RedDwarfIV

Using the Global Construction mod. I designed the bases with launch clamps in the SPH, then constructed the base on-site.

The Lionheart passenger SSTO can ferry a large number of Kerbals to anywhere in the Kerbin system (or slightly outside of it). With twin nuclear lightbulbs for orbital propulsion, this vessel still has 3.6k d/v after reaching LKO. I used it to carry ten tourists, plus three kerbonauts, on a mission to solar orbit then down to the Mun, where two tourists switched to a lander for a visit to the surface. It had some issues on re-entry, with the centre of mass having moved behind the centre of lift, but I got it down safely on my second try. I've since redesigned it so the wings are further back and it has additional horizontal stabilisers to increase pitch control.

About a month ago, I got the itch to play KSP again. Specifically, with the USI/MKS mod installed. I'd had previous runs with it, but I always burned out when it came time to go interplanetary. I sent entire armadas of base modules off to Duna, in the hopes of setting up a base there, but the sure and certain knowledge that I'd got something wrong, along with the arduous process of shepherding so many vessels into capture drained my enthusiasm. But this time... this time, I was going to do things differently. And the Global Construction mod was gonna help me pull it off. Why send fleets interplanetary, why assemble bases piecemeal (oh god the lag) when I could just send an engineering ship, and a metric crap-ton of Materials Kits? Why, indeed? So much simpler, so much neater, and I could test out my base designs easily enough on Minmus. So that's exactly what I did! One happy little workshop lander, one DIY kit, and a MaterialsKits resupply because bases don't grow on trees. Aaaaaaand... It worked! Yaaaaaay! One fuel refinery, fully operational! Though I did later end up moving everything off that radiator boom, since it bounced like mad on vessel loading. Say hello to Aurora Base. So with that success under my belt, I thought, why not expand the base? See if we can't generate some supplies with an agricultural module? ...turned out the ag module was set to cultivate with Substrate, and the base only had a Dirt drill. Whoops. But hey, learning experience! Surely I'll remember to keep a supply of MaterialsKits and SpecialisedParts around my bases in future, right? Right? Anyway. Good as Aurora is for mining Ore, it's useless for Substrate, Minerals and Metallic Ore. I set my sights on a location for a new base, one that would be a hub of industry! The Orbital Survey told me there was an area that had all three resources in fair abundance. I sent my workshop lander off on a new mission. A mission which resulted in the construction of... Meridian Base. Nuclear reactor, extensive cooling arrays, two drills for each resource, and storage for everything. Plus Material Processing Units to turn those resources into better resources. Surely this masterpiece will be a great boon to my space program! Oh. Oh no. Damn thing broke in half! Good thing I've got all these flexi-tubes! But... half the cooling array is gone, and the processing systems are all wonky. This isn't quite going how I'd planned. Still, the first upgrade is under construction. Extra large smelters, storage for MaterialsKits, and extra drills. Just Substrate and Mineral drills, though. My Orbital Survey lied to me. There was no MetalOre here, so I had to launch an automated mining rig. That had its own problems, with 3/4 drills set incorrectly. It took waaaaay too much time and effort to fix that thing. Hey, let's check back in on Aurora, shall we? Things were going smoothly enough ther- ...the base reactor launched itself 300 meters into space. It decided to go for a walk. Shockingly, it survived that little jaunt with no damage. Minmus gravity is awesome. The rover on the bottom right was used to drag it back to the base, where it was reinstalled with a lower spring setting on its landing legs. Something you may notice is that the entire base also decided to go walkies, shuffling onto a weird angle. I guess the fuel farm wanted to feel the gentle touch of a lamppost. Okay, I take full responsibility for this SNAFU. My liquid-fuel transport, a Manticore FTV-L, hit the ground at high speed due to my failure to start the landing burn early enough. I hadn't taken into account the LV-Ns having significantly lower thrust than the Cheetah engines on the standard LFO Manticore design. I had it drag its backside like a dog over to the base, for later disassembly. Scrapped for MaterialsKits, it can still serve a use. I was having rather more success with my space stations. Centaur Station here is my fuel depot and science lab over Minmus, providing a destination for all the fuel Aurora cooks up. I've since expanded it by adding another fuel tank, and moving the Orbital Workshop from Mirage Station in Kerbin orbit, once I was finished building my first two interplanetary vessels. Speaking of... Mirage Station. Since I didn't want to build stupid huge launch vehicles, or dock a ship together in orbit, I had Mirage build them in one go. Here's the IPT Adventure, ready for launch. Adventure was originally supposed to go to Eve, with that dinky lander for Gilly. Unfortunately, the Eve launch window was over a year away, so it was given a much larger lander and sent to Duna instead. The IPT Odyssey, a somewhat more capable vessel (at least in terms of life support) which will be heading for Dres. It carries a lander and rover with skycrane. After landing, the engineer will move all the science experiments from the lander to the rover, which has a Bon Voyage controller on board. With that, it can visit many more biomes than the lander could, even taking into account the fuel Odyssey carries. In the background is the Super Atlatl SSTO, a very capable vessel, though not as reliable as the original Atlatl design. IIRC, this one went into a flat spin it was unable to recover from, due to the centre of lift moving too far forward and there not being enough liquid fuel on board to trim it out. I've been working on a new SSTO, the Paladin, which looks to be much more stable in flight, though it's significantly more expensive. After everything that went wrong at Meridian, I decided I wanted a fresh start for my industrial ambitions. About 7km away, I set up Wyvern Base. There's a few substantial improvements here, but the main thing to note is how I replaced landing legs with launch clamps. Landing legs bounce. They yeet reactors into the heavens. Even with Ground Anchor enabled, they go walkabout. Launch clamps have proven much more reliable, although the base is a bit higher off the ground than I'd have liked. Still! The base works, and it didn't break in half! I also used much more resilient radiators, so I wouldn't have to worry about them. While I was faffing about with uncooperative bases, Adventure arrived at Duna, performing a flawless aerocapture with an apoapsis high enough to capture around Ike afterwards. It occurred to me that since I had a Manticore FTV arriving a few days later, I could make more landings than I'd anticipated. And since Duna has an atmosphere, and Ike is so easy to escape from, it was the logical choice to go to Ike first then make a Duna landing. I love this cockpit design. Adventure made its way to Ike, and the lander did its stuff, getting data from 2/3rds of Ike's biomes. Unfortunately, it turned out to have less deta-V capacity than I thought it had, and despite the FTV, I ran out of LFO. I felt it was more important to have a large margin of error on the interplanetary spacecraft than to attempt more landings. So, Adventure left Ike, dropping into low Duna orbit, where it rendezvoused with a garden station I'd sent. That will keep it in Supplies for the year and 160 days until the Duna-Kerbin transfer window, when the crew will head home. Sadly, no Duna landing, but hey. There's always next time. In recognition of its being very well behaved, Wyvern received this expansion. A MaterialKits workshop, and industrial module for refining metal, polymers and chemicals, an ag module for generating supplies, and an ag support module for generating Fertiliser. The ag module didn't work for lack of water. I forgot to add a water tank, but that's easy enough to fix. The industrial equipment was also lacking in Machinery, so I used the Paladin to lift a resupply probe, which transferred the Machinery across. Now there's a new problem... not enough electricity! The reactor I gave the base can't keep up, even at 100% output, so I had to shut down some Fertiliser and Materials Kits production. My shopping list: Bigger reactor, water tank, and a bit more Machinery. Given how little lag there is at Wyvern, I may well expand it further for SpacialisedParts and Machinery production. I look forward to having a huge, fully functional base, Not only will it provide the resources for orbital construction over Minmus, it will serve as a blueprint for bases on other worlds. I have a good feeling about this playthrough. I might actually see it to the end, this time.

This is the Atlatl autonomous cargo SSTO. It should also be capable of lifting 6-ton payloads, though I haven't tested that yet. Its party trick, however, is that it carries around 500 d/v worth of oxidiser for the SWORD engines to use on ascent, while the LV-Ns have a cool 2,000 d/v to play with after pushing to orbit and circularisation. Heaven knows what I'd use that for, but it's there. Pod retrieval missions, perhaps? EDIT: Just carried out a mission to refuel a craft in LKO heading for Minmus. This SSTO lifted an 18 ton fuel tank. I am very pleased with its performance, though I have no idea why activating the brakes on the runway caused it to flip up into the air, stall, crash and lose one wing and its nuclear engines. Kraken attack , I guess. Still recovered 2/3rds of its value!

This is my Warrior SSTO, which went through a few iterations before I got the most utility out of it. It can carry a 6 ton payload to orbit with 300 d/v to spare. Costs 143k VF, of which 137k VF is returned on recovery. I may make a crew transport version. It does have some odd characteristics, such as a tendency to yaw left (especially on the runway) and the fuel needs to be moved forward before re-entry to avoid going into a flat spin. Using fairly low-tech engines, it can reliably reach orbit. Very pleased with the performance of the linear aerospike. Whiplash is underwhelming at altitude, but needed to reach Mach 1.

I really like this mod. I did edit the warnings though, since they tended to loop immediately rather than have a moment of silence between soundings. I also replaced the "horizontal speed" sound effect with a 737/787 overspeed alarm. It was super weird going 400m/s above the Mun while hearing a computer voice saying what sounded like "hollyhopbullseed-hollyhopbullseed-hollyhopbullseed-hollyhopbullseed-" over and over.

I feel like the problem is likely the fact that you're trying to drill an asteroid. Unless MKS adds Resources to asteroids as well as planets.

Ah. That would explain it. I have two pilots on the base, one of them doing nothing. I'll try shifting them to the Ag module. Thanks!

Yes, the Tundra and Duna modules each have at least 100 Machinery.

There is fertiliser, as it's needed for the Agroponics systems already used to keep the base at a steady level of Supplies. (That reminds me, I need to launch a processing unit to generate more Fertiliser from the minerals and gypsum...) I've tried it with the Duna and Tundra modules set to Cultivate and to Agriculture. Neither produced Supplies.

Me again. The Planetary Logistics is working fine, I now have 30k units of Water sitting in the tank at my main Minmus base. Now I'm confused as to how I generate Supplies. I have a Duna Agricultural Module and a Tundra Agricultural Module. Both are set to Agriculture (S). I have water, I have Substrate, I have electricity. I have an empty Supplies container. I have a Scientist sitting in the Duna module. But my Supplies resource is refusing to go up. Do I need more Scientists/Farmers? One other issue is that I had my engineer set the Tundra module to Agriculture (S), but the right-click control still says "Activate Cultivate (S)". It says above that in the right-click menu that it is set to Agriculture. Am I missing something?

Since I only seem to have small resource drills unlocked, I could send more of those and have my engineer attach them. He'd have to fly all the way from the refinery site, though. I've been letting it do that while I work on my Minmus fuel refinery. Which I have also been having problems with, but that's a Ground Construction issue, not MKS.

Ah, thanks! ...maybe I shouldn't have used a 3.5 metre tank for the mining rig... It's gonna take forever to fill up.

Hi. I'm confused about how to use Planetary Logistics. I tried reading an MKS guide, but all it said was that I needed a Tundra Logistics Module (which I have) and a storage part set to Planetary Logistics: On (which I have) and that the Logistics Module would, even when unmanned, "push" a resource into Planetary Logistics. I have a water mining unit on Minmus. It is successfully mining water and at this point I have 4,000 units of it in the storage tank. I have an agricultural base on Minmus with an empty water tank and a manned Tundra Logistics Module. Its water tank is also set to Planetary Logistics: On. I don't see any options on the tank or the Logistics Module for "pushing" resources into Planetary Logistics. The menu on the right hand side comes up with tabs including Planetary Logistics, but it doesn't show resources like the Local Resources tab does. Please could I get an explanation for how I am supposed to use this function? I'm very invested in this mod in my current playthrough, and I'd love to keep going with it, but this is a wall I've slammed into. My only alternative would be sending an entire water tanker lander out to Minmus and shuttling water around, if I'm unable to get Planetary Logistics working. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, that... kind of works. The symbol is tiny, has an even smaller hitbox for recognising when my mouse is over it, and only changes colour very slightly to show when my mouse is in the right place. You've been helpful, but whoever designed the interface definitely wasn't. It wasn't at all obvious that the deployment symbol was a button rather than just a notification of readiness to deploy.

When I try to place a deployable experiment, the game acts as if I am trying to move the experiment from one inventory to another. It doesn't show the object in position and the options menu that is supposed to appear. Is this a bug or am I doing it wrong? All the information about the Breaking Ground DLC talks about how placing experiments is a feature, but none of the articles or videos I could find explained how you were supposed to do it.

I'll try that, thanks!

None of the lift fans were showing up in the part editor. I looked at the cfg files and I thought the problem was that they were listed as "category = propulsion" rather than "category = engine", but changing this didn't seem to do anything.

Can planes fire fixed weapons behind them? You know, for when they've got an enemy on their tail.

Looking at what I did last night, seems like the problem might be I used the wrong download link. I didn't see the link on the releases page and tried downloading from PapaJoesSoup/BDArmory. I think I've found the correct link now and will try running that instead. Sorry.

I'm having problems. First, the BDArmoury tab shows up as grey when it didn't do that in earlier versions. There are also important parts missing such as the radomes (they aren't in other tabs, I checked). I followed the installation instructions including downloading Physics Range Extender. I placed the entire mod into GameData like it says to do. What might be causing these issues? I tried google searching it, but only found one instance of someone else having the same problem and they never got answered.

Thanks! I wasn't sure where it was supposed to go. I haven't been on the forum in a while and was logged out, so I may not have seen the right sub-forum.

Using Extraplanetary Launchpads and a few other mods, I built this. Workshop, smelter, reactor, rocketparts silo, metalore mining unit and one launchpad were sent from Kerbin, but the rest of the base was built by the base. I've been using it to launch Duna and Eve missions, and when Minmus gets into position I'll be using it for an asteroid capture mission too. Aside from specialty equipment like reactors, electric engines and spacecraft that are required by contract to have been built at the KSC, I am now building pretty much everything here. Those Duna and Eve missions (which will both be setting up ore mining facilities and fuel converters at their destinations) barely put a dent in my 8,000,000 Vessel Funds. This being my first Extraplanetary Launchpads base to actually work, I'm really pleased with it.

The author knew exactly what he was doing. Its a case of without the dust storm, there is no story. Personally I'd have preferred that the dust storm was a problem for the reason stated at the beginning of the book - that the MAV was a spacecraft, and that too much dust would destroy its delicate systems. This would give them a time limit to abort the mission in, without the unrealistic thing of it tipping over. Of course, then you've got to work out how Watney gets left behind without having a communications antenna sticking through him, and for that matter, how the communications antenna broke in the first place.

They fared better than Sky Captain's static airfield