Terwin

Thought: what if manufacturing DIY kits(off-kerbin) required MKS specialized parts equal to 80% of the mass of the kit plus Machinery for the other 20%, 2x Engineer skill hours and 0.5x Scientist hours? Specialized parts are one of the more expensive things to create in MKS, Taking Refined exotics(Rare metals + Exoitic Minerals + Chemicals) and Silicon(Refined silica) Having a bit of machinery in there also requires that you have those parts of the production chain in good order as well. I could even see having an extra 10-50% colony supplies that do not actually go into the kit, but keep the workers happy while doing this unusually demanding work(and incidentally ensure that you are using the end result of every production chain except for fuels) Might also require a distinct 'kit construction' bay in a 3.5m Tundra assembly module or a distinct 'Kit Assembly' module. Of course this may mean that building kits off-planet will require MKS.

If you can get a vessel to orbit without staging off any boosters, then you should be able to land it if you can refuel it. If you have enough thrust and d-v to get the fully fueled vessel off the surface and into orbit, you should have ample thrust and d-v to get out of orbit and down to a soft landing. On the way up, drag is a hindrance and on the way down it is an aid. If you were slow enough to not burn up on ascent, you should be able to slow down from orbital velocity to whatever velocity you were at when you left the atmosphere by the time you reenter. The only SSTO that might not be able to manage this is a space plane that has barely enough LFO to circularize when it's tanks are empty after relying on LF for most of the thrust.

Did a couple of quick checks: No inflatable parts have workshop functionality, even when inflated(old vessel, but the same vessel had workshop functionality on other parts) Tundra assembly plant is only 50% workshop functionality. I would expect the Ranger workshop and Tundra assembly plant to be around 100% as they are already workshops (although it may need to be a different configuration than making material kits or machinery, I did not check to see if that was an option). The smallest 50% workshop I found was the tundra hub, so I will probably throw a couple of those on either my crew transport or the cargo hauler carrying the packaged base.(unless my final base package needs more than ~600 skill hours, at that point it makes sense to send up a ~250skh workshop rover kit as well) Question: why is the 'short' version 10x the weight of the one with end-caps?(according to the wiki) I was kind of hoping I could use an inflatable workshop as my initial assembly facility(even if it was at 50%), might even design a base with a missing workshop so that I can then transfer it over after the base is built. (currently I am debating the utility of adding a nuclear fuel refinery to make the base truly self-sustaining. It is already long enough I need to move it back and forth in the VAB to get at the ends though... Much bigger than anything I would consider launching from Kerbin.) Note: due to other mods, I removed several entries form ConfigurableContainers\Parts\Squat_patch.cfg, although just removing the whole directory would be easier now that I know that is an option. I notice that there is already a configurable containers core mod, could GC switch to be dependent on that instead of the full mod? Seems like that should address most of the concerns without limiting those who like CC. edit: Ninja'd

Wouldn't you want 12 hours of production storage as it keeps 50% when pushing to Planetary storage?

Ranger habitation modules provide a big boost to either hab-time or the hab-time multiplier, so if you weer already planing to produce material kits, just take a few extra Ranger Hab modules and once you expand them you should be in pretty good shape(just make sure you have enough warehoused mk storage to expand them even if you can only get them to 60-70% capacity(PL will keep them from getting fuller than that)). I figure 4-5 years + hab modules to be deployed as able should give plenty of time to get Duna up to 500%, or at least give you a long time before you need to send replacement crew. And the crew transport will only need to handle transit time+safety margin, as hab time is per-vessel and home-time is based on the best vessel(aka base). (Refueling the crew transport will hopefully let you send the current crew back...) Although I suppose you could start by putting you kerbals up in a luxury resort for a few minutes on Kerbin or LKO to set their home timer way-high, then just have them hop out and stretch their legs every now and again on Duna to reset their hab-timer. Have not tried that myself though.

There is also a green cube button in the VAB/SPH that you can use to estimate hab time(LS does not take into account any Nom-O-Matics, so only reflects supplies) Personally, I found a couple hitchhikers, a bunch of view-ports(those mini-cupolas that give a hab multiplier instead of a hab bonus), and a Mk3 passenger cabin gave me quite a bit of hab-time for 4 kerbals.(I put the hab-time multiplier back at 1 so I get 30 kerb-days/seat instead of the 7 at 25%, so you may find a couple more hitchhikers to be better than a mk3 crew cabin at the default settings). That ship just recently landed on Duna and is heading to Ike(biome-hopping on Duna was put on hold after I realized just how un-aerodynamic that ship is) Just be sure to turn on habitation for all of your hab-parts when you get to the lunch-pad.(Adding 'activate habitation' to the stage action key can be a good way to make sure you do not forget) I like sending nom-o-matics a soon as I can. They only need fertilizer to turn mulch back into supplies at a 10:1 ratio, greatly reducing the amount of material you need to send. Also, even if you don't have MKS installed, you can use the small ISRU to (slowly) produce fertilizer from ore, giving self-sufficiency for as long as your hab lasts. (if you do have MKS installed, trading supplies/fertilizer for commodities can be highly profitable for the space program, just repaint the container after you empty it, then fill it up and send it home)

@Pinchy If your kerbals went grouchy with an older USI-LS version(before 0.50?) then you may need to fix it manually.

That is really up to you. There are advantages to both serial and parallel missions. I would suggest that parallel missions are much easier to manage with the Kerbal Alarm Clock(KAC) mod to remind you about upcoming burns or maintenance windows. If you are not doing anything else, then serial missions will seem much faster as you just time-warp through the wait. If you dislike leaving the rest of your space program on-pause while you zip out to another planet, then you can run daily tourist missions, maintain your mun base, and prepare your Eeloo Explorer mission while your kerbonauts are on the way to Duna, but it will take a lot of play-time before your vessel arrives at it's destination. It is just a matter of play-style. (in the past I have kept the number of concurrent missions small(1-2 kerbaled missions at a time, and perhaps a few probes to make sure I would be able to find the ore to get back home), but in my current game, I have multiple kerbaled outposts on each of the Mun and Minmus, along with an orbital science station around Kerbin, unmanned MKS resource harvesters heading to Ike and Duna, a Duna mission that has made it's first landing and is currently refueling, and a Moho mission that will land as soon as the sun rises over the KSC. I also just launched a combination fuel-drone/Scansat to Jool(they will discard the decouplers around the first moon then reconnect via klaw after scanning and refueling for the fuel drone to refuel the scanner and push it to the next moon))

I am not so sure about rep, but funds are a small fraction of what you can make with 1 monthly supply vessel that repaints the crate and takes back commodities(rare metals/exotic minerals). Looks sort of like 4 science/16K funds/10 rep per kerb-month for passive rewards. As opposed to much higher active rewards(doing research, sending back resources, or doing missions). As these benefits may require nothing beyond set-up costs, I am ok with the perpetual colonization rewards being relatively low. (think of it as putting our money in the bank and accruing interest) Makes me wonder if it would be worth while to send up a batch of colonists in a hab module to add-on to my mun-base. (currently dumping lots of fertilizer into planetary stores, so hab-space and recyclers should be all I need(at least until I need to convert both ranger ag-modules to agroponics, but that would support a *lot* of colonists)

Why not use Kerbnet to verify that your projected landing site has the biome you want? All you need to do is orbit a few times, making note of the locations of the biomes you want to visit before you land. You may need a higher orbit around airless bodies to see the polar biomes from the equator, but stock already has the tools you need. (Personally, I prefer the ScanSat mod, as that lets me generate permanent maps so I need not wait for my satellite to get into the proper position)

2 in a MKS mining base, 4 in a MKS manufacturing base, including an extra engineer to drive the node-harvesting rover around. Thinking about sending a second scientist and a lab down to the larger base, but I will probably not get around to it as my tree is already unlocked. Minmus is pretty much the same. The changes in MKS since I established those bases means that the mining base en route to Duna is unmanned, as is the one heading to Ike(which is being pushed by an autonomous refueling drone on a high-impulse(~11km/s from lko to lio) trajectory.

I drop a ScanSat in a high polar orbit of each body before I send kerbaled missions there(to scan for ore and biomes mostly, using all 3 ScanSat scanners plus the stock scanner), with the addition of antenna range, I just started adding a couple relay antennas instead of a couple of 88-88s. With the relays in place around Mun, Minmus, Moho and Gilly, my Moho explorer vessel was able to spend back data pretty much whenever I wanted to. I'm a little less confident about my Ike relay being adequate for both Duna and Ike however.(I really should have sent out relays to start scanning Jool by now, possibly even Dres and Eeloo)

Each cradle leg is extended/retracted/adjusted seperately. 100% is fully up while 0% is fully down. The reverse of what I originally expected. Adjust each let go 50% and deploy, then adjust them to get them where you want them. I think they should have enough adjustment range to allow 2.5 and 3.75 parts to connect directly on flat terrain(but I have not tested that)

Efficiency parts provide a total bonus of EfficiencyPartsMass/ActiveProducersMass Meaning if you have 10 tons of efficiency parts and 5 tons of producers you will get a +200% boost As such, if you go from 1 producing bay to 3 producing bays, the per-bay bonus will drop to 1/3 for each bay. The primary utility of the efficiency part setting is letting you keep using your older parts with less functionality to perform more advanced processes. So unless you are using ranger parts and producing most of your mass on-site with material kit production, you are generally better off just shipping in the heaviest parts you can when you want to improve production(to save on part-count).

As this mod will only activate when KSP would otherwise just delete the vessel in question, disabling his mod would do you no good. If you want drop-probes to work, you will need to find a way to get them onto the ground before KSP wants to delete them, all StageRecovery does is make it less expensive when this happens. While a part is out of focus, it is 'on-rails' and it's orbit will not change unless it goes low enough in the atmosphere to count as 'destroyed'. This is stock behavior.

According to the Ranger Sifter config file, ResourceLode produces 4 times the resources as a similar amount of dirt and a sifter can process 100 times as much ResourceLode as it can dirt. And instead of drilling for all that dirt, you just need to drive out and collect the node(or process it on-site).

It updates anytime you add or remove a part that could affect life support or habitability, so adding and then removing a supply pack should refresh it(as a work-around).

Loving the node-wrangling mini-game(had one appear inside the rim of a near-by crater, not only could I not get the node out, but I had to use RCS as thrusters to get my collection rover out of the crater). Warning: Be careful of node wrangling for established bases with ample supplies: I spent 2 days of play-time wrangling nodes between the ejection burn and the SOI escape of an unmanned mining out-post headed for Duna, and almost all of that was spent collecting and harvesting nodes for a base that already had hundreds of thousands of units of excess raw resources in planetary storage. Save it for bases that actually need the resources! I finally cut it out when I realized that it was either that, or KSP 1.3 would arrive before my outpost did...

No voodoo, Magic Smoke. 2 clear indicators: 1) no dead animals or dried herbs hanging on the wall at Best Buy 2) when smoke comes out of any part of your computer, that part stops working(and usually the rest of the computer too, but you can probably fix it by just replacing that one part). (Seriously, creating microchips looks suspiciously like 'Start with a single crystal of Virgin Silicon, and in a purified room, apply potions A-R in order, using the correct magic pattern and purification step for each, then take your magic crystal, attach gold wires and put it into a protective shell to keep it in a pristine state'.)

This mechanic is identical for all physical resources, not just supplies. As a catch-up tick is 6 hours, you should have capacity for 6 hours worth of processing at each step if you intend to be away from a base for extended periods(like more than a kerbal day). So if you have a large container that has it's warehouse flag turned on, then it is expected that you feel the need to have that much storage on hand, and thus may reasonably expect it to stay at least half full if the local production exceeds the local consumption, allowing the next step to function properly, even if pulls from the planetary warehouse only happen every 6 hours. Now, if you have a rover, that 'local' can be up to 2km and everyone will pull out whatever they need as they need it. If you are talking about shipping materials around the planet, why should they engage in long-distance trucking of something that is expected to be needed locally? Personally, I find that having a Nom-o-matic 2500 at any location where I have kerbals to be a good policy, meaning that I have a reasonable window to make deliveries, and the raw materials being delivered only have ~1/11th of the mass of the supplies that would be needed. I did have one outpost that was starting to run low on fertilizer, so at another colony on the same body that was producing fertlizer(if slower than I had expected at that time), I transferred everything out of a supplies/mulch/fertilizer inflatable storage dome, undeployed it, and put all the fertilizer back in(over-flowing the ~20 unit capacity and sending most of it into the planetary stockpiles). After that I went to the colony running low, and had them fill up before I went back to re-inflate the dome. Generally I use those shipping crates for 2 things: 1) transferring resources between bodies(like sending out machinery, specialized parts, or material kits to a new colony, then re-painting them and sending the transport back full of rare metals/minerals to pay for the shipment) 2) a single 2.5m crate for storing material kits on bases where I have one or more habitation modules I need to inflate(the 16K unit volume will let me fill it to 8K without sending it off to the Plantetary stockpile, and I can then expand the Habitation unit in question) For everything else I find those inflatable domes to work much better.

I sent a node processing rover up to Minmus and that worked much better than the node lugging rover on the Mun. I processed the two large nodes I generated previously, and found the smaller node to be just small enough to cart over to the base for processing so that I don't need to keep it out of focus at night(I mounted a power coupler on the rover only to realize I had none on the base to supply it...). Now I have a second one on the way to the Mun to clean up the large nodes I generated there, so hopefully the existing rover can then handle a second node at the same time once I can pop nodes again. All in all I think it is a pretty neat way to allow you to deal with minor deficiencies with your base location while also giving you something active to do to help your bases. In retrospect, I think I may have over-reacted to the original size of the nodes. I do not know how much consideration has already gone into the size of the nodes, but thinking about it, I find the idea of nodes with different sizes appealing(be those more or less random sizes like asteroids, or a small number of specific sizes where you find out how big it is when you start to process it(aka klaw it)). That way you can be surprised (pleasantly or not) while out prospecting a new node...('Yes-sir-e I found myself dealing with a node bigger than any I had ever seen! must have been over 500 tons and there was no way I was dragging it back to base with my rover, especially not with the sun getting ready to set, so then I ...') I also find the idea of smaller nodes being more plentiful than larger nodes appealing ('I had been having a run of bad luck, nothing but puny little 5 ton rocks, needing half a dozen of them to fill up my tanks before going home, then with my tanks nearly full, I found big one, not one of those 25 ton ones, mind you but one of those honking big 125 ton ones, took me 3 days to process it down to a movable size and I had to go back and empty my tanks at least 4 times to do it!. By the time it was all done, the base commander suggested I should take a day of R&R, so I ...') Finally, I nearly jumped out of my seat when my first node neared empty and it did *that*.

No reason to think that Kerbals are unfamiliar with the possibility of hazardous falling debris and the need to destroy them to prevent the loss of life. They may not have been prepared in time to protect the tracking station, but they have time to prepare now... Imagine the reactions of the Kerbulans when their missiles start getting blown out of the air. @Dman979 Looks a bit like the ship she was on when they recovered Wherner, may or may hot have had flight capability at that point, but there has been plenty of time to add it...

Let's see, I started early March of 2015, so with an average of more than 3 hours/day(2-3 hours most week nights and usually 15+ hours per weekend) I should be over 2000 hours, even allowing for things like spending holidays with family where my wife seems to think that spending all my time on the computer is inappropriate. Have not yet landed on Tylo or Lathe, and only a probe on Eve, but Every Kerbal has either been recovered or at least had a viable ride home at their disposal(I think, I may need to double-check the number of seats I have on one of my evac-ships for one of my Mun colonies, but I can always use KAS to add a hab part from the base, if needed. Not sure exactly how I'll handle this for the Duna colony I am planning next though). Of course once I have returned from every body, I'll need to do Eve and everything outside Duna again with stock engines...

And creating a new DB instance from the back-up is only part of what is needed to do a partial restore of the missing threads...

Nope, just like desteroids, they do not exist until you search for them. After you search for them, they show in the tracking station, the map, and everywhere, just like an asteroid or a rescue mission.