suicidejunkie

The claw is a stock part. It is a round-nosed cylinder which opens up with four grabby fingers when deployed. Touch the center of it to another vehicle to grab on.

I've got a matching pair of Absentminded Rescue Mission Returning With The Seat Empty Commemorative Coins. And we can't forget the Recursive Rescue Mission Triple Crown.

Anything built in the VAB/SPH tends strongly towards commonality and regularity and symmetry. I find that for real variety, the KAS Screwdriver and a junkyard or crash site in the wilderness is key.

Today I finished my pair of polar omnicomm towers. Enough antennas to target every planet in the system, plus the active vessel. And since they are sitting on the actual pole of Kerbin, they provide constant line of sight forever with no drift. The original plans were nice and symmetrical: The actual assembly process at the south pole with KAS was not quite as planned. Extra ladders were needed, and a few parts were ultimately proved unnecessary when they exploded after being dropped. And, despite some wacky wobbling when some dishes clipped into each other, nobody died: The engineering team got a bit lazier for the second station at the north pole, when they realized they didn't need to build a tower since they already had a great big platform to attach the dishes to after landing:

Is the stock thing a fundamental decision? KAS has the great feature of being a useful extra option without being overpowered. Anything but the simplest stack you build by hand will be of significantly lower quality than something built in the VAB and shipped, but you can still do it if you want or need to. For example: http://imagemodserver.duckdns.org/nick/postedimages/KSP_Mun_crash_reassembly.png Laughable alignment of thrust and CoM, frightening fuel balance changes during the ascent, fragile and unwieldy. But lovingly and individually hand-assembled from discarded parts by a munar artisan who desperately wanted to return to orbit.

Or, the engineers who built the accelerometer remembered being told that centrifugal force isn't real, and designed the instrument to only report on real forces. That's why it is so expensive.

You'll need some self-sustaining outposts, at least in terms of fuel and lifesupport resources, as many places as possible. Locally-stationed rescue craft would be a good idea for prompt response from the space patrol. Since you're eschewing EL, I'd suggest that you at least have a local scrapyard where you can disassemble and store old and spare rocket parts initially delivered from Kerbin. You'll be able to build new ships on site and on demand using KAS, or repair moderate damage without having to send for a completely new ship.

I swapped to Whiplash + Reliant and added oxidizer to the fuel tanks... and my SSTO plane still SSTOs. LV30 isn't underpowered; all the other engines are simply more OP.

I like those units. For comparison, my car gets about 15000 m/$

Can't you just place things against the side of your helmet and then let them drift away? I used to do that all the time in space.

You can use physics warp up to 4x by holding meta (shift/alt depending on OS) as you time accelerate. You could alternatively not worry too much, and timewarp faster, then re-capture the part before reentry. Does the contract tick off 'obtaining the part' when you switch to the part using '[' and ']' ?

I don't follow. All of my comms have to reach KSC as well. Every one of those links is a probe with an omni and some solar. Sometimes a parachute or RTG for the newer models. Signals from the southeast shore of booster bay will relay across the mountain peaks towards the south, hit the south pole, and then run along a chain of relays sitting on the ice cap 12.5 km apart until they reach the actual south pole. 25km out from the south pole are a set of four 50m tall towers with relays on top that relay the signal to a repeater landed on the south pole of Mun. This repeater then beams the signal back to the northern continent of Kerbin. At some times during the day, that is direct to KSC, but other times it can only reach a relay on the far side. The far side relay bounces signals to mountain tops down through the desert, then to a special pair of low-altitude relays for jumping the channel, then back up to the mountains, finishing with a stop at Mt WhoopsTooShort, which then beams the signal into KSC. One thing you will need to do is have a separator between the main body of the tower and the active core with the relays and sensors. My towers are 50m tall, but act as if they're transmitting from the base. The actual transmitter is a HECS core with relays and RTGs sitting in the bowl at the top formed from struts and panels. Note; according to the math, if you want a single tower at the pole to get LoS on the matching pole of mun, you'll need a tower 350m tall. Moving out 25km, you'll need only 30m tall towers, but more of them. I chose 50m tall so that four towers placed on the cardinal directions would give constant contact. If you want to get constant contact with any other body in the star system, you don't need a tower at all, just long range dishes on both poles.

Another alternative to ensure your network does not drift, is by anchoring it to the largest mass in the area: I've also heard about a trick with KAS attaching a launch clamp to your satellite while in keostationary orbit, and then fleeing the scene before the Kraken attacks. The radio towers near the south pole are 50m tall so they can reach around the curvature of the planet to bounce a signal off of an M1 relay at the munar south pole in order to get a signal across the oceans. I've now got a supersonic bomber to skim mountains and drop relay probes for quickly expanding the grid, but the first probes were done by hand with a juno based bushplane, Jeb's wild piloting and Bill's trusty wrench.

If landing a rocket is sufficiently negative fun to overcome the sense of accomplishment, then that's a better path. Keep it in mind to try again when you get your next piloting star Did you just build a launch pad with no other parts? Your design to teleport to the mun should have some struts and probably some fuel tanks and an RTG and a probe core on it somewhere to make it functional.

What I'm suggesting is that you build the launchpad on the moon, not land it. Start with a bare minimum seed factory lander, and it won't be much different from a basic lander pod. The Colony Stallion pictured there was built by an orbital station (while in transit, since they had plenty of time waiting) with the rockomax sized large parts tank. You'll want to make your seed with struts for a much wider stance so it doesn't tip over, and add extra fuel reserve so you can hover down slower. Upon landing, it has a drill, smelter, part production, part storage, part deployment, and minimal power. It then builds a gigantor panel, more drills, more tanks, more power again, then after a while, a full workshop, greenhouses and ISRU, landing pads, shuttles, rovers and more.

Slightly modded, in that it outputs some CO2/Waste/Wastewater along with with other resources. I also changed the small convertotron to just have an on/off switch so you can't control what you get out; instead of losing a straight 80% by mass, I instead get a dribble of everything and all the stuff I can't use goes to waste.

Try doing it wild west style: Get yourself the absolute basics in orbit, ride that horse down to the surface and then bootstrap your way to success!

You may be interested in the idea of deploying rest stations in key areas: Solar powered, self-cleaning restrooms with a sterilizing UV light. Includes a drill and slightly modded low efficiency convertotron to slowly restock the greenhouse between visits. Upgrade from Stayputnik to Hecs + docking port for skycrane based deployments.

Yeah, the quick mod wouldn't be a complete lock, but it would be quite a helpful prod to keep you mindful of the house rule. I had all my first few Mun landings using engineers, since I wanted them to deploy relay probes on the surface, but as below, that didn't go as well hoped. I also had Bill driving a rover around Minmus deploying a surface relay belt for a bit (only a few dozen kilometers before he completely wrecked it and had to walk the rest of the way). Pilots would have prevented a LOT of wrecked equipment in my early career, and the Pilots' SAS is absolutely essential for taking the spaceplanes to space currently.

I was more specific with my Pilot's union; Probe cores aren't allowed to be in command of engines. There are quite a few relay satellites in orbit now, but they have been either put into space atop a manned vehicle (those went poorly due to staging issues causing the sat to separate at 60km altitude, but were heroically nose-bumped to orbit) or were assembled by engineers with wrenches after a pilot brought them to the correct orbit. I'm also using probe cores on bases to provide basic functionality when all the kerbals are busy working in their labs and there's nobody left to open the pod bay doors. Something like this could be accomplished by deleting all the probe cores with Snark's MM idea, but with the sole exception of the Stayputnik.

Not yet, but I have Reduced and Reused. My boosters do not normally go to space; the payload puts itself in orbit, and all staging is done within an atmosphere or while/nearly landed. Beyond the very early game, anything that goes to orbit will be capable of being refueled with ISRU even if that tech hasn't been researched yet, so it never ends up as space debris. I did once send up an overpowered booster instead of redesigning a lighter variant, and after bolting on some docks and a probe core with KAS, I reused it as a fuel station. I had some plans for an LKO station with an extraplanetary launchpads recycle bin to hoover up all the junk capsules the other space corporations keep stranding Kerbals in, but it never panned out. Turns out that there's no real need for LKO construction, and no space garbage elsewhere.

If you're within 40km or so of the north or south pole, you'll never see an eclipse, because you'll never see mun. As you get closer to the equator, you'll start seeing partial eclipses, and then fuller ones as you move into line with the sun and mun.

The Kraken attacks your ship. You'll need to roll a Greater Flats or better to save vs RUD.

TWR of 2.0 is quite decent for a launcher, right? 0.05g net acceleration off the flats, but 200+ tons of fuel delivered to LKO in one go is quite a good deal.

My Munar station provides refuels in case I want my spaceplane to land on the surface, and a rest location before Kerbals transfer to the Munar surface shuttle. My Minmus station provides EVA refuels to the Kerbals jetpacking to and from the surface, and also provides a Kraken-free alternative construction site to the surface bases. For a while it was also the main lifesupport depot, and Val had to make a few EVA pack beer runs while the scientists were biome hopping. All my major bases also include some EL construction capacity so that crews can perform emergency KAS repairs in the field.