Der Anfang

149,600,000 kilometres, anyone?

Ah yes. That's exactly what I meant. The effort of actually shipping ore FROM the surface would be virtually pointless. I have designed an SSTO for Tylo which is meant only to mine and refuel on the surface, rather than taking anything back up.

It's incredible you can SSTO on Eve at all. Even so, it's also quite fascinating at how much of a difference you get in ISP for every 1000 metres on Eve. Right on Sea level, it's a damn pain in the ass to deal with and only very few engines actually work at that level. I have also considered in the long future trying to land on a mountain top, but it would require expert piloting skills and a lot of practice. Also you gotta be sure not to tip your craft if you land on an incline... which makes mountain landings especially difficult.

That moment when I realized during my Ascension Programmed that I was supposed to have an engineer along with the rest of my crew to go to Eve. However, when I discovered why mining Gilly was so slow, I realized that an extra scientist snuck on board in place of the original engineer's spot... must have tied up that pesky engineer and posed as them during the boarding procedure. Sigh.

I always land on the Mun first. Considering what humanity has done in '69... there's just that epic sense of nostalgia and accomplishment when you actually do that as your first extra LKO mission. If Minmus were my first ELKO mission, it would be a bit of a pushover and in fact it's kind of - actually it quite is - anticlimactic. Given, for future missions, I always establish stations and mining operations on Minmus versus the Mun, for obvious reasons. Although you need ~100 Delta-V more to get there, the overall mission needs much less than Mun. I love both worlds equally, although to me the Mun is just so very strange and I love it for it's strangeness. Then again, irl The Moon has always been such a strange world to try to imagine - for me at least. And airless world with no blue sky and much lower gravity, and very dusty. Oh my! When doing a Mun Mission, I love listening to this:

I find stations extremely useful around moons and planets outside of Kerbin. For one, if I have any automated mining operations, it could help me for interplanetary missions to further planets. I like Dres especially because of the dresteroids, which is perfect for an asteroid mining station. Once you drain that asteroid, just move the station to a new one, preferably look for E class ones. Eve is an interested planet to have a station around. It's also pretty convenient, since you want to mine Gilly as well. The best reason for that is to save fuel for future landings on Eve, just deploy a dry mass Eve lander and dock it in Eve/Gilly orbit to refuel. As for Jool, although I haven't sent any manned craft yet (and I only sent a probe to one of the moons thus far), I would definitely want a mining operation there, since there are a lot of moons to visit. Tylo is a tricky one to visit constantly for science, so you probably want a very specially designed SSTO lander for that which can mine and process fuel on it's surface. Otherwise, just use the other moons for stationing.

It's been a while since I have really touched KSP, or even been in the forums for that matter. I kinda want to get back into it again, but was deterred by the 1.2 release since some of my favourite mods weren't updated for a while. For instance, EVE, Mechanical Jeb, and Distant Object Enhancement. Yet I have noticed people were able to use those in the 1.2 version and I have no idea how they managed to do that. I found a way around that only for KER via some sort of master folder thingy of some sort. KSP is a beautiful game even in stock... but after I have played so long without those mods it feels kind of lack lustre.

Yes. I had Fraps for a little bit. Although, I was really confused, as I couldn't seem to get any of my recordings beyond 30 seconds each. Is that a non-premium feature where you're supposed to buy it if you want longer recordings?

What kind of software do most KSPers use when recording a video? Is there any freeware? And any recommended video editing software?

I've updated the scoreboard, everyone. Apologies for the long delay. Please, keep the entries coming! I love what we have so far.

@ JacobJHC Don't forget about my submission, mate. ;)

http://imgur.com/a/z7gbm 27 tonne nuke ship. Hope you like it. Had to play in 1.1.3 because I wanted to use the KER mod, and was too lazy to muck around with the file stuff for 1.2. Are resubmissions accepted?

How did you get KER to work in 1.2?? The KER wasn't updated yet... was it?