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Career Mun Polar Crater Mining Challenge V 1.1 With 5000 science points, 500 000 funds, and a bargain on facility upgrades you are challenged to mine Mun's polar crater. After choosing the proper technologies all leftovers will need to be converted into funds to pay for your one and only vessel. Tasks include upgrading facilities, choosing technologies, administrating for funds, designing an automated all in one ISRU Scanner Miner Rues: Start normal Career set Starting Funds slider to 500 000 set Starting Science to 5 000 set Funds Penalties to 20% Automated Only; No Kerbals Allowed Any craft that will be controlled needs some communication in anticipation of the upcoming changes to antennae. Use all ISRU scanners at Mun Only One Vessel and One Launch Deploy mining rig to Polar crater and deliver fuel into 200 km circular orbit around Mun Ore mined from the Polar crater and converted to LOX is valid Fourteen day time limit starts when vessel takes off No cheats or exploits* Mods that do not alter game play are alright Use this game seed: 1004551218 Edit save file and look for RESOURCE_SETTINGS then change GameSeed. GameSeed = 1004551218 *Once landed on Mun and during ISRU operation the time warp cannot go above 100x due to an electric charge exploit #8816. The exploit is mining can be performed with a small fraction of normal electric charge which renders batteries, fuel cells and solar panels over powered. The time warp can go above 1000 during times when charge exceeds demand and is illustrated using screen shots of normal time electric usage before and after exceeding the 100x time warp. Winning: Post screen shots of your vessel, ISRU scanning mining operation. The amount of LOX delivered to 200 km circular orbit within the fourteen day time limit. High Scores: 6356 MoeslyArmlis My Rig Posting my results might spoil the fun and frustration of this puzzle.

The Mun Polar Crater ISRU Challenge Stock Sandbox This is about sending a complete autonomous ISRU package to scan resources, mine ore, convert and deliver the fuel back to a station in an equatorial 250 km circular orbit around Mun. Using the GameSeed = 1823959382 in the persistence file* will set the resource map and Mun's polar crater will have the highest concentration at 80% resources. This area was challenging because the sunlight had long periods of both dark and light plus returning to an equatorial orbit. Send a complete package to an equatorial Mun orbit. Disembark Scanners once inside Mun SOI and send them to a polar orbit. Scan Mun for resources. Disembark the ISRU to land in the crater. Mine for resources and convert to LOX. Deliver to an orbiting fuel depot. Score is based on total vessel cost over the total fuel delivered to orbit. Gather as much as you can in the 90 day time limit. Rules Stock parts only / no cheats / sandbox mode / mods that do not change gameplay are ok Autonomous vessels only Only one launch vessel Ninety day time limit begins at launch Launch a complete ISRU & Scanner Package (all resource scanner types must be used) Send package first to an equatorial Mun orbit Fuel depot must be at 250 km equatorial circular orbit High orbit scanner below 100 km polar orbit Low orbit scanner below 50 km polar orbit Ground surveyor scan Polar Crater LOX (maintain fuel ratio) converted from ore that was mined in the crater during the ninety day period is valid LOX need to be only docked to the fuel depot Divide vessel cost by the total liquid fuel post screenshots GameSeed = 1823959382 * create/start a sandbox game and exit to menu. Edit the save or persistence file and look for ResoureScenario and then Resource_Settings This works in the 1.1 prerelease not sure about earlier versions. I used to reload and rescan to achieve the right game seed. This example of initial orbit setup just before landing the ISRU. This is my A ISRU AIO vessel. Delivered Low and High Orbital Scanners; Lander / Heavy Fuel Truck; Rover Light Surveyor, Rover ISRU; Orbital Fuel Depot; Light Fuel Truck This vessel is intended for interplanetary ISRU and testing this on Mun in the Polar Crater seemed to be the best litmus test. The mining operation will begin tonight and I will post my results. Postponed the operation and redesigned the vessel for the challenge. Going with this cost reduced version. Managed to shave 70k off the original. Edit: The original ISRU version had no issues with heat and in prerealese 1.1 it is now a problem. Tried adding fold able type radiators but they sit idle. Sure glad to see that bug is squashed #8157 New Build: I decided to rebuild and now working on a Mega Miner. It scales in at 45 tonnes and has 14 heavy drills. Needs more cooling.

First off I can not say enough to thank all the great folks making some amazing mods for this game. The RO RSS community and its leaders/founders are just doing an amazing job and are really inspiring other people to new levels of exploration and mission planning. I recently came across stratochief66's thread "RSS - Challenges of Mars Missions" It involves using ISRU as a way to develop more feasible mission plans for Mars. I am trying to develop and orbital fuel/production station and a ferry for travel between the station and surface and for suborbital hops. These type of station and craft would be employed well down the road from the initial interactions with Mars like stratocheif66 is working on. I will start with one main station design and two ferry designs; one for crew transport and one for cargo/materials. Utilizing ISRU for production of additional fuel on the surface of the planet allows for much smaller craft with very reasonable round trip deltaV. Producing fuel in orbit also has its advantages that i will explore. Right now, I am working with a 70 tn prototype. It has about 4600 deltaV of fuel and can produce another 4600 deltV of fuel after landing over a period of 70 days. This is the crew variant and can support 3 persons for 210 days if needed. Crew, supplies, capsule come in about 7.5tn. So the cargo variant will have about the same capacity of 11% weight cargo for a 70 tn craft. This is a completely reusable craft, and will use a pure propulsion profile for ascent and decent. I may incorporate aero interactive devices of some sort to shave some deltaV requirements, but for now I am trying to keep it simple. I also do not want to use anything that I do not feel certain is modeled as closely as possible to a real life object. The orbital fuel station prototype is fairly simple and, when full, can refuel/restock a ferry twice, and has tank space to take on resources for fuel production in orbit. It will develop more as the ferry design is refined and we get a better understanding of the frequency of the initial transit scheduled. Even as it stands now it could be mirrored on a central hub or expanded to any radial degree desired. All resources are in color/pattern coded tanks so that I can get used to the proportions of volume and weight of the various resource components as I develop designs and test things. I am working with the basic RO RSS install and I only use RO modified stock and procedural parts. ISRU and Heat Pumps are my two part pack additions for my current testing. I use all sorts of visual stuff and control/metrics mods. Ill paste screen below with full mod folder. I have two videos of some of my initial flight tests. Ones is a decent from the orbital fuel station to the surface and the other is the ascent from the same location on the surface to the orbital fuel station after refueling with ISRU. Both trips had 500+ deltaV to spare so we are close to the set up that I will use. I would like to have 10% fuel reserve in the final design if possible. Mars Ferry Landing https://thumb2016.s3.amazonaws.com/1616/test/Mars Ferry Landing.mp4 Mars Ferry Takeoff https://thumb2016.s3.amazonaws.com/1616/test/Mars Ferry Takeoff.mp4 craft files for ferry and station as they are in these videos. https://thumb2016.s3.amazonaws.com/1616/test/Mars Ferry C1.craft https://thumb2016.s3.amazonaws.com/1616/test/Mars Station F1.craft I will always post the craft in the video so that anyone can try the same thing. I will also in the future include flight profile information to better help you get similar results. I have an educational background in math and physics, but I am a total newb to this game, community and rocket science in general. However, it is all about solving small problems and I love to do that. I am open to suggestions and alternative methods for what I am doing My next goal is to land two craft in close proximity. I will be installing scansat and researching to choose a good place on the equator for my landing site. Let me know if you are aware of a good spot. Right now I would like to be able to land +or- 0.5 km from a given target.

ISRU Rhino SSTO Explorer Mk1 Jool 5 Mission Hi All Here is the Mission Report of a new try for the ISRU Level of The Ultimate Jool 5 Challenge - continuation for KSP 1.0! , my first try since the 1.05 update ! I started a new career in hard mode, so the challenge is a little harder in ISRU version, because of the restricted Ore availability... To be efficient, i wanted to do a SSTO ship with 4 Kerbals ( The Orange Suits boys and girl ), the minimum of fuel, two big drills and a big converter to avoid long mining time. BTW, that's the first mission to Jool in this carreer, so i also needed the full science pack... FOR SCIENCE !, and to find good Ore spots. After a looong brainstorming and simulation testing (Thank's HyperEdit ), i ended with this ship: The ISRU Rhino SSTO Explorer Mk1 ! ( <--- Craft file here) 235t., 82parts, 225097funds, 1 Rhino, 2 Vectors (to help Kerbin ascent, and if a boost is needed), 16155LF and 19475Ox. The Vac. Dv of this ship fully fuelled is 4719m/s with the three engines On, and 4836m/s with the Rhino only. The only mod used in this mission: KER. One launch, no sats, no rovers, just 4 Kerbals and a ship Total cost of the mission: 225097 - 201775 = 23322 funds ! Now, it's time to go... First chapter of the mission: To Jool ! In this chapter, the Kerbin ascent, Minmus Journey, ISRU refueling, and first burn to Jool System Second chapter of the mission: Vall and Laythe ! In this chapter, the Jool System insertion, the Scanning of Ore and the Landing on Vall and Laythe Third chapter of the mission: Bop and Tylo ! In this chapter, from Laythe to Bop, and... Tylo Fourth and last chapter of the mission: Pol and Kerbin ! In this chapter: from Tylo to Pol, and back to Kerbin ! Fly safe with Valentina !

This is an ISRU factory I'm planning on sending to Minmus. It has: 1x Drill-o-matic (the 1.25 ton version, not the Jr.) 1x Convert-o-Tron 125 (the smaller one, because it balances nicely weight-wise with the drill) 8x radial ore tanks (at 75 ore per tank, total capacity 600 ore) 2x Thermal Control System (medium) 4x Radiator Panel (large) about 4.5k electric charge capacity 8x gigantor solar panels. I'm using some mods, but most of them hopefully aren't relevant to this question -- exception might be TAC life support because the kerbals need electric charge to stay alive. The complete list is: Chatterer - 0.9.7.86 Contract Configurator - 1.9.6 Contract Pack: The K Files - 1.1.1 Contract Pack: RemoteTech - 2.0.1 Contract Pack: Tourism Plus - 1.4 Kerbal Attachment System - 0.5.5 Kerbal Engineer Redux - 1.0.19.4 Kerbal Inventory System - 1.2.5 KSP-AVC Plugin - 1.1.5 Final Frontier - 0.9.8.1882 RCS Build Aid - 0.7.7 RemoteTech - 1.6.9 SmartParts - 1.6.6 TAC Life Support - 0.11.2.1 Kerbal Alarm Clock - 3.5 TweakScale - 2.2.6 Waypoint Manager - 2.4.5 So here are the actual questions: If I'm planning on running the drill and the convert-o-tron pretty much continuously until the LFO tanks are full... Which processes ore faster, the drill producing the ore, or the convert-o-tron 125 turning it into fuel? In other words will my ore tanks fill up because the drill is faster, or empty out because the convert-o-tron is faster? If my ore tanks fill up, will the drill shut down? If so will it start back up when some space becomes available? If my ore tanks empty, will the convert-o-tron stop working, or simply wait for more ore to be put in the tanks? I know the answer to question 1 potentially depends on the abundance of ore at the dig site, but I'm looking for a general answer based on people's typical experiences. This is my first attempt at using the stock ISRU system, I don't want to waste funds and time sending a mission that has no chance of working, and for mental health reasons I don't want to start up a separate sandbox to test this out for free first. Thanks in advance for any replies. Hints regarding electric charge and heat dissipation would also be very welcome.

I get my fuel from Minmus using a large ISRU lander. (photo below). I seems to take a lot longer than it did on some previous missions. In my latest fuel mission, I have 8 drills taking up 0.00525 units of ore/second. But after 30 days, I only get 1103 units of liquid fuel. (Using Lf only on the ISRU converter.) By my math, this is 1/5 of what I should have gotten?

Hello, this is my first entry here. I wanted to share my Jool 5 mission with you. Thought about this for a few months now, but never had enough time to do it. But, the mission: It´s an IRSU level entry, and because thats not enough, i´ve put a station on my ship, that i´ll leave at Jool when i return. The ISRU unit is built into that station. Mods used are: KER, MJ (call me lazy, if you want ), Kerbal Alarm Clock, NavHud, AntennaRange, EVE, scatterer, Planetshine Part 1: Planning Part 2: Orbital construction Part 3: Journey to Jool and first mining run Part 4: Mining on Pol Part 5: Laythe Part 6: Tylo and Vall Part 7: Bop and back to Kerbin

Sorry no cool story line here. Just me touring the System for the first time. Ahead will be the mundane ramblings of a madman, lessons in minimalism and mission creep, probably more than a few stupid questions if anyone is around to answer, and maybe if we're lucky some pretty pictures. Mission Goals: -Step foot on every body in the system aside from Eve (Jool and the Sun obviously excluded) -Rescue Valantina (stuck in between Duna and Kerbin orbits on an escape scooter) -Don't loose any parts, be able to refuel in every system. -Return to Kerbin, land safely. Settup: Sandbox, no mods, no real self imposed conditions, minimal part clipping. No dV calculations done, don't have KER or MJ have no idea what it can do. Everything is SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) The Ship: Ramble Into Bramble The RIB is actually three ships, not counting the two uncontrolled cargo pods. The Ramble front and center, on the left the engines of Bramble are visible, and Into parked on the right. Ramble: Ramble is the main interplanetary drive, living quarters, and fuel storage section. It comes up on a booster with Into which I'll document later, then docks with Bramble and heads off to the Mun to refuel (took about 18t of fuel off the first RIB... more on that later too. But it will need a small top-off to get to Mun or Minmus) Into: Into is a workhorse. It's a main engine pod, a polar scan-sat, an RCS tug, a personal shuttle, a fully fledged interplanetary ship if need be. Into grabbing the Krayon, Bramble visible in background. The idea is, upon getting captured by a body, when your Ap is very high Into will detach and put itself in a polar orbit to do a resource scan. When complete it will meet the other ships in an equatorial orbit to help docking (it is the only ship with RCS, although the others can be docked without it by a skilled hand) Bramble in next post...

So my next mission I have planned it to land a load of refuelable planes on Laythe and making my own "air force" to police the waters where the kracken may lye. I was wondering if anyone has done something similar or if you guys have any general advice. A little bit more detail: I plan to have at least 4 small drones 2 manned fighters and one largeish bomber. These would all use jets (Laythe has o2 in Its atm right? ) and be refueled by an isru with grabbers around it (docking on the ground is awful). So yeah any advice/ ideas are greatly appreciated

Is it possible to edit the cfg file for the stock resource converters so they create things like argon gas? I haven't looked into it but I was going to try somehow copying the section of code that defines the ore to xenon or the ore to liquid fuel module and paste it in only making it an ore to argon gas converter. Would this work? Or will that just give me errors? thanks.

Spent the last week or so designing a lander/interplanetary ship combo that should be able to land and take off from anywhere but Eve, and refuel everywhere except Kerbin and Tylo (maybe Duna and Laythe too) So with some good piloting I should be able to bounce around the solar system indefinitely... Or at least I could until I died of old age, the combined ship had 330 parts and was a lag nightmare. So I'll be sending it off to the Jool system just to prove it can do can do Tylo, but I've already started designing a new ship combo that'll be able to do anywhere except Eve, Kerbin, and maybe Tylo, while keeping the part count reasonable. I'll post pics tonight, but I'm more interested in seeing what other ultra long-range craft people have been building, as well as having a place for people to ask questions about ISRUing in general, and self sustaining craft in particular.

So I've finally got over my aversion to using the small ISRU (i thought it would make ISRU too easy, I wanted the large one to be even heavier as it was), and designed a 2 kerbal lander <10 tons to go finish off all the science for the Mun that I had not got earlier (tech tree is completed, just doing this or the sake of completion), the "Science Cleaner" vessel (shouldd go to Minmus and do the same afterwards). 1x 3 star engineer is onboard to make ISRU go faster, 1x scientist on board to reset the experiments, 2 mk1 cabins to store duplicate samples/experimments. Everything seemed good, 2 small drills, 3 small deployable radiators, 1 radial ore tank, 1 small ISRU. Everything is temperature stable when its running, but if I switch to something else, timewarp, and come back, the ore tank is full, but almost no fuel was made -> it gives me a message about the core temperature being to high and a shutdown. If fills up its small ore tank in less than 2 hours. To make this thing work, I have to come back to this ting every 2 hours, and start the ISRU... which when drawing from a full ore tank (vs the ore that is produced at the rate its made from the drills), consumes moe power than the craft can provide, so I need to shut the drills down, timewarp until the tank is empty, an repeat... 75 units or ore in the tank converts to roughly 7 units of LF... it will take forever to get this thing to the next biome... Its realy a pain in the ____ .... so I'm going to .cfg file mod. Ideally I'd just prevent the core temp shut down. in the .cfg file, it says: DefaultShutoffTemp = .8 What is that 0.8 value? which way should I change this to allow it to get hotter (even though I don't know why it shuts down at all, it seems to be a calculation error from the calcultions done for when I switch to it to make it the active vessel - again it is temperature stable wen its the active vessel).

Alright, so I'm too lazy to find the other thread, but I'm starting fresh for the sake of 1.0.5 Kerbin to Minmus: Such Edit, much bad, very nominal launch

In developing an SSTO floatplane for Laythe the following occured to me: we can drill for ore on land to make fuel and oxidant, but not in a planet's ocean. But it should actually be pretty easy to get H2 and O2 from water, by applying a current to the H2O and separating the gases. If there is a supply of carbon nearby (e.g. in the air, as CO2) then it would be possible to make any hydrocarbon. Proposal as follows: an ISRU device that, only works when its extensible probe dips into a liquid surface AND there is atmosphere present requires electricity to operate--(lots of electricity--obviously, a bit more than the energy content of the product being made) makes fuel, fuel and ox, ox, or mono just as the present ISRU unit does No rush, my SSSTO (single stage sea to orbit) won't need to refuel, but just an idea for sake of completeness Next up--making fuel from Jool's atmosphere using only a radial intake and a cryogenic turbocompressor!