Admac

Anyone else not able to reconfig the drills since the last release? The menu is there, but it doesn't change my substrate drill to a water drill (or any other to any other) Heaps of Matkits and Spec parts, but no error, or any yellow text at all. This is the in the field reconfig obviously, the in hanger one works just fine. Edit: Yeah the new USI tools fixed everything, thanks forums!

I got pretty far in the last version's challenge, but I remember it got super duper unstable once I had like 80 vehicles up at once and it looked like I'd need 200ish to make it all work. Did this last patch do anything about that?

I'm with Jetski, while the challenge is great, 100ish vessels in the game is running like a dog.I made the mistake of using a career save in which I had already built up mun/minmus and Duna with colonies and RT networks, and I am not even done Vall and it's being pretty unpleasant to play. This seems to be a known issue with how it handles objects in memory, and to be fair prior to this challenge I didn't run nearly this many vessels, nor try to colonize all of known space. Maybe if I get some hardware upgrades I'll pick it up again but for now I'm putting my campaign on hold.

Probably more fun and rewarding to install MKS and hunt for rich seams of Exotic Minerals and Rare Metals. A 50 ton crate of those can be worth tens of millions, and in my last save the only rich seam I could find was on Moho. It was a pretty fun way to make some Kerbucks!

Oh my god yes. So good!

well it only take like 20 minutes to rescue a kerbal from the kerbin system, so just knock that out in the first 10000 or so minutes of your career! But if you are one of those people that doesn't want spend 17+ hours rescuing dudes, i suppose there are a few mods that can help, astronaut overhaul and deepfreeze come to mind. oh and Civpop.

Communication Sat Scoring Concern; I do not like the scoring/rules for comsats, and I think they can be made better. Based on the height of orbits, there are several ways that you can get 100% coverage with as few as 4 sats per body. I think the full coverage challenge should be 4x per body instead of 6, and the challenge I suppose can be w/e but there are lots of inclinations that make 6 almost 100% double coverage. Also the current scoring calls for 6 comsats around each of 5 moons + 4 around Jool, for a fairly skinny 8 points. Launching 34 sats into precise timed orbits seems like it should be worth more. Esp considering they'll have to be individually scripted with massive RT delays. Also; Orbital transfer stations with 20+ kerbals in them will obviously have antennas, I assume they can be counted as comsats?

We could solve this and make the Transgendered aerospace engineers happy by renaming Bill to Belle. Besides, I always mix up which one of them is the engineer....

Ah, I misapplied that sat spacing! Issues: The polar orbit was too high for scansat, the inclined orbits sychronized, leading to big missed spots.(All three at the same place every half orbit) Solution: Use a low half period polar orbit and a full height equatorial orbit instead. I desync'ed the inclined orbits but using mechjeb's resonate orbit by 5/6th, and recirc'd after two and then four orbits. Whew! RT is hard!

Large vessels need to be pretty large in my experience. I am working on that Jool 500 Challenge, and my first wave contained a 25 kerbal ship with 27 years of hab. It was 300ish tons of dry mass, but with on orbit refuelling, scaling up is pretty reasonable. There is very little drawback to stacking Kerbitats and Hab rings since they weigh so little. Even my little Duna science mission had 2 of each, and that was lots of time. I think my colonization ship with 25 crew had 12 Kerbitats, but whats 36 tons if you are dooming them to a lifetime in a tin can? I noticed that was a design shift with using USI, in stock there is very little difference between a Mun mission and a Duna Mission. With Hab requirements and supplies requirements, I find my Duna mission is about 3x the mass now, and Jool missions 5x the mass. Which is pretty much the reason I like having LS mods!

If the stage 1 reuse costs get low enough it might make sense the throw up a company owned launch of a specialized stage 2 spacecraft that gathers up a half dozen regular stage 2s, deploys a big heat shield and land them somewhere, maybe even propulsively. The gathering them up might be a nightmare, assuming they are all on their own LEO or GTO orbits with different inclinations. Probably more economical than setting up a landing system for each one, but you'd need more advanced space robotics than exist now to get them put into a single vehicle. It would be incredibly awesome though, so maybe they'll run the numbers! I could do it in Kerbal with docking ports, but I have a feeling the real world is less forgiving...

#BrownStarPlanetsMatter

Nice! Much more effective than my plan! I might have to use the high inclination polar Joolian Relays. for the actual moons, I found a neat article about 4 satellite coverage for 100% up-time with 4 sats and never more than a 15 degree signal inclination that I've adapted. 1 Polar(90 degree inclination) sat with scanning rigging 6hr period 1 sat at 210 degree inc 6 hr period 1 sat at 330 degree inc 6 hr period 1 sat at equatorial inc 3 hour period the exact period can be changed so long as the equatorial one is half the main ones. Then all three will focus a different sat in Joolian orbit, I think I'll do 2 up and 2 down in elliptical orbits, at opposite points in the orbit. The inclined moonSats will target one Relay each, and the equatorial one will focus all 4. Should be 100% uptime with minimum connections and sats I think. I might be over building the Jool relay set with 4 though Also I went full on launch nut and lofted 19/24 required sats in the first trip, in a 430 part monster of lag and regret.

Has anyone figured out an elegant solution to RT relays around Jool? Pol is almost 200MM away at apoapsis, so the neither of the antennae with cones work, so I suppose you need a dish to the main relays in LJO? or does it make more sense to lug your main relays beyond Pol an have a wider ring? Every plan I have seems to run into complications, setting up relays in the crowded yet sparse system. I think I'm going to go with direct link 88 deployables from all the moons' comsats to the main ones in lowish Jool orbits 1 to 1 links with three sats in each orbit. Complex stuff! Also I've built like 10000 MKS bases and would be happy to help with and MKS/UKS questions!

Any thoughts on allowing EPL use only in Kerbin orbit? That would allow some latitude in making non aerodynamic vessels and wouldn't be that unreasonable to expect that at least some parts are assembled on orbit.

KPlus economy play through feedback Drills need to be drillier Having recently done a lot of mining with this mod, I think the extraction rate needs to be buffed 50-500x. With the stock rate on a moderately capable mining ship, 100ish ton dry mass, 12 medium (1.25ton I think) drills, on the richest spot on a very well prospected Eve (0.0027 concentration) took over 400 days to get enough fuel to get back to orbit (enough K+ for 5500 M/s DV). It was crewed in case the extraction rate is modified by the engineer. My mission was to get about a hundred+ tons to a refuelling station in MEO to kick start a K+ economy. Based on the out of the box rate, I's have either needed a lot more drills (like hundreds) or centuries of mining. In my opinion neither make for compelling game play. I buffed the rate 100 fold in the config file, and it filled up in about a year, which felt about right to my mind. Fusion drives are about how I remember them the lack of isp in atmo scared me since early phase Eve mining needs ducted fans and Fusion drives, but they still worked out just fine once I got too high for the fans to work. Ascending 25km at ~30 m/s on fans was a memorable and majestic moment! Idk if new reactors are better, or I just added more or them, but EC management used to be the toughest part, and it was a total non issue this time. There is nothing smaller than a 1.25m Kontainer for K+, so I can't build any really small ships with those awesome 0.625 Fusion drives. tiny radial packs from before seem missing, and they were great. the non sample double bottles. The changes to the torch drive are neat. The use of ore made me have to retrofit a lot of my bases and stations, since they had little or no storage for it and I needed 100s of tons to top off torchships. the lack of a stylish way to attach that much ore means lots of kontainers of ore, which looks functional but maybe less futurey that the feel of the mod implies. Liquid fuel filler fuel would have been a lot easier since I had to have storage for it everywhere for logistics hubs, but ore is cool as far as things that call for sweeping redesigns. There is a bug where the 5M drive is currently unusable, the attachment point looks to be in it's centre of mass, so it glitches out pretty brutally. which is a shame since it's got the best ISP. I really dislike how big the spread in ISP is. The 2.5m form factor has the best mass and thrust for most things I was doing, but had half the ISP of the 3.75m drive, so it was always a better choice to use that one, with the thrust limiter set to not crush it to death. I think the spread between the best and the worst should be 20-30% rather than the 150% that 5000- 12500 ISPs represent. It might be a funny mechanic to add a crushing gee penalty to USI LS? I accidentally hit like 25 Gs with a 3.75m torch drive, and it would be hilarious if that stunned everyone for a day or two.

The other thing is the fuel it uses is liquid hydrogen which is super terrible to work with. It embrittles things, and it has to be handled differently than other cryofuels. The result of this is aerospace grade liquid hydrogen costs a bit more at about 2-10 dollars a kilo, compared to about 40 cents per kilo for methane. The high fuel costs mean, best case scenario, based on the skylon working perfectly, have a full launch manifest, and lasting for decades of daily service, they are pretty close to 1000 USD per kilo to LEO. Still way better than $15000 per kilo with the shuttle program, but higher than the $500 dollar a kilo system than SpaceX is targeting at with their 10m Methalox launcher, that should be ready to go much sooner(By decades?), with 1/100th the potential hurdles. To be fair though, it's all still rocket science! But really all it comes down to is price per kilo to orbit, and reusable methalox rockets are the cheapest thing on the horizon, which is why we see SpaceX and Blue Origin both basing their next generation of systems on it. Oh, and Skylon wouldn't work on Mars...

It sounds like it would be easier to just release 1.1 tomorrow, then you don't have to do Dev notes. Oh but you'd have to do patch notes.... Also today is the ninth, making tomorrow the tenth, so it may be less of a sign.

Yeah 90% of my SLS frustration would be solved if there was a sweet 70 ton spacecraft that could fly to places in the solar system, even unmanned but beefy. But all it has is the Orion capsule, but that's pretty underwhelming too, since it looks like it doesn't bring anything new to the table compared to crew dragon or starliner-100. I love big cool rockets, but the idea of spending a billion dollars a throw when there is nothing available to throw is pretty mind boggling.

Everything about this SLS project frustrates me. Why is Congress wanting to get back into the LEO delivery business? I think NASA has a massive competitive advantage in deep space ops, and orbital habs/construction, but SpaceX (And maybe even Blue Origin in 5ish years) seem to be so much more cost effective than the SLS project. Over the planned 20 year life span, how many commercial launches could that 40ish billion buy? Especially when the point of SLS is to have some super heavy launches, and all they are planning so far is a light Orion capsule and some cube sats. Better value than the shuttle, but not by enough! I place zero blame for any of this on anyone in NASA, and I admit that leaving rocket design to the politicians will result in the most expensive and biggest rockets imaginable, so maybe it was all inevitable...

I wish that it wasn't only unique things that leveled up kerbals though, like 10 mun missions should be worth more than 2 measly stars, and being passenger on a jool flyby ought not to be worth 5. Also; by the time I have any 5 star astronauts, the game is basically over already. I suppose I send out 2-3 missions at a time though. If I were king of the world, slight diminishing returns for repeated activities would still count for XP. doing to LKO -> mun route a few times should be worth at least 4 stars. doing 5 landings on Duna and Ike should be enough for the little guy to be 5 stars, even if it's on one extended mission. I suppose I only care about the crew since EPL and USI have mechanics that reward better crew pretty strongly.

Lots of cool things Mars could export to earth! There are kind of two reasons mars would care about earth money, one to repay investments, and two to buy Earth goods for Martian consumption. With permanent deep space transports ships doing to journey every window, as per the SpaceX colonization plan,, the freight costs would be pleasingly low. The ships need to return to Earth to take on more colonists and supplies, and would otherwise be travelling back empty. Small Colony phase (under 5000 people) -Science and samples, lots of organizations would pay a lot of money for interesting samples to be returned, collected by scientists on Mars -Cool TV shows about how living on ANOTHER PLANET is. It would be probably worth far more than the Olympics, and networks bid billions for the broadcast rights to those. This is the sole income source envisioned by Mars One. -Novelties. Literally anything from Mars would be worth a mint on Earth. eBay would go bananas for a shirt worn on Mars, and I am sure the world would be flooded in 10 billion fakes. Big Colony phase (Over 5000) -Patents. Most people going to mars would be pretty educated so it's far to assume mars would produce more interesting patents and advances than any other small town ever has. This would flow back as tech that can be licensed to terrestrial manufacturers. -light manufactured goods. If it's tiny and can be made better in 1/3 G and is worth more than about $2000 a kilo, it would be economical to ship back. -Sweet Mars videos. Low Gee sports leagues, Lonely (Red) Planet, This Old Aeroponics Dome, Martian dune buggy racing , low gee strippers and the like would be enough to float entire mars based network. -Art. Even the most terrible art would be worth a fortune if it were from Mars, since there is such an guaranteed notoriety and scarcity. I don't think that from the point of view of the economy of Earth, the investment will be paid off for close to a hundred years, but there would be absolutely unique additions to human culture and science that I for one feel would be worth it at almost any cost. Also having the infrastructure to move thousands of people to Mars would mean developing a space based infrastructure that would yield all sorts of more immediate advantages for the homeworld.

What you are describing in the OP is exactly what scientists call Geoengineering. It's super controversial since it's directly messing with the environment, albeit at a lesser extent that the combined industries of Earth. The cooling shade theory has two semi realistic options, increased clouds and solar umbrellas. To increase the reflectiveness of the planet, the idea is to get thousands of autonomous drone ships in the deep ocean, using solar or tidal or ocean currents for power, and evaporating massive plumes of steam to blanket the oceans in a semi permanent cloud layer. The perk to this is it's a thing that can be reversed fairly quickly, the drawback is monumental costs, and the effects of changing the humidity on a planetary scale is still unknown. This is a lot like your nuclear winter idea, but a lot less radioactive/murder-y. The solar umbrella is looking more likely as launch costs keep falling, but placing some big shiny Mylar mirrors at the solar Lagrange point to reflect a bunch of the suns light back. also heartstoppingly expensive, and also filled with unknowns. In the end it might be what gets done, but we are decades away from any sort of consensus, and even then they will need to find a trillion-ish bucks to make it a reality.

There are lots of good use cases for in system fuel mining! I use boost tankers for all my serious business missions. Granted I have USI Kolonization mods with that handy logistics hub to get the fuel from my surface base to the orbiting ships, saving time at a cost of more fuel. But I sent a reusable ship to haul 200 tons from Kerbin to Moho and back a few times as a part of the Grand Orbital Station challenge, and in space refueling is a billion times easier than lugging it up from the surface. Back to the Jool question, I agree with the consensus here, you are really building 3 ships; 1) Launch vehicle with at least 3400 DV and starting TWR of 1.2 or more 2) A transfer vehicle with 4000ish DV and a TWR of 0.2 or greater 3) A payload to have fun at Jool. as light as possible. Your satellites should be closer to 0.5 tons each, that should be plenty for experiments and an RTG and lots of fuel. All these parts can be made reusable too, if you are feeling hardcore and don't mind making them all a bit bigger!

Yeah, I am super hoping RabidWombat comes back some day. There are huge aspects of this mode I love, but he hasn't posted in 2 months, and it is 100% unplayable in 1.05. A few habs and I melted through a very expensive 160 000 suplies in under a day. Well the laser drills and landing legs are still great, but that's not why you'd download this mod.