of the model. so for now no fairings. I don't understand what's OCD about having a drill and it's sister part on the same node, but guess I will find out at release And anyone is free to add more drills and other goodies - wide open CC type stuff. I love contributions, sharing is good! Lovely stuff! Thank you! Going to get these snuck into pre-release (which I can now focus on as I am back home, despite a delayed flight) I'll see Worst case, just pull request an alternate config. Changing the drag model would be a plugin then you get into fun stuff like FAR/etc...

Still need landing legs, and those were kinda a pain when I was doing some playtesting. Plus, less parts, it's a bit people have asked me for in the past anyway, and it comes with a wide track (those pistons stick out about half a meter each) because landing heavy mining rigs is a pain. Plus I had to get in at least one part in all of this other awesomeness

We're almost at first release! So here's the deal. There will be a first cut of this tomorrow. Would be sooner, but I will be in the air. Rest assured, I'll be testing this while flying Anyone who has any tanks, I'll take those (textured please). Otherwise, we launch with one. We have a drill. We have a landing system. We have a converter (operational, animated, and doesn't waste resources) and we have a tank. ORS is set up with some default maps, and detection is handled with stock parts. The resource is created, so really we're pretty much at go time. Oceanic and atmospheric will come next, plus tons of balancing, tweaks, random maps, etc. - this will be a dev cut, with the intent of getting our scrappy startup release out to the world (hopefully) by Sunday as an alpha preview. Once this hits, I will toss an open call for testers, and release everyone to have fun Out for now, gotta go work on setting up the plugin for this drill

And here's the cage and landing gear module to hold it - all a single part, and you can even slap stuff on the cages outside. A 2.5m part fits exactly inside with a few cm to spare before it hits the cage trusses or landing gear.

I was looking at the former. Or allow a drill already operational and 'primed' to burn off a portion of it's fuel during rails operations, thus if it sees a Karbonite generator on the ship, it will switch to rails mode, using that to power generators, converters, etc. - or just warp with solar power. Dunno, I am open to ideas. But want something nice and simple to plug in

USI links are up - had to upgrade to a pro Dropbox account, which I did, because I love all of you. I'll see what I can do - I have a few more mods to get wrapped up but love for this will resume. That's my job Let me know - I'm curious. Granted, KAS is a bit flaky right now so I am surprised it works at all. Side note - put brakes on first BEFORE you release from the pylon

Excellent - licensing wise you're fine with MKS, and I believe the EL license is even more permissive (but please check). Once you have balance sorted out let me know and I can make this a permanent part of the MKS mod. Building this It will be a cage that covers the drill in closed-mode with integrated landing struts. Plus particles are cool. Thank you for being awesome!

I have a lovely belly-slung drill from nertea that I just need some collider work on. I'll look at the EPL drills and see if I can fiddle with textures Fortunately I have PSP and I have nertea's pallete to go off of.

Well technically you can I was bummed when I realized I have a whole chunk of dev not with me, so I can't progress more than some MM configs today while I wait for more Karbonite parts. May switch back over for a bit while I wait for my plane, and fiddle with how to handle out of atmosphere resources.

Working on it No worries, my suspicion is KAS given it has a lot of issues right now - but if it's DERP then by all means let me know and I will investigate.

A quick update, more on gameplay, etc. We're wrapping up the stuff on this mod as well (can't wait to get home to my dev PC!) The probe will determine the chemical makeup of an asteroid. The Jaw will vaporize and the asteroid into rock. There will be an option to choose whether to keep the rock, or to jettison it into space. If the rock is kept, any number of converters (Water, Karbonite, Ore, etc.) can be used to process the rock into it's corresponding element. Requires a probe to have analyzes the asteroid, since this impacts conversion rate. The tank bits are for the expanding tanks, independent of the asteroid content The crew hatch just adds crew capacity to your asteroid

Yes, in the works. Not for alpha - I want to get folks gathering and testing as fast as possible - but definitely on the books. The rub is making sure people do not game the system by going on rails with insufficient power to run their extractor and excavator. And that gets tricky with solar panels, etc. so I need to noodle over something that's nice and abstract. Agreed, I love this! Oh - handling rates is the easy bit. Handling resource drain/sufficient EC is more entertaining. If you can get me the FBX and textures (vs a mu) I can add particle effects in unity This weekend. I'm on a plane today, most of the core parts are done, just handling the extractor and it's animations (resolving a collider issue, need a texture). Initial parts pack is just going to be the 2.5m set - extractor, tank, and converter. I'll whip up a truss platform for the belly extractor, and that will pretty much be it. But enough for people to test the core mechanics, then we add in new parts as folks get me stuff.

I love this!

You really should not write over stock parts - use Module Manager for that.

Soon. Just coded auto-generator shutoff, so the generators are done. The tank is already done. A detector is worked into the stock antenna so that is done. I just need to start working the code for the drill, then we're on the cusp of a first VERY rough alpha.

Thanks! Adding now. It's still ORS, so you can happily add away using that. But the nice bit is that all code, models, etc. are CC 4.0 so there are no license issues when people want to extend it. So less a matter of it being buit for moddability, and more a case of it being built to be modder friendly. Concur on price, and folks can always play with values and extend the mod. What this guy said.

Correct on both counts. But only one resource for the base mod - people are free to extend and play with it as they see fit beyond that Was not thinking in those terms, but I expect it's only a matter of time before someone adds spice as a resource.

Dunno, consider that liquid fuel is already past the refining phase, a raw material is generally less, otherwise there would be no market (why buy Karbonite when it's more expensive than just using rocket fuel?) Ideally (and this is a coding thing) it will be random on all bodies (there will be some parameters for how random), but I have to sort out some coding bits first, and also see how ORS handles it's resource maps, etc.

FYI sellable would be purely a function of recovery and cost. Probably not the most valuable thing in the world though, it's cost would be inline with liquid fuel / oxidizer.

Three separate converters you can turn on/off independently, all on the same part. The more you have on, the more electric charge it sucks out. No heat generation, just resource costs. If we end up in a place with enough models, I would not be opposed at all to changing that, but with just one, that's where we're at Could also be a case where the 2.5m can do all three, but smaller ones (1.25/0.625) can only do one, and at lower efficiency.

Glad I could provide some comic relief

It should stop the converter, I'll ensure that's the correct behavior since it has a custom plugin anyway

One part I want to make is a giant (2.5m or 3.75m) collector that is conical, but when activated, the sides fan out like petals, making it a giant air funnel. Possibly with appropriate shark-like nose art....