suicidejunkie

If you need more than one tanker, you didn't build it big enough! The Titan class tanker lands itself next to the refinery on Minmus, and carries more resources than any of the asteroids except Gilly and Dres

You have a contract to extract 600 units of ore or so. You've collected 450 units so far. Once that reaches 100%, you get money! The ore will continue to flow; you're not depleting a region. PS: I must admit, a very similar message caused me to panic because my mining rig was immobile and the name of the company sounded very much like a site name.

Val: While on Minmus waiting for Bill and Bob to finish mining and deliver fuel to her ship, B&B managed to shatter their miner down to just a poodle, mostly-empty Rockomax tank, and capsules. They failed to make orbit with the remains, so Val, being on the opposite side of the moon, boosted retrograde, met them halfway, pulled a U-turn rendezvous, and then used the last of her fuel to boost everybody to a safe periapse for rescue. Bill: A Minmus shuttlebus miscalculated the lifesupport supplies and ended up a couple days into a Minmus trip with only 4 hours of supplies left. While they burned all the reserve and Kerbin return fuel to get a high energy transfer of 3.5 hours, Bill hand-assembled a ship on the surface of minmus using KAS. He then flew the lobsided monster up to a >1km/s rendezvous, and slapped on an emergency air tank with 9 minutes to spare. After docking and fuel transfer, all 7 kerbals survived to reach the surface base. Jeb: Flying the first SSTO plane to Minmus and back with tourists and trainees, the aerobraking maneuver went badly, but Jeb kept his cool, aborting to orbit with one wing and 3 of 4 engines left. To this day, the spaceplane lies safely yet upside down on a grassy hill on the back side of kerbin with one engine and slightly less wing than before. Its value as a monument outweighs the minor recovery funds it would fetch. Bob: While nothing in particular stands out, Bob has risked his life across the Kerbin SoI to bring the "RTGs for Everyone!" project to fruition. And RTGs are the best thing since the LV-N.

I feel like I've missed out on a big chunk of !!fun!! now. The first time I had two rockets in orbit at the same time, I accidentally clanged them together before I'd even installed docking ports. I had to learn how to avoid collisions during mere rendezvous missions, rather than how to approach and dock

SSTO doesn't need to be SLaunchTO. There's one stage, nothing falls off. SSTAnywhere is perfectly legit to refuel on Minmus. The mountains are the Minmus of Eve's surface, like Gilly is the Minmus of Eve's orbit.

Quite. As I noted above, LF wholesale costs 80 cents per unit. LF converted from purchased ore costs a smidge over 2 cents per unit. In terms of absolute value, the rocket will still cost much more than the fuel, but you can recover the rocket (and moreso with spaceplanes) For example, my mk2 SSTMinmus spaceplane can take 5 tourists to Minmus surface and return for about $3500 in LF, and maybe $5 in TACLS catering. If I convert that LF from ore, it will cost about $100 for the ore. The plane itself costs between 80k and 250k depending on if you get the base model with fuel cells or the deluxe model with RTGs, but it lands on the runway for 100%, so that doesn't matter. I've also considered building a mk3 bus with a claw; it would be able to rumble out to the runway, swap out the tourists and trainees, refuel the plane and then roll away so the plane can take off immediately. In practice, I've got a hanger full of about 8 spaceplanes, so the KCT recovery time is a non-issue and I just rotate through my fleet.

This gimbal lock has happened occasionally to me. If you're not in the middle of aero or a time-critical landing/docking maneuver, you can switch to the space center and back to resolve it.

Mining fuel has a slightly higher margin (~3%), but much worse ROI. To mine, you need to buy a lot of drills in order to feed the ISRU, keep a high ranking engineer on site, and provide a lot more electricity. To refine, you simply buy ore for dirt cheap, and convert it at 100% rate with a probe core.

A while ago, the company bought 12GB of ram for all our office desktops. That was a neon sign that RAM was dirt cheap and I should get an even bigger pile for myself at home too.

If you want to go with the fueller route, consider using the megawheels to make a crawler and park it on the crawlway. Have 6+ orange popsicle tanks, or whatever amount is required to fully fuel your rockets in one go. Then trundle up and use a claw on the nose to grab a launch clamp rather than the rocket itself (for safety). Pump and go. If you can't get your crawler safely up the ramp, you can use 2-3 jeeps and daisy chain fuel hoses up the ramp, but that gets old very fast. If you want 97.2% (LF=80cents/unit, Ore=4cents/unit; Ore->LF =2.2cents/unit) of the economic efficiency with only 1% of the faffing about with trucks and hoses before launch, then consider this: Take the launch clamps on your rockets, and build out from them. Add an ISRU unit (or five) to the base of the launch clamps, and then a large array of heavy ore tanks. Deploy with the ore tanks full and fuel tanks empty, then convert and fuel the rocket on the pad with the ISRUs under timewarp, powered by the launch clamps. You may want to cluster-spam launch clamps for sufficient power input. Take a launch clamp and attach two more clamps to it using mirror symmetry. Then copy that first clamp and attach the copies with symmetry to the first set of mirrored clamps. Repeat one or two more times, and you will have a thick forest of launch clamps producing gobs of electricity. (Or just jack up the clamp power generation with MM)

It has two refills worth, so your EVA Prop is effectively 3x. I don't recall how the mass changes, but you should get at least twice the dV. I haven't used the tank much; it is carried by a lot of Kerbals just in case of emergencies. I did use it to extend my range and deploy a ground-based RT relay reasonably far from the mothership for assembly on Minmus, while still having enough propellant to return safely, but I use a rover for that now. Carrying the parts from orbit was similarly a one-shot deal that I don't do anymore. I didn't have to dip into the reserve tank, although I did run down to almost zero on the standard fuel by touchdown. Its not worth the time once you've got a mining station up and running.

The main trick to a Minmus surface sample return without landing your vehicle is sticking the ladder rendezvous at the end on your last wisps of EVA Prop. Except for the first landing of my Minmus base, and SSTM tourism, almost all my crew transfers around Minmus have been via jetpack. Because there is a base and 7-seater truck on the surface to recharge from, my Kerbals all get to transfer up and/or down from orbit with 55-60% fuel remaining, and occasionally carry a spare part up or down in their KIS backpack.

Now that you mention it, I think this is a good technique to start. And once you've done it a few times to get the idea, you can optimize the maneuver by burning halfway between those two directions and gradually improve it into a smooth approach.

If you have the PC version, you'd be better off hooking your TV up to your PC for a bigscreen experience. Also look into getting your controller hooked into your PC, but you'll likely want to keep the mouse and keyboard handy as well for design and science work. Best of both worlds that way I'd suggest a career mode with funds income turned up until you're ready to challenge yourself with efficiency rather than reaching the new destinations. Reading up on gravity turns would help you get more fuel to orbit, and looking up delta-v calculations should help you budget for your mun mission. http://strout.net/info/science/delta-v/intro.html Although, you will probably be better served with a visit to Minmus's surface before Mun's. It is actually far cheaper to do because of the low gravity.

I believe it is not so much a 'middle distance' thing as a 'too long before arrival' thing. If you close in faster, there is less time for your orbital motion to throw your approach off. You can also compensate for the approach skew at midrange by burning downwards (antiradial) if you're approaching from behind, or upwards (radial) if approaching from ahead. Also; if you've got a fast closing speed, you can burn about 30 degrees away from retrograde to keep pushing retrograde to anti-target as the skew shifts it. Ideally, you'll have slowed down to a good approach speed at the same time as you reach short range.

So, if I understand you correctly, you're compensating for the inefficiency of an "up then over" ascent, by using MOAR BOOSTERS?

I'm sure it isn't super efficient, but I use an all-solid bag of hammers to create a High Velocity Launch Pad (HVLP); the rockets themselves then carry 1.0 TWR, and cruise at an aerodynamically safe mach 0.9 through the lower atmosphere. I have not had any need for or use of struts this game.

Most of my spaceplanes have landed from the east, because they make a U-turn over booster bay to bleed off speed and altitude after giving Mt. Whoopstooshort a lot of clearance. The one time I landed from the west was early on when I had to do a go-around, and that was the fourth approach that flight.

Tether targeting sounds like it might be a good job for kOS scripting. Even if it has to wait many rotations to get a good timing for launch due to low frame rates, it should eventually catch a near-perfect angle.

This issue caused quite a bit of concern after a fuel truck trundled up to my heavy rocket on the launch pad, and the hose-wrangler kerbal found himself ~50m up in the air. There was some very careful climbing around some fuel tanks, down a ladder to the drill level, and then carefully around and down again for a slide down the side of the boosters, using their helmet to slow the fall against various widgets sticking out before landing back on the launchpad. The second time it happened, the unlucky kerbal simply waited for someone else to hook up the hoses, and then got aboard the capsule for a game of hose-squeezing and musical chairs. Nowadays, KSC just pays for fuel in the VAB to save the hassle.

In the optimal case, the tether-dropped vehicle will suffer zero gravity and steering losses; you can spin the tether so it matches the surface speed of Minmus when it is pointed straight down, and release or grab the vehicle at 0m/s and 0 altitude. If you're constantly picking up loads of ore, say, then you'll be net losing energy, but you can re-boost your tether with a maximally efficient burn with the best available engines directly prograde at AP. On the other hand, *sending* something to Minmus using a tether, results in the station having EXCESS energy afterwards! Using rocket engines to land is terrible negative efficiency. The main trick would be timing the rotation so your docking port or claw will connect as you go past at ~150m/s.

To put in other words what has been noted by quite a few people in the thread; DV loses its practical meaning when you spread across multiple ships. Saying that one ship will take up more or less of the DV burden changes the summed amount of DV needed, and could increase or decrease any of the actually summable physical properties like fuel or mass or time required. You can use it as a yes/no for whether an option is even possible given a specific design, or get an idea of how monstrous your lander will be, but those are all for one vehicle of the pair.

DV budget varies notably in terms of which vehicle pays it. In the first case, you have an amazing lander capable of returning a corpse to Earth. In the last case, you have a much more reasonable lander which can make orbit. It should also be noted that the mothership can afford a high efficiency, low TWR engine burn, while the lander needs a short, high TWR burn to get off the ground. Not all of that DV budget is equal!

Vector loses points for being an end-game, and OP engine. Terrier, NERV, and Whiplash are my best. Whippy loses out due to the limited habitation range, despite the bonus from SSTO space planes. Which brings me down to two. And I think I'll have to give it to Terrier, since interplanetary isn't big in my games.

No. You only need to buy KSP in the PS4 store ONCE