[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Having figured out this whole Orbital Construction business, I've used it a couple more times to upgrade Tarasque Station.

This kit included the Anansi FTV-NEU, a Garnet nuclear reactor, and the radiator array needed to cool it. They were constructed successfully. However, I am now having issues with the Deployment stage, where the kit decides to have an absolute fit of phantom forces, which on one occasion even NoCrashDamage and UnbreakableJoints couldn't prevent the docking port from detaching from the station. Fortunately it's easily handled by Time Warping through the minute and a half or so that deployment takes.

I had to dock the Manticore FTV with the Anansi to provide it with fuel. and then it headed down to Wyvern to collect a load of Enriched Uranium.

On return. the reactor was fuelled up.  The fuel depot's LH2 tanks would now have a source of power during the night. On 25% power, the Garnet will have a core life of 20 years before it needs its fuel changed again.

Docking a craft with no power, no fuel and no monoprop was a big hassle, so my next move was to build a Logistics Module. When the Quartermaster arrives, I should be able to simply transfer almost any resource straight from Tarasque to a constructed vessel, so long as it's less than 150 meters away. This is a feature I'll want to remember to add to all Orbital Assembly Platforms and Engineering Vessels in future.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Failing to capture at Tylo, we're trying for Laythe now. It has less gravity to contend with, and I've gone for a less efficient capture that won't take advantage of the Oberth effect, but will provide Jool Surveyor 2 with a much longer encounter to carry out its braking burn in.

...still not enough. However, Laythe was kind enough to provide a slingshot maneuver that would reduce the probe's orbital velocity around Jool by a couple hundred m/s, which could well allow it to capture on the next go round. We'll find out in 46 days.

Once I'd remembered to transfer the engineers from the Orbital Assembly Line to the Orbital Assembly Workshop, it took only 5 days to complete the fuel depot. 

13,000 LF, 572,000 LH2, 54,000 Ox. I'm kicking myself for not setting the LH2 tanks to only have LH2, not LH2/Ox, but they'll serve. Besides, I found that they're actually light enough for a single Kerbal on EVA Construction to move around, so I could just replace them if I feel the need.

The module also provides extra docking capacity.

I decided to move the Orbital Workshop, because I felt this configuration was the most aesthetically pleasing option. It also reduces the likelyhood of the solar panels being blocked from sunlight. I have found that, on occasion, their power generation capability has been insufficient. For that reason, the next upgrade to Tarasque will be a nuclear reactor. Since it will be unfuelled, the station is also going to build an Anansi  FTV-NEU (Fuel Transfer Vehicle - Nuclear Enriched Uranium.) That will head down to Wyvern, aquire EnrichedUranium from the fuel plant, and head back up again. 

This will prove the concept for when I use Tarasque or Leviathan to produce nuclear powered vessels and bases.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Much of what I did today was sheperding various vessels through orbital maneuvers, nothing exciting. But once that was done, I found Wyvern had produced enough SpecialisedParts that I could finally try out Tarasque Station's manufacturing capabilities, end to end. For a very long time, I've had issues with Centaur Station's fuel capacity. It's good enough to facilitate the refuelling of various smaller craft, but it's woefully insufficient for interplanetary vehicles. So I designed a fuel depot for Tarasque to build... and then attach to itself.

It's entirely possible that I will decide to relegate Centaur Station to little more than a place to put the inter-lunar vehicles and Minmus landers when I'm not using them. The only thing it will have that Tarasque doesn't is a science lab, and that could be rectified easily enough.

The process was simpler than I thought it would be. 

Step 1: Open the Orbital Assembly Line's Workshop Window.  Click Create Empty Container. The Orbital Assembly Space will spit out a kit.

Step 2: Use a vessel with good RCS and an Advanced Grabbing Unit to move the Kit over to a docking port.

Step 3: Open the Orbital Workshop's Workshop Window, and click Start Construction. The station will begin to use Specialised Parts to inflate the kit to full size.

Step 4:  Do the same thing again when it's done inflating, it will now use MaterialsKits to build the vessel inside the kit.

Step 5: Launch. If the vessel has clipped parts, use NoCrashDamage and UnbreakableJoints in the Debug menu to keep it from flying to bits. Turn them off when it stabilises. This is the only time you will need to enable cheats to keep the vessel intact.

Documentation is sparse and the YouTube video explaining it is not the best quality. Like I said before, I'm partly making this thread so others new to USI/MKS can learn from it.

 

Jool Surveyor has been having a fair bit of trouble getting into a Tylo polar orbit. The moon's massive gravity well is overwhelming the probe's ion engine, which can only use around 20% thrust due to the low light levels out at Jool.

I'm not even entirely sure why I'm bothering. Tylo's only attractive quality for colonisation is the same gravity that makes it so difficult to land on... and Laythe doesn't lag so far behind in that department as to overshadow its many advantages.

If I'm unable to capture in this pass, I'll move on to Laythe and Vall. Laythe is the premier colonisation target in the entire Kerbol system, while Vall is a good candidate for resource extraction. Low enough gravity to make lift fairly easy, while being close enough to Laythe to make it worth doing. Bop and Pol are little more than scientific curiosities, which will be visited, but likely ignored afterwards.

With the expectation that Jool Surveyor 2 will at the very least be unable to scan Tylo, I have launched Jool Surveyor 3. Technically it's the fourth one, but I forgot to put a comms array on the 3rd and I'm going Soviet on it. Mission failed? No number for you. Anyway, this upgraded probe carries more advanced solar panels, a small nuclear reactor, and an ion thruster with twice the efficiency and twice the thrust but 25 times the energy use. Thanks to the reactor, it will be able to provide a full 3 kN even with the reduced sunlight out at Jool. In fact, the only reason I put solar panels on it at all was because of the remote possibility that I might find a use for it after the reactor ran out of uranium fuel. That won't be anytime soon.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

I saw this and just had to take a screenshot.

Jool Surveyor is having to navigate its way around the inner system without getting itself yeeted by gravity slingshot right back out again, which Laythe nearly did. It'll be a while before it can perform its first scan.

As it turned out, WorldStabiliser was not responsible for the mysteriously rising launch clamps.

Most likely, it's KSP not quite knowing where the vessel is supposed to be, and in an effort to avoid loading the ship underground, raises the launch clamps each time instead of putting them at a set altitude. I have run out of options, and more importantly, patience. I can't be bothered with removing and replacing all the launch clamps every five times or so I visit Wyvern, which I do fairly often, as important as it is. So, I replaced all the lanch clamps with landing legs... except one. I figure one should be enough to prevent the base sliding about, and resetting it will be a fair simpler affair taking no more than five minutes.

I also took the opportunity to use the small vessel that carried the legs to push some of the base sections about. You may notice Stage 4 is now much closer to the rest of the base.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Oh yeah, something I forgot to mention, thought it's shown in one of the screenshots: A large part of the reason for doing orbital construction out at Minmus instead of Kerbin orbit is that anything out at Minmus can take advantage of its orbital velocity.

Leviathan is something of a wallowing pig when fully stocked, having slightly less than 2 km/s of delta-V. From LKO, that would be enough to make the Duna transfer burn, and possibly capture at Duna too. Ike capture would be about the same. But the margins would be tight. Because it launched from Minmus, Leviathan  used a mere 674 m/s, leaving plenty of reserve propellant.

This kind of savings won't matter so much as more of my vessels start to use the increasingly efficient high-tech propulsion systems, but the idea of using a moon as a giant slingshot does appeal to me.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

48 minutes ago, Kerbalsaurus said:

That is a hell of a lot of infrastructure. How much has all of this costed in total? Cheap-ish I imagine, If you’re building everything off world.

Around 7 million VF so far, I think, haven't really been keeping track. The Milk Runs made it possible to acelerate my efforts. Couldn't have built Leviathan or Tarasque without it. Contract missions are too little reward for the effort required.

Wyvern accounts for maybe 3 million of that.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Not so glamourous as the manned missions, but essential all the same. The space probes Jool Surveyor and Wayfarer 4  arrived at the gas giant.

Jool Surveyor, a scansat with the mission of surveying each of Jool's moons for exploitable resources.

Wayfarer 4 is primarily a communications relay, hence the Molniya style highly elliptical polar orbit, which should prevent comms blackouts except on very rare and [predictable occasions, so long as other relays are present at the moons, otherwise vessels landed on their southern hemispheres would have no connection.

The satellite is also equipped with a fair number of orbital science instruments, which it has used to collect data in high Jool orbit, and will do the same for low Jool orbit after an adjustment burn and the long fall to periapsis.

 

The Duna to Kerbin transfer window opened. Adventure undocked from the garden station and burned for home. Having drained the garden station's fuel tank - which it no longer required - and completing the escape maneuver, the IPTV had 1,100 m/s of delta-V remaining. Certainly enough to capture at Kerbin, hopefully enough to make LKO. 

I had intended for these early IPTVs to be reused, but the serious design flaws exposed by the missions they went on have shown that doing so wouldn't be worth it.

 

Over Minmus, Centaur Station had begun work on it's not-quite replacement, Tarasque.

The work took ten days. Six Kerbals in the Workshop do a quick job of it!

Once again, the services of No Crash Damage and Unbreakable Joints was temporarily required, at least until it had settled itself. 

The first MaterialKits delivery was mostly spent on inflating the habitats. I had gone to the effort of using the Skycrane that had been sitting around Kerbin to pick up the abandoned workshop at Meridian base and plonk it down over at Wyvern, to double the MaterialKits production rate. Happily, it worked, though it certainly wasn't easy to lift the thing, or put it down where I wanted it.

 

There was nothing else on the to-do list, so... ♫ let's do the time warp agaiiiiin! ♫

Neither KSP's stock alarm clock, nor the mod version managed to accurately predict the Duna transfer window, being off by about 10-20 days, but Minmus was in the right part of its orbit so I could afford to wait no longer.  It was finally time to sent the IPEV Leviathan on its way.

As I learned from the Odyssey's misfortune, NTRs eat EnrichedUranium like there's no tomorrow. The Emancipator engine is no exception, possibly being even worse for it. Leviathan's engines will last long enough to reach Ike, of that I have no doubt. What it won't do is allow a return to Kerbin. Not unless I send a supply of EnrichedUranium so the engines can be serviced. That should be eminently feasible, but it's by no means the only option. Leviathan's capability to make Kits and construct vessels from them offers an enticing alternative... simply replacing its main drive altogether. Having discovered the effectiveness of Fission Fragment drives, andwith the ship already mounting extensive LH2 storage capacity, I figure it's perfect for a refit with that type of engine.

I would send the uranium anyway for safety's sake, but any refit operation will mean the Emancipators get dismantled. The options are mutually exclusive. I'm definitely leaning toward the refit option, as the rewards would be so much greater. Besides, if it comes down to it, Endeavour could return the crew home. Or Leviathan could become Ike's permenant orbital shipyard. That would be no huge loss,especially since it would have been Leviathan's job to build such a shipyard anyway. 

As for Endeavour, it left Kerbin not long after its bigger brother. using two burns to escape into Kerbolar orbit.

All she has to do is get to Duna and land on it. I fully trust that Endeavour is up to that mission.

Oh yeah. I should send a rover for them. A proper one, with all the habitation and life support they could need for exploring the dusty orange planet. The Badger was good enough for Dres, but it won't cut it this time.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Leviathan will have company on its journey. In 40 days, Adventure is going to depart Duna, so there wouldn't be anyone present to receive a new and improved lander. May as well use all that funding the Milk Runs have generated to assemble another IPTV, right? Say hello to the Endeavour.

Since Mirage Station's Workshop was moved to Centaur, it can no longer construct vessels in orbit, which is why I didn't bother with launching a kit. Instead, I did the orbital assembly the old fashioned way. The Command Section and Propulsion Section are technically viable spacecraft when separated, in the sense that the Command Section could serve as a very basic space station, while the Engine Section may function as a tug. It's going to need some small upgrades before that would be possible, however, as it currently lacks the electrical storage for independent operation. 15ec isn't much and those LH2 tanks are hungry for spark juice.

Aside from construction, what most sets Endeavour apart from its IPTV cousins is the propulsion system. An advanced afterburning Fission Fragment drive. Even while using LH2 to increase thrust, it provides 75,000 m/s of delta-V. Seventy-five thousand.

This thing is insane! And while the supposed drawback for that is low thrust, it's still about on par with NERVA engines, so far as I can tell.  I think I've found my new favourite drive system. With that kind of mileage, I would never have to worry about running out of fuel again! Hell, that might even be getting into the realm of feasible Brachistochrone trajectories.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

I discovered that the Dres capture burn had fully depleted the Uranium fuel in the Odyssey's three NERV engines. Had I known this would be an issue, I might have kept one offline in reserve, but alas, no such foresight. However, after rendezvousing with the DRP, LFO was in plentiful supply. The lander reserve tanks were still full of oxidiser. With no nuclear propulsion, I instead moved the crew lander to the nose and used its four Terrier engines to do the job of braking into LDO.

From here, a Dres landing mission becomes possible. Ennie and Linski board the crew lander, while Luman Kerman remains in orbit. She'll get her turn.

Before risking the lives of any Kerbonauts, it was important to ensure their transport would have already landed safely before they attempted the same. The rover successfully made its descent, and began collecting some basic science, since the majority of the scientific instruments were on the crew lander and would remain so until Ennie could transfer them over.

The rover currently has three days worth of Supplies on board, certainly enough for the purpose of exploring the nearest biomes, of which there are 5, possibly even 6.

Power output was too low for the Bon Voyage controller to operate. Happily, I didn't immediately ditch the Skycrane, so I was able to fly it just over the border into the Highlands. I'll be keeping the Skycrane attached until Ennie can transfer its solar panels across to the rover. It'll need them. 

All scientific equipment successfully deployed, including an RTG to keep them operational overnight. It produces 4 power, not quite the 5 needed to run everything, but hopefully the control unit will shut down the Seismometer instead of anything more important.

The third biome visited by the landing party was Dres' Impact Craters. Here, the rover is parked on the slope. I'm very glad I fitted it with an RTG, because otherwise it would've been a sitting duck for the 5 hours or so until sunrise.A generous battery capacity of 2,000 ec also allows for the transmission of plenty of scientific data.

Getting the rover out of the crater was a harrowing experience, but after finding the right combination of SAS and traction control, became surprisingly simple. I can only attribute this to the RoveMax Ruggedized wheels, which have excellent grip.

I did, in the end, timewarp to the daytime, but mainly so I could actually see when the rover reached Dres Canyon. It's not as impressive as I was lead to believe.

And now for the 19km drive back to the lander.

Made it! So long, little Badger, our trusty steed. Of course, I had Ennie salvage anything useful from the rover, including scientific instruments and the RTG, before liftoff. With all the power issues Odyssey was suffering from, every little was going to help.

Mission complete. I might make one more landing at the Impact Ejecta biome, but as you can see, Odyssey has already collected an immense amount of data. I would not be surprised if this was enough to complete the rest of the tech tree. This is what the three brave Kerbonauts came here for. It, as much as they, is what Valkyrie is coming to rescue.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Finding Wyvern insufficiently capable of generating Chemicals, I decided to launch an Industrial Refinery module to operate as a dedicated chemical plant. It took 9 days to reach Minmus, by which time Odyssey was finally arriving at Dres.

I activated the crossfeed to the landers, giving the nuclear engines access to all the liquid fuel on board. Somehow the crew managed to fully charge the batteries, allowing the vessel to limp in with a constant power drain of a bit over 1 ec per second. With life support shut down and just the inflatable module for habitation, only engineer Ennie Kerman was still at his post. The other two slackers went on strike, if you can believe it.  

Even with all the LF available, it wasn't going to be enough. Odyssey was going to fly off into Kerbolar orbit. Something to do with a miscalculation over liquid fuel verses liquid hydrogen, which meant the vessel would have less delta-V than expected. To make up the difference, RCS added its miniscule thrust for the duration of the burn, and in fact made the final ten m/s of deceleration that ensured a successful capture. Admittedly, if she hadn't been carrying a 2.5m tank's worth of RCS to begin with, this might not have been neccesary.

Talk about cutting it fine!

Wishing I'd thought of this earlier, but better late than never.  A pair of flat-aspect solar arrays had been sitting on either side of Odyssey's main propellant tank. Their original purpose was to ensure that no matter which direction Odyssey was pointed, it could receive at least some solar power. That meant they were effectively useless extra mass so long as the vessel was oriented to allow its main arrays to point at the sun, which is basically all the time.

Ennie Kerman went EVA to move them somewhere more useful. Generating a whopping 3 ec/second, these panels allowed the hydroponics gardens to be reactivated, ensuring that the crew would at least have Supplies to (hopefully) last them until Valkyrie arrives.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Today was all about fuelling the Leviathan. After building Dragon Base, I realised that while I had two ways to transfer fuel to the Loup-Garou FTV-H, they both required a Kerbal on site to assist the process. Either by hooking it up with a KAS fuel pipe, or with Local Logistics.  I opted to send a habitat to expand Dragon . The Stag DCC (Depot Control Centre) features genous living arrangements for a single Kerbonaut, and the fuel tanks used for getting it to Minmus ended up serving a second purpose of storing fuel that could be transferred to the FTV-H lander without waiting for the ISRU converters.

I discovered only after reaching LKO that this vessel was incapable of roll, pitch or yaw. It had no SAS or RCS. As luck would have it, though, I'd elected to use this mission to ferry another four Engineers to Minmus to join the Leviathan's crew. All I had to do was send up a 20k VF rocket with some small SAS parts on board, and the engineers could stick them to the sides of the vessel.

 

Fuelling operations began, requiring five trips from Dragon to Leviathan. I'm very much considering building a larger tanker that could have done it in two or three trips instead. I was tempted to use Hyperedit, but I promised myself I was only going to cheat where the game forced me to, and it wasn't doing that. Happily, Minmus is such a forgiving planet that five trips didn't become a bunch of save/reloads.

 

It's nearly 4AM. So, alas, I couldn't get everything done today. The ship needs more MaterialKit deliveries, but it is fully fuelled and nearly fully provisioned. The vessel uses LFO for RCS, so the lack of monopropellant is effectively a non-issue. At best it's a safety net for the lander, but even that could dock with its main engine if neccesary.

Annoyingly, the six radial LH2 tanks don't seem to be feeding the engines directly, so the current delta-V readout is only around 2,500 m/s of delta-V. Transferring fuel to the main tank manually shouldn't pose an issue, so I don't forsee the ship running low at any point on its mission. It'll need that fuel, too, since the unretractable solar panels preclude any aerobraking maneuvers.

The next Duna transfer window is in 90 days. Wyvern actually ran out of MaterialKits, having used so many in the production of Machinery (which the Minmus Planetary Warehouse now has a great abundance of.) I cancelled further Machinery production, along with Specialised Parts (also in abundance) because that was using too many Chemicals. The base is now working solely on making more MaterialKits. Here's hoping 90 days is enough.

 

In other news that happens to lack any nice screenshots to look at, the "DRP" arrived at Dres. I can't remember what that stands for, but it's probably "Dres Refuel Probe". Despite the name, it's not going to save Odyssey from being stranded at the dwarf planet. It's a 2.5m aviation tank that's half empty already. At best, it would allow Odyssey to turn it's highly elliptical capture orbit into a low Dres orbit instead, where it would be much easier to launch and receive the science lander. Better than nothing.

Odyssey itself is a week away from arrival at its destination. Many little green fingers are crossed.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Milk Run 2 was completed, bringing the space program's funds up to 7 million VF.

I'm still no closer to understanding why my spaceplanes swerve around or go into a spin when I turn on the brakes.

Figuring the "LH2 full" issue might just be an artifact of trying to use KIS connectors to transfer fuel, I decided to send up a new Minmus facility: Dragon Base. Its sole purpose, to mine ore and convert it to hydrogen fuel.

It did not, in fact, fix the issue. I have no idea why it does this, and google couldn't find anyone else with the same trouble. Fortunately, this is a modded playthrough, and I'm not above cheating when the mods refuse to do what they're supposed to. I have a facility that should be able to generate LH2. So I ended up using HyperEdit to fill the tanks. I'll still be shipping fuel from this surface base to any orbiting spacecraft that require it, so the only real difference is that I don't have to timewarp to get the fuel. I'll be happy to not cheat if I can get the bug fixed. Already brought it up on the relevant thread.

 

And finally, please imagine a drumroll in your head before you scroll down to look at this. I present to you all, the true form of The Surprise:

The Inter-Planetary Engineering Vessel Leviathan. Carrying a full assembly line, this vessel will be capable of orbital construction from start to finish. I had to turn on NoCrashDamage just to launch this thing, or else the clipping would cause it to shake apart, but it seemed stable enough when I turned that back off again.

A Garnet fission reactor ensures the vessel will have power even where its gigantic solar arrays are insufficient. Twin Emancipator engines provide immense thrust and twice the ISP of the Liberators used by the Valkyrie and Kraken. When empty. the vessel's delta-V is over 6,000 m/s. When filled with MaterialKits and SpecialisedParts, that drops to just 1,800. Clearly I'm going to need to find a happy medium that will give it enough SP and MK to build a base that can produce those on the surface of wherever it goes, which will allow it to then produce bigger and better bases.

 

I'm planning to send Leviathan to Duna in the next transfer window, to start working on infrastructure at Ike. Infrastructure that will go on to support the colonisation of Duna.

[[1.12.x] CryoTanks: Liquid Hydrogen storage and management (Oct 25, 2021)]

I have encountered a bug where, despite having plenty of empty LH2 tank space on a craft, the ISRU converter insists that LH2 is full.

Clearly it worked for a fraction of a second, because there is some LH2 in there, but then it stopped. I know it can work because I was able to fully fill a 5m tank then partially fill it again before running into this bug.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Even as the Surprise was under construction, Centaur's next project arrived at Minmus. This is the kit that will become Tarasque Station. Centaur is a perfectly serviceable fuel depot and research lab, but the difficulties I've had with building things there inspired me to design a new station that would handle orbital assembly properly.  Tarasque will do that, and more, as it features modules for creating Kits in-situ using Specialised Parts... which Wyvern manufactures plenty of, when it's not producing Machinery.

No sense messing around with the Surprise when it's already in progress, though, so the new station is going to wait.

Not long after Valkyrie's arrival at Kerbin, it was followed by the Paladin SSTO, carrying another load of valuable resources, braking around Kerbin so as to rendezvous with the Warlock that had been waiting in LKO for the past few weeks.

Coming down over the terminator was quite the sight. It brought home 2 million VF. Another launch is needed, then the Paladin can descend with the rest.

I didn't carry out that mission because the transfer planner was telling me I had 2 hours before the Dres transfer window. So, finally, it was time for the Valkyrie to stretch her wings and fly.

Fly she did. The Liberator's thrust is impressive, so despite the immense mass of the vessel, only a single burn was needed. 

My streak of good luck ended here. After making the burn to leave Kerbin orbit, I found that the transfer planner had lied to me. Dres' extreme inclination tends to mess with the planner's calculations, and as a result, no simple inclination burn would allow Valkyrie to intercept the dwarf planet. After much faffing with the maneuver planner, I found that if I decelerated while still close to Kerbin, then set another maneuver close to the solar orbit apoapsis, I could meet Dres where its inclination against Kerbin was zero. This would mean a journey time of over a year, but the intercept would happen.

I decided to go ahead with the plan to send a tanker to Dres alongside Valkyrie, so here we have the Kraken FTV-H. With a tiny nuclear reactor on-board, it won't run low on electric charge even if its solar panels fail to collect enough energy. Since it has four panels, somewhat awkwardly placed where they can rarely be all used at once, I was thinking it could donate two of them to the Odyssey after reaching Dres. That then put me on to the idea that it would be nice if that big Liberator engine didn't go to waste. So, should Valkyrie turn out not to need refuelling, I'm considering the possibility of using the FTV to replace Odyssey's entire engine section. I know Odyssey has some spare docking ports. If successful? I wouldn't just rescue the Odyssey's crew, I could salvage the ship too!

You know, I'm starting to think I got a bit too ambitious launching a Dres mission with only NTRs . Should've sent a tanker. That, at least, is not a mistake I plan to make twice.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

As planned, Valkyrie parked itself in LKO ready for tankers to ship fuel up.

It required two trips with one large and one small LH2 tanker, but the refuelling operation was successful. In the end, the IPTV ended up with a bit over 5,000 m/s of delta-V to play with, and that's with a full load of Fertiliser and Supplies. As those are used up during the mission at Dres, the vessel will gain some delta-V which might be needed for the return trip. I'm considering sending an LH2 tanker to Dres along with Valkyrie, just to make sure it will have no difficulties.

Whilst I am using this vessel for the Dres rescue ship, I don't plan to send it further out than Duna in any further missions. The Liberator is a highly efficient and powerful drive, being the second best NTR, but it's by no means the most efficient or powerful drive I have unlucked. It was what I had available, with the financial and logistical constraints, not to mention the Dres transfer window deadline. In short, it was the only vessel that would be ready in time.

Meanwhile, a Pandora CRV was headed out to Minmus, carrying four Engineers to Centaur Station. They're joining three others who arrived a few weeks earlier along with a Mechanic for Wyvern Base. That makes seven Engineers... and the Orbital Workshop only houses six. But fear not, for once this wasn't a bugger-up on my end.  No, I have special plans for several of these new Kerbonauts.

"What the frick is that!?" you may be wondering.  It's so large I had to move the docking port just to fit it! But I'm not going to say just yet. It'll be a fun surprise. Won't be too long, because the extra Engineers reduced construction time from 60 days to just 15.

Something else of note is that I replaced the old Orion ILV with a new Inter-Lunar Vehicle, the Leo. With its nuclear lightbulb drive, this vessel can trot about the Kerbin system without me having to worry about fuel. It can happily return to Kerbin from Minmus, then fly back to Minmus again and have propellant to spare. It could probably make that trip twice. Oh, and it actually has a communications antenna. Upgrades, people, upgrades.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

With the Dres  transfer window coming up, it was a race to get the rescue ship operational before it would need to leave. At only 35 tons, the kit was easier to get to Minmus than Wyvern Stage 4, but actually building it was a another matter. The only free docking ports on Centaur were on the fuel cans, and as a result, the entire thing had a tendency to shake itself to bits (in simulations). More annoyingly, the Workshop was bugging out if I separated the transfer stage before Deployment, so I had to make sure SAS was off, start Deployment, then separate the transfer stage *before* the interaction started causing phantom forces. Got there in the end, though.

16 days later...

The IPTV Valkyrie, in all it's glory. Dramatically improved habitation and agricultural support, advanced solar arrays, a nuclear plant, and a Liberator LH2 nuclear thermal drive for propulsion. Fully fuelled, this absolute beast of exploration has around 6,000 m/s of delta-V. More than enough to reach Dres, and return the stranded crew of the Odyssey to Kerbin.

Honestly, the most annoying part is fuelling it. It requires LH2, which I was able to get one shipment of from Aurora base by docking the Loup-Garou FTV with a KIS pipe and activating LH2 production on the ISRU unit. When the FTV returned for a second shipment, however, the base provided 2000 units of fuel before claiming the 216,000 unit tank was full. Nothing I tried would get it to continue fuelling. Even restarting the game didn't work. In the end, I decided that since any mission to fix the Minmus infrastructure would require a base construction mission or a jerry-rigged solution, I might as well send Valkyrie to Kerbin orbit, refuel it there, and leave worries about infrastructure for after  the ship headed off on its mission, rather than risk delaying its departure beyond the transfer window. That would have to wait until Minmus was in an equatorial position, however.

In the meantime, I sent the engineers Kathbart and Samson back down from Centaur to Wyvern, since none of the other crew members were capable of performing Maintenance and the Machinery couldn't be transferred from the Paladin SSTO through Logistics.  Samson did the honours. The Machinery plant now produces 0.05 Machinery per second, all three bays operating at 208%. The Recycling Centre and Nuclear Processing Plant were brought online, and the Smelters returned to full operating capacity. 

I discovered that, for some strange reason, the Nuclear Salt Water option on the Vulcan nuclear smelter required Ore, rather than... you know, Water. Presumably because it's from a separate mod to MKS. I'll see if I can make some changes behind the scenes to fix that. I'd rather not have to send an Ore container to Wyvern to get it working when it doesn't make a ton of sense to begin with.

On the plus side, uninstalling WorldStabiliser does indeed seem to have fixed the issue of floating launch clamps. No more faffing about in EVA detaching all the clamps in hacked gravity just to lower the base by a few meters.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Using the wealth generated by the recovery and sale of an absolute boatload of Rare Metals and Exotic Minerals, I was able to launch Wyvern Stage 4. The Ground Construction Kit massed 50 tons by itself, so rather than send it and its skycrane up on the same launch, they were brought to orbit separately. The first skycrane turned out to have insufficient propellant and was quite unstable. The second, however, worked flawlessly. I used LH2/Ox engines for the first time, and I appreciated their high ISP. The boiloff when the vessel ran out of electricity was negligible.

During the 47 day construction period the Dres communications satellite arrived at the dwarf planet and shuffled its way into orbit. Thanks to an ion drive that couldn't go above 10% throttle without eating all the electricity, its acceleration was pitiful. Thank frick for Persistent Thrust. That it had such difficulty at Dres orbit leaves me with low expectations for the comsats I sent toward Jool, Urium and Neidon. They'll almost certainly have too little power to function and sail past the planets. At least they were fairly cheap, so no great loss.

Then, finally, construction was complete! Wyvern Stage 4 popped into existence, and nothing exploded besides the lag. I spent about 15 minutes driving the Wolverine out of physics range then launching the Workshop into Minmus orbit. Much more bearable after that, but seals the fact that this is the last expansion Wyvern will get.

Here's the result! Stage 4, containing the Recycling Centre (turning Recycleables into Chemicals, Polymers and Metals), Nuclear Processing Centre (taking Uraninite or Depleted Uranium and producing Enriched Uranium), Machinery Plant, Training Academy, Nuclear Fuel Plant (takes Uraninite and produces fissionables for advanced nuclear propulsion.) And, last but not least, a second Prometheus nuclear reactor so the smelters can be brought online.

Wyvern now has two bays for producing Specialised Parts running at 160%. I couldn't activate the third without running out of Silicon. All three bays for Machinery were active, but for some reason they were all at 10%, and barely producing anything at all. I spent quite a while scratching my head over this, and only just now realised that's probably because it has very little Machinery in the assembly plant itself. So I'll need to send a resupply mission to fix that. In ten days or so, we'll have the base fully operational!

 

I have been having a problem with the Launch Clamps... the base keeps going higher every time it loads, and the launch clamps can't return to the surface since they're anchored. I think this is WorldStabiliser's doing,  so I'll be uninstalling that mod and seeing if the issue goes away. Not a bug, just an intended feature that happens to not play nice with my preferred base design.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

As mentioned in my last comment, the space program is a little low on funds. Normally having over a million VF in the kitty would be pretty good, but this is an MKS playthrough. Nothing comes cheap when you're building a self-sufficient colony. So I launched a Paladin SSTO with a Rare Metals/Exotic Minerals cargo container in the payload bay and sent it all the way to Wyvern Base. 

The mission: Milk Run 1.

Before arriving at Wyvern Base, the Paladin had 3,000 m/s of delta-V remaining. 

After filling up the 3.75m container, it had less than 800. Nowhere near enough to return to Kerbin unless I was willing to faff about with a tedious series of aerobrakes. So instead, I sent it up to Centaur for refuelling... where I discovered it had no RCS ports for moving forwards or backwards. No worries, I just filled the Manticore with LF and docked that to the Paladin instead.

In an alternate universe, the Paladin made its descent after two aerobraking maneuvers, having used up much of its remaining fuel in an inclination burn as it left Minmus at a bad time. It overshot KSC, flying across the ocean with the  goal of making a landing on the other side, a common landing area for reusable boosters that couldn't return directly to the launch site. Unfortunately, it was too nose heavy to flare and hit the ground with its horizontal and vertical speed far above safe limits. It was destroyed with the loss of all cargo.

Happily, that never happened to us!

Here, it left Minmus about a week later, when the moon was above Kerbin's equator. This gave it an extra 200 m/s for its braking burn, which it ended up needing, having just 80 m/s remaining after entering LKO.

Knowing the Paladin would be too heavy to safely land with the payload on board, I designed the Warlock SSTO to meet it halfway.  Its large wing area and 2.5m cargo container would give it much greater tolerances, though multiple trips would be needed to carry the cargo down. The pair of Project Eeloo nuclear engines performed well, had less mass than the lightbulb/Valkyrie combo, whilst being significantly cheaper than the Paladin's Nuclear Lightbulbs. Their only drawback being the lower ISP, which is no issue so long as the vessel doesn't have to leave the Kerbin system.

Just don't let anyone leave the KSC until the boys with the lead pyjamas are done hosing everything down.

Despite making a successful landing, it was still pretty hairy. Nose heavy and with a tendency to swerve, bringing the fully loaded Warlock down onto the runway was an effort of will, and it only stopped where it did when the rear brakes were increased to full. It slid sideways until coming to a stop... but it was intact. All it needs is a few adjustments in the SPH and it ought to perform better next time.

That one flight netted me two million VF!

And that's only a third or so of what the Paladin brought back! This is gonna finance the colonisation of the Kerbol System. Can't wait!

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

3 hours ago, Kerbalsaurus said:

These are some pretty sick looking bases. Nice job man! Base construction is not easy.

Thanks! Being able to design them in the SPH then use Global Construction opens up a lot of options that I was happy to take advantage of.

The stations in Carnasa's Coming Home Redux series were a big inspiration for me, having a lot to do with the aesthetics of Aurora, Meridian and Wyvern.

Fenrir was all me, though.

 

I think a big reason why I decided to make a thread about this playthrough is how neither the YouTube tutorials nor the full series I watched really helped me understand MKS. The tutorials didn't go far enough, and the series weren't trying to explain how the bases worked.

Seeing as I'm learning by doing, I thought I might as well log the learning process, since that might help some people having the same problems.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Turned out I was wrong, I hadn't put two RareMetals/ExoticMinerals containers on Wyvern Stage 3, so I actually had to send one (the right size this time) to replace the 3.75m container dangling from the base's underside. Used Konstruction ports to weld it to the base.

Having gotten tired of running out of basic resources, I also sent a new base section with Industrial Strip Miners on board. Now I shall need never worry about running low on silicates, subsatrate or minerals ever again! Mwa-haha-ha-haaaaa!

I also found I could increase refined resources production by activating some of the Material Processing Units in Smelter mode. Unfortunately, they're whacking great power hogs, and even the Prometheus reactor I'd built into Stage 3 couldn't keep up. As it stands, the assembly plant has one bay producing Specialised Parts at 173%, while a second runs at 70%, The third production bay is shut down for lack of Silicon. What I've learned from all this is that Stage 4 will not need another SpecialisedParts assembly unit, rather it will need to have another nuclear reactor so that the MPUs can be run at full capacity. Then, and only then, will Wyvern Base be capable of producing MaterialsKits and SpecialisedParts at a rate that would support full orbital construction over Minmus, which would finally disentangle the space program from the need to launch anything but crew and resupply missions from Kerbin.

Might take a while before I can launch Stage 4. I'm down to 1.2 million VF, which I think should go to fulfulling some ooutstanding contracts I have. Either that or a cargo ferry to carry Rare Metals from Minmus to Kerbin, make some cash that way.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

31 minutes ago, TwoCalories said:

Eh. I'm sure you won't miss much by skipping the landing. Dres isn't real anyway.

Ah, the Bielefeld of KSP.

A little update today, since I didn't do anything major.

Pegasus Station reached Eve, and since it still had plenty of fuel. I decided to park it over Gilly. Not like any crewed missions I send will be doing much at Eve itself anyway.

I managed to find a Dres braking maneuver that would get the  Odyssey into orbit for 1,500m/s delta-V. It will use all its spare lander fuel to do so. Looks like we'll only have one shot at a landing. On the plus side, there's another Dres transfer window coming up in about 250 days, so at mininum I can send a Manticore FTV-L to refuel it. More likely, I'll send something even bigger, carrying a bunch of Fertiliser and extra Gigantor solar panels. Odyssey has an engineer on board, so if he hasn't gone Tourist by the time it arrives, I can do more than just dock them.

Had to send a couple more missions to Wyvern Base, as it turned out I hadn't included a Refined Exotics storage or any means of drilling for Silicates... aaaaaaand it just occurred to me that I'd given Wyvern Stage 3 two RareMetals/ExoticMinerals storage containers, so I could have moved the contents and converted one for Refined Exotics. In fact, I may still do that, because the 3.75m container currently dangling from a docking port on the underside of the silicon workshop is Kraken bait if I'd ever seen it. In any case, with the drills added and somewhere to put RefinedExotics, I was able to start Specialised Parts production. It's quite slow, so I'll see if I can move the no longer in use Industrial Refinery at Meridian over to Wyvern and reconfigure it for Specialised Parts so I can double the speed. Regardless, the base is ready for Stage 4.

 

Also, in an Alternate Universe, the Wolverine GCV's Bon Voyage controller had it arrive in the same location as Wyvern base. This telefragging on load caused a massive explosion which destroyed the base. Luckily...

So we don't have to worry about that.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Fenrir Base is now fully constructed and operational. A remote mining outpost, fully automated. Metallic Ore, Exotic Minerals and Uraninite are mined here, and at prodigious rates, too! I imagine Wyvern's next segment will include a facility for the production of fuel for advanced nuclear rockets. And here I thought it'd just be making Enriched Uranium for the base reactors!

I had to reconfigure one of the strip mining drills, I'd accidentally set it to Rare Metals rather than Exotic Minerals in the VAB. Luckily, I had some Specialised Parts lying around, this time.

Also present in these pictures, connected to the Workshop, is the Wolverine Ground Construction Vehicle (GCV). Twice as efficient as the in-line workshop, with space for more engineers, I decided the original workshop just didn't build as fast as I'd like, and barring a (very heavy and cumbersome) Orbital Workshop, this was the only option. It has a pair of greenhouse domes for Supplies recycling,  a pair of little inflatable habitats for extending hab time, and a Bon Voyage control unit so it can move around Minmus with no fuel required. Though it does have engines, so it could fly if need be.

Next stage, Wyvern's Machinery production and nuclear processing facility.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Today I launched several missions, but since I've been asked how I got launch clamps to Minmus, I thought I may as well show off a mission from start to finish.

My Thunderstorm reusable rocket. I have variants with side boosters of various sizes, also recoverable.

Separation! At this point, I controlled the payload all the way to orbit before using FMRS to load the booster for descent.

Burn, baby, burn.

I use parachutes because I'm not too picky about where I land.

Also because they can keep the booster from exploding if it does this. One of the landing legs failed due to a high impact velocity. My bad.

The payload made its way to Centaur Station, where it sipped a bit of fuel since it was almost out.

Payload landed, skycrane disassembled for the Materials Kits. The Workshop flew over here, followed by the Chipmunk lander when I realised my engineers weren't on board.

Ta-daaaaaa! One Rare Metals mining rig, fully operational! Though, uh, pointed in the wrong direction. I couldn't fix that, but at least it not being properly aligned with the reactor tube port meant that the Strip Miner drill didn't quite touch the tube. I can live with that.

 

On a less happy note, the Odyssey's mission is not going so well. Originally designed for a mission to Eve, I failed to consider the drop in solar energy that would result when the ship headed off to Dres instead. Everything except the hab ring and the main life support unit have been shut down to conserve power.

To make matters worse, the delta-V remaining is reading as 900m/s. I can increase that by using fuel intended for the lander, but that would mean even less science will get done. Unfortunately, sacrifices may have to be made to ensure Odyssey captures in Dres' SoI at all. A rescue mission would be far easier with them in that situation than orbiting the Sun.

At least they're in good supplies, which they'll need, since I missed the Dres window for launching a garden station after them. Once the supplies run out, the crew revert to Tourists. I wouldn't be able to set foot on Dres, let alone transfer the science experiments from the lander to the rover. Silver lining, the rover has an RTG, something I almost skimped out on. If I can get it to the surface and transfer the experiments, it can carry out the mission on its own. All will not be lost!

 

Lessons learned: my next interplanetary ship needs to have a load more fuel, a load more supplies, and a load more power generation.

[Making Life Difficult (a heavily modded colonisation playthrough)]

Since this is not just a colonisation playthrough, but career mode as well, I had a bunch of tourists needing shipped to Minmus. My new Lionheart class SSTO served the purpose very nicely. I've been using SSTOs a lot for low-mass payload missions. For heavier stuff, I use the FMRS mod to recover my boosters. It was confusing at first, but now I understand it, I'm using it all the time. Clawing back those sweet, sweet funds!

It was surprisingly easy to take off from Minmus. Felt just like lifting off from a runway. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to experienced spaceplane pilots, but I haven't really done this sort of thing since 2012.

The next stage of Wyvern Base is complete! It has everything it needs to make Specialised Parts... so long as I set up mining facilities elsewhere on Minmus to gather the materials.  It's honestly shocking how little lag I experience. The timer is yellow, so it's not like there's no lag at all, but I was kinda expecting a slideshow at this point. I don't exactly have a beast of a cmputer, either. 

Next step is setting up the mining facilities. I'll need to confirm the presence of the resources, but my Orbital Survey suggests that I can get Metallic Ore, Exotic Minerals and Uraninite on the spot my metal mining rig was established.  Rare Metals, meanwhile, are found around Aurora Base. I'll send a survey rover, then the mining rigs, if the scan goes well. Fingers crossed!

After that, an assembly plant for Machinery, and possibly a nuclear fuel plant. At that point, the facility would be basically self-sustaining, aside from crew rotations once a decade.

 

[Orbit Portal Showroom [Show me your OPT Spaceplanes!]]

After switching the OPT-J/2.5m adaptor from structural to a Liquid Fuel tank, the Lionheart's delta-V in LKO went up to an astounding 5.8k.

EDIT: While this is a fully functional variant of the Lionheart, it should not be given missions that will not make use of its full delta-V capacity. It's too nose-heavy on landing and will sustain serious damage if the adaptor tank cannot be emptied. I lost a nuclear lightbulb and a 2.5m jet engine on the runway last time I tried.

It does take a little longer to get it into orbit to begin with, now. It has to take advantage of the velocity gain from descent in order to accelerate fast enough to put the apoapsis into space, so it spends quite a while at 35,000 meters.