impyre

One thing I haven't seen considered here is TWR differences. While burning from that high up would take more fuel than if done from lower down, the much weaker gravity means a much smaller engine can push much more fuel. Since the fuel-mass to ship-mass ratio is improved you have higher starting dV. I'm not a math wizard, so I can't be sure if it's even possible that this can offset the costs of an inefficient burn (let alone save anything), but I thought it was an interesting idea (and sortof on topic). Any thoughts?

If you're intent on doing it this way, my suggestion is this: Perform the planned burn at the correct time... but don't worry if you don't get an intercept. Only fiddle if you happen to notice an encounter "pop" up and then disappear... then you can just turn around 180 degrees and backtrack a bit at a time until you find it again. Adjust thrust limiters by right-clicking engine(s) to help reduce excess thrust for fine-tuning. If you cannot get an encounter during your ejection burn, that's fine. The reason we do ejection burns at low altitude is so that we get the most juice out of the fuel. That being said, burning 99% of it at low altitude, and 1% outside kerbin's SoI is almost the same thing (close enough that it won't make a big difference). So this means that you can perform course correction burns partway there (aim for about a third of the way up [distance between kerbin's and duna's orbits]... it's not exact, but very good). Once higher up, it may be easier to get an intercept... especially since you can once again play with maneuver nodes to get it precise. Setting duna as a target while setting nodes will also help you find an encounter, just keep an eye on the point of closest approach... you can mess with the node until you decrease the distance enough for an encounter. A final correction burn just before encountering duna can also help set up aerocapture... which can save a lot of fuel.

Starmade is pretty huge, both in terms of the vastness of space, but also in terms of planet/asteroid surface/volume. Much larger than KSP.

I tend to use a rover-hopper with aircraft landing gear and a good roll cage.

Yeah, props for the orbit matching. Most people couldn't even manage it with the information readouts . This is good to know, because i've never had to use timewarp and/or save/reload to get contracts to recognize completion.... it could've very well been me asking this very same question. Now I know.

Another solution is to set up co-orbital satellites along the same orbit as the mun and with the same period. Even if the drift is 1m per day, it would take years to be captured if it's placed far enough away. Using a satellite that orbits around kerbin and which follows the same path as the mun (and as close an orbital period as you can get) will allow you to connect all satellites inside the mun's soi to kerbin pretty easily. Then inside the Mun you can set up satellites at different altitudes (as asynchronous as possible); that will allow you to have virtually everything connected 99.9% of the time. And if you ever do lose connection, it would only be for a couple of minutes... just plan around those outages. (They'd be easy to spot because you'd have all your satellites on the wrong side of the mun). If you set up a "sister" to the first co-orbital satellite that orbits behind the mun instead of in front... you'd have pretty much full coverage all the time (and then you'd scarcely even need any commsat network inside the SOI at all).

Yeah, karbonite is it's own fuel type. I personally like it. It's low ISP isn't really all that terrible... and is offset by the little noticed fact that the stuff is heavy as all get-out (and increased density means reduced fuel-flow rates and higher fuel mass/ship mass ratios... which offsets (at least mostly if not completely) the costs associated with lower ISP. I've begun using it as my primary fuel source in my career save. The ability to use without refining makes it worth many times its weight in LFO imo. Also, having the ability to leverage 12g's of acceleration when you really need it is handy... for long burns *or* emergencies (like stopping before hitting the ground). In response to your other questions: A) it does not use "handwavium"... it uses "obsurdium"... wait, no... it uses fuel. The same as other rockets (LFO or Karbonite in this case) also. And the amount of fuel required to lift a given payload mass (of fuel or supplies... as the logistics hub is capable of performing automated delivery of life support supplies, spare parts, and pretty much any other resource) is set up to mimic a semi-well-piloted craft. I could probably do it more efficiently myself, but it saves me time and annoyance... so I use it. (Besides, I'm sitting on nearly 600t of karbonite... i'm not gonna miss any) I answered your question about tons... I *explicitly* said that a "gas station" setup could expect about 20-40t of equipment... but I *also said* that there are a *lot of factors*.... which you seem to be aware of yourself (by bringing up the extreme eeloo case)... in those cases, perhaps a small drill would do... but you'd still need tanks, and tanks aren't light. Did you read my post? C) Karbonite can be refined into LFO, monoprop, xenon, etc... but the refineries will cost extra tons and the tanks will cost extra weight. I'm sure you can add. I tried to give a general answer for a most common usage (like mining karbonite on the mun or minmus to fuel things up before leaving kerbin soi (or for repeat local missions)... since that's cheaper than flying LFO up from kerbin). Whether you use that approach or not should depend on the situation. It doesn't seem worthwhile (to me) to ship out a refuelling/refining station to Duna for a single mission... though having something that can refuel itself on the fly can extend the mission capabilities of the craft. D) Honestly, the best way is to download karbonite, look at the parts in a new sandbox save, see for yourself, come back, and ask some more specific questions. E) I'm not really sure that stock-resources=karbonite... I'm certain karbonite will still do its own thing, and I doubt that stock will really allow you to do much besides mine ore for science/money and perhaps refuel in-situ. I doubt that knowing the exact tonnage required to build a full-scale karbonite fuelling station capable of delivering monoprop+LFO will really carry over into the stock versions. ******Here's the bottom line, Karbonite is a rich and complex mod.... stock cannot compare. There are many ways to accomplish tasks, and no one solution is "right". It takes practice to master it, and come up with your own solutions (which must be designed with a specific task in mind). Your question is not unlike asking "How much tons do I need to get to orbit?". I'm sorry, but there's no clear cut answer.********

That's so awesome!! I've been wanting round cargo bays ever since they introduced the funny-shaped space-plane bays (since I hate space planes). Although, even I admit the new intakes look cool. I may have to revisit planes once the new aero is in. Heat shields look really nice too, as does the mining.

In my opinion, your best bet is to "simulate" landing on a barge by landing on the launch pad, or some other confined and well-marked area (perhaps with flags).

Well, it depends on a lot of factors. If you're using a karbonite-based probe/small lander and simply want to fill up on karbonite at the landing site, you can do so. The small drills *are* quite slow and inefficient... and depending on what kind of deposit you're sitting on, it could take hours or days. Also, electricity is needed (and using the small portable karbonite generator will likely draw more karbonite than you can pull up with a single small lander/probe). Also worth considering is time constraints for missions (and if you use TACLS or other life support). In order to build a site that is capable of performing refuels in the neighborhood of 6-10k units of karbonite, you'll need (*at a minimum*) several tons worth of equipment and a few more tons worth of storage tanks. This would allow you to refuel, but only crafts that have landed there. If you want to refuel orbiting vessels you'd have to launch the logistics hub (part of the USI MKS/OKS suite), which weighs 15t *by itself*, and isn't cheap. Of course once you add fuel, engine(s), landing gear, docking/connecting equipment, etc... it gets quite heavy and expensive. Not to mention the tech isn't available until something like tier 3 or 4. On-site refuelling for small probes and landers is only really worthwhile if you save the vessel itself for future missions (return in a cheap capsule built specifically for that purpose)... otherwise, you may end up spending more (than you saved in fuel) by purchasing mining equipment that you ended up ditching later. In Karbonite (not sure about the stock implementation) mining vessels continue to mine while "on-rails", meaning you can do other things while fuel is being brought up. Time warp works just as well. TL;DR: For a basic gas station, you'd need somewhere around 20-40 tons of equipment on site (depending on setup). For probe/lander, just make sure it has some source of power (*not karbonite generator*). Mining speed depends entirely on concentration, number of drills, amount of power available, and type of drills.

Using mods like DRE, NEAR, TACLS, stage recovery and RT2 give me reasons to use almost all the parts at one point or another. The radial engines can be useful when your landing/return stage needs to bring back more than just a capsule... this way you can fit a heatshield under it (in place of an inline engine).

Thanks guys, I'll have another look and pay a bit more attention to exactly what's going on. I'll update once I know for sure what I'm doing wrong. UPDATE: My issue was a combination of floating point error and very slight orbital period mismatch.... so I kept falling back into kerbin's soi. Setting up just outside the soi and *behind* kerbin was much easier (and I was able to stay relatively close without fear of being "caught"). Another thing that was confusing me (but not causing problems really) was that KER was showing orbital periods in 24-hour days rather than 6 hour days. I also managed to set up a much more interesting "pseudo orbit" by burning radial-out once out of the soi, this eliminated accidental encounters and made it seem as if I were still orbiting kerbin (was kinda cool).

You're right, L1/L2 couldn't work. As is, I wasn't trying to simulate an actual lagrange point... just a point on kerbin's orbit a little ahead of it in such a way that I don't drift off or "fall" back in. As for distance from kerbin being the issue, I've been pretty far... I can try for further though.

Next attempt tomorrow 4:10pm EDT.

--I know that Lagrange points don't exist in KSP... that's why I wrote "Lagrange" instead-- Now that that's out of the way. Here's what I've been trying to do. I want to eventually build a station just outside Kerbin's SoI. Since KSP uses two-body orbital mechanics, I thought this should be possible.... so I started trying to launch communication satellites up there (RT2). I establish escape trajectory, wait until I'm outside the SoI (quite a bit outside it in some cases), and then attempt to match kerbin's orbital velocity. I've tried matching the orbital periods, but it doesn't seem to make much sense... it seems like in order to get an orbital period that matches kerbin's, I have to raise my apoapsis well above kerbin's (and thus I drift off). If I try to match kerbin's orbital velocity, I end up falling back to kerbin (though I shouldn't if I understand the two-body system correctly). What am I doing wrong? Is this even possible? I've done it with the Mun with no issues... but I can't seem to replicate my success with Kerbin. The only theory that I've been able to come up with is that Kerbin is "on rails" in an orbit that makes no sense given its velocity. Is this true? EDIT: Unless they manually calculated gravity in the kerbin-kerbol system accounting for both masses, and treated the mun as massless in the kerbin-mun system..... but why would they do that?

Honestly, I never bother with tugs (at least not in the Kerbin system). I simply stick to an expandable structure with the largest parts on the core. IE: 2.5m parts that have docking port sr. on both ends (disconnect payload by "undocking" once it's in place). This is pretty easy and simple. If you ever need to rearrange, you'd need a tug (or use a vehicle that you've just used as a launch vehicle for another part). Personally, I like to use a modular approach and design modules that all have the same length. I usually end up attaching them in a cubic-shaped structure for added rigidity/attitude control. Stations/ships built this way can be difficult to disassemble (especially if you use multi-point docking).

The boxy looking pieces on xruler's craft are the larger K&W batteries.

This. I always try to treat each module as if it had its own internal RCS source. This way, when something connects with RCS they are fairly well balanced. It won't be precise, but usually close enough. Combined with a torque source, it's good enough to take care of most anything. As long as the amount of RCS TWR is kept fairly constant, things should stay relatively balanced. EDIT: FYI, so long as RCS is placed symmetrically and has no rotational offset there's no need to calculate the RCS TWR for each direction. Total thrust/weight will give you just as useful a ratio... it doesn't matter whether it's being divided by three or four or more (so long as *all* vessels that will be connected have the same symmetry mode). If you're connecting one vehicle with 8-fold symm RCS to one with 4-fold symm rcs, you need to account for the difference in TWR. Again, none of this is *exact*, but it's usually good enough that getting it more closely matched doesn't end up making any noticeable difference (especially when torque is present from other sources).

For anyone else that sees this post and might use this mod, gilflo was directed here by another user.

I don't use RCS build aid. You might have more luck in the RCS build aid, or mod support forums.

There's nothing wrong with expecting solid-state technology located in deep space to last for decades (or longer) without any intervention at all... it's not like a car (which is subject to weather, dust, debris, roads, friction, moving parts, etc). The main problem is projectile encounters... micrometeorites (or even larger ones), though they *should* be far less common in deep space... and this would likely result in problems whether the crew's asleep or not... the best solution is probably some sort of auto-targeting weapon (like anti-missile tech).

I use them all for various purposes. Pylon for planes, detachment manifold for large radial stages (2.5 and above) that are to be ejected in space (most of my launch stages)... the higher decoupling force makes it safer (it's also more structurally rigid). TT-38k for small stages and combination lander/return vessels (used for ditching side tanks). TT70 for 2.5m crew launchers with 1.25m side tanks (or where more clearance is needed). But honestly I use *no* radial de-couplers just as often (if not more often). I just add a tank under the stage above it, then attach side-mounted tanks directly to the central tank and add fuel lines. This is much more rigid (while not as efficient from a staging perspective) and offers the advantage that the resulting ditched stage is in one piece, and can thus be easily recovered.

Use the abort action group to set up the LES as an emergency detachment system(you can add engines, SRBs, chutes, solar panels, decouplers, docking ports.... anything really, to action groups), and stage its decoupler normally when no longer needed.

You *are* yourself... you cannot help it. If you spend your life emulating others, trying to be like them (some might call it trying to be something you're not) then obviously emulating others is part of who you are. If you want to go against the grain, and whine about others resisting your "uniqueness", then more power to you. I feel sorry for those that cannot make peace with who/what they are, regardless of morality. If it's in your nature to change yourself for the better, then you shall... if not, then not. All you can do is try to do right by you and your personal judgement. - - - Updated - - - ...the comment you were responding to is obviously dripping with sarcasm... it seems pretty plainly so. In fact, it's about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

If you were to strike from space, you'd use explosives or some other destructive payload. "Kinetic" orbital strikes makes about as much sense as a space catapult. As others have pointed out, the amount of fuel spent establishing an advantageous orbit would be many times more effective when used established a depressed suborbital trajectory.