Dr. Jet

My Best advice is to install CustomBiomes mod. You'll get a lot more fun fully exploring a same stellar body... and recover a lot more science too... even without returning probes.

Foldable wings? Excellent idea! As for inbuilt control surfaces - I advice you to look at Firespitter addon. It does have em implemented already.

1) You splash your craft in water. 2) You right-click on ISRU refinery 3) ??? 4) Profit!

Great job, man! Now to befriend your mod with Mechjeb and it will be totally purrfect!

First of all - I want to notice two quite nice TACLS compatible mods. Biomass and a seem-to-be-more-realistic Biomass Science+ DEV-build. Those are worthy to be put in compatible mods list. Though... First one is totally unrealistic as it doesn't use water in photosynthesis. Yep it's just "C02+light=Biomass+O2". Second one is much better, as it counts water usage and even simulates microbiotics, plant germination and respiration cycle, but... it seems to be using Kethane... what ruins all the realism thing. Trying to configure my own greenhouse part for use with TACLS, I realised some annoying things... 1) Stock generator module can't work with extra-tiny production rates used in TACLS. No problem, TacGenericConverter module can do and do it fine, but it doesn't have an "AlwaysActive" option, which results in such strange buttons as "Turn on/off Photosynthesis". (Always forget to switch it after launch. ) 2) Resource units are not proportional to mass or volume thus making it quite difficult to calculate realistic tank capacities and proper consumal/production rates for anything else than living kerbal. 3) Water purifier part produce from 1 unit of Wastewater 0.9 Units of Water and 6.382 Units of Waste... Where is the logic? Brine, which is almost inconvertible remnaint from IRL urine processor is merely 15% by mass and even less by volume to input. Considering wastewater to be not only urine, but also a graywater and water extracted from air filters, it's about 93% water and 7% combined waste output (RL systems). And we CANNOT store that small amount with current capacity balance. Not good. So... I request a much needed "AlwaysActive" option for TacGenericConverter (for simulating such slow things as photosynthesis, plant breathing, decay and so on) and suggest to think about a more sane mass-based units and proportional volume storage capacities, as it is already done with stock liquid fuel and oxidizer. P.S. Some math for people trying to configure their own greenhouses for TACLS like me. Glucose photosynthesis formula is 6CO2+6H2O->C6H12O6+6O2-Q. Formula for general carbohydrates is relatively the same (CO2+H2O->[CH2O]+O2-Q). That means with theoretical 100% efficiency 22 kg of carbon dioxide and 9 kg of water converts to 15 kg of general carbohydrates and 16 kg of oxygen. Nice and easy-to-remember numbers. In current (awful) TACLS unit system (using the sheet from http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/40667-0-23-WIP-TAC-Life-Support-0-8-22Dec?p=673496&viewfull=1#post673496) that will be "129.226 units of carbon dioxide and 15,019 units of water converts to 142,11 units of will-be-food-biomass and 111.884 units of oxygen". Do you see the difference? Unit-based CO2->02 is different from expected 1:1 rate. Facepalm... P.P.S. Plant respiration cycle can be simulated ve-e-ery draftly by a reverse process at 25% speed, which happens all the time independently of light.

Am I the only one who experienced 2.5m chutes shrinking down back to 1.25m on the launchpad?

Tried to experiment with FAR+DE+MJ(with FAR support module) and heavy SSTO spaceplanes. Partial success. Typical scenario: 1a) Manually launch, then slowly accurately pitch up close to the high-in-the-sky AG navball, then turn on AG with 0,1;69;0;35 (corrective steering off) 1b) Turn on AG with 0,1;69;0;20 (corrective steering on) right at start and pray about not catching a huge stall after takeoff 2) Wait till Rapiers or Sabres autoswitch and finally bring a spaceplane to orbit. Then do stuff at orbit (rendezvous, docking and such). 3) Deorbit burn to either 25km or even slightly negative PE, targetting at ocean to the west from KSC (Node planner or retrograde SASS and manual controlled burn). 3) Activate SASS with 90;5;0 setting (pitching 5 degrees about horizon). 5 to 7 degrees pitch seems to provides enough lift to aerobrake slowly without taking too much heat, while prograde trajectory with active DE effectively kills both spaceplane and crew. With shallow pitch at SASS almost no oscillation or wobbling occurs, what is good considering that any agressive pitch easily converts to stall. 4) At about 16 km altitude activate SPG "initiate hold" with 90;15000 and turn on engines (manually set back to airbreathing mode). 5) Pray about too aggressive SPG PID vertical oscillation and resulting wobbling not destroying spaceplane or put it to stall. 6) Wait for about 30 km distance to KSC runway. Activate autoland. 7) Pray about too aggressive SPG PID vertical oscillation not destroying spaceplane or crash it to land. 8) Slowly manually change thrust to zero. Manually deploy RealChute drag chutes at touchdown. So... Almost everything is very nice , however landing process is a bit complex. Just few suggestions to make things better. 1) A separate AG trajectory for SPH launches - starting from 0 degrees pitch, not 90 degrees as for VAB launches. Easy to implement, I believe. 2) Absolutely needed option to make SPG's PID less agressive at pitch correction, ideally disabling vertical oscillation at all. Corresponding PID tweaks are already implemented in rover autopilot, i believe. 3) Some way to automate the abovementioned landing scenario (3-8) would be nice. Input parameters: deorbit starting node, aerobraking pitch, glide altitude (already in SPG), landing dive distance, landing angle (already in SPG). Glide heading is determined by target (KSC or island). Maybe Autom8 revival? 4) Maybe some FAR-compatible and spaceplane-compatible aerobrake calculator for predicting a deorbit node and other needed parameters? Alas it would be some complex math for sure... 5) RealChute mod support. It's much more useful for VAB projects, but nevertheless. P.S. Still can't figure out if SASS is capable of holding "targetwise" heading with manually assigned pitch.

This mod is potentially a great couple for Interstellar based on ORS which have a pretty well working system of planetary resource gathering. One can already easily patch ORS to make Interstellar's Atmospheric Scoops collect avaiable CO2 from Eve and Duna atmospheres - just by adding "resourceName = CarbonDioxide" at appropriate places of \GameData\OpenResourceSystem\PlanetResourceData\atmosphericresourcedefinitions.cfg. Water, Oxygen and Hydrogen are trickier however... as they are treated as LqdWater, Oxidizer and LiquidFuel respectively and changing that will break Interstellar mechanics... BTW, RL life support systems are not using any magical CO2 -> O2 convertors, but use water electrolyse and Sabatier process instead. 2 H20 -> 2 H2 + 02 C02 + 2 H2 -> CH4 + H20 Wonderfully, Interstellar mod already DO use a methane (CH4) for engines and have an implementation of Sabatier process at ISRu Refinery.

Excellent piece of automatization! However a triplet of design flaws were detected: 1) Altimeter doesn't let one to choose less then 6 km in "km" mode (though one usually want to deploy drogue chutes at 4-3km). 2) Altimeter doesn't let one to choose more then 100m in "m" mode (though one usually want to deploy main chutes between 1km-700m). 3) "Gears" action group is missing from the list (though one obviously want to deploy landing gears before actually landing).