Admac

Anyone else not able to reconfig the drills since the last release? The menu is there, but it doesn't change my substrate drill to a water drill (or any other to any other) Heaps of Matkits and Spec parts, but no error, or any yellow text at all. This is the in the field reconfig obviously, the in hanger one works just fine. Edit: Yeah the new USI tools fixed everything, thanks forums!

I got pretty far in the last version's challenge, but I remember it got super duper unstable once I had like 80 vehicles up at once and it looked like I'd need 200ish to make it all work. Did this last patch do anything about that?

I'm with Jetski, while the challenge is great, 100ish vessels in the game is running like a dog.I made the mistake of using a career save in which I had already built up mun/minmus and Duna with colonies and RT networks, and I am not even done Vall and it's being pretty unpleasant to play. This seems to be a known issue with how it handles objects in memory, and to be fair prior to this challenge I didn't run nearly this many vessels, nor try to colonize all of known space. Maybe if I get some hardware upgrades I'll pick it up again but for now I'm putting my campaign on hold.

Probably more fun and rewarding to install MKS and hunt for rich seams of Exotic Minerals and Rare Metals. A 50 ton crate of those can be worth tens of millions, and in my last save the only rich seam I could find was on Moho. It was a pretty fun way to make some Kerbucks!

Oh my god yes. So good!

well it only take like 20 minutes to rescue a kerbal from the kerbin system, so just knock that out in the first 10000 or so minutes of your career! But if you are one of those people that doesn't want spend 17+ hours rescuing dudes, i suppose there are a few mods that can help, astronaut overhaul and deepfreeze come to mind. oh and Civpop.

Communication Sat Scoring Concern; I do not like the scoring/rules for comsats, and I think they can be made better. Based on the height of orbits, there are several ways that you can get 100% coverage with as few as 4 sats per body. I think the full coverage challenge should be 4x per body instead of 6, and the challenge I suppose can be w/e but there are lots of inclinations that make 6 almost 100% double coverage. Also the current scoring calls for 6 comsats around each of 5 moons + 4 around Jool, for a fairly skinny 8 points. Launching 34 sats into precise timed orbits seems like it should be worth more. Esp considering they'll have to be individually scripted with massive RT delays. Also; Orbital transfer stations with 20+ kerbals in them will obviously have antennas, I assume they can be counted as comsats?

We could solve this and make the Transgendered aerospace engineers happy by renaming Bill to Belle. Besides, I always mix up which one of them is the engineer....

Ah, I misapplied that sat spacing! Issues: The polar orbit was too high for scansat, the inclined orbits sychronized, leading to big missed spots.(All three at the same place every half orbit) Solution: Use a low half period polar orbit and a full height equatorial orbit instead. I desync'ed the inclined orbits but using mechjeb's resonate orbit by 5/6th, and recirc'd after two and then four orbits. Whew! RT is hard!

Large vessels need to be pretty large in my experience. I am working on that Jool 500 Challenge, and my first wave contained a 25 kerbal ship with 27 years of hab. It was 300ish tons of dry mass, but with on orbit refuelling, scaling up is pretty reasonable. There is very little drawback to stacking Kerbitats and Hab rings since they weigh so little. Even my little Duna science mission had 2 of each, and that was lots of time. I think my colonization ship with 25 crew had 12 Kerbitats, but whats 36 tons if you are dooming them to a lifetime in a tin can? I noticed that was a design shift with using USI, in stock there is very little difference between a Mun mission and a Duna Mission. With Hab requirements and supplies requirements, I find my Duna mission is about 3x the mass now, and Jool missions 5x the mass. Which is pretty much the reason I like having LS mods!

If the stage 1 reuse costs get low enough it might make sense the throw up a company owned launch of a specialized stage 2 spacecraft that gathers up a half dozen regular stage 2s, deploys a big heat shield and land them somewhere, maybe even propulsively. The gathering them up might be a nightmare, assuming they are all on their own LEO or GTO orbits with different inclinations. Probably more economical than setting up a landing system for each one, but you'd need more advanced space robotics than exist now to get them put into a single vehicle. It would be incredibly awesome though, so maybe they'll run the numbers! I could do it in Kerbal with docking ports, but I have a feeling the real world is less forgiving...

#BrownStarPlanetsMatter

Nice! Much more effective than my plan! I might have to use the high inclination polar Joolian Relays. for the actual moons, I found a neat article about 4 satellite coverage for 100% up-time with 4 sats and never more than a 15 degree signal inclination that I've adapted. 1 Polar(90 degree inclination) sat with scanning rigging 6hr period 1 sat at 210 degree inc 6 hr period 1 sat at 330 degree inc 6 hr period 1 sat at equatorial inc 3 hour period the exact period can be changed so long as the equatorial one is half the main ones. Then all three will focus a different sat in Joolian orbit, I think I'll do 2 up and 2 down in elliptical orbits, at opposite points in the orbit. The inclined moonSats will target one Relay each, and the equatorial one will focus all 4. Should be 100% uptime with minimum connections and sats I think. I might be over building the Jool relay set with 4 though Also I went full on launch nut and lofted 19/24 required sats in the first trip, in a 430 part monster of lag and regret.

Has anyone figured out an elegant solution to RT relays around Jool? Pol is almost 200MM away at apoapsis, so the neither of the antennae with cones work, so I suppose you need a dish to the main relays in LJO? or does it make more sense to lug your main relays beyond Pol an have a wider ring? Every plan I have seems to run into complications, setting up relays in the crowded yet sparse system. I think I'm going to go with direct link 88 deployables from all the moons' comsats to the main ones in lowish Jool orbits 1 to 1 links with three sats in each orbit. Complex stuff! Also I've built like 10000 MKS bases and would be happy to help with and MKS/UKS questions!

Any thoughts on allowing EPL use only in Kerbin orbit? That would allow some latitude in making non aerodynamic vessels and wouldn't be that unreasonable to expect that at least some parts are assembled on orbit.