suicidejunkie

The simplest thing to change in your current setup would be to launch two of those ships. Have them rendezvous in LKO, and pump all the fuel from one into the other, and have that other complete the rescue starting with a full tank in LKO. A harder but ultimately better way would be to improve your mun rocket into one fully capable of the whole return trip, but send it to mun with some empty seats so it can pick up the hitchhikers.

1) Make your tanker at least 200 tons wet so you need fewer trips to orbit. 2) Include ISRU on the surface so you don't have to waste station fuel on the tanker going up and down. 3) Add docking ports to the tanker. 4) Reroute traffic to dock directly with the tanker. The old station is now a science ship that only needs occasional visits. Problem solved? Bonus: If your tanker includes nuclear engines, it can be a station orbiting almost any body and still refuel itself on Minmus as required.

"Profitable" is stretching it for raw stock ore. Unrefined, it only gives you a speso or two per ton, and unless you're using EL to forge the tank and parachutes in space, you'll be taking a loss. Converting that ore to fuel and delivering the fuel is definitely profitable however. If you have a fully recoverable SSTO, then you can launch with some empty tanks, fill all of them from munar ore, and glide back for a net profit. The most efficient but most cheesy way is to buy ore on Kerbin, and operate a refinery business instead of a space program.

Have you considered building a working replica space center, taking a bunch of screenshots and/or drive-through videos, and then reconsider upgrading it to a boring but better frame-rate launch site?

Eclipses, transits and being on the far side of the body are local issues which would be a problem regardless of the Kerbin-side arrangements. Most of which can be solved with polar relays as well. Moho would make a great if expensive relay site since its orbital wonkiness will almost entirely eliminate the eclipses and transits.

You may be completely unsurprised by the fact that Scott Manley has a KSP space elevator video.

If you read the fine print in the acronym, Single Stage To Anywhere does not guarantee a return to KSC, so Eve ascent is optional.

IMO, the chain to the pole is its own reward A single ground level dish on both the poles can get LoS to any body in the Kerbol system except mün (ironically because it is too close). The LoS cones from the north and south poles merge into an omniscient bubble before reaching the orbit of Minmus.

This sounds like fodder for an Experiment! Can you get a higher land speed by reducing the terrain quality setting so that the quads that are maximum level are physically larger, and thus have bigger colliders loading further away?

@fourfa For radio towers, you'll want to try for ~50m tall at four points 25km away from the pole to get yourself constant contact with a reflector on the mün and each other. Those are reasonably stable. If you do get over 350m tall, then a single tower on the terrain seam at the exact pole should get you line of sight to the mün. On the ice cap, probes with omnis should be spaced 12.5km apart to run a landline to the nearest mountain relay. http://imagemodserver.duckdns.org/nick/postedimages/KSP_RadioTowerMk1.png Be sure to make the relay probe on top of the tower a separate vehicle so that it has an altitude of ~80m. The tower itself counts as being on the ice cap at 32m, but the independent probe sitting in the cup on top gains the benefit of the tower height. Combine with the simple air-dropped mountaintop relays, and that can get your signal across booster bay. If you want to build a radio tower on lowlands, the unevenness of the terrain will kill a lot of plans. I suggest bringing some launch clamps in the max sized KAS containers to stabilize your construction at regular intervals. But mostly, you're best off just bombing mountain peaks. There's almost always one in sight from anywhere on Kerbin.

Bridge over the Dres canyon?

I really look forward to, and rush for the ISRU, whereupon colonization efforts begin. However, I'm having plenty of fun carting around busloads of tourists, dealing with the sudden but inevitable rescue missions that result, and improving the local infrastructure to assist future rescue operations. Breaking out of a flat spin 10km over KSC after a spaceplane broke its tail stabilizer on minmus, KAS delivery and installation of replacement LV-Ns to the surface of Mün. Extracting tourists with a claw from a misshapen heap of wreckage 180 degrees away from the Minmus base. Completing tours on a completely wingless spaceplane after a too-shallow ascent.

One of three possibilities: Münbase - Didn't really notice much difference except that the lifesupport mod is hardcore, and there's no way to get back to orbit. Jebediah Kerman Baseball - A very slow paced game with zero stolen bases and zero strikeouts. StarVal64 - Suffers from completely absurd dV, unbalanced parts with 6500+ thermal limits but no impact tolerance, and whoever made this save file spawned way too many ships using BD armory and hyperedit. The final battle against the Space Kraken is great, but the contract completion reward is terrible.

For me, 1.0.5 is the last version I can get to still render the surface of Kerbin on every frame. I hope to be moving up this year when I get a new PC with an actual video card, but I'll be keeping it around as a stable fallback.

Great work. Doing your empirical testing in a frictionless vacuum with spherical surfaces is the theoretical ideal.

Peril Amplifying Wobble

That says to me that you need to make a very Kerbal offshore oil rig tall enough to push the drills down to the sediment Or a submersible that can sink the entire craft to the bottom and drill there.

A fair bit more mundane than the above things, but I was pretty pleased to get two stranded Kerbals from a surface wreck up to Minmus orbit using EVA packs during the same pass of the orbital station. The first one to launch, arced up higher than required and caught the station during descent. The second one flew a more direct route and boarded the station 2 minutes before the first one rendezvoused.

For my SSTO's common failure modes: If the wings burn off on the way up: 1) Abort to Minmus, continue mission. If the wings are/become missing on the way down: 1) Buckle up, lock barf bags in ready position. 2) Wait for whiplashes & RCS blocks to explode. 3) Wait for altitude and speed to drop. If the wings are/become missing below 4km altitude: 1) Tighten Seat Belts. 2) Open forward cargo bay. 3) Deploy drogues. 4) Deploy Main chutes when safe. 5) Recover and file insurance claims.

Have you evaluated a Laythe mining operation? Even less transfer time, and both launch and landing costs should be low if you use airbreathing engines.

Once it goes up, it stays up until an accident occurs. Half of my SSTO spaceplanes are currently lacking wings due to certain incidents with piloting errors, but normally they hit the runway for 100% recovery. I could just drive a truck out to refuel them and take off again, but I've got a KCT inventory of spares and its easier to let the ground crew deal with passenger and cargo exchanges.

One should always remember to raise the landing gear on your spaceplane by the time you have reached 40km altitude or mach 4, whichever comes first.

I launched a mining rig from Minmus, modified with a colonization module on top for what will hopefully be my first successful interplanetary journey. I managed to get an intercept with Dres just before leaving Minmus SoI, but then later discovered that my velocity at Dres is going to be a few km/s too high. Construction of the rescue ship began before the victim had left Kerbin's SoI. Just an LV-N, 10000 LF, a capsule, a claw, and lifesupport. About a RL year and 200 game days later, they've just rendezvoused and started transferring supplies over.

Periapsis Altitude Warning.

Making a high velocity launchpad out of a brick of SRBs is a classic. I like giving my rockets a starting TWR of 1.0, and igniting them at the speed of sound. If you want precision maneuvers with SRBs, you'll need to include separators so you can jettison the still-thrusting booster at the right time and get large but arbitrary amounts of dV. Having a 24-pack of separatrons that fire in pairs for balance can allow you to make small, controlled correction burns as well.