TheTripleAce3

The one time full production would be a bad thing

Ah, so it wouldn't be from Dres' position just being closer to the Sun or something like that then

If you can post some screenshots of the craft and drop rank arrangement I'll try to get back to you later today on any tips I have (aside from whiplases liking 8km more than 4km on MK2 bodies). Best of luck.

How bad was the power deficit earlier that you mentioned?

This is stock w/Making History

Anyone else see this?

What is the draft (depth) of your hydrofoil at low speeds? And also, any tips for making them?

If you're in science mode I'd suggest a flyby of the mun first before a landing attempt, but another issue is that your craft doesn't seem to have the fuel or engines to go terribly far. If you have a probe (which I assume you do if you have a fairing), I'd launch a few of those first to the mun, get some science from space high over and near the mun and spend that science unlocking more stuff you can use to get there and land there (like the Terrier for manned flights or Spark engines for small probes which are easier to get to the mun with). Another idea would be adding a set of Fleas at the bottom of the rocket for launch to save a bit of dv and give you more thurst to pack in extra fuel for your swivels

Try doing polar circumnavigations from each launch site going north once and south once. You'll get slightly different scenery each time and have a lot of land to ISRU with, not to mention it takes you over more area than equatorial circumnavigation.

I may have found my new favorite place on Kerbin

Literally just one radial ore tank will work, and I'm not sure about the crossfeed constraints on Ore, build a small thing with radial tanks and try it out? For building seaplanes, just try it out on Kerbin. If it works there, it usually works on Laythe.

A plane with the small ISRU and big drill is viable at Laythe, but powering both at the same time will be "fun".

Exploring laythe's water can be as simple or complex as you like. Make a stick with a decent sized (filled) ore tank on one side, and probe core w/rtg, science, parachutes, antenna (plus batteries to transmit), and even a skycrane if you want to on the bottom if you want to be simple about it while reaching the deep blue. If you mean surface science and not floor science, make a seaplane.

BFR it up and send another 2 or 3 Landers that can refuel each other?

I flew to the Golden Chain isles yesterday and the ice island as well in something I threw together in 5 minutes. Great spot to keep the birds while you're near the southern ice sheet. And the tankers by this point have probably flown 2x equatorial circumference of Kerbin. Keep up the good pace man.

Ion outwards has 2 easy solutions. 1: retrograde kerbin orbit keeps you on the light side for your burn with only a 352m/s dv cost 2: put 2 stacks of 3 oscar-b tanks alongside the main probe and use them while on the dark side of a prograde orbit.

I've never been to that island, guess I have something to do this weekend now

Try setting the nav ball to orbital mode at the very start of a launch. While you don't have any movement on/over the surface, you do still have rotational velocity and also carry the velocity of kerbin. NVM I just saw the parentheses, disregard this post (which it seems I can't delete)

Meanwhile 2 or 3 years of playing and I still don't do rendezvous without absolutely having to... (Thank god for ion engines being great and not doing manned missions) Congrats man.

At least Eve is fairly easy to get to?

Not as unfortunate as the tylo impactor I made yesterday that was supposed to be a jool probe.

Awesome job making a hydrofoil, man. Very glad to see the giant crater get attention, that's the benchmark I use for finding my aircraft range :p

I've never made it that close to the sun, but a tip I'll give you is to use repeated mun flybys to exit kerbin for about 770m/s (perfect run) and then burn so your aphelion is about Duna height and then retro from there. For me it cut down dv cost to 4.8k due to sloppiness in retroburning. If you are seriously considering going that close to the sun, the ablative shield isn't going to help that much, a fairing and an (uninflated, yes this sounds strange but it works) inflatable shield might do better, not to mention solar array are done for pretty far up from 16km, so your best power option might just be RTG. As for comms, if you have any strong relays like the RA-50, one of those at Eve or Moho should help dramatically.

I only use them for initially landing the rover on planet, to avoid water and really steep hills mainly.

It does still protect you, look at @Stratzenblitz75 and his videos on land speed records and you'll see he uses them quite nicely with a rotated ablative shield too. That might be fairing though, not quite sure.