Tyko

@Snark More biomes are great and tying them to interesting geographic formations give you the added bonus of getting great vista to appreciate.

Yep, I've run into it occasionally before. Instead of getting irked, I took your approach and decided to find it humorous. I wasn't posting the pic as a rant, but just sharing an amusing moment. Could you imagine if the Apollo program had found that on the far side of the moon? LOL

Pepe and Corgas landed today right outside the sprawling metropolis of Minmus City today. Off to the left you can see the Kerman Central Park

If stock air intakes' drag profile changes when they're retracted you could probably mod one to produce EC when it's extended. That would do a pretty good job of acting like a RAT. I'm not sure if/how you could get it to only work when you're moving though. It might generate EC even when you're sitting still.

wow, a 1000 Tons...what about lifting it in parts and then assembling in orbit? Along the same lines but a little simpler - lift it with empty fuel tanks and launch fuel separately - fuel it in orbit. what's the Dry Weight of the craft?

If you want a deployable base check out MKS LITE it's an inflatable base system in which you can land one central lander with inflatable buildings already attached. You fly the one lander to your destination and then inflate the modules on site. It's pretty close to the "3.75m box" you were asking for

Nice work! Slowing down is always a good thing...don't want your precious science coming in a several kilometers/second

Good info. Do you have a model for how many radiators it really takes? I'd found that the VAB numbers don't don't cut it because they don't account for the fact that your radiators are actually going to soak heat from sunlight too. The VAB numbers work great in the shade

Did you use a lander? a rover? tell us more

@Claw you're just awesome! just last week I was running into EVA light failures and undocking not working. This week you come out with a solution!! Wish you had a Paypal link...I'd send you coffee money

I'm running OPM in 1.1.3 and haven't had any probs so far

Totally fair! and the work you do "in your spare time" makes the game even more fun! Can't thank you enough. Now that I'm not fearing for my kerbal's lives because of the readout I can sleep better

That KSP and the USI-LS readout isn't accurate if the ship isn't in physics range. I was remembering the times I've pulled up my life support readout and had a panic moment because it reported my ship was out of EC or almost out of Supplies only to jump to the ship and find that everything was fine. @Merkov explanation from the USI-LS thread: "this happens because KSP doesn't really calculate life support when the vessel in question is not in physics range (or maybe when you're not focused on it?) so when you re-focus on that vessel, it retroactively calculates what the life support usage was since the last time it was in focus. If I remember correctly, this also happens with other resource usage, such as warehousing/logistics in UKS, and drilling/ISRU and fuel cell usage in stock. The reason we notice it with USI-LS is because there is actually a window for seeing life support status when you don't have the vessel in question loaded, whereas there is no equivalent status screen for unfocused vessels using the stock functions. KSP is super complicated and there are trade-off between performance and accuracy...this is just one of those tradeoffs and now that I understand it I can plan for it.

Got it...the "overheating when the sun rises" thing might be happening in 1.0.5 too...that wasn't really a 'bug' fixed after 1.0.5 as much as me lacking full knowledge of all the thermal considerations.

good conversation. I've (finally) been able to get my drilling rigs to run in the background. It was a PITA to figure it out and had to do with my rigs overheating when the sun rose each morning. You'd mentioned that you hadn't revisited since 1.0.5. If you want to try again I'll be more than happy to walk you through what I've learned, send you a breakdown of my rig's design or just share the Craft file if we are using the same mods.

Totally get that everything is a tradeoff and it's really helpful to have you and other Devs on here taking the time to clarify things. I think for me the game experience is a repetitive series of frustrations, discoveries and revelations. I read up what I can. I make a best guess based on what I can read. I find out that it doesn't work as advertised because of some mechanic that's not fully explained. Then I re-think and re-work my plans with my new info and try again. One could argue this is wonky or one could say "this is what NASA went through"

again, I have to disagree...time is another "currency" in KSP that you spend to accomplish tasks. If time passing weren't important then why bother with requiring players to wait several years to get to Jool? You could equally argue that KSP should include warp drive so players don't have to wait to get to other planets. I'm not saying "your wrong in wanting to play a certain way"...what I am saying is that KSP (at many levels) gives players the experience of running a (semi-) realistic space program. I just think that the Mining/ISRU system should reflect a certain degree of "realism" just like the rest of the game does NOTE...I used a lot of qualifiers because I realize KSP isn't entirely realistic, but it does do a pretty good job of giving players a sense for how it might work.

I get your point of view. For the record, I disagree and wouldn't want to see the game go in that direction. In my opinion ISRU refueling is a late game endeavor for people who've spent the time to master launching, landing, rendezvous and are looking for a new challenge. Furthermore, most places where ISRU makes sense (i.e. other planets) take years to get to, so those player are also accustomed to a longer time scale than newbies. To present those experienced players with some instant super-simple way of generating fuel is actually taking away from the coolness/challenge of being able to accomplish it. I think the system should work as advertised (heat, etc) and I think it should be easy to understand. I think the implementation of that system should be (somewhat) complicated and take time to make it a challenge for advanced players.

The Mars Direct mission plans expected it to take 10 months for the fueling mission to create enough fuel for the return trip. As this is kind of the working model for how ISRU would work in real life, I think that we could probably use that as the measuring stick for Stock Mining - "How many drills would it take to mine enough fuel in 10 months to return a lander from Duna back to Kerbin". Excerpt from Mars Direct Wiki "96 tonnes of methane and oxygen would be needed to send the Earth Return Vehicle on a trajectory back home at the conclusion of the surface stay, the rest would be available for Mars rovers. The process of generating fuel is expected to require approximately ten months to complete." To be clear, I don't think that Stock Mining is perfect, but I think that we have to manage our expectations rather than just expect a full tank of fuel overnight.

Congrats! Landing on moons was one of those early frustration items that took me a lot of practice to master. Like so many things in KSP - once you get it it'll be second nature

I've been running Nukes without radiators too. I think they must have changed the heating mechanics on nukes because I lot of older threads talk about having to cool them.

I'm struggling through this too, but have a few insights. To the question of how many drills. @KerikBalm mentions 8 drills, you talk about 2. Maybe it's just about expectations as to how big your drilling expedition has to be? 2 drills might be great for a Mars Direct style "park the drill out here and let it sit for months and months" style mission. My first rig had 4 small drills and was hideously slow - I almost gave up until I realized I just needed moar drills. On the heating question. Are you accounting for daytime solar heating of your rig? I was having the same problem with my rig shutting down despite having "enough radiators" based on my VAB calculations. Then I watched the rig run (in time acceleration) for a full day and discovered that when the sun rose in the morning there was a sudden heat spike that took my radiators some time to compensate for. THIS was shutting down my rig. Once I added enough radiators to overcome that morning heat spike my rig ran just fine.

hmmm..that's a good question. I'm in the midst of a long Career game. I can't uninstall USI-LS to compare because all of my craft have LS parts, so I'm not sure how I would do a comparison. Any ideas?

Yep, I think that's it! sounds like a workable system

Thanks for the continued explanations..I'm going to restate this to make sure I'm following you. I think you're saying that - "every 6 hours it does a catch-up calculation that accounts for production by greenhouses, recycling (reactors and solar panels too?). As long as I have enough Supplies, battery EC, etc for over 6 hours without counting power generation, greenhouses and recycling then I should be fine because on that 6 hour cycle my out of focus craft will be "visited" and have their production quantities adjusted to account for everything I'm generating"?