Norcalplanner

Having a minimum TWR of 0.3 will make life much easier for any craft transferring to a different SOI, whether the Mun or Jool.

I would be very happy if SpaceY and Fuel Tanks Plus both became stock. NecroBones is killin' it.

You said you had tons of mods. Some mods will slow things down significantly - the earlier versions of Kerbalism were particularly bad, since they were checking resources at every step. Other mods that calculate things in the background, such as life support, scanning, and communications mods will each add to the slowdown, particularly if your save has lots of craft in flight.

Forgive me if this is a duplicate, but I didn't see anything like this in the first few pages of threads. I wanted to make a place for both myself and others to post modded craft suitable for 6.4x scale. If you choose to post something, please be sure to call out what mods you're using. To kick things off, here's my Bluebird. It's a low-cost crew transfer craft to bring up to four Kerbals to LKO and back. It generally reaches orbit with at least 1,000 m/s left in the tank, so it can probably go up to MKO if needed. Relies on KJR, SpaceY, Fuel Tanks Plus, and Color Coded Canisters, all by Necrobones. It's also intended to be run with SMURFF at 0.5 lever, and Stage Recovery with a recovery threshold of 4,500 m/s if you want to recover all stages. You can download it from KerbalX.

Would I be correct in thinking that this and SMURFF are not going to play nicely together? I'm running a 6.4x scale game, and am running SMURFF at 0.5 lever.

Some mods using contract configurator do look at the vessel type when deciding whether you've fulfilled a contract.

I'm running Sigma Dimensions at 6.4x scale, with an atmosphere height of 1.3 (so it's 91 km). I added SMURFF at 0.5 lever to reduce the mass of returning pods, and then bumped down atmospheric heating to 0.9. Works great and feels right - pods with heatshields will come through fine, as will spaceplane parts with a proper reentry profile, but most other things will overheat and explode. I tried using RealHeat briefly, but it was conflicting with another mod and throwing lots of NREs.

Single stage biome hopping works better on Minmus than the Mun, but you can really do it either way (single stage or multi-stage) on either body. If you send a biome hopper with a rockomax 16 and a Terrier as the power section, you should have over 3,500 m/s of delta v on tap. You can do a lot of hopping with that. Put an Flt-200 and a Spark on top as the "get home" section and you should be good.

Try Near Future Spacecraft by Nertea. It has a large pod that's 2.5m on top and 3.75m on the bottom that holds 6, IIRC.

Here's my latest station, Minmus station alpha. Not nearly as impressive as some others around here, but it ended up being 33 tons in orbit around Minmus in a 6.4x scale career game.

I tried that first, but it didn't have any effect. The program was still creating and destroying asteroids in the background, which was creating all sorts of NREs with various mods. Seems to be working OK now with Nightside's advice.

Thanks, this worked great! I already had that mod installed so it was just a matter of editing the config.

Does anyone know how to roll back the tracking station to tier 2, so that it no longer tracks asteroids? My heavily modded game is occasionally throwing errors, and on rare occasion crashing, due to what appear to be interactions between KAC, Strategia, and spawning/disappearing asteroids. If there's any way to roll back the tracking station from tier 3 to tier 2, so that asteroids are no longer a factor, I think it would solve my problems for the moment. I'm happy to edit the persistence file (I've done it before) but I don't know where to look. Any help would be appreciated, and thanks in advance.

Yep. It's my understanding that the standard Falcon 9 1.1 has joined the 1.0 in the history books at this point. All new cores being built are FT, either singly or with additional hardware for Falcon Heavy.

I'm playing 6.4x scale in my current career, and have cranked the recovery velocity up to 5,000 m/s. Orbital velocity is 6,100 m/s, so this feels right to me compared to stock. That said, any stage going that fast is going to fly a long way around Kerbin before coming back down, and be recovered at 40% or less of value, which means it's only marginally worthwhile to add expensive chutes for what is typically a smallish sustainer stage. Hmmm, now that I think about it, I could probably just reduce it to 4,000 m/s with little to no impact on the finances of my space program...

I think you mean this post from this thread. Major kudos to OhioBob for putting this in an easy-to-understand format, using two common scenarios - transfer to Duna, and transfer to Jool.

I would probably depart from the classic look and put a few drogue chutes near the nose. The other trick is to enter the atmosphere backwards with the wings perpendicular to the ground so they generate no lift. You need good control authority to hold a retrograde attitude, though.

Modular Rocket Systems by Necrobones has the quad-nuke, which helps increase the thrust of a NTR craft while keeping the part count down and having a more natural rocket shape. If you want to go LFO, I recommend the Penguin from SpaceY expanded. Same weight and thrust as the Skipper in a 3.75m part, bit with an Isp of 400.

Once I have orbital stations around Kerbin, Mun and/or Minmus, with scientists on board busily researching away, I then feel like I can time warp for interplanetary journeys. That way, my program is still doing something as time passes. And if I have to interrupt the interplanetary journey a time or two to rotate crews or head down in a lander to get some science and top off the labs, then that's ok.

A second vote here for reducing the size of the station. A single lab and a hitchhiker is all you really need, plus electrical, propulsion, a reaction wheel, and a small lander. Also, LV-Ns are expensive and heavy. Make sure your initial TWR is down around 0.3 or 0.4. If you want to push the station with a detachable drive section, use a 2.5m or larger docking port.

Here's my save, including a ckan mod list. I've also included the custom settings file for Sigma Dimensions, which is what I'm using for the 6.4x scale. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zpzqo16a5e6n615/AAD0w1IOlkYyTVosK90wbbvla?dl=0

Got it. It'll be a few hours until I get back home and can send it to you.

Would I be correct in thinking that a 6.4x scale game with 60 mods isn't your first choice for a test? Because I've got lots of craft in my save, but it would probably be a PITA to get it working.

Same here. Always yellow, even though this is a brand new system with an i5-6600k. Then again, my Kerbalism career save currently includes 31 small satellites, 14 landed probes, 2 large interplanetary probe motherships, 3 fuel depots, and two large stations, each with dedicated lander craft. And I've only made it as far as Duna and Eve so far. :-) I'm also running EVE and scatterer for the first time, and I think that strategia and final frontier are also contributing to the computational slowdown.

You have to upgrade one of the KSC buildings to enable resource transfer - can't remember which one at the moment.