Col. Kernel

You guys do know that the "Science guy" is an engineer, and that lately he's put out some info that's far from scientific?

Thanks man!

Pardon my ignorance, but I have a question. Am I correct in thinking that to update this mod I'll have to download it anew and extract the fresh download into the directory? Do I need to do anything like delete the old mod directory first?

It's true, you don't have to go to the moon, but there are advantages for doing so. 1) Accountability. As I said, you aren't sneaking jack across a 240,000 mile vacuum. 2) The Lunar environment is much harsher than the Martian one. 3) There's science to be done. There's some cool stuff that can be done on the moon that can't even be dreamed about on Earth. The thought of a radio telescope on the far side comes to mind. And there's always profit in science.

I suppose that @Aegolius13 and @Helmetman are correct. What I asked for is Sim Colony on top of KSP. I guess that's feature creep about the size of Godzilla. I'm currently playing the stock game to learn my way around, so I won't be adding any of the mods suggested for the time being. But thanks for the suggestions, I will definitely be playing with them down the road.

If it makes you feel better let's say "establish a permanent, self sufficient manned presence" on the moon then. My point being that when it comes to establishing a self sustaining habitat, we have never been successful. Every one of those established on Earth has failed. Resources have been sneaked in, and people have been sneaked out. Put one on the moon and we'll have to figure out what it is that we've been doing wrong without cheating. When materiel or personnel are brought in or out, everyone will know about it. But it's still close enough (a day and a half) that materiel or personnel could be exchanged in an emergency without excessive risk to the people involved. Jumping straight to a Mars colony puts the personnel there at undue risk simply because of the distance involved.

Colonizing the moon would be for practice, practicality (much lower risk to the colonists for the reasons I cited), and for scientific returns. Once we have mastered the technologies and techniques to run a self sustaining base (aka colony) on the moon, then doing on Mars becomes a LOT more realistic. Unlike your Norse comparison, an initial base will be 100% dependent on resources from Earth. As for your concerns with power, thorium salt reactors are five 9s safe and no larger than a shipping container. Any lunar colony should be sub surface anyway since there's no atmosphere to burn up incoming meteorites.

I'm new here, Steam says I've played for 13 hours at this point. I'm not playing now because my sinuses have overridden higher brain functions, so please pardon me if this post is lacking in literary or logical content. Planetary bases are, from what I've read, one of the few points that KSP falls short on. Orbital stations seem to be fairly well fleshed out, so I would like to see if there's any player or dev interest in letting us build functional, aesthetically pleasing bases on the ground. Anyone here play Subnautica? If so, then you know what I'm looking for. Well, aside from the magical gun that shoots base parts out based on what mats you have on your person... I'm not expecting a radical change in the direction KSP plays, so initial parts would have to be delivered to the planet/satellite where you want your base. I'd like it if there were refining and manufacturing modules that players could land, then take their rovers out to find materials to refine (bases not just for fuel any more!) and construct more base parts to add on. Additional missions could be generated to bring rare minerals back to Kerbin, etc. But emergent gameplay aside, I would really like to see bases that look like bases, and Subnautica has what I consider to be very good examples. Well, I was trying to find some examples of people actually building a smallish base, or maybe even a medium one, but all of the base building videos I looked at were some ADHD Twitch streamers doing everything BUT building a base for the first 45 minutes. Still, you can see from the extravaganzas above what I'm after.

As several people already said, it's tough to define cheating in a single player game that has mods. Do you cheat at solitaire (assuming you play with real cards). You can, simply because it has rules. The rules I want to play KSP by are simple, no mods that change physics, add extra components, or automate decision making for me. I'm currently running 2 mods, KerbalX so I can upload my own ships, and The Kaptain's Log so I can document my adventures. Edit: No mods per above ... the first time around. After that I'll look and see what makes the game better or different (OPM)

When is Yellowstone, or one of the other 5 super volcanoes going to blow? When is a wandering asteroid that we haven't detected yet going to come screaming out of the sky and ring the Earth like a bell? All of the eggs our species has are in one basket, and we've just recently become aware just how fragile that basket is. I'd rather see a self sufficient Lunar colony first. It's a lot easier/faster to resupply if we find out that it's not as self sufficient as we think it is. Or, far more likely, it won't start off being self sufficient; we'll have to figure out how to make it that way as we go along. Mars is 8 months away, the moon is a day and a half. The first step towards a Martian colony begins on the Moon. Mars will NEVER be terraformed until we get mass conversion or some other SciFi energy source. Mars' iron core isn't liquid, and can't rotate, therefore Mars does not have a magnetic field. No magnetic field means that the Solar wind will erode any atmosphere we attempt to generate there, almost certainly faster than we can replenish it.

Installed, thanks for a very cool mod! I'm playing KSP as vanilla as I can keep it, I don't want any mods that alter the way the game plays. But I surely do want to have a record of my flights. Some are certain to be worthy of a Mission Report, such as this one.

Sorry @tomf I'm new here. Link to info on said expansion please?

Only power was from the Mk I capsule batteries. I wasn't in orbit long enough to use all 50 of that up. I have no been able to reproduce this issue, therefore I am going to consider this resolved.

I figured it could be done with a regular save game. It's the editing in of the money/science/reputation that would be tricky, in addition to the planetary alignments. But also, being able to lock out certain parts would be cool (or uncool!) for certain challenges.