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HyperEdit seems like a weird overkill when you can just use MechJeb. Open the Maneuver Planner, choose "change inclination" in the dropdown and set 0 as the new inclination. It lets you choose whether you want to do it at the equatorial AN or equatorial DN. I do virtually perfect equatorial 0º inclination orbits (and perfect 90º polar orbits) all the time and it takes me less than a minute to accomplish. MechJeb will create the maneuver node for you and can execute it itself if you want it to. KSP really should have a way to see the equatorial AN / DN for the body you're orbiting in map mode, especially when creating maneuvers.

Cool, thanks guys for the info!

I know it's the underside of a docking port and how to rotate stuff. I included a few photos because I see it on a lot of parts and because it was on the docking port I thought maybe that signified that it had something to do with docking. I guess from your responses it's not something a clamp-o-tron can connect to.

I see these "+" ports on some parts but not on others. Do they have any special function, such as for docking? Or does docking always require two clamp-o-trons?

I've never mined or captured an asteroid but I did read somewhere that if you leave your drills running they will deplete the asteroid even if the ore tanks are already full.

The temperature gauges still leak but we have the TemperatureGaugeKiller mod that ensures it's turned off unless it's activated manually. I recently installed 5 or so mods that all claimed to be 1.0.2 compatible and I'm now getting crashes and freezes ad nauseam. When I just had KER, MJ and TemperatureGaugeKiller it was mostly fine. I should also mention I play on a Mac. I'd expect most of these issues to be fixed in just a matter of weeks tho.

On their Github I think you can get the latest version that is flagged to work with 1.0.2. Everyone just ignores that message. There's no actual incompatibility to worry about.

I started playing KSP for the very first time pretty much right when 1.0.2 dropped. It's hilarious thinking about how little I actually knew about getting stuff off the ground. It was a struggle at first -- especially in early career -- but it definitely wasn't as bad as you make it sound. C'mon, if a total newb can figure it out, why can't you with all your experience? Even now, I mostly roll my eyes at this whole debate over the new aero because it's all I've known and I don't really find it annoying. Edit your config if you're so "desperate" for the easy-mode halcyon of yore.

Lots of replies to make! RocketPilot573, I think you win the Kerbin SOI fuel mini-game. I have no idea how you assembled that thing on the ground like that with docking ports. Did you align them so you just drive up next to them and the tolerances are tight enough that they snap together? Well done, sir! Fantastic pics. I had the same thought -- I'll force myself to do the docking and rendezvous manually until I feel like it isn't challenging anymore, then I'll consider ways to automate it. MechJeb would do the job excellently but I've also started looking at kOS too. A fully automated mining operation in the Jool system sounds so epic even if it's probably an overkill. Would be a fun project to take on someday! BTW, I also had never heard of Davon Throttle Control either -- great tip! I agree that for many missions you don't need to refuel near Kerbin. As I mentioned in my OP, this is mostly preparation work for a mining operation in Jool. I learned so much from this and it would have been too stressful or wasteful to figure this all out so far away from Kerbin. That alone has justified it for me and plus it was fun! I am one of the folks who bought the game post-1.0 so everything is new and interesting to me. I do think there are some spacecraft designs that could benefit from a Kerbin refueling station, though. For example, (and maybe I'm just an naive newbie about this) an interplanetary Laythe-bound SSTO spaceplane. Or maybe another interplanetary craft that can get into Kerbin orbit with its expensive Rhino+Kerbodyne stage still available but almost empty; you could top it up and use it to its fullest potential, maybe even all the way to your next refueling station. Or maybe a Minmus + Mun + Kerbin science hopper for quickly collecting science from all the biomes. I'm also intrigued by the idea of a permanent Duna shuttle that can leave Kerbin SOI full on fuel, get to Duna, send its returnable lander out for maybe a few landings, then return back to Kerbin for refueling, ready for another mission without anything else required except a crew change. I do think if a refueling station is used like this it would save a lot of money, especially considering I only spent maybe 350kish so far on mine. ---- I find it kinda funny no one with an orbital refinery has posted pics yet. Maybe it's not as common of an operation as I thought! To offer a progress update, I think I'm pretty happy with my untested bigger, badder miner. It can store 18k ore, a lot of fuel, an engineer, has 4 drills, science experiments for transmitting data from biomes I land in that I haven't hit yet, a claw for more efficient docking, plus some other miscellaneous improvements. I'm going to hold off on launching this though until I finish some science missions and get some more cash.

xtoro, that mining operation is sick! So many great ideas. I love seeing what creative things people come up with to solve these kinds of problems. It's the essence of why KSP is so excellent. The VTOL super rover with integrated refinery is awesome -- and that Atomic Age engine definitely helps there. I haven't unlocked those big rover wheels or heavy aerodynamics stuff yet but I'm thinking I may get them sooner rather than later. Do you fly everything manually?

I'll go back and re-watch that video. 4-5 minutes from orbit does seem about right for me, tho. What happened this last run is I took off from the mining site with an apoapsis of 7500m, cut the engines, then accidentally hit Z while I was in map mode and didnt realize it immediately because I didn't see the engines firing. Long story short, I had to do two more adjustments of my orbit before I was able to find a successful intercept. Once I get a ~1km separation intercept maneuver in place, I can get within 100m very efficiently by getting my target marker to face retrograde by burning both toward offset prograde and offset retrograde vectors. I'll try to find a video of a MechJeb rendezvous tutorial too. Yeah, it's totally too small. I am working on Mark II of it now that's enormous but I'm flailing with the design to get its ÃŽâ€V up to the 2000-2500 range. I think I have maybe made it too big! I'm really hoping to see someone's details of a high-yield mining operation with a full round-trip time of 10 minutes or so. If I can figure that out, I'll start preparing a mothership to go to Jool!

Very cool stuff. Yeah, KIS / KAS seem perfect for stationary refining. That roving fuel line connector is a neat idea. I have virtually no experience with MechJeb but I'm starting to think it's an inescapable tool. Do you also use it for docking with your orbital refueling station? How much time does that take approximately? I play career and haven't yet unlocked the 550 science Advanced Unmanned Tech node to get the MechJeb docking+rendezvous module. I guess I could install the mod that obviates the need for the craft-mounted part. I did another mining run and took down as much information as I could. It was honestly probably my worst run yet -- even worse than my first I think -- but it's realistic to expect some of them to go poorly. This is kinda my worst-case benchmark. [TABLE=width: 500] [TR] [TD]Total time[/TD] [TD]45 minutes[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Time to undock, land and finish mining[/TD] [TD]8 minutes[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Time to rendezvous[/TD] [TD]25 minutes[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Time to dock[/TD] [TD]8 minutes[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Final refinery housekeeping[/TD] [TD]4 minutes[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Monopropellant used[/TD] [TD]100[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Liquid Fuel used[/TD] [TD]690[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Oxidizer used[/TD] [TD]863[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Net LF gain[/TD] [TD]1928[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Net monoprop gain[/TD] [TD]77[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Net oxidizer gain[/TD] [TD]2378[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Ore leftover after filling station[/TD] [TD]275[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] My rendezvous took so long because I screwed up my orbital insertion by accidentally over-burning and tried to find a intercept without circularizing an orbit slightly lower than my station. This also wasted a little fuel. Assuming my best-case run would be 30 minutes and an average run of 37 minutes, it would take me 4 hours to fill up my refinery if it were empty. The fuel tanker I designed can hold a little over twice what the refinery can, so it would take 8 hours to fill up alone. That's 12 hours for the tanker and the refinery combined. You can see why something ain't right here! I can't be refueling vessels frequently with this setup. Honestly, launching fuel from Kerbin would probably be better considering how slow this is. To answer your question about my drilling, this run had an ore rate of 0.004449/sec with 100% load on my 3 drills. No overheating issues. This is a screenshot of where I landed this time around: I have a narrow band scanner onboard but frankly I think it's meant more for long-term stations and rovers. It would probably take me way longer to skip around to find the perfect drilling site. With time acceleration it isn't so much an issue. I forgot to check the narrow band scanner's details for where I landed this last time. I think I'm going to try to design a mega miner with nuclear engines and figure out how to use MechJeb for expediting the process. Any other tips would be greatly appreciated! Still hoping others share pics and efficiency details of their mining operations!

I finally got my Minmus mining operation setup and I'm not too thrilled with the efficiency of it. I have an orbital refinery with two Kerbodyne S3-14400 (largest stock) tanks, a FL-RC1 RCS Fuel Tank (largest monoprop), and a Small Holding Tank for storing ore for conversion to fuels on-demand (e.g. more LF for nuclear, more monoprop when getting low). I have a medium-sized miner lander with 3300 ore capacity powered by a Poodle and the large Rockomax X200-32 fuel tank. I net about 2200 LF and 2600 O2 per run but each run takes 15-30 minutes. The re-docking takes up a lot of that time. Here are some photos: Filling up those refinery tanks is taking much longer than I expected. What's more concerning is I have been planning to launch a large tanker I designed that can carry several times more fuel than the refinery for parking in LKO. These are all preliminary steps toward my goal of a grand excursion to the Jool system where I will have miners, a refinery station, a tanker, science rovers, landers, etc. Without some improvements to my process, KSP feels like it will become a mining grind game where every big mission must be preceded by a few hours of repetitive landing, drilling, orbital insertion, rendezvous, docking, processing, repeat. Yes, there's the big debate about whether one should be doing orbital refining or refining on the surface. I'm still very open to both options but what I have now is an orbital setup so I'd prefer to fix what I have rather than redo it all. I'm wondering if I should create a bigger mega-miner, use the claw for faster docking, use more auto-pilot features to speed up the process, redesign my miner to use the nuclear engine, move to some form of surface refining with maybe a big landable tanker and a rover that can do the resupplying, or something else. I'm hoping some of you guys can share some numbers and other specifics about how efficiently you're able to fill up your orbital refueling station, all things considered. Share your photos too!

Seems like a coastline aligned with the rotation of the moon would be your best bet for a runway. I haven't scanned it yet so I don't know if there're any good mineable coastlines like that.

RTGs weren't even considered for my probe because I play career only and it's going to be a while before I unlock it. Yes the solar generated is much less out there but if you have to time-accelerate it doesn't really matter how long it takes. My puny battery and puny solar panel recharge in something like one in-game day, maybe less. I don't even have the 4k battery unlocked yet. Jool is where a lot of people go to finish collecting science for career mode so they aren't going to have the most advanced stuff to send on their probes.

I have a single small ore tank on my refinery station around Minmus even though my miner is what really holds the ore bulk during processing. The idea is, once I fill the LF+O and monoprop fuel tanks, I can fill up the ore tank and have it as a reserve for conversion into whatever may be needed but unavailable in the future. Ore has a 1:1 conversion ratio into fuel mass so by having the refinery with you you're only adding 4.2t of weight. On a long-distance ship, you might as well just use that weight on extra smaller tanks to save the hassle of doing the refining. One tank of ore doesn't really yield a whole lot of fuel.

I thought my little 26k ÃŽâ€V scanner probe is kinda cute, altho it's woefully inadequate in its power generating and storage capability, especially for an ion engine. Here's a screenshot of it scanning Pol: And a view from the side: A scanner probe like this really needs the jumbo solar panels and maybe some more battery storage. You won't get 26k ÃŽâ€V with that extra weight but it'd be much easier to do longer burns without having to time-accelerate through battery recharging every 30-40 m/s. My plan is to have Pol be the refining center and have a dockable tanker that can move around to different orbits. Laythe adventures are probably going to be my biggest expenditures of fuel so I was expecting to fill up the tanker and then put it in orbit around Laythe.