Starman4308

If you're going for electrical propulsion, there's an ion-based RCS part pack (depending on your KSP version, possibly part of AmpYear), which provides a potentially interesting tradeoff between efficiency and ease of refueling + electrical requirement + TWR.

So long as you've got ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water, the elements are there (except maybe the 0.5% HF in IRFNA, which is admittedly space magic*). My best guess is that they're talking about the chlorine necessary to make the chloramine, which can theoretically be recycled from the HCl byproduct... adding yet another reaction to the crazy set of reactions involved in making MMH/UDMH. *And the HF is pretty necessary; without hydrofluoric acid, RFNA likes to chew through its tanks like candy. If you haven't already, I'd recommend "Ignition!" by John D. Clark; I recently gave it a read and loved it. I'm not quite as sold on the idea that cryogenic propellants will ever be practical for RCS applications; it can be difficult to get a reliable start, and RCS thrusters need to be able to turn themselves on and off very frequently, favoring hypergolic propellants and monopropellants. Fortunately for future ISRU operations, hydrazine is relatively easy to make from hydrogen peroxide and ammonia, and dinitrogen tetroxide from ammonia and oxygen, although the high melting point of hydrazine and the fact that hydrazine is liquid death to humans does put a small damper on things.

You know, there's actually a non-zero chance Bartdon could hit a golf ball across some of the smaller craters on Mars. Given a 100 m/sec swing (almost the world record), at a 45 degree angle, with Mars's weak gravity and negligible atmosphere, that ball could go nearly 2.7 km. And yes, I was thinking "hm, I wonder if Bartdon could hit it across Hebes Mensa" when I started to run the math.

If it helps you guys, I did hack up a RealFuels config (which seems to work in 1.1.3) for Karbonite to hydrolox, methalox, methanol, ammonia, the standard hypergols (hydrazine, MMH, UDMH, Aero50, with NTO and IRFNA-III oxidizers). The two biggest stretches I can think of: the HF component of IRFNA-III comes from space magic, and the synthesis routes for MMH, UDMH, and Aero50 are... complicated. If you use it, I suggest using a bit of restraint and thinking of whether it would be realistic to get the raw materials at that body; I generally started my syntheses from H2O, NH3, and CO2, which may not be always available.

I'd just zip up the old KSP directory with the solemn (never actually kept) promise to come back to it some day, and start anew. Once you hit the 50+ mod mark, you pretty much just assume moving to a new version will break your old saves into tiny little twigs. 'Tis why I will be on 1.1.3 for a while yet; I have 0 confidence that I'd manage to successfully port this to 1.2.

You guys make me feel like such a paranoid, perpetually over-engineering chump; the worst I've ever been at (for a manned mission, anyways) was 350 m/s with 4 days of spare life support, and that was after a botched exit from Minmus SOI that left me sailing out of Kerbin SOI (never did find out if that was me making a mistake or a KSP bug). Granted, I kinda treat it as a feature-not-bug that my transfer stages usually have enough dV to complete lunar insertion, despite being intended to be just enough to get payloads to lunar injection.

I have to say, I'm kinda impressed. I doubt I'd have the patience to take a rover several hundred kilometers. I've most enjoyed this; I hope you keep it up.

My major lunar operations are coming together. There's a load of moving parts; per moon, two refueling stations, two rovers (to bring the fuel from the station to the lander), two refueling landers (basically a 1-man capsule on a giant hydrolox fuel tank), two hydrolox-propelled science landers, two hypergolic-propelled emergency landers, the space station itself (requiring three* auxiliary launches to add modules to it), and two 4-man transfer vehicles. *Though turns out the giant "fill it up the first time" life support probes were made redundant because I forgot again that pump-enabled fuel clamps will refill all resources, not just propellant as it sits on the pad. Could've been bad were my rockets not ridiculously overengineered and indeed capable of bringing a 26-ton station to lunar injection with 3-4 tons of life support resources that were meant to be delivered separately. Probably the biggest misadventures were figuring out the ideal tanks for the absurdly cryogenic liquid hydrogen. I noticed some of my vessels were leaking 0.5-1L of hydrogen each second; my best guess right now is that cryogenic tanks work well when you don't have 20+ parts surface-attached to them, and do not work well when you have surface-attached parts. Most of my vehicles have had cryogenic tanks replaced with heavier but less leaky command module tanks as a result. What I'm proudest of is landing my first rover in forever; a roughly 5-ton vehicle intended to bring fuel from my refueling stations to the landers. I didn't use a separate skycrane; I just slapped a couple engines roughly distributed around the CoM on the bottom of the rover, which is, after all, mostly just a giant hydrolox fuel tank. Wrestled a bit with Throttle Controlled Avionics doing it; I'm not sure how to set that mod to say "just act like SAS, don't change my flight vector". Fortunately, it had more than enough control authority to compensate with default SAS; a quartet of RCS blocks and a 1.25m reaction wheel. I think I'll nickname it the Bumblebee; when it's still on the second-stage booster, it looks kinda like a queen bee. And yes, this means I'll have to wait for lunar sunrise to get my first rover to its destination 16 km away: Finally, the Duna/Ike stuff is mostly on its way, after minor correction burns shortly after leaving Kerbin SOI to maximize gravitational assist from Ike, with the Ike stuff generally entering Ike SOI directly (approaching from behind to minimize crossing velocity). Here, for example, is a lander plunked beneath a few relay sats it will help deploy.

They built the mighty N1 booster/explosive device, which was intended to get cosmonauts to the Moon before the US did, and mostly just exploded. Part of it was inadequate launch/testing facilities (unable to test the full thrust assembly at once, for example), part of it was the silliness of a first stage with 30 experimental, little-tested engines. Every engine represents a point of potential failure and/or cascading failure, which is probably a good part of why NASA went with the Rocketdyne F1 for the Saturn V; a few high-thrust engines will be less complex and hopefully more reliable than a large cluster of smaller engines.

For something like that: either just avoid accepting those contracts, or build a borderline spaceplane so you can get to the general area at near-orbital velocities. I tend to go for the first option.

Thank you so much for reupdating Porkjet's Hab pack. I really like having a centrifuge part for quasi-realism. As for TAC:LS support, I'm not really sure anything should be done for Porkjet's inflatable stuff; while regular habitat modules can be assumed to carry some amount of food/water/oxygen by default, the inflatables are probably just "inflatable living space". If you want some generic default values, TAC LS has an "MM_AddResources.cfg" config which gives anything with a ModuleCommand module 1.097 food, 0.725 water, 111.038 oxygen, and storage for 95.913 CO2, 0.1 waste, and 0.924 wastewater per Kerbal capacity. Another thanks to Porkjet, DennyTX, and udk_lethal_d0se for creating these wonderful mods in the first place, and allowing Tokamak to re-release them.

With luck, if the source code for a plugin is available on the web under an open-source license, you can just clone the project and recompile against the latest binaries. With less luck, you'd need to edit the source code to match the newer API, and edit module configurations in case the underlying modules were also changed. With no luck, the source code either isn't on the web, or it's under an ARR (All Rights Reserved) or similar copyright license which forbids forking and redistributing. If you don't know what "compile", "source code", or "API" are... welcome to computer programming. There's a plugin development subforum, and C# is not a bad language; it's very similar to C, Java, and C++, all of which are popular programming languages.

First ISRU station on the Mun. I'm having trouble with this one, though; for some reason the cryo tank is leaking LH2 all over the place. My best guess is that I have too much surface-attached to it, so I replaced the simple radiator panels with the extending ones (which pipe from all over the ship), and changed the tank type to command module for the second batch. Speaking of the second batch: despite ensuring the Karbonite tanks were empty in the VAB editor, they come out full on the paaaaaaad and I just realized they're probably getting filled by the launch clamps! One semi-finicky thing about that: because my config creates LH2/LOX in a 2:1 molar ratio and the engines usually consume more of a 3.5:1 ratio, my refill-in-flight shenanigans are followed by dump-excess-oxygen shenanigans. Otherwise: the first of my Duna flights is away, this one a RemoteTech relay satellite. Three Yagi antennae from the Antennas mod (one pointed at Kerbin, two at equi-Kerbin relay sats in case Kerbin is occluded by the Sun or another planet), a Log-Periodic that'll be pointed at Ike, another Log-Periodic just in case I need an extra for something, and a Communitron 16 for basic omni coverage around Duna.

The batteries come from KW Rocketry, Procedural Parts, and Near Future Electrical, the capacitors are from Near Future Electrical, and some stock parts are reskinned by Ven's Stock Part Revamp.

Okay, this is just too funny for words. I accidentally sent up my (first, at least) ISRU station with a full load of Karbonite. I think I dumped ~25% of it before I realized "oh, hey, I can just use it to refuel the main tanks mid-flight". Not as planned, but it'll still work out.

MechJeb here. I think I'd ragequit if I had to plot out every single maneuver by hand, particularly for routine missions like "rescue Kerbal #491238 from low Kerbin orbit". Plus, at 6.4x scale, burns can take a long time, and it's nice to be hands-off. That said, I run ascents and descents semi-manually, maybe using Smart A.S.S. to hold my course, docking is manual... I really only use it for information, holding trajectory, and plotting/executing maneuvers*. *And with RealFuels ullage, I need to set KAC to drop me out of warp ~10s beforehand so I can fire RCS.

I'm not too concerned. They probably aren't selling many new copies, and the money for further development has to come from somewhere. There may be a few more bugs to squash, and Squad may consider expansions, but I suspect these guys were brought in as a temporary push to get 1.2 to where 1.0 should've been. I just hope that's what it is (Squad running out of money), instead of something less pleasant like a work environment issue. I do hope these guys aren't burned out from modding, though; they've been cornerstones of KSP modding for a long time, and that's a big part of the appeal for a substantial part of the community.

Kinda-sorta action shots today: the Kerbin space station is in operation with a crew of 4, and a bucket of science is on its way in... probably 11 days or so, given the need for a bielleptic transfer from the polar science-collecting orbit to the equatorial orbit of my station. The Ike package on ascent to parking orbit: The big design for today is the lunar space stations: at 26 tonnes each (after emptying the food/water/O2 tanks), they required me to design my heaviest booster yet, the Sarnus IV. The booster masses nearly 1000 tonnes on the pad, the upper stage powered by seven Poodles, the lower 1.5 stage by five Mainsails and four 110-tonne Linebacker SRBs. First stage image: Station (from an awkward angle, I know). Goes from a 2.5m to 3.75m stack, room for 9 Kerbonauts, four Gigantors for power and an absurd stack of batteries to keep the science labs going through the dark side of the moons.

Wonderful! Our engineers will put this in place immediately to ensure 24/7 geostationary coverage over all Kerbin, not just over the equator! Though, ironically, I've just realized that's pretty much what a regular radio/cell tower is, albeit at a much lower altitude.

You're not the only one to send up a payload with mismatched docking ports and curse when you realize you need to send up an adapter. On a side note: if you haven't already, I suggest downloading the Docking Port Alignment mod; without it, I'd be hopeless trying to dock. Speaking of docking: sent up the first crew of four to the KSS (Kerbin Space Station); will be sure to screenshot the station once operations have begun, the lights are on, and the scientists are... well, waiting for data. I plan to rendezvous a probe with gravitometric measurements from space over all of Kerbin's biomes, but it's still 42 hours from complete in my KCT queue, nevermind launching it, collecting the measurements, and rendezvous (which will entail a bielliptic transfer from polar to equatorial).

I swear at some point I'll show action shots, and not just VAB pictures of what I plan to do. 6.4x scale Kerbin, so don't be scratching your heads on why the delta-V seems ludicrously exaggerated. Ike package: includes lander and a rather amusing stack of three communication relays. The biggest advantage of having all four payloads combined is so that they can share the Ike lander's big, heavy, power-hungry interplanetary antenna during the trip to Duna; the relays themselves have smaller Communitron 32 omni antennas, and will be relying on the primary Duna relay network to link back to Kerbin once in-place. In a small digression: RemoteTech causes you to need far more batteries and power generation than you otherwise would; even the inner-solar-system antennae are eating up nearly 1 EC/s, easily over 2000 EC for a dark-side transit of the inner planets. I'm starting to realize that's part of why the Juno mission spends so much time at a large distance from Jupiter; it needs a long time to gather the charge to transmit the results from each Jupiter approach. Duna lander: planning on semi-powered descent. Haven't done this before (except for one time in stock, probably 0.24 or 0.25), so as many precautions as possible are taken: when the heatshield decouples, I have two mini-sepratrons making sure the heatshield doesn't just smack straight back into the lander, and another couple mini-sepratrons (activated simultaneously) to make sure the descent engine has ullage. The OMS for pre-landing maneuvers is overkill, probably sufficient for insertion to low orbit, but propellant is cheap, and it was too big for my 4-tonne booster, so may as well max out the capacity of my 6-tonne booster. Duna orbital package: is loaded down with scientific instruments (3 from ScanSat, an ISRU surveyor, gravitometer, thermometer, barometer). One for Duna, one for Ike. Primary Duna comms relays not shown, as they're basically just antennae and solar panels.

I would recommend against endorsing bargain-bin PSUs for any purpose; saving $10 is not worth putting the rest of your expensive computer at risk from it.

PSUs at that price range tend to be unreliable out to fire hazards, though. Sometimes there's a nice deal, but taking a quick gander at PC Part Picker, the list of PSUs below $30 can be summed up as "nothing I would ever plug into my computer". Closer to $40, there's at least a few SeaSonic units, and those tend to be decent. Don't forget that the mountains on real Luna are higher than the Mun, and that there's no Minmus for extra science farming.

Getting back some steam in this save; I think this time I may be able to actually pull off something interplanetary in 6.4x Kerbin. The "get 24 level 3 Kerbals" project is nearing completion; the general plan was to launch a 4-man capsule to a brief stay in solar orbit, followed by pre-emplacing 4-man landers in both Mun and Minmus orbit, to which a second crew capsule would rendezvous. Adding in all that, 4 test flights, 1 badly borked lander launch (decided to ram it into Minmus rather than risk a lander with so little fuel), and the 20 "rescue Kerbal from orbit" contracts involved, that's a total of 49 launches. Two groups of 4 have already returned, and the very last group is about to land on Minmus. Crew vessel: C/SM powered by the 40 kg "Spark" engine from MRS (I love that engine to death), which is efficient, albeit almost painfully slow maneuvering a roughly 16-tonne capsule. Beneath is the very, very large cryogenic 2nd stage (hydrolox), beneath that is a kerolox/solid 1.5 stage. Mun lander: Also powered by a Spark. Massed 15 tonnes after booster sep, a smidge overengineered, dV readout misleading. The intent was that the first 4 radial cans would be for orbit insertion, the second 4 would get me landed, and then back up to orbit on the central tank; what usually happened is that the booster would get me 50 m/s into the descent, I would drop the orbital insertion cans midway through an almost agonizingly slow descent, and the landing cans midway through ascent. I was usually able to top off the crew capsule with resources remaining in the lander after post-landing rendezvous. Minmus lander: pretty much the same, but much lighter (6 tonnes lander). Usually spent more of its propellant than I was comfortable with getting to low orbit, so I usually topped it off from the crew vessel. Hooray for everything using MMH/NTO! The first Duna transfer window is approaching in a couple weeks; I'm going to have to split launch priority between that and finishing off my business in the Kerbin system. I probably won't send too much in the first window; just a set of relay sats, a semi-permanent science orbiter in polar orbit, and at least a lightweight Ike lander. Not much has been designed/built except for the major interplanetary relay sats. Ordinarily at this point in a 64k career, I'd be building a space station around the Mun and Minmus, and chucking semi-reusable 1-man landers and giant 40-tonne refueler probes at them. Not this time; I've written configs for Karbonite to replenish Real Fuels, and hacked up a script which spat out engine configs for all O/U/L+ engines for 900 ignitions, albeit at 90% thrust. I've decided it's semi-plausible that the Mun and Minmus have reasonable concentrations of ice and/or hydrates, so I'm going for hydrolox-propelled, fully reusable landers with ISRU operations on both moons. The only thing I'll need to send along periodically is food and MMH/NTO to top off the RCS systems. Mining Station: over 10 tonnes of hydrolox storage, should be able to produce 3.1 L of LH2 and 1.5 L of LO2 per second. Plenty of KAS attachment points, more solar panels than I've ever deployed before, over 10,000 charge (including capacitors)... and it'd still shut down within 10 minutes during night time. This is why I'm sending two per moon; while it'd be less mass to throw a nuclear reactor at the problem, I like to at least pretend Kerbals are slightly nervous at the idea of radioactive waste dropping all over their home planet if the launch fails. I probably would have made the mining station even bigger, except for the fact that I don't have large landing legs or 3.75m engines yet, and hydrolox tanks are enormous due to the very low density of LH2. Orbital hauler: basically just a giant insulated fuel tank on legs, with a trio of Spark engines. Much like the mining station, I probably would've built it even bigger if hydrolox was denser. The last piece of the ISRU puzzle will be rovers, as I don't trust myself to land within KAS linking distance of the mining station. I just don't have rover wheels yet, and I'm saving up my science for extra-large docking ports for the stations!

I dunno; gold would go part of the way towards explaining how hilariously dense Kerbin (and the rest of the Kerbol system) is.