Zebulonious Kerman

Hey everyone, I just uploaded my modest miner, MOEL 3 to KerbalX. Check it out here! https://kerbalx.com/Zebulonious/MOEL-3-Stock Zeb

I think your design is a great step towards a two-kerbal lander. Some points: 1. Lower the landing gear to their lowest possible extent. If you come in hard, you will want the gear to have as much travel as possible to absorb impact. You run the risk of damaging (destroying) your engines if you come in hard. You are handicaping your gear's ability to save your craft from bottoming out. 2. You need RCS thruster blocks and fuel. They will help in attitude control when you go in to land. 3. I notice you don't have docking ports, so you likely don't have any stations. These are good to have early on, as they give you more options down the road. Things like rescue missions and refueling operations require them. 4. You can never have too many parachutes. Put four drogue chutes on, and stage them first. If you replace your center chute with a docking port, put four radial mount chutes to stage last, otherwise put two more radials on. It sucks to come in to fast after a long mission and blow everything up on impact. 5. Action group your solar panels. I assign them to one with my radiators. Two deploys drills, three starts/stops the drills, and four runs all my science, to include crew reports. This will save you time and aggravation down the road as well. 6. Your science jr is fine; I had mine in a similar location. You can EVA your scientist into there, and do resets and such. Just make sure you always retract your panels when on an EVA! 7. consider adding a few lights. I have some pointed up, to help with docking, and a few pointed down, do help with depth perception when landing. I put some low power service lights to illuminate hatches and ladders, and your science jr could use some illumination inside the bay. Things to consider: A. Set up a station network. They don't have to be special, just hold fuel and have a docking port. Radial ports are ok, but lineal ports allow for expandability. KSP will be upset that you have a docking port for a decoupler, but strutted up properly, they are way more useful, and have no rigidity issues. Just make sure you put docking ports on the right way! B. Mechjeb. I swear by it. Landings become point and click. Docking becomes manageable. There are tons of mechjeb tutorials. My craft look naked without the MJ module attached. Zeb

"Don't forget, if you see something that should (or shouldn't) be on here let me know " I would like to see smarter fuel management interfaces. Some examples would be: 1. Sometimes, I just want to empty a fuel tank and fill every other tank up that's onboard. I shouldn't need to select a destination tank to pump fuel out of a station tank. It should automatically fill all onboard tanks when I tell it to "fill other tanks." 2. Tie similar tanks together that are on the same stage automatically, or give me an option to. Sometimes my designs have multiple small monopropellant tanks for a reason, such as center of mass considerations or simply because they look cooler than one massive tank. Filling or emptying eight radially mounted tanks is tedious and clumsy. 3. Give us an option to jettison fuel like you did with ore. I've wanted this capability when my Kerbal bound ships are a bit heavy on reentry, and I'm trying to reuse parts. Mostly its because I didn't pack enough parachutes. 4. Give us more control on pumping fuel out of a tank. Right now its click and pray you get close to pumping out the right amount. The center of mass could get messed up if you don't get the precise amount pumped in or out of radially mounted tanks, and that's not a good way to fly. 5. Perhaps with the specialization of fuel stations, a module could be created to facilitate these capabilities from an interface after you right click on the "fuel manifold control module." Surface mining operations could benefit from a specialized control module as well. You've got a science module, why not something for fuel? 6. If I do hit alt-right mouse on a couple of tanks and schedule up a fuel transfer, I don't want the transfer to stop just because I try to do something else, like it does now. 7. Split the engineer class into chemical and mechanical engineer sub classes. Chems work with ore mining, fuel conversion, and fuel management. Mechs fix stuff (like solar panels, pause for effect), optimize the mechanical functionality of ore drills, and restore functionality to things that degrade over time on craft.