Blue_J

The mod set I run with has a pretty good balance. Key points: Use DMagic orbital science and SCANSat to give you extra experiments that you can run, so that the early part of the tech tree feels like less of a chore. Community Tech Tree makes the tech tree longer, giving you a gameplay reason to go to other planets for that sweet sweet science. Overpowered and/or futuristic technologies (such as Near Future Propulsion, Karbonite Plus, and even an Alcubierre Drive) give you a reward for unlocking those 5000 and 10000 science nodes at the far end of the tech tree. Yeah, some of them might be a little game breaking, but by the time you get there you've probably explored everything legitimately anyway. For mods like KIS/KAS, you basically start unlocking parts like that around the time you start thinking about your first Mun mission, (which is where you start to get fun toys in an unmodded career save anyway.)

It's been a major version or two since I messed around with SSTOs, and I had about 60 days until my fleet of probes arrives at Eve, so last night I decided to take a crack at making a Minmus-capable flyer with a crew capacity of 6 and a docking port. (A standardized craft like this has a lot of uses, obviously: Space station crew shuttle, orbital rescue craft, tour bus, training flyer for new crew members, and Kerbin system space station contracts.) After a few failed or overly anemic designs, I arrived at this craft, the Skybax Ultra: It's pretty standard as SSTO shuttles go, but it's mine, and it is capable of getting to LKO with ~1650 m/s of delta-V, plus a small reserve of LFO for using the maneuvering thrusters. I can probably do better; I'm still tweaking the ascent profile and fuel mix, but it's theoretically there, (albeit with a tight budget.) So, throwing caution to the wind, (as is the Kerbal way,) I picked up a Mun orbital base mission, a Minmus surface base mission, three tourists, and a trainee crew, and set out into the void. I knew that circularizing my orbit around the Mun would burn too much fuel to complete the mission, but I had left a refueling tank in low Mun orbit, and I was able to dock with that and pick up enough fuel to journey onward...although apparently I should have taken more. I botched the transfer from the Mun to Minmus and came in about 200 m/s too hot, killing my budget again. I successfully landed on Minmus' Lesser Flats, with 163 m/s of dV left, meaning I'd need to send a rescue tanker. After confirming that KAS was still up to the task, I set about designing the refueling lander, and quickly came to the realization that I could send a small refueling craft...or, I could send a massively oversized refinery to Minmus so that nobody needs to run out of fuel there again. One half-million funds launch and eight days later... If I can get the tourists back in one piece, this trip will pay for almost the whole refinery. We'll see how it goes tonight.

I lost a Kerbal last night, on a very routine mission. I'm a veteran player. I've had the game since 2013, and pick it up again every year or so. Mun landings are routine for me. However, I was tired last night, I was trying a new ship design, and I made a number of mistakes such that I might have saved her if I'd acted differently. The plan was to send a single-seat lander to the Mun to biome-hop and do science. I had parked a fuel tanker with a science storage pod in orbit to refuel the lander and hold the science results. I was trying to be minimalist with the lander to maximize the number of trips I could make, but with the amount of science equipment I put in there, it wound up being a little heavy, and with a narrower lander base than I normally use. So, of course, on the very first landing of the mission, I tipped the lander over. After kicking myself for my bad piloting, I went about trying to right the lander, and that's when I made my first very stupid mistake: I forgot that I had packed RCS thrusters. See, I almost never put RCS on my early-game Mun landers, and I never ever use them to land. So, after initially trying to flip the lander over using reaction wheels and landing gear, I skipped the RCS and attempted to use small bursts of thrust from the main engine to flip. This, of course, led to me sliding up a hill a little too fast, and blowing up both my engine and main fuel tank. The lander was a loss at this point, so I figured I would just have to send the replacement lander to pick up my kerbalnaut, when I realized that the crash had destroyed all of my solar panels, leaving her with 2 hours of electricity to run life support. (TAC-LS). This meant that I didn't have enough time to wait for a rescue, (although in retrospect, the 2 hours in the pod plus 6 hours of suit life support plus the 2 hours it takes to die without electricity might have been long enough for a rescue with an aggressive ballistic transfer.) There was one small hope, however: I still had the RCS thrusters on the lander pod, I had left a very basic space station with lots of life support (and some maneuvering fuel) in Mun orbit for just this eventuality, and it was going to pass over the landing site in 5 minutes. I turned on the landing pod RCS and lifted the stricken pod into the air, but it ran out of monoprop much faster than I was expecting. That left only one last desperate thing to do: bail out and use the jetpack. I was able to get the her apoapsis up to the height of the emergency space station, but I ran out of fuel just 70 m/s shy of circularizing her orbit. At that point, there was nothing I could do. My ill-fated kerbalnaut had about 10 minutes to contemplate her life before she slammed into the side of a hill at 450 m/s. I occasionally lose kerbals, (and sometimes I revert if the loss was especially cheap,) but because there were a number of design tweaks or different actions that might have saved her, and because she was so close to escaping death, this one hurt. RIP, Beaus Kerman. That mountain is yours now.

A few comments: 1. If you try to plan your missions with any kind of game-time efficiency, the residual benefit (whether science or converted money) from the MPL becomes far, far less dominant. Around mid-game, when you've simultaneously got 4 vehicles headed to Duna in the same transfer window, a probe headed for Dres, and are running tourist missions in the Kerbin system, then you're not really going to want to just timewarp into the future 60 days at a time like people seem to be doing. The income from having a couple labs is nice and residual, which I think is what was intended. (I understand that eventually we all give up and timewarp our missions to Jool, but still, that's pretty late in the game.) 2. I've been playing KSP on and off for almost three years. I am very good at landing on the Mun/Minmus. Biome-hopping to juice every last drop of science from the Mun/Minmus is a pretty good way to get bored with the game and make me put it down for another 6 months. As such, I'm not opposed to making it viable to not hit all 17 Mun biomes every time you start a new career. 3. A good set of mods/game settings can do a lot to nerf indiscriminate use of the MPL. Right now I'm running Community Tech Tree, USI Life Support, and a handful of other mods that provide some high-end parts. I also have tech buy-in on. This does a few things: First, it provides large science and money sinks, making it very inefficient to fill out the tech tree around Kerbin. (The higher nodes are very expensive.) Second, using life support means you can't just leave your guys in stations for years at a time, you need to bring them home every so often. Third, the ability to get overpowered toys that take multiple missions to other planets to afford keeps you motivated. At the end of the day, the game is about trying to go farther out and do new things. It is viable to put 10 MPL stations in Kerbin orbit and make money by converting ore to monopropellant on the runway, but at that point I'm not sure why you bother.

My current solution to this issue is to run some combination of Community Tech Tree, DMagic orbital science, Karbonite/K+, Near Future Propulsion, MKS, EPL, and Alcubierre Drive. While DMagic means a lot more science overall, Community Tech Tree massively expands the size of the tech tree (and the science cost of filling it out,) and the high-tech mods actually put useful parts into those expensive technology nodes. (Whereas the stock tech tree has a lot of nodes worth 550, and a handful worth 1000, the overpowered Karborundum Engines and super-high ISP ion engines are in nodes valued from 3k-5k, and the Alcubierre Drive node is worth 10K. I've never actually gotten that high in career mode.) While a lot of the higher-end parts in these mods are decidedly "overpowered," the science and Tech buy-in costs (not to mention part costs) of getting them are so high that you'll have sent many conventional missions around the solar system before your game becomes completely sci-fi - and by then, you're in what might be called the "end-game" already, at which point I'm not really opposed to overpowered toys. TL;DR: Instead of maxing out the tech tree around the Mun and Minmus, use Community Tech Tree to make the Tech Tree longer!

After playing on and off for about three years, I've still never sent a manned mission anywhere other than Duna. (That is, if you ignore the one time I messed around with KSPI in sandbox a couple years ago.) I'm sure I can, but I usually play career mode with a life support mod, (and now with USI's new habitation mechanic,) so my interplanetary ships have to be pretty big. By the time I get enough infrastructure set up for a long mission, I'm usually kind of burned out on KSP, then I wind up starting a new career when the next version comes out. ETA: That probably should have said "Anywhere outside the Kerbin system other than Duna." The Mun and Minmus are not exactly that difficult.

In my current career save, my plan is to (largely) design my bases in a single piece, then build them on-site using Extraplanetary Launchpads. I've built several huge (mostly) vanilla space stations orbiting Kerbin in previous games, but my problem is that by the time I've launched, aligned, and docked nine or twelve segments, (plus a half-dozen supply missions,) I'm usually too bored of repetitive launches to put together interplanetary missions and I wind up quitting KSP for a while. I'm kind of hoping that an orbital shipyard that I ship parts up to will take some of the grind out for me. I could be seriously wrong about this - it could wind up being worse, for all I know - but I'm at least trying to make new mistakes. (Additionally, in an effort to keep the part count of my bases and stations low, I'm planning on using a few of the 11 m and 15 m spherical tanks from MKS. I've never tried launching one, and I'm sure it's not impossible, but yikes, it does not look particularly fun or easy. Building them in orbit seems much more reasonable.)

In addition to Life Support (as has already been suggested,) I would suggest installing CTT and playing with tech buy-in on. This will not preclude you from running a bajillion LKO rescue contracts, but it will provide you with mid-to-late-game money and science point sinks, which will encourage you to take higher-risk, higher reward missions just to keep it interesting. Moreover, you'l probably wind up running these missions with lower tech than you might otherwise - no more filling up the tech tree before you shoot for Duna! (This strategy works even better if you add mods that actually put stuff in the higher CTT levels. You want to actually get something cool in exchange for that 5-biome Duna mission.)

It's not like he's stranded on Eeloo or something. If you're playing career, you're almost certainly going to have to go back to the Mun anyway. Just combine the rescue with another mission.

Well, a quick check says that a Mk3 Rocket Fuel Fuselage Long carries 4590 funds worth of fuel+oxidizer, so that's the kind of scale you're dealing with. Your profit is going to be a pretty small fraction of the cost of your drilling rig, but you could in theory turn a profit that way. Whether or not it's worth it is up to you...

If the goal is saving money, a much quicker and more painless system would be to build the miner and tanker as one unit, drive to a mining site right off the runway, fill the tank, then just drive to the runway and sell the whole thing. Selling a craft from the runway gives you 100% recovery price on both the fuel and the parts, so if you then build your rocket normally and put it fully fueled on the pad, the price you pay for the fuel is offset by the price of the fuel you just sold. This may break the immersion a little bit, but financially it's the same as mining the fuel, driving it over to the pad, docking with the rocket and transferring fuel. Not entirely sure the cost is worth it, as fuel is pretty cheap. (Now, finding out how much money you could net using a giant rig with dozens of drills and a few Mk3 fuselages might be an interesting exercise)

So, yesterday I broke down, updated all my mods and started a new career. This time around I'm using a few mods I've never played with before, including CTT and Near Future Propulsion. I have to say, I'm optimistic about the pacing this time around. With cash and science rewards at 100% and the initial tech-buy in on, I can advance quickly enough to key techs that the early game isn't too terribly grindy, but I still have to be thoughtful about my research choices. Moreover, it looks like the combination of the high-end mods and CTT will mean that I can't just max out the tech-tree in the Kerbin system, and I'll need to run some high-yield Duna/Eve/Dres missions to get the really fun toys. It also looks like changes over the summer to MKS/OKS are going to solve my space station woes, (once I get that far.) I'm thinking of replacing my complicated multi-launch fuel depot with a handful of the really large "Kontainer" tanks. It'll be a pretty scary/expensive launch, but if I can get a few of the 11 or 15 m tanks into orbit, I'll have more fuel storage than I can possibly fill in like 10% of the time and 20% of the part count of my previous designs. We'll see how it goes.

I've been away from KSP for a few months and I'm kind of getting the itch to start a new career rather than wait for 1.1 (and then all the stability updates/mod updates.) As such, here's what I'm thinking of doing differently: - Play at a lower difficulty level. Yes, lower. If I remember correctly, my last couple career saves (both pre and post-1.0) have been hard mode (except with loads/reverts in case of bugs.) However, the funds/science restrictions make the game a tad grindy for my tastes. I'm pretty confident by now that I can save orbiting kerbals and take tourists around the Mun, and repeating those missions over and over just to get the funds/science for more interesting missions kind of kills my attention span. - Bootstrap missions more aggressively/stop worrying about gleaning science. KSP isn't too hard if you play conservatively. If you do a bunch of LKO missions, then do a healthy number of Mun-Minmus missions, (especially science missions), send up a science lab, run some Scansat maps, and you can have the whole tech tree unlocked by the time the fist Duna and Eve windows open up. However, I've run....not a small number of those types of missions since I started playing KSP a few years ago. It might not kill me to just let the KSC take it easy for a few months, then launch a tech-constricted chemical-rockets only Dres mission or something. - Re-think my space stations. Ever since last year, I have kind of default class of space stations that I build in a 150km orbit for refueling and the like. They've a got a pretty healthy fuel storage capacity, (including fuels for whatever mods I have installed at the time,) lots of LS storage, living space, a big docking facility - They're a good family of stations. The problem, of course, is that I generally have to launch them in about 9 or so pieces, plus refueling missions. It takes essentially an entire IRL weekend to build/fill, and by the time I finish, I'm usually a bit bored and I tend to lose interest in career mode soon afterwards. I need to figure out a way to either get the same functionality into orbit in a lot fewer launches, or possibly even bypass the permanent facility all together for interplanetary missions. TL;DR: I've been playing KSP for a long time and my attention span has decreased, so I'd like to avoid spending weeks running repetitive LKO launches.

So, I'm not able to see the torch drives in the tech tree. I think this is the same problem that someone mentioned over in the USI Warp Drive thread: The .cfg file lists them as being in the Experimental Rocketry node, which no longer exists. I'm not exactly anywhere near torch drives in career mode, mind you....

So, I've look at it a bit, and I have a few comments: First, this looks like a solid concept for a LS-lite. I would agree that it is stock-like in its simplicity and softer consequences. There's a lot of potential here, especially since it's integrated with the USI mods. Second: There are plans to add additional supply containers/form factors, yes? I ask because right now, there's a pretty big leap between the standard 15-day window in a pod with no supplies and the 1.25 m pod that can keep a single kerbal fed for over a year. Empty mass seems pretty low, so only packing what you need isn't too bad, but the 1.25 m inline part is a fairly large volume if you only need 10 extra days or so of supplies. Third, I would very humbly suggest that you may want to reconsider adding supplies to command modules, and possibly decreasing the "no-snack" window if you want the balance to be the same. Just because a kerbal can work for 15 days without snacks doesn't mean it would be particularly thrilled about the idea. Sending him/her off with no supplies whatsoever for a short trip to the Mun doesn't feel quite right. Moreover, if you're shooting for stock-like integration into career mode, I don't know that it makes sense to go from "supplies don't matter" to "supplies on everything" around the time you start getting interested in Minmus. Anyway, I'm excited about this because I really like the USI suite of stuff, and having an integrated life support system makes sense. Thanks, RD.