Hagen von Tronje

I am genuinely curious because sometimes I miss tech advances (getting old...), can I see this? That would be amazing even making allowances for realism (presumably a real unit wouldn't have a 5m magic drill that extracts unlimited resources and never wears out the bit). EDIT: Also not sure if you like mods or not, but I THINK tweakscale works on ISRU. Won't swear to it, and I certainly can't guarantee it's good for anything, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the scaling available on the part.

The ISRU is about the same size as the mobile lab, slightly bigger than a hitchhiker. How much smaller is an interplanetary drilling rig and fuel refinery supposed to be? Smallest possible configuration should be 1 ISRU, 1 drill, 1 small tank, 1 Oscar B, 1 OX-STAT solar panel, and 1 probe core. You will get to enjoy running it for a few minutes a day due to having virtually no power, so presumably a couple of Gigantor panels and maybe more battery space would help out, and assuming you want to do more than fill up the Oscar B, you'll probably want a bigger tank and/or a docking port. Here's what I consider a tiny mining operation. If you consider this "stupidly big" then you'll probably find it difficult to get ISRU out there, though you can of course trim the living quarters off the top.

I'd be happy with oxygen, water, and food, drained at different rates and available by different means, as resources. Overdoing it with stock resources would make the already steep learning curve maybe a little too steep for a new player. However, they will have to have just enough complexity to be interesting. Simply having water recyclers on board your ship adds nothing to the experience except added mass to any long term mission. Fun factor there is not especially high. On the other hand, having something inherently useful about, say, Duna's poles or Laythe's atmosphere, requires that access to large quantities of water or oxygen carry specific advantages beyond what you could obtain by merely reusing them. Possibly this could be accomplished with the simple non-reusability of food/snacks. If it's possible to manufacture food in situ with access to power/sun, water, and oxygen, and simply have the food production facilities be inefficient enough that you'd either need extremely huge and heavy oxygen/water recyclers or access to a natural resource, this might make "colonization" efforts more fun. But a system even that complex, just the three resources, would probably be something like 50 new parts, especially if you wanted to do fun things like use electric powered sun lamps which can be turned off if you have enough sun for your food rather than just make a nondescript production cylinder that consumes power. This also means that making a really sweet station like many enjoy doing will raise already high part counts, so let's hope the game engine gets some big improvements in the meantime.

Yes and no. Yes, you can daisy chain asteroids. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129068-5-asteroid-chain-in-Kerbin-Orbit But I'm pretty sure pushing asteroids into a claw mounted on another ship will cause the game to crash just like with any other vessel unless you install Claw's (the moderator, not the part) bugfix patch found here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97285-KSP-v0-90-Stock-Bug-Fix-Modules-%28Release-v0-1-7d-28-Feb-15%29-Misc-Utilities-%2818-Jan-15%29

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/130281-Elcano-Challenge-As-Long-as-it-Takes Kerbin circumnavigation officially underway, first update posted. All details in that thread, thanks to everyone who reads!

First part of Kerbin circumnavigation posted! Per my update notes, this one will take a different tone, slightly less Lovecraft, slightly more Sagan. Though I'm sure we'll still find a place or two that's just too bizarre, such is the nature of the beast. Hope everyone enjoys! Updates may be slightly less frequent than Minmus, Kerbin is a whole lot bigger, so it takes more driving to see enough things to constitute a worthwhile update, to say nothing of the fact that the terrain can be even more hazardous.

This is how my engineers like to roll.

4820K @4.8GHz GTX 780 x2 32GB memory Windows 8.1 Running ~ 40 mods (roughly a dozen or so parts mods, bunch of lightweight dependencies or bugfixes, bunch of utility mods, no graphics mods) on KSP 1.0.4 32bit Memory usage before*, with maxed settings - ~3.5GB (crashy) With ground quality normal instead of high - ~3.0GB (stable, standard issue memory leaks excepted) With OpenGL, maxed settings - ~1.8GB I kid you not Framerates remained more or less the same either way and depended largely on part count within physics range. Main drawback I found is that alt-tab is a lot more likely to screw something up in OpenGL. Use with caution and only when nothing is loading. Great fix 10/10. *Memory tests were done on Kerbin's surface while piloting a surface vehicle, as this seems to be much higher memory usage than in space.

More struts indeed. Now I want to build a submarine, strap a gigantic heat shield to the front of it, and slam it into Jool.

When you see a sci-fi or space movie where the pilot describes a maneuver as extremely dangerous, and you think he must be braindamaged because you can do that maneuver in your sleep, and even if you goof it up, it's a minor correction burn.

Good looking rover, I like the treads! Is the water speed limit imposed by the thrust you can generate, or is 5m/s where stuff starts coming off? My amphibious rover has to be quite careful on entry and exit lest pieces (or kerbals) become useless debris. I've gotten up to 10m/s on a barebones model with no pontoons floating on structural panels but it gets dangerous going fast. In any case, I've had this urge to try actually building a submarine or submersible, I'd love to see yours in the water.

I've tried it using assorted parts, both as a guide rail and to "key" the port so it would align correctly. It can work. It can also lead to rubberband physics, parts flying off, and stuff exploding, even if you use parts with 80m/s tolerance and make contact so softly you're barely moving. On the other hand, Infernal Robotics provides many, many possible ways to move things into position. One that worked for me is creating hydraulic suspensions using rails, which can be scaled to work on a variety of vessels with Tweak Scale. Even a tiny probe with three legs could have three miniaturized rails attached behind those legs, then all it has to do is bounce into position above the dock using RCS/torque then lower suspension until it makes contact.

Vertical surface docking procedures are about a thousand times easier and more practical by taking your pick of mods such as KAS or IR, which give you some options for moving things around. I've done both under and over docking with stock but it sucks. Docking under is subject to variable fuel mass even if you tested and aligned the ports and even accounted for the gravity of the target body, docking over is subject to everything going kablooie without rhyme or reason. PS - Whatever you do, don't put the claw on one ship then drive another one into it, you will crash the entire game.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97285 Assuming you have no issue with a bugfix mod.

I'm pretty sure you can get constant or near constant light at the poles, I've had bases land there that seemed to always have sun access even if they looked like they were in darkness. The downside is, of course, that they're at the poles. But it may be a simpler problem than you think. It won't empty out the power stores at night if you simply go do something else (as in go pilot another ship, go to VAB, etc, but get out of physics range of the mining base). Alternately if you need night power while you're playing the ship, bring fuel cell arrays. In fact you can drop the solar panels and do just fuel cells and it will be fine, just bring maybe one panel or an RTG as a safety measure (to prevent lockup if you drain batteries and empty tanks).

To say nothing of the oil based mud, drilling fluid, etc. Needless to say, real oil rigs aren't using solar farms and typically aren't on the city power grid, so I leave the reader to guess how you power an entire derrick out in the middle of the desert (or offshore). Quibbles about the realism of KSP's fuel and mining aside, there's nothing even paradoxical about using fuel to harvest fuel. If it took more energy to extract the mineral than the product yielded, we'd have zero interest in acquiring it in the first place.

It's impossible to rule out "working as intended" without more details (like was there possibly anything at all drawing power to create a deficit even if they were operational), but needless to say they aren't intended to randomly cease operation entirely. OX-STAT don't generate much power, it's very easy to overwhelm them, especially if they're only getting partial exposure.

When you right click the panel, what does it say for sun exposure and power generation?

If someone makes a "roughneck" mod where drills require kerbals to trip pipe, I will totally play it.

Greetings fellow Elcano traveller; I can't say specifically what problem you're having, but Kerbin seems to have the roughest surfaces of any body I've driven on, because many places have a ground "texture". I've certainly found seemingly randomly exploding parts are more common on Kerbin than, say, Mun. If I had to guess, lengthy "rover" bodies like yours probably make that problem all the worse since the shaking induced by uneven ground will have the whole length for leverage on every bounce. Physics speed up past x2 leads to explosions on Kerbin for me even with vehicles that survive x4 on other bodies just fine. Never heard the wind sound, though. At first I thought it was some flaw in my rover caused maybe by wheel contact "biting" something with suspension compressed (Kerbin is what, the second highest gravity environment? Probably rougher on suspension than most places.) but numerous tests convinced me it's just the way Kerbin is, at least in big rovers. Hope you solve it, I enjoy how you really appreciate the landscape in your Elcano.

Much stranger things than that can happen. Every pole I've visited has assorted ways of crashing your game and has generally horrifying properties in general. Minmus's south pole is probably a great place for a space-landfill, since it seemingly contains a black hole.

Pretty sure Near Future and Stockalike Station Parts both have some assortment of jumbo-sized pods, though I don't think either have completed IVA yet.

Did you pass over the exact north pole? Weird things happen at exact poles, I've found.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/130281-Elcano-Challenge-As-Long-as-it-Takes#post2112348 Updated with Minmus completion. I hope I documented everything adequately.

Updated with part 3, completing my circumnavigation of Minmus, with a bonus just for fun. Also updated with pics of the amphibious design, see spoiler tag in original post. Thanks to everyone for reading! Kerbin will be next!