Dr.LoveJoy

Quick question.. Im in 1.3.1 and the Otter reactor doesn't seem to be cooling down. The otter cabin doesn't take thermal panels either, and in any event, I had thought that the cooling was integral. Am I doing something wrong here? I only have a ballast tank, some dive planes and experiments and an inline float installed.

ISRU being unrealistic is no different from the fact that we are literally bolting together components to make a rocket, tossing equipment on the exterior surface attached, as well the size of Kerbin vs its density. Reaction wheels are so powerful because if you are steering with a joystick or keyboard, and using a normal computer, you generally won't have the ability to positively steer your spacecraft, even with RCS. I don't think it is in scope for SQUAD to make the game more realistic per se, as that would be an incredibly huge amount of work.. work that the RO people are doing very well.

Tested in 1.3 from Kerbin to Duna and works quite well. I was wondering.. were you planning on adding an animation for the jump? I think it would add a lot to the experience. Also, I wondered if you could post how much energy is needed given that a ship and beacon is almost entirely outside a gravity well, say orbiting at something like 40 million km for bodies like Kerbin and Duna. I would think you would have to expend at least as many joules as the kinetic energy difference for the two orbits (aka, the difference in kinetic energy between Source Orbit1 -> Escape Velocity -> Target Planet Orbit -> Target Planet Escape Velocity energy - Orbit2 Energy), but it seems to be much less than that. Personally I would like it to be based on something like this :-) So roughly, to move a 40million km orbit around Kerbin to a 40 million km orbit around Duna for one ton would have a kilowatt hour cost of ~4820. I know KSP doesn't have real units with regard to electric charge and volume, but I would think that 4.8 Megawatt hours expended in an instant would be... lets say difficult for a battery to handle. I know you are just wonking around with this mod part time, but I was imagining the feel of the parts would be better if there was a longer "windup" and "cooldown" of the vessels, an animation, and a larger electrical cost when free of gravity wells. It would be tougher, and more dramatic! Regardless, thanks for the work you are doing :-)

Re: Moral Obligation. I never said anyone had a "moral obligation" to do anything whatsoever. It isn't about morals. It is about reality. Quote economics all you like, but the reality on the ground is simple. SQUAD is a small group that makes an excellent product, and early, enthusiastic adopters made it possible for them to make this into a viable enterprise. They are clearly aware of that, and seem to attempt at every turn to service those people ( as well as their wider user base), as well as involve the customer base's ideas in the stock product, over time. SQUAD isn't a behemoth, nor does it have deep pockets. They are still a small group, they are still fragile, and they could vanish tomorrow due to some accident, contract problem (such as the lower quality than expected for the console port), or market turn. I for one do not want that to happen to a company that makes such a quality game, and since I know they can't afford to have a dedicated business shark, I'll remain quietly dedicated to seeing them succeed. In other words, if you don' like it, don't buy it. But please don't try to convince me that somehow this is all just sterile economics. SQUAD is small enough to be considered as a bunch of people who are trying to do the right thing. They make mistakes, but their intentions are good, and in my opinion, they deserve whatever extra support we can give them in order to get over the bumps they encounter. And again, $15 is NOTHING for this game. It is barely a price at all, considering the endless hours I have enjoyed it. One lunch costs as much or more than this game did, so by that scale, it is more than a bargain. It may not have that value for you, and that's fine. But that is it's value to me, and many others, and I think we are all going to take issue with anyone who is baldly complaining about something which is, in the end, essentially irrelevant to the value everyone is receiving. So, thank you SQUAD. There are many more of us out there, I guarantee.

Oh I see. Well, chalk one up for Astronomy not being quite clear when you look up references online. :-) Thanks very much for the clarification! Makes perfect sense.

Kerbin precesses? I don't think it does.. or do you mean its "stellar day" is that amount? I suppose, this is a nitpick.. OF the nitpick... ;-)

I am amazed so many people don't understand basic economics. You paid the equivalent of a decent dinner for a game that has been continuously upgraded and updated for years. SQUAD has to be one of the most responsible gaming groups I have ever encountered. I am, quite frankly, very very thankful they have continued to tweak and enhance the game for as long as they have, for as little compensation as they have received for it. I'm certain they had no idea it would balloon to the size it has when they developed it in the first place. They have, to my estimation, responded with integrity and professionalism to every issue they have encountered, and every mistake they have made. I genuinely hope that SQUAD succeeds long term, that they charge a good and fair price for new expansions (for which I will most certainly pay) and that they have a long and healthy life as an organization. If they had a Patreon, I would donate to it a monthly amount because I receive so much benefit from KSP. Life ain't free guys. There are many gaming groups that sell sub standard material for too high a price. SQUAD is not one of those guys and should be getting a lot of support from us, with our dollars and sense. Some of us understand that and have put blood, sweat and tears into mods and overhauls that have shown SQUAD and the world what the game is capable of. This has had an enormous effect on the game, and is probably one of the largest factors in its success.. which SQUAD is very aware of. So please give back guys. Saying "I paid for it" is silly. How much did you pay again? As much as it costs to refill a motorcycle's gas tank once? Im not impressed. Do something more! You want multiplayer? Well, that's *hard* to do well ( look at all the incredibly bad multiplayer stuff out there), if you didn't know that, and SQUAD isn't a big org So, if you really want it, then offer to work for them, send them donations, do work on multiplayer mods.. whatever it takes. Because SQUAD doesn't have deep pockets. They have to keep the lights on first, and that means they are bootstrapping everything they do. And that takes time, effort and persistence. Which is something its user base should possess as well, considering the kind of game this is ;-)

@DC Heya mate. Easier mode is to burn even with the horizon before/after Apo, starting at a point where the surface is less then 45 degrees to the tangent of your orbital position (so, your rocket will be, if the surface is evenly below you, 45 degrees or less to the screen, if it is pointed prograde) and adjust your positive/negative angle while watching your orbit develop. This guarantees Radial -/+ in the right places, and also puts energy into prograde. So you can set your MechJeb to 0 pitch, and change the pitch as you watch your orbit balloon out to control it. If you test a few things, you will see that it is possible to setup a reasonably circular orbit (it will still be a bit eccentric) by setting up a high Apoapsis with an overpowered first stage, then burning "Radial -" before you get there with your second stage. This is actually what the Vega rocket does for some of its ascent profiles in real life (since its first three stages are solids). This flattens your apoapsis and raises your periapsis, because by burning "Radial -" before your Apoapsis, you are adding energy to your orbit, and removing it from your ascent vector. Think of your rocket as a Vector arrow pointing towards where you want to add/subtract. You can also wait until after your apoapsis.. well after.. and burn Radial + . This will also drag down your apoapsis and raise your periapsis. If you wait long enough, it will do it by quite the amount, if you are close to orbital velocity. I have gotten out of a suborbital periapsis with a TWR of <1 by doing this. You can play tricks with Radial burns if you have enough Delta V. Pre Apo, burn negative. Post apo burn positive .If you have two ignitions on your second stage, you can extinguish before the Apo and resume after. I'd recommend something like at least 1 minute either side. During my ascent profiles I wait until at least a minute post/pre before doing this to get better results. If you think about it, standard practice for normal KSP is to burn half your Delta V before and after the Apoapsis to circularize. This means you are burning radially in part for the entire burn.. slightly negative on the way up, slightly positive on the way down. So this is just a brute force way of doing the same thing. If you use MechJeb, you can adjust your attitude during this burn, if it has to be all at once, to accomplish it. Its tricky and requires a lot of attention. One thing I realized was that with long duration Radial + burns well after passing Apoapsis, you can push your Apo way out on the other side of the planet using this method, then with RCS you can circularize. This is what I think of as a bounce. I've done this multiple times with TWR of less than 0.50 on second stages, but had to descend to something like 120k from 250k, burning the whole way, to get there. So basically, if your Apoapsis is over the height you want it to be and you have deltaV left over, start burning radially negative until you reach the Apo, then go back to prograde and slide slowly into Radial + over time. EDIT: forgot to mention.. if you have the ability, add a small tank to the underside of your command pod that has 100% hydrazine or HTP.. whatever you set the command pod up to be, and add 4 RCS blocks to the bottom edge of the pod. If you are using probes, make sure it has plenty of RCS. It will save your butt up there :-) You can also setup linear RCS thrusters to point "down" like a rocket engine, and they will respond to the throttle, as will the RCS blocks above. Its a simple way to get linear thrust that can be used over and over again for adjustments.

This can work, except in my case where the second stage has a TWR of <1 and the first stage has a TWR >1.. so even if I wait, the boosters "hang around" for a long time and draft upwards in the air stream.. long enough so that side slip happens downwards, they collide, and often bounce off my spacecraft. In my case, angling them away worked very well to avoid this. That's why I said "in certain cases" instead of "in the general case" :-) In the general case, your second stage will have a TWR >1 and your spacecraft will accelerate away from any devastation that might happen below. BUT, if you are trying to save money, and your TWR on higher stages start out at TWR <1, you can get into this sort of problem depending on the design. Basically, angling the boosters slightly away from your spacecraft costs nothing, and s a way to get out of that problem very easily, once you encounter it. You don't have to pile on sepatrons :-) I wish I could do that on a supersonic first stage with no wings while below 15km ! :-) THIS is a link to a more obvious screenshot which might make things clearer. It's fairly simple. The 4 poodles up above are just slapped on the 4 small fuel tanks, which are radially attached, plumbed with fuel lines to the main orange tank, and angled slightly to avoid cooking the nose cones below. I needed the TWR in that stage so I sacrificed the delta V to get it with more engines, and it turned out that I got more delta V with 4 poodles and the extra fuel tanks than with a skipper, plus it made the whole design shorter, which helped with aerodynamics. Three large reaction wheels. Asparagus staged. This can lift probably more than 50 tons to orbit, if you don't mind sacrificing the upper stage to space. And its pretty cheap.

That works in FAR as well. But the problem solved isn't that the boosters are not rotating away, it is when the bottoms of the boosters collide with each other on separation, or the spacecraft, when they do rotate away. If there is any 'side slip' in the design, they can quickly slip downwards and inwards if their center of mass is close to the center of drag of the spacecraft.

Really handy for perfect fairing separation though, so for an upper stage its a great technique :-)

Thanks! Done. In stock it can also be useful in some situations, especially when using many small boosters around a larger stage that are packed closely together. You've probably seen the 'wedding cake' style method of doing this with Really Big Rockets. You're right about that. In this design, it was about 95 m/s difference in final delta V after orbital injection with upright boosters. However since this thing is supposed to be able to get to very high or elliptical orbits to do rendezvous, I wanted to maximize delta V after orbital injection. In the end, I did rotate the engines to point straight down, which improved things. However I lost the side benefit of less sensitivity to angular perturbation. Which was ok in this one, but in another incarnation I was lofting a very unwieldy payload that had a tendency to oscillate, so I had to put them back to their original angle.

Thanks Temstar, I did know that :-) The issue is that in some designs, it is hard to achieve that balance. Also, using FAR changes things. In stock KSP, this isn't needed at all in my example design, but using FAR, and after putting in the boat-tail fairings, I needed a way to keep the ends away from the middle more definitively. I then realized there were probably a lot of people who may have made designs where their booster stages collided too rapidly due to other reasons. If you have significant overhang on the bottom, with FAR the vessel will shield the bottom from aero but not the top, so the rotation rate will be much faster than you would expect and the boosters end up colliding, even if you balance the center of mass. Once they collide, they can "stick", which creates other cascade effects. Especially in my case, where the craft is just over supersonic when the first boosters separate. Mounting them with a slight angle inwards avoids all the potential problems associated with this. It moves the center of mass away from the vessel a bit so the rotation angle is subtended beyond the crafts trajectory. EDIT: By the way, all of this is so you can use the stock parts and so on with FAR more easily. If you had added needle tanks and/or fairings up high, the boosters would separate out and down, and you wouldn't need this method. Clearly, there is a great deal to talk about with regards to separating boosters well, but I wanted to add this as a very simple trick to getting a design the otherwise works well to work better without having to redesign from scratch.:-) It's also a way to keep part count down, since you don't need to include sepatrons if you don't want to.

There is one in the link. :-) I suspect I do not have enough status here to post images as the "Insert Other Media' button tells me I do not have access.

Separating Booster Stages Gracefully I have seen this technique used in various craft designs, but I thought I would make an explicit post on separating booster stages, especially using FAR, with parts that tend to touch your spacecraft or each other during rotation away from the spacecraft while separating, due to aerodynamic effects. For booster stages, you generally don't need sepatrons to get your boosters away from the craft. In fact, in some designs they simply do not work the way you would expect due to aero drag overcoming their power, or due to parts clipping into each other and "sticking" to each other while rotating away from your main vessel (I tested this with full size Flea SRBs as separators and even they didn't work in FAR. the stickiness was too great). Take a tip from the Russians: mount your first stage boosters with a slight angle inwards: use the decoupler itself to rotate a few degrees inwards.. doing it with the tank alone will not work. When the boosters fall away, they will rotate around their center of mass, which is way down near the bottom of your boosters when the fuel tanks are empty. If you rotate them inwards a few degrees, a normal decoupler will provide enough force to rotate them away, and their rotation will never get near your spacecraft. You will lose a small amount of delta V, but in your first stage boosters, this likely doesn't amount to too much. For stages that are separated high up in the atmosphere, this isn't as much of a concern, and sepatrons will work just as you expect, but you can use this technique there as well to avoid the additional part count. This technique used in stock KSP will also help avoid your boosters impacting each other on the way down, if you would like to use a recovery mod to save cash. Basic Example of inwards rotation The example is not elegant, but it shows the principle. :-) This design is very simple, and is spec'd to cheaply take a full orange tank into orbit at 80km with 500+ m/s to spare (using FAR). It succeeds in stock KSP without the fairings with 1000 m/s to spare. This was intended at a Munar or Minmus orbital refueler. It has loads of RCS as well. To use it as a Munar/Minmus refueler in FAR, you can add a few solids to increase the delta V left after orbital insertion. Mainsails and Poodles for the entire thing. The shown craft game has FAR, StockBugFix and Procedural Fairings installed so that you can fire your rockets while they are protected by a boat-tail. If you don't have those mods installed, don't use fairings like this.. they will not work! The engines will not activate. POST NOTE: Yes, I do know there are other ways of achieving this (with different nose cones, etc) but this is one technique that I haven't seen getting much attention, and it has saved me a lot of hassle in early games! Also, in FAR, your boosters, if ejected in a low enough atmosphere with enough speed, will have a good chance of self destructing regardless of how you tweak it. To avoid that, you have to use more advanced nose cones, add back in sepatrons to keep the stage upright after separation, and use any other technique you can to keep them upright until they slow down enough not to get destroyed by aero forces. But they will still not touch your main spacecraft.

I am unsure if this fits here, however I find I cannot put my engines inside boat-tails (using procedural fairings.. stock fairings cannot do this obviously, unless you put a decoupler below them somehow) due to this mechanic either. This is a very important aerodynamic, and look-and-feel element. In fact, if this was a feature request area, I would suggest that SQUAD add the ability to put in open ended fairings for exactly this purpose. In the real world, first stage engines on many designs are shielded from aero forces. EDIT: Although, if SQUAD is trying to work out how to develop MultiPlayer, and enforcing Stock in that environment, this would make perfect sense as a balancing decision.

This probably means your rocket is unbalanced, in terms of center of mass vs center of drag/lift. Also that the TWR is likely a bit low, because the program only seems to repoint if when the initial turn is executed, apoapsis starts to decrease or stalls out. I use SMART A.S.S for setups that are like that. But also I have found that adding TWR keeps things pointed correctly. Fairings help with aero. And you can always add winglets, or wings with control surfaces at the very bottom of the stage to help counter the tip over problem. They have to be big enough to do it though :-) Small ones wont work that well on larger fuselages, unless it is a very small correction that is needed. However, best solution is increase TWR/SLT in the first stage... that way, it won't try to repoint. I have found when it works ok with this mod, generally it will work better in any situation. :-) I would turn on Aero effects so you can see the drag and thrust, etc, vectors while the rocket is in motion to determine your course of action.

OverEngineer, this is quite possibly one of the best user experience mods I have come across since MechJeb. :-) In fact, Kottobos said it best in that "This mod is trying to just do one thing, and it does it REALLY well" Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to make this mod and support it so well! I have done the "follow time to Apoapsis" manually and it is an incredible pain to do. I am very very happy you have automated this launch approach, since it the most efficient, non advanced mathematical method for producing a good launch profile. I'd suggest that for RP0/RO you simply add a checkbox option (by default unchecked) for turning down the nose earlier during the entire launch profile, and include an 'aggressiveness' factor in how hard it does it in atmosphere, to handle non throttle-able engines. It will be up to the user to figure out how to tweak it for a particular craft. I have been thinking about tackling this in terms of predictions using more hairy math, but Im a ways off from doing it. ;-) Kudoes! EDIT; Oh I would also put a checkbox for "Dont cutoff the engines when burn is complete" for RO/RP0.

Well, I don't know if it is strictly mentioned in all the FAQs, but 'since this is RP-0, it is meant to simulate real life. And in real life, "Avionics" refers to the control systems used to manipulate the control systems of an aircraft or spacecraft. It has nothing necessarily to do with the guidance System per se , which can be a pilot or a computer core. So, this means insufficient Avionics can happen if you have a pilot, since the craft just doesn't have enough power to manipulate the tonnage, no matter how hard you pull back on a stick :-) Looked at another way, imagine an 18 wheeler truck without power steering, parked, and think about how on earth you would actually turn the wheel. Thats what "Insufficient Avionics" means. One thing which is also not mentioned is that you can stack Avionics units to get more control. so two 45T unite can control 90T, and so on.

Oh! Well, I have just started using it and didn't see that you had already included a Greenhouse :-) Looking forward to testing it out!

Is it just me, or does this module, and maybe some of the USI stuff, seem like the beginning of Sid Meier's "Civilizations XVIIXV: Kerbals IN SPACE" ? Because you know.. CIV KSP, a macro game that happens only AFTER you settle a new planet, would be pretty damn amazing :-) Great mod!! It brings a few circles closed for me. Sending heavy habitat modules first is difficult, and takes a lot longer to get started. This mod brings the "first steps" capability that we sorely needed. It may have been mentioned before, but a hydroponics dome would be really good for this. light ISRU, just enough for supplementary use for very long expeditions, that is compatible with TACLS, USI-LS, Snacks and etc would really make it. You could generate a small amount of offset food, process out some waste water, waste and CO2 and create some oxygen. Not enough for self support, but enough to stretch your supplies a good while. It would be the space equivalent of foraging. :-) Essentially: Inputs: Water, CO2, Ore, (optional Waste Water and Waste, which would improve the yield multiplier) Outputs: Food, Oxygen, Hydroponic Waste (high salt content sludge) The Ore Input subs in for NPK in the plant macronutrient cycle. Perhaps also you could have a 'NPK' supply that would work better than Ore which you could bring along for mid length expeditions.

Well, you don't want to land a long range craft if you don't have to, and so you will have to ferry fuel up to orbit anyway, so you may as well, instead, ferry Ore and have a converter in orbit, with an enormous fuel depot. For Planetside you can have a seperate converter for local operations and a small fuel depot.

Also, perhaps this reference may help: http://voitlab.com/courses/thermodynamics/index.php?title=Co-Electrolysis_of_CO2_and_H2O_to_Create_Fuel_and_Oxygen_on_Mars I would ignore the cost estimates though.. they have just gone down given SpaceX's accomplishment. PS: Just read the last three pages and I see people are all into thinking about this stuff. Hope my notes help ping some ideas :-)

Hey folks. I haven't had time to re-read everything here, but I am getting the idea :-) I absolutely love the depth people are going into with processes!!! There are a few points I wanted to make/ask about (and I admit I am leaving out a lot of smaller details and smearing over some things to make it simpler): Summary point: Electrical power plants give us the very most bang for the buck we can get as far as multi-use technology, so we could look at what we can do with it chemically to reduce the need to ship bulk feedstocks, complicated (and delicate) equipment, and losses during chemical transformation steps. We could also look at how we can make things smaller and/or simpler. Sabatier and Fischer-Tropsch (and generally, almost any) processes are large if they are designed for continuous process. They can be smaller for batch process.. much smaller in fact. But, the apparatus wouldnt produce as much over time, and would have to be reset by a person (kerbal) somehow.. perhaps an engineer or scientist. Industrial processes can be adapted to batch form and made very portable. So, this may be a way to make smaller units for a small bootstrap base/colony as a sort of Tier 1. Adding robots to do this work for you would get back to the large size problem, but might be a good example of multi-use technology, if we assume we can make robots with multi use capabilities in the not so far future. There are many other ways to produce these various chemicals that are needed for sustenance and fuel that are not used on Earth industrially because they are not cost effective.. on Earth. On another planet is an entirely different question. (De)Methylation, for example, of an organic material can be accomplished literally hundreds of ways, with varying yields and results. Catalytic organic chem processes are much simpler to run than their industrial counterparts, but take a long time. Very little energy input usually, though. Microwave chemistry along with ultrasonic chemistry is currently being used to accomplish a lot of interesting things in various baseline and green chemical processes, and usually only require some sort of substrate (like zeolite) to replace the heavy duty oxidizers or catalysts and etc that are normally used. I would think preference would be given to any electrolytic form of a process that exists, even if it is not in current use industrially, as this allows a simple way to oxidize and/or reduce things in huge numbers of ways using only one basic thing.. electricity (and some sort of electrolyte, which is often renewable) What we would probably use on another planet at first for all of this is simple hydrocarbons, since they can be made from water and carbon. Nitrogenous compounds would not be easy to make if the remote environment were not rich in nitrogenous things, or didn't have a nitrogen atmosphere. If, on the other hand, there were a Nitrogen atmosphere, you could make Nitric (and Nitrous, though is is usually oxidized to make more Nitric) acid from electricity, Nitrogen and water, and then use that reacted with any local carbonate material to make Nitrates. Which could then be used to make high energy nitrogen compounds... or you could use it directly, but I would think you would want to store it as Nitrates. Mind you.. if there are no nitrogenous compounds on planet.. we'd be in serious food trouble. We would have to import a lot of nitrate anyway. Given the above, I would think we would be developing Alkane (Methane, Ethane) and Alcohol rockets, power sources, heating/cooling plants and for general use, and the exotic stuff would be reserved for special cases. So I don't honestly think that anyone would put in the energy to develop a method to produce UDMH, for example, on Mars.. at least, not for awhile. Oxygen can be stored in various intermediates as well, without the need to store it as liquid. Methane obviously can easily be stored as liquid, as can almost any alcohol. I mean, for high test use, wouldn't we be looking at things like Pentanol or Hexanol? Hexanol would pack a damn good punch, and all you need to produce it other than O2, H2 and C is some ethylated Aluminum, which is regenerated as an oxide of aluminum when you're done with it. I haven't looked it up, but I am guessing you could build Hexanol another way that didn't use that process, given that it looks just like a series of hydroformylations/hydrogenations away from Methanol... that is to say, you can use a process that needs no Aluminim to do it from 1-pentanol, and I don't see any reason this process couldn't be adapted to smaller chain alcohols. In practice, you would end up with a mixture at the end, which you would purify by distillation, so the yield would be poor.. however the remaining fractions could undergo the process again and you could get more. What I am suggesting is this: We know that there is a lot of Oxygen, Hydrogen and Carbon out there in space (that are relatively easy to get to). We can't say the same with surety for NItrogenous or metallic compounds. Also, we might be on a planet that is abundant in, for example, sulfur, so we might look at using that as an agent to help us along. But in 100% of cases, we KNOW we will find O2, H2 and C. In some form. If we don't, it's unlikely we would want to do anything on that particular rock anyway, regardless. So.. I would start with simple hydrocarbons and stay away from nitrogenous compounds to start. Then all you need to do is ship a hell of a lot of solar panels (we have solar cells now that are very light per watt) and batteries, and you would be able to bootstrap a base with only food, luxury goods and machine parts as inputs. This restricts the rocket engines you can use, sure. But we know a Methane powered rocket is not only possible, but likely to be developed to a high level of perfection in the next couple of years. We also know that Methanol can be used as a fuel cell input directly, and that alcohol is a viable propellant. Then, there are potentially hydrogen blimps that could be used as transport and drone stock, if a planet had a decent atmosphere and not a lot of wind. You could have rovers with in situ solar recharging, and a small alcohol fuel cell for emergency power. Electric "gliders' for long range flight, perhaps heavier than air ones (partially hydrogen buoyed).. And so on. At some point you would find nitrogen containing minerals, salts, or etc. Then.. Now you can produce NItric Acid by the cart load and make whatever you like from it. Ammonium Nitrate is the first thing that comes to mind, which is a great way to store nitrogen, and also is a good fertilizer. Then we would only need to solve the P and K part of the plant biology spectrum to make things realistic enough. At this point, If you want a hypergolic propellant, then NTO+Hydrazine (straight up) will do, and anhydrous Hydrazine can be produced from liquid Ammonia, electrolytically (1958). NTO can produced catalytically from Ammonia (1950's), so you have a handy single source feedstock for this stuff. All you need to make either one is O2, N2 and H2. And producing ammonia is also possible electrolytically, at a lower temperature than Haber-Bosch (2005). So you could now have a high power hypergolic propellant with pretty much only the things you have found lying about on the ground, or in the atmosphere, and some solar. The people would be bringing along the bacterial cultures you need for food production (aka, you would use feces and urine as an addendum to your soil system to make it properly balanced) so you don't need to worry about that. You could also ship soil samples in suspended form to preserve the unique qualities of each biome you wanted to replicate. Etc etc. All of that could be contained in a 'soil science' module. In other words, just producing food, water, O2 and purifying out toxins for exhaust or reuse in situ will be very hard, but doable fairly quickly, as long as there is a supply and comms line back to Earth to work out the kinks, plenty of power, and there is enough emergency food and water there to sustain the populace for as long as it will be between "now' and ' the next time you can launch a resupply or rescue'. And that's just Tier One. Maybe that's what the focus would be at first? So.. some thoughts. I hope this helps the process!!

This works really well for me for booster setups that I have for contract keeping. As long as your first stage still has something like +/- 5% Delta V that you tested, it flies well this way. Then you just disengage and go to manual. Depending on the setup, I hit t he second stage manually with Smart A.S.S. and get it close, then use Man Node planner to get a circularization burn. I have to say, I have learned a lot about TWR and aerodynamic design affecting the flight path of first stages doing this. It's pretty amazing how much of a difference you can get if you vary final angle, shape of curve and end of turn altitude. They all have different effects on flight path and efficiency, depend on TWR and ISP, and those all depend on what altitude orbit you want to reach. I usually start out with the ideal delta V for an orbit (ignoring atmosphere) and go from there. I have intentionally left off fairings and etc to see the difference and its pretty large, on average.. 100's of m/s delta V lost to drag just because of missing fairings if you use a shallow flight path. Im sure all of this is old hat to you veterans... ;-)