Angel-125

Today I finished up the baseline Resource Support Unit parts. With these done, I started working on the Converter Support Unit. Here's a preview: It borrows the mesh from the original Buffalo's Micro ISRU. I'll be retexturing that to bring it up to Restock standard. Anyway, the first pre-release of 1.3: Back to Bases, can be found here. It has the three RSU parts in it.

They should probably be updated. To save time I tend to copy existing config files and modify them.

The fusion torches are from my DSEV mod. I'm running JNSQ. I'm not sure what all the visual mods are. When he was still streaming KSP, @Rocketology had a setup of KSP on his Discord server, and I used it for my career game- my last three mission reports have used that setup, upgraded to the latest KSP. I want to use Parallax 2.0 as well but I don't think there are configs for JNSQ yet.

It's built in orbit via extraplanetary launchpads, but you could strap a pair of 7.5m boosters from Near Future Launch Vehicles to its sides, powered by Cryogenic Engines mod: Once you break atmosphere, light the fusion torches (be sure to charge up BEFORE launch). It also helps to unload all non-essential resources and reduce the fuel mass to just enough to attain orbit.

Today I made more progress on the RSU parts; now there's an optional notch in the mid section part to accommodate the Buffalo Chassis Coupler. Why? Here's why: The docking port notch is there to enable a chassis-based rover to slip under the RSU, pick it up, and haul it somewhere. Stock landing legs are standing in for a set of stilts that I'll be making later.

If you put the gate inside the buildings at the airfield, don't. The airfield hangars have weird colliders that cause unexpected results. The ship is very heavy so it makes just over 0.2C. It is filled with resources because it'll be a factory ship capable of building other craft.

Yeah, I didn't like clipping the huge hinge either, so I've slated a small chassis hinge part into the Buffalo 2 v1.4 release. Next release will also slightly adjust the nodes for the flatbed variant. Meanwhile, random warpship:

Unfortunately, no. I tried doing that with THOMPBERRY (the repair bot in EVA Repairs) to no avail. Stock EVA Construction is explicitly tied to kerbals, and from what I can tell, so is KIS/KAS.

Here's another solution to gate deployment:

Superstructure variants of the Buffalo 2 parts also work.

The original plan was to limit the vessel by dimension, but the game proved that calculating vessel dimensions on the fly resulted in numbers that were very off. So I went with the mass limitation instead.

That's normal behavior. Gating to the ground makes use of KSP's vessel lander. It's no different than using the cheat menu-with the exception of the resource requirements. As long as you land on your feet, you're good.

Given that I fixed the warp engines to function through timewarp, I've pretty much made the Whipcrack redundant. With that fix, the Whipcrack would invalidate all the previous work I did for warp tech. If the cost of operating the engine during timewarp is too high, then you can adjust the interstellarWarpSpeedMultiplier in settings.cfg to give you a speed boost during timewarp. That will result in your ship going faster per time-tick and thus consume less graviolium. Between that and either enabling jumpgate anomalies (they automatically-populate around stars) or building your own, Blueshift has plenty of FTL options to choose from. If you still want super-easy FTL then you'd probably want to look elsewhere. ELSD Jump Beacons is pretty much point and jump- and has its own set of limitations. The hieroglyphs indeed go on top: To deploy the gates, you might notice that the top of the gate has an attachment node in addition to the base attachment node- and even forward and back nodes. In my tests, I created a warp-powered gateship with KFS gravity engines for local maneuvers, and dropped the assembly out of the bay: The gate can fall over and still deploy successfully:

Yes, they do indeed float.

Today I got most of the meshes done for the Resource Support Unit parts and got them into the game: For context: The RSU parts aren't just for the orbital MSEV, they double as foundations to rest rover and station parts on the surface: