Trann

Yeah, a bad combo of pics and a wee bit of story embellishment: with all the radiators active, I had about 30% efficiency.

I don't usually do longer stories but this bit of mission prep was entertaining to me. Lifted my nuclear tour drive (with SCAN sat tech) and ore mining rig into orbit to dock them up and give them a shakedown mining mission at Minmus. The trip and descent was a breeze but unfortunately, I forgot how to use radiator panels vs thermal control systems and this rig was useless. So I sent a crewed tour lander up with a few extra parts tucked away, landed within 100m of the rig, and made a few short hops to deliver things. After repairs, the rig runs nicely at 100%; adding simultaneous ore conversion drops efficiency to about 70% (but I prefer to mine ore then convert it anyway). The next time the tour drive came up overhead, I launched to intercept. Everyone launches two ships at once because they're too lazy to wait an orbit, right? Tour lander and fully loaded rig docked, lining up for docking with the tour drive in the background. What happened next was a bit of a blur: moments after docking, I noticed a small oscillation start in the ore mining rig. I got super lucky: I disabled SAS and immediately undocked and things settled down. I'm guessing the ore mass in the center of the vessel was an issue because my radial tanks had no struts to the center bodies. A delivery probe sent up with needed components and, once it arrived, parts were transferred off the probe and onto the tour lander. I packed eight struts -- four for each ship (I probably could autostrut things but I don't understand the mechanics of that as well) -- and, with so much space left in the delivery probe's storage unit, I also brought drain valves (in case I needed to dump fuel from the lead tour ship to move the center of mass further back), some extra lights (to make the interiors gaps more visible in the dark), and a four pack of chutes (to up the redundancy for the mining rig's descent in atmosphere). Repairs went well. This iteration of my tour ship is now stable under full burn even with the leading ship fully fuelled. She'll remain in a parking orbit until an interesting rendezvous presents itself. Hopefully, I haven't forgot anything.

Nice

Oh, I see what you mean now; I totally forgot what the original looked like (and I was looking at it on the wiki page like a doofus). It's gotta be the Restock mod (it's listed in the hidden items) https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/182679-1123-restock-revamping-ksps-art-feb-25/

Oh, sorry, I completely missed your point! Pretty sure it's part of the base game? The larger https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/'Drill-O-Matic'_Mining_Excavator and the Junior https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/'Drill-O-Matic_Junior'_Mining_Excavator which you can find in the Tech Tree under Advanced Science Tech https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Technology_tree The best way to (almost indefinitely) tour the system by processing your own fuel.

Yeah, it was all about getting the light transition right. Testing in the VAB doesn't reflect the actual movement of parts so I was going back and forth to the launch pad to try and get the light drop and rise to match the drill's. I'm way too excited for such a small visual effect

Laughing at myself for sinking hours into useless-but-pretty robotics!

When Minmus satellite and rover repair missions are fast and have good profit margins... 8)

First, I'm constantly impressed by what you folks are designing and building. So much amazing work! Me? I've added even more mods that I've never had before and built my first rig for rover deployment (and recovery)! I got lucky: I designed this to have a short drop when the ship is sitting on her engine bells and the magnetic ports were strong enough to grab it back! Worked like a peach on Mun and Minmus! So many exclamation points! I may never build a mecha but I bet I'll be able to get another few years out of this game, easily.

While waiting for my Outer Planets intercepts (first time with this mod)... ... I got my Jool Relay Satellite Bus to successfully deliver all orbital sats: after circularizing at a near-planar orbit, I detached them all, set each to intercept a different Joolian moon, and all captured on their first pass. Laythe's is the only one that didn't quite make polar orbit due to insufficient delta-v. The old design (on an old computer) had me put a Jool delivery vehicle into orbit and then lift each sat into orbit and attach the payload to the "bus"; this new design (on a new computer) can lift them all without killing my frame-rate! The goal with this run is to have an orbital relay and surface probe on every body before doing a Grand Tour (I gotta research if that's even possible with Outer Planets). I'm so rusty, Moho tossed aside two of my surface landers before I finally succeeded in sticking one there I can't believe I still want to keep playing this game after starting with 0.21 about a decade ago! I think a lot of it has to do with the great folks who do the cool add-ons and mods. Thank you, all.

After a two year hiatus, I'm creating my first relay network (again) so I can enjoy KSP with all the visual mods I can find. *Recently upgraded to some Pro Apple Silicon and a 27" 4K monitor and things are soooo smoooooth!

0.21 so another post-free-updates 2013 guy here, paying for stuff like a chump.

That works within a forum, sure, but doesn't cross forums. As a test to confirm that, I went to Breaking Ground Discussion and marked that entire hierarchy as read. The one following it had plenty unread. I then went into to the multiple articles in Breaking Ground Discussion and there is no "Next unread topic" available.

There used to be a method to list all unread threads (those that have had new posts since the last time I visited) regardless of the sub-forum. With this newest UI, I can visit a sub-forum (eg, KSP Discussion), select Sort-By->Custom->Last Reply: My Last Login. At that point, I see what I want and the URL adds these interesting bits at the end of the forum name: index.php?/forum/32-ksp-discussion/&sortby=forums_topics.last_post&sortdirection=desc Is there a way to do this across all forums? If I can figure out the URL build, it becomes a great bookmark to drop in with. Thanks.

My first Duna landing, circa 2014.