Terwin

Complexity is one reason. There are fewer modes of failure if you just increase the size of the solar panels to account for dust accumulation. If you have a gas cannister, it will eventually run out of gas, so if switching that weight to more solar panels will last as long or longer, then solar panels are the simpler solution. After all, our Martian landers have all lasted much longer than the original plan(possibly because they put in additional redundancies if the mission is likely to go under the minimum desired period).

Unfortunately, the only form of metallic hydrogen we have evidence for thus far would require very high pressure containment, thus the tanks could very well weigh more than an order of magnitude more than the fuel contained therein. This would make it useless as a rocket fuel. If metastable metallic hydrogen exists(which is what they have in KSPI-E, I believe), then that would be a wonderful rocket fuel, but unfortunately, the only paper that suggests metastable metallic hydrogen is even possible(as far as I am aware) has been debunked(to the best of my knowledge), and there is not currently any strong hope that metallic hydrogen can exist at pressures where it would be useful for rocket fuel. On the other hand, you can combine just about anything with ClF3 and get a strong exothermic reaction, too bad it is so hard to handle and has very toxic combustion products.

I would assume that the gold mod would have already added the abundance to appropriate biomes, so hopefully that part is done, so hopefully you only need to update the drill and refinery configs. (they are text files, so you should be able to look at the existing entries, and just duplicate one of those, changing the values to match the gold related tags that the gold mod has presumably already added to the stock drills and ISRU config files) You may also want to add gold as an option to the storage parts, or possibly just add it to the existing rare minerals/metals storage config on the large MKS storage crates(1.25m and larger).

In a Tokamak, magnetic fields will hold the hydrogen(Probably deuterium and tritium) fuel in place because it is an ion after stripping away the electron. Because the hydrogen fuel is missing electrons, and the number of protons does not change, the waste(Helium) will also be ionized and can be held by those same magnetic fields. But D-T fusion(the whole point of the tokamak) also produces neutrons, which do not have a charge, and as such, those neutrons will escape the magnetic confinement. The fact that there is a plasma involved has nothing to do with the neutrons, it is just that plasma(aka magnetic) containment does not work on neutrons, so they escape while the plasma does not. Note: Hydrogen has 1 proton, and no neutrons, Deuterium has 1p 1n, tritium has 1p 2n and helium(the waste) has 2p2n, so combining deuterium and tritium gives helium+1n and the neutron goes flying off. D-D fusion should not have waste neutrons, but is also much much harder.

Look in your save file(probably KSP/saves/GameName/persisteence.sfs ) Open in a text editor (notepad if you do not have anything else you prefer) Search for: "name = WOLF_ScenarioModule" Should look like this: SCENARIO { name = WOLF_ScenarioModule scene = 6, 7, 5, 8 DEPOTS { DEPOT { Body = Kerbin Biome = KSC IsEstablished = True IsSurveyed = True RESOURCE { ... You can remove a depot by deleting the appropriate DEPOT [...] entry from the save file. (I recommend backing up your save first, as it is easy to miss an opening or closing bracket and leave the file in an invalid state) You could also 'back out' adding modules by manually adjusting the resources back to what they were before the module was added.

WOLF is an add-on that can be used to support MKS, but is not required in any way. WOLF is a way to handle mining/production/logistics bases without needing to visit them for catch-up mechanics to run.(also without increasing the part-count in your game, as WOLF bases are not rendered and do not participate in physics) WOLF is primarily intended for support or mining bases, and also handles interplanetary logistics. The only interaction between MKS and WOLF is through hoppers. Hoppers let you pull resources out of WOLF and feed them into your MKS base.(this is one-way, and you cannot feed resources back into WOLF) A MKS base and a WOLF base in the same biome will be 100% independent of each other unless you have a hopper on the MKS base and pull resources from the WOLF base using that hopper. You can have as many MKS bases in each biome as you can physically fit, but you can only have one WOLF base per biome.

Drills and refineries can be reconfigured to harvest/refine a different material, but I believe it takes an engineer and material kits to do so. If you do a planetary scan from orbit, you should be able to configure everything before landing. Just assume that Rare metals and rare minerals will be in different spots and have those pre-configured on different miners to save some kits.

Machinery is a setting, so easy enough, but if your remote miners are solar powered, make sure to only do catch-up when they are in sunlight, as the catch-up mechanic looks at current status, so 3 days worth of catch-up would calculate based on how much sun is hitting the panels when it enters physics range. (this can mean you do not need batteries to mine all night long, but can also mean losing a months worth of harvesting because you switched over 15 minutes before dawn)

3 biomes is more realistic than 2, unless you are willing to work with everything being less than 5%, in which case two biomes might be doable. No idea if scavenging even works across biomes, but I know that a single vessel will be in whichever biome contains its center of mass.(can you guess what I tried to do?) If you can refuel without expanding anything that would make taking off again difficult, you can adjust your location with small hops if needed(or use wheels if you have them)

I think the math goes: harvest rate = drill production * resource concentration(Survey tells you this) * Engineer harvest multiplier * MKS colonization production bonus(starts at 100% goes to 500%, I think) Generally the easiest way to get the actual rate is to test-drill. If you do not have enough storage, you can always add more later, and 'too much storage' just means it transfers the resource in larger chunks . It may have changed, but I think you can only access the planetary warehouse if you have a logistics module and a pilot present(or a remote processor which does export-only logistics and does not need a kerbal)

The unmanned refineries are a good way to add logistics to an unmanned base, and if you will have the refinery, then you might as well make use of it. When using planetary logistics, there is no transport cost between biomes, so the two biggest benefits of having on-site refining are: 1) you do not need to worry about the refinery running out of resources from the drills being too far behind(you must visit each location for the catch-up mechanics to run, and they process a 6 hour block at a time when doing catch-up, and planetary logistics leaves warehouses half-full, which is why 4+ days of storage is suggested), and 2) if the refinery is on your unmanned base, then that is fewer parts on your primary base, reducing the processor load when it is loaded.

Yes, all refineries need machinery, but if you set the machinery consumption to zero, then said machinery does not get used up. Also, unmanned refineries have a larger machinery store than a similar manned refinery so that they can be re-stocked less often. Don't forget to send some organics so that you can eventually produce colony supplies

I do not know how much SP it takes to go fully self-sufficient, but specialized parts production and full self-sufficiency is not usually an aspect of early colonization. I would suggest that sending a few resupply missions is entirely reasonable. Parachutes are your friend, and in KSP you can have an arbitrary number of them in a small space without worrying about tangling, interference or other real-world parachute issues, so just add lots of parachutes and some air-brakes to help keep you slow enough to open those chutes. If you use your engines to slow you down until you run out of fuel, that should help as well, as fuel mass is usually the bulk of a rocket. (but make sure you have enough fuel to slow your horizontal velocity to pretty slow, as you do not have a lot of air on Duna for aero breaking, and a little bit of fuel for final breaking can save a lot in parachutes if you are proficient at such) Unmanned refinery parts also provide the ability to push to planetary stores, so one or more drills, sufficient storage for ~4 days worth of production storage for both raw material and processed material, and an unmanned processor unit should provide the desired functionality(when supported by appropriate power and radiators). If you only want the raw materials, then you need not even start the processor, and the smallest available should be sufficient(I think this is lighter than the pioneer logistics unit when without machinery, but not 100% sure).

This means: Currently drilling Uraninite, if you switch you will drill Rare Metals. It is set up like this because it costs material kits to switch, so cycling through all of the options like you do with storage would be very expensive. If there is gypsum in your current location, then a powered drill and a powered refinery set to convert gypsum to fertilizer should allow you to produce fertilizer. The refinery will need equipment if you want a non-zero efficiency, and an engineer will increase the efficiency of the drill/refinery (more boost with more stars, I think it is ~10% efficient without an engineer at all), and, as with everything else, power and waste heat will need to be addressed to keep everything running. I would not consider it free myself, but you can certainly make money with mining rare resources from other bodies. If you can SSTO and refine fuel, consider setting up a zero-cost WOLF transport path to 'automate' this transfer.(you do this by refueling before completing the path soo that your ship is the same as when it left, does not work as well with staging)

No clue on the exact rate, but I vaguely recall having perhaps a dozen Kolonists for more than a year and being somewhere in the 300's. In any case, I would expect it to take more than ten Kolonist years to get to 500%, possibly less if they are all 5-star kolonists(I forget if the star-count matters, but it does for lots of things), and I would not be surprised if it takes more than 20-30 kolonist years to get to 500%. Drill resource and heat production are affected, but radiators and drill heat dissipation are not(last time I checked), so over-provision your head dissipation if you plan to grow your production multiplier.

https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki/The-Kolonization-Dashboard#kolony-statistics Basically, each type of Kerbal will slowly increase one of the bonus types(or all three for kolonists) the longer they stay on a body. Funds can be collected from a connected pioneer module, and production/habitation bonuses will automatically increase the efficiency of the appropriate production types across the entire body.

The whole point of ranger modules is to allow you to launch your base with smaller rockets. The material kits represent all of the bits and pieces that you left out when you launched the initial collapsed shell. Since the initial shell is small and light, and you can launch small containers of material kits, you can build your base off of a large number of small launches/vessels instead of the larger launches/vessels needed for the other part families. You still need the same amount of mass however, so the primary benefit of using ranger modules on a ship that is also carrying the material kits to expand them is easier fairing coverage.

A pusher-plate design is incredibly inefficient. The ONLY reason to use a pusher-plate is if you have a hugely efficient reaction with a high minimum size. Fission has this with 'Critical mass' as the simplest fission explosions just involve just putting together enough plutonium (approx 10kg) and you get a nice big explosion. This explosion is too powerful for any known materials to contain for a normal nozzle-type arrangement, so they designed a huegly inefficient pusher-plate design to potentially make use of the 8000x efficiency of nuclear over chemical. Unfortunately, the gross inefficiency of the pusher-plate means that it is only about 13x the efficiency of the space shuttle main engines. (giving the pusher-plate an efficiency of roughly 0.16% or 1/615 the efficiency of a nozzle) So unless your explosion is more than 600 times the efficiency of a hydrolox engine, you will not get any benefits for using a pusher-plate, and if your reaction is small enough to use with a nozzle, you can get roughly 600x the efficiency by using a nozzle over a pusher-plate. Note: Fusion pellets can be(and currently must be) made small enough for a nozzle, so pusher-plates only work with fission. In short, pusher plates are great for steam-punk fission rockets, but fail miserably for anything better.

In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) is incentivized to have at least one, but as few as possible nuclear reactors running in the country as it can manage. That is the federal level organization responsible for nuclear safety regulations, and they only have 2 incentives: 1) they are not needed if there are zero nuclear plants, 2) they get blamed for every negative event associated with nuclear energy generation. Their budget is independent of how many plants they govern, and so whenever nuclear power starts to look attractive, they pile on more regulations to keep it unattractive to minimize the potential for mishaps.(fewer plants mean fewer mishaps, and higher regulatory requirements mean fewer plants, ergo, they are incentivized to have as many expensive regulations as possible without driving all of the existing plants out of business) And any sort of attempt to scale back the costs they impose can be met with 'but we just want to keep everyone safe', which is very hard to contest politically. I would not be surprised by similar regulatory bodies in other countries, or even just using the US nuclear regulations as the gold standard. While getting rid of a bureaucracy is all but impossible, if the budget of the NRC were somehow attached to the number of functioning nuclear power plants, they might become more cost-effective relatively quickly.(unless the fossil fuel companies already own the board members or something, which is entirely plausible)

You do realize that no mass is created do you not? All you are doing is allowing a wider variety of molecules for your starting point, with the commensurate reduction in efficiency. It would be more efficient to just have a mass of pure iron pellets that you shoot out the back than to run those pellets through a process(biological or mechanical) to make them less pure, then shooting them out the back. If you want less pure iron, then start with pellets having an optimum purity for your engine, that way you can avoid that excess processing mass.(and you do not need to deal with strange compounds coaking up your engine until it is completely clogged and it explodes on you)

This is like when Whitney used his existing dirt to turn lithosphere + fertilizer into additional productive soil, so yes, you are expected to have some organics to start. Check your bonuses, because if you do not have an appropriate Kerbal(Scientist or Farmer I think), then your production penalties could reduce your organics production below break-even, slowly draining your organics until empty. (I do not remember the rates, but you may need a high-star kerbal to actually produce more organics)

Plasma is when electrons and nuclei are disassociated, so while you can easily have an oxygen nucleus flying around without electrons, or a hydrogen nucleus flying around without an electron(ie a proton), you could not, for example, have a water nucleus flying around without electrons, as the atoms are held together by the electron interactions, and there are no electrons to hold them together. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, electrons are identical, so once the atoms regain the appropriate number of electrons, they are indistinguishable from their pre-plasma state(unless you ionized a more complex molecule, in which case the nuclei could easily swap around and end up paring with different nuclei when 'cool')

If you place a refueling station in orbit and can get to orbit without staging anything off of your rocket, then you can refuel at the station and have a zero cost route to orbit. The same can be done for other hops, you just need to put in infrastructure to support your low-cost/free shipping. IRSU can be a great way to land for 'free' If I remember correctly, colony supplies are not a prerequisite for putting a kerbal in your depot, for that you just need habitation and life support, so colony supplies are a later game resource that requires an established off-world presence to produce.

You seem to be suffering from the misapprehension that we want drag when SS is traveling nose-first. We do not. We want drag when SS is falling sideways. In this case, the SS flaps are ALREADY the equivalent of a fully rotated flap on the F22, because the only thing we want from those flaps is drag, so they do not have a 'non-rotated' position, just 'deployed' and 'not-deployed'. Sort of like the stock air-brakes in KSP, just with better control so that they can fine-tune the drag if needed.

That sounds a lot like having an emergency refueling drone on stand-by, possibly even by the time the recently fueled starship reaches the moon. Got to imagine that having a tanker on stand-by would mitigate a few risks, especially if it had some sort of emergency habitation capsule near the nose that could be fed oxygen from the lox tank... (the size of the interior of an apollo lander should be more than enough, and adding that much(usually) empty space should not make it too much heavier. Might need to add a small heater to be manually turned on when needed, as the rest of the rocket might be chilly, and the LOX vented into the rescue-pod sure would be)