Warmachine

I'm having a bit of odd behavior with the MKS drills, though as I'm typing this, I'm realizing this might be a Restock issue and not an MKS issue. Regardless, I'll float it for opinions while I continue to troubleshoot: My suspicion is the animation module isn't getting a texture it is supposed to have. I'm working under the assumption that it's because Restock didn't load a texture or something (pulling up my log file now), but in the meantime is anyone else experiencing this? edit: Yep, it was a problem with my whitelist not being broad enough.

I tend to agree with the CoM assessment, but disagree with the yaw control. He could drop the inward vertical stabilizers and make them into elevators. Might give him better control when the CoM moves. That said his description almost sounds like a not enough power scenario. I'd recommend more wing personally, so that he has more lifting surface in the thinner atmosphere.

I've had a lot of success integrating my landing thrusters ala the Mako from Mass Effect. I like doing it that way because I can then send the rover ahead of a crewed mission. Alternatively, I've done some R/C Car style rovers that simply go in a service bay and get decoupled. My most elaborate was dropping a medium sized Malamute rover (from USI) out the back of a cargo spaceplane while aerobreaking at Duna. Bill: "This is my stop!" Jeb: "We're not stopping!" Bill: "What?" Thunk.

It can move itself, so it's not technically a space station, but it fills the same role, functionally, for long duration interplanetary missions. Also it's not yet fueled up and supplied, but it is structurally complete, so meet the "Armstrong." 5k dV fully fueled, and capable of supporting it's crew for 6+ years without resupply with full saddle bags. Saddle bags can be attached along the rails below the docking arms. It is powered by a fission reactor for efficiency in the outer solar system, and has LFO verniers for orienting itself. It clocks in just shy of 100m long, and 500 tons wet. Thrust is provided by a single "Scylla" aerospike, as it is has the best thrust/efficiency ratio of all the nuclear engines I have unlocked. Eventually I plan to replace the engineering block with something a bit more efficient, but for now, 70/30 engine/craft is what I'm doing! Of course, unfueled it's basically a very fancy orbital laboratory.

I want my missions to be perfect. In my latest save, this means I want to accomplish as much as humanly possible in one trip, so I end up with extremely elaborate plans to send a space station towing a rover, lander, ISRU to service the lander, and life support for a multi-month surface mission to send the rover (with all of the science) to every biome, transmit one copy of the science to every lab in the SOI, and keep a copy to bring home. I've entered the "late game" in that my modded game has entered the speculative part of the tech tree, and I only just landed on Minmus yesterday. This also leads to me having entire multi hour sessions where I'm just staring at the ship in the VAB and trying to think of features I'm missing and tweaking, alt-tabbing to check delta-V maps, then repeating the loop. I'm just glad I like building space stations/bases. Any missions to other planets (let alone OPM) are going to be nightmares.

My advice on this is to never ever ever eyeball rendezvous. Fiddle with maneuver nodes until you have a close encounter (within physics range close), switch to "target" on the navball and zero out your velocity by burning retrograde to the target. Then, point at the target on the navball (just use your reaction wheels for this to save RCS), switch to docking mode, and coast in, keeping your prograde marker on the target marker. I find it helps me to orient myself so that the whiskey mark on the navball is right side up (looks like a W). This will help if you have to switch to eyeballs when you get close because you're not aligned to the docking port. And above all else, do it slow. 1m/s slow, no more than 5m/s when you're pretty far away, at least until you get a feel for your RCS power.

Download a life support mod, and grab some stuff like Station Parts Expanded to give you options. I'm partial to the USI stuff, but really the idea is to force you to consider the fact that shipping a Kerbal off for 10 years without any snacks or televisions is inhumane (inkermane?). Also there's a space station science pack that makes stations more useful. And USI has a colonization pack that adds a minigame to the ground base building. Basically, start getting mods. KSP is a sandbox, and you're free to bring what you'd like into the sandbox to play with. Links below are to a base I'm currently building, and an interplanetary vessel I assembled in orbit, for inspiration. https://i.imgur.com/CCjzGW2.png https://i.imgur.com/kCFAZYR.png

Loading bottlenecks are 95% of the time hard drive related. Your NVMe drive is what is dropping your load times--it has blazing fast access speed with the NVMe protocol. The processor helps, but more for physics calculations than loading files. As a rule of thumb, I look at the processor when it's gameplay calculations slowing things down, the GPU when it is texture rendering slowing things down, and the hard drive for loading times.

So begins the construction of Gagarin Base. Among other things I did today.

I'm building something.... big... Project Tourmaline is the code name for this mothership-style interplanetary craft. I play with life support, so when considering things like a training mission to Jool, I need to contend with the fact that my Kerbals will need sufficient facilities to keep them alive for multiple years in space. I'm missing a few technologies I want before actually starting to assemble this thing-namely some of the more advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear engines my mods provide, but this is the general idea. The TWR of this thing is more akin to something powered by ion engines, but given that as of writing, with all 8 cargo containers full of fertilizer (a very unrealistic payload for this thing), it clocks in at 315 tons "fully assembled." This will only go up once the reactor is installed, a proper nuclear engine is installed, and the docking arms are completed. I still haven't figured out two things: what kind of lander to build, and how to deal with turning this thing and keeping it stable. I figure I just need to hide reaction wheels somewhere (sticking them in random places looks really ugly), but also there's also an argument to just bite the bullet and include LFO verniers. Edit: I finished a prototype and took it on a hyperedit test flight. Unity blew up when I tried to view the Jool system though...

This has convinced me to give kOS a shot. I love the idea of a "real" space program, using computer programs to actually do the mission. Of course, before I start working on automated flight plans, I need to work out a few bugs myself. Namely, remembering to put matching docking ports on the craft that are expected to dock with each other. This station has no Jr. size docking ports. Not that it really matters, since the capsule is also under-engineered, and doesn't have enough margin of error in fuel to actually return to the surface. Ultimately, the mission is still good--my kerbals will EVA across with the science, and I'll even get some science when I slam the pod into the surface--but still disappointing. I might end up opting for a more broadly useful craft as well by including the ability to move cargo too. That'll require more powerful engines and more dV though.

Today I brought all of the theoretical pieces of my exploration plan together. Rover, Shuttle, Base Station, Space Station, and Crew Transport. Thus the field base is complete. The things in the background are the landing stages for the shuttle and rover. The shuttle actually rides in on the much larger supply lander, which brings the material kits for inflating the habitat and agroponics modules. In the future, with more science, I'll have a more elegant rover delivery service than "stick the rover in a faring, yeet it at the Mun, and tip it over on landing." Speaking of yeeting things into space, the crew transport is a somewhat lazy thing. A cupola, shanty, docking port, fuel tanks, and an engine. I forgot batteries, so once it gets back to LKO I'm going to have to ship some up and have the engineers attach them. The saddle tanks are too wide and I was too lazy to build a faring and rocket that'd be aerodynamic, so... a triumph of thrust over aerodynamics? I did my ascent the old fashioned way by burning straight up to the thin atmosphere and then tilting over to circularize. When it arrived at the munar station, I completed three contracts I'd completely forgotten I had.

Today I have sent out the third part of an experimental 4-part exploration plan. This "Menthe" orbital station primarily exists to process the science collected on the surface. On the surface sit a "Cadmus" rover and "Beachhead" base station capable of supporting the scientist and engineer sent to the surface of new worlds to actually conduct the experiments. The Beachhead has supplies and agroponics, as well as resource processing to fuel the yet-to-be-finalized light shuttle that moves the crew (and experiments they gathered) to and from the surface for processing/crew rotation. Theoretically, the Menthe can be expanded with fuel tanks, habitation modules, and additional science equipment to fill more roles, but below is the base configuration. It is powered by a single MX-0 150kW nuclear reactor on the ventral side of the service module (top left), to simplify and stabilize power generation during dark side transits.

Today was a quiet day, relatively speaking. Two shipments to KerbStation 100, the first being a small skiff of 810 units of monopropellant and a capsule for a crew rotation. Somehow an extra pilot was lurking in one of the modules, when I need more scientists, not pilots. The capsule brought Sigfry and Podus Kerman to the station to work in the research and zoology labs. They've since passed their first experiment results over to the processing laboratory on the other side of the station, and we're all very optimistic about future experiments this station is slated to perform. The last time I posted, the solar blanket hadn't been installed yet. Here it is in its fully deployed, sunward glory. You can also see the fuel skiff in the gaps between the array.

I ended up strutting it to hell and back (there's four attached to the upper girder segment, and two to the lower), so I'm hoping that keeps the Kraken below Jool's clouds. That said, I do see some worrying wobbles when SAS is on (or Smart A.S.S.), but the struts seem to keep this from turning into more than a slight flutter. Still, if my station does try to fly away again, I'll keep this in mind!