Dragonking

Thank you! Sorry for the late response, heres the answers: -PC Specs: Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Graphics Card: GTX 1660 RAM: 64GB From what I know RAM is really important for KSP so you should really have something comparable. And the lag is pretty horrible for most of my stuff anyways. Laythe City is the worst in lag, it gets nearly unplayable at times. Generally stuff in orbit is fine, but large bases on the ground really start to have problems. -Miners: For figuring out how good the miners are the only thing that actually works is testing them, just go into a sandbox save, cheat them over and check how much they produce, there is no other way. I also dont really calculate the miner output, I just build a big miner with lots of output and hope its enough to meet the resource demand of the production. I only really needed the ore distribution info to know which biomes have the highest concentration of each resource. With that I can make a miner for each biome that then mines all the resources that are most abundant there.

Chapter 40: First Laythe Miner & Sarnus Colonization Preparations Continuing the project of expanding Laythe industry I set up the first of the huge Miners that will be supplying raw materials to Laythe City and other future industrial centers for processing into MKT & SPT. 2 Miners of this type will be built on land, the concentrations for the other required resources are the highest in ocean biomes, so specialized underwater miners will be required, which will also need a ship to carry them out to sea and drop them off. First Miner Pictures: Each of these miners however costs well over a million MKT, and the underwater miners are not any better (and the ship needed to launch them is another 4 million), which is more than even the huge reserves in orbit at Laythe Station could provide, so even though pretty much all of these designs are finished and ready to build I will have to wait for the existing small Industry on Laythe to produce enough to supply the resources. I noticed that a transfer window for Sarnus was coming up, so I had to pause the Laythe mining efforts to use this. I had been wanting to send a large colony fleet to the Sarnus system for a while now, as this system will be the key to interstellar exploration, with the moon of Hale being perfect for a shipyard large enough to build Interstellar vessels, so I did not want to wait any longer. This will be my most ambitious Project yet, with even more and larger ships than the Jool colony fleet. It will Include a huge main colony ship that has many of the same features as one of the large logistics stations like the Orbital Dockyard over Kerbin or Laythe Station, being a central logistics hub, able to construct other ships, store lots of various fuels and resources, etc. This one however will also be mobile and carry the majority of the colonists to the system, and carry a cargo and a passenger shuttle capable of landing on and returning from every body in the system except Slate. The next crafts will be a medium-sized science station around Slate, a construction Zeppelin for the colonization of Tekto, a seperate colony ship for Ovok that will also be able to land on Ovok and directly construct colonies there and a specialized construction vessel to build the huge shipyard on Hale. The main focus of the colonization project will be Hale though, for which I have a special "instant colonization" planned, so instead of slowly building everything on-site with EPL the main equipment will be directly brought in from Kerbin. This will include a huge main base in the form of a 500m-tall spire with dozens of MKS 20m Atlas factories and two giant miners to supply it with raw materials. Once this equipment is landed on Hale it can instantly start producing lots of MKT&SPT to be used by the shipyard construction vessel to build the shipyard. Before I could actually start sending out any of this colonization equipment I needed precise ore distribution maps of Hale to know how to configure the miners. I first thought this would not be a problem since I could just use some of the satellites that were already in system from the Sarnus satellite deployment mission. Once I tried to get one of them in orbit around Hale though I noticed a problem: the minimum altitude required on all the scanning equipment the Satellites had was actually higher than Hale´s SOI, meaning the satellites could not be used to scan Hale. To fix this I quickly needed to quickly send new satellites with specialized equipment that can scan from lower altitudes, but this posed a new problem: to get these satellites to Sarnus before the transfer window closed I would need a spacecraft capable of accelerating to huge velocities and then slowing down once at Sarnus. For this task I designed a 2-stage(technically 3, but with that the first stage is just some SRBs) nuclear saltwater(NSW) rocket. This rocket carries just 2 Satellites (1 for Hale, 1 for Ovok(which has a similar SOI problem)), but is incredibly expensive for this at over 9 million funds. It uses 8 SRBs to clear the thickest parts of the atmosphere, then igniting its first NSW engine to get to orbit and perform the burn for Sarnus. During this burn it accelerated at over 1g for ~1 day to reach a final speed of 400000m/s, allowing it to reach Sarnus in just a few weeks, where it would then slow down using the second stage and enter Hale orbit. Pictures of the satellite deployment mission: With the Satellites I now had a good idea of the ore distribution on Hale and the preparations for the colony fleet could proceed. During this time I also did a few more cargo runs of ExoticMinerals and RareMetals from Minmus to Kerbin to fund the whole fleet, which will also be my most expensive project yet. Dres Station also finally arrived at Dres, where it started collecting & processing science data and sent down its small autonomous rover to explore the surface: I am sorry it took so long to get this next chapter out, I have been busy with a lot of other things, have run into a lot of extremely bad bugs which prevented me from playing, and have spent a lot of time just designing crafts for future missions. The next chapters should come out a bit faster now since most of the designs for the Sarnus fleet are nearly complete and I have (mostly) fixed the bugs.

Chapter 39: Laythe Airport & Heavy Mining Preparations The crew of the Sarnus mission was still on the ship in Kerbin orbit, together with all the science data gathered from the mission that could not be transmitted without loss. To collect the crew and science I sent up one of my standard passenger SSTO designs: With the newly gained almost 32000 science I researched a couple new tech nodes, although that did nearly nothing as those tech nodes just included upgrades for KSPIE parts that I had already started modifying. I am working on making a custom version of KSPIE that mostly uses FFT`s systems and is more balanced, so these upgrades just did nothing, currently my entire KSPIE is just a unuseable work in progress mess. The next big project would be heavy industry on Laythe. For this some very large miners would be needed to supply the factories with raw materials, just the three large atlas factories in Laythe city were consuming far more than the starter miners could provide. The first step towards building these new miners was a new construction plane. The old one that had been sent over from Kerbin with the colony fleet was plagued with issues, mainly very low TWR which made it nearly impossible to climb in altitude and generally hard to keep in the air. Another big issue was also range, it could not fly very far with its fuel capacity. This new construction plane would keep most of the features of the old one, but fix these issues, and also look way better than its predecessor: New construction plane at Laythe city right after being built: The first thing it built was not a miner though but an airport. Landing cargo SSTOs and other planes at Laythe city directly had started to take a lot of effort as the city was growing and the lag around it was getting worse. So I designed an airport, which would be placed away from the city, far out of loading range. Planes can land at this airport, unload their cargo and get refueled there without much lag, the cargo would then go to the city or whereever else it was needed with planetary logistics, the fuel would also come to the airport by planetary logistics. Pictures of the airport: Once the airport was in place everything was ready to start shipping in lots of MKT & SPT from orbit to build the new mining equipment, so the first delivery was made using LSSPL-02, which also now looks way better in flight thanks to a mod I made, NF Aeronautics Waterfall, which as the name says adds waterfall effects to NF Aeronautics engines: The next shipment was going to be SPT, which would be done using the older LSSPL-01. But when I rendezvoued it with Laythe station I noticed a problem, it had no oxidizer left. This is not an issue for normal burns as it uses nuclear engines for those but it needs oxidizer for its RCS, so it could not actually dock to the station. The plan to fix this was to use KAS cables to connect instead and then transfer some oxidizer from the station to LSSPL-01 as well as the SPT, but then I noticed another problem, I had actually forgotten to put crew on the station. To get crew there I started building some more infrastructure that would be useful later as well, a support rover for the Apollo SSTO which would be able to refuel it and connect it to things at ground level, the Apollo was simply so high up on its landing gear that it needed this support rover to be able to connect to normal-sized planes or almost anything else. Support rover pictures: The second part was a new medium-sized passenger SSTO, almost the exact same design as the one I used earlier to get the crew of the Sarnus mission back to Kerbin. Once it was finished I flew it over to the Apollo, picked up some Kerbals and flew them up to Laythe station. Pictures of the new SSTO and its first mission: Once the Kerbals had arrived at the station I noticed another problem though. I had wanted to bring over mechanics and technicans to the station, mechanics can do EVA construction and add the KAS connector that I had brought along with the passenger SSTO to the station, while technicians can operate the nuclear processors on board the station. Engineers were not available as there were none left on the Apollo. To select which Kerbals I wanted to bring up I used the USI life support menu, it shows a letter after every Kerbal`s name to show what that Kerbal´s job is, for example (E) for engineer. I did not use the IVA view on the bottom right as I had disabled it and IVA in general most of the time to avoid the added lag it causes. When I actually tried to use one of the mechanics to add that KAS connector I noticed that was not a mechanic, but a miner. All those "mechanics" I had brought were actually miners, they just both had the (M) next to their name, and miners are very much useless on a space station. Tired of the constant problems I just decided to use LSSPL-02 instead, I even used it to get a proper engineer and some more fertilizer up from the surface to the station. I then picked up some SPT and MKT with it and sent it back down to the surface. Pictures of this LSSPL-02 flight: With this new shipment of MKT & SPT everything is was now finally in place to start building the new miners.

Chapter 38: Dres Station & Neidon Mission I had gotten a contract to build a station around Dres, and since I wanted to do something with Dres anyways so it isn`t completely neglected I accepted the contract and got to making a small research outpost station to put around Dres. It has life support to keep its small crew alive for ~20 years(I am not planning on having to care about this station much), an infinite RTG power supply, a small lander to get some crew to the surface and a rover that would be sent down to do some experiments on the surface. Dres station design & deployment: After the SSTO spaceplane had returned I sent Dres station off to Dres (I have no pictures of that sadly). The Sarnus mission had also now made its way back from Sarnus to Kerbin, and performed its deceleration burn to get into Kerbin orbit: A Neidon window had also come up, so I wanted to get ahead with the exploring and send out a mission to explore the system and deploy satellites to it. Before I could actually do this I needed some more funding, so I made another shipment of resources from Minmus to Kerbin. With those new funds I was able to build a medium-sized exploration ship and a rocket to get it up into space. This exploration ship is not as advanced or large as the Sarnus one, mostly because Neidon is just not as interesting or large of a system as Sarnus. It carries a small SSTO spaceplane that will be used to land on the moons of Neidon and a temporary base that will be deployed on Thatmo. Neidon mission launch & burn to Neidon: With the Neidon mission on its way, this concludes the last "backlog" chapter of this series! All the chapters until now were just the things I had already done in my career and I was just now writing down afterwards. From now on new chapters will come out as soon as I have done enough new things in the career to fill a whole chapter with. Originally I had assumed writing this all down would take just a few weeks, but now it has been about half a year since I started this project. I do not have as much time for KSP as I used to have so they will not come as quickly, but I will keep playing in the career and going further, hopefully interstellar soon!

Chapter 37: Laythe Skyscrapers With all the new additions to Laythe city it now housed a lot more Kerbals that have been brought in from the Apollo SSTO, so now its life support systems were reaching their limits. To solve this I added 2 skyscrapers to the city, a large habitation one and a medium-sized greenhouse one. The habitation skyscraper will for the first time push the habitation timers of all Kerbals on the city above 50 years, above which it turns into infinite, making the city fully self-sufficient in habitation. The greenhouse tower just adds more food production to keep up with the increased demand from all the Kerbals. Habitation skyscraper construction: I sadly do not have any pictures of the construction of the greenhouse tower, but it went pretty much exactly the same as with the habitation one. Overview of the city with both skyscrapers: At night:

Chapter 36: Bop Colonization I wanted to start the colonization of some of the other Jool moons now that I had already done so much on Laythe, so I went for Bop as my next place to colonize. First I did a small suborbital hop with the Bop colony ship to move it to a flatter location than the slope it was landed on previously and then started by building the central colony piece with planetary logistics, some basic habitation and command equipment. To attatch more modules to that starter module I needed a building mover so I could push them into place(when you build a part with EPL its orientation is pretty much random and the exact location is very hard to predict), but this building mover needed LFO for its engines, which I did not have on Bop. So I used the LFO tanker I had previously built on Pol to pick up some LFO there from the Pol construction gantry and ship it over to Bop. Pictures of the LFO delivery: With the LFO now here I was able to quickly construct and connect the new modules, they were all relatively cheap to build so I was able to build them with the materials carried by the Bop colony ship: 1. Central Colony Piece Starter module, has command equipment, basic habitation and a planetary logistics module. 2. Nuclear Storage & Production Module Processes uraninite into enriched uranium and can store that enriched uranium. 3. Agriculture Module Farming module to convert mulch & fertilizer into supplies. 4. Nuclear Smelter Module Has 2 large tweakscaled Nuclear smelters that can produce NSW or some other advanced fuels. 5. Power Module Uses 2 HX power modules to provide power to the entire base. 6. Fertilizer Production Module Mines gypsum and converts it into fertilizer to run the agriculture module. 7. Docking Module Provides an area with KAS pipes to connect various vehicles to the colony. 8. Cargo Storage Module Has USI Kontainers for every relevant solid USI resource to store them and share them with planetary logistics. In this picture you can also see the base`s EPL survey module building on the very left which will allow the base to build things by itself even once the colony ship is gone. This is what the full colony (so far) looks like:

Chapter 35: Laythe City Expansion Now that the station was fully operational I could focus back on building up the city on the surface. To do this I needed even more materials though, so LSSPL-02 did another supply flight to bring them down. LSSPL-02 supply flight pictures: With the new materials I built a new SSTO, a fuel transporter. The NSW freighter needed monopropellant for its RCS, which I did not have available anywhere in orbit, but Laythe city with its new ore mining & refining module could easily produce some so I made a dedicated fuel transport SSTO, LSSPL-03, which uses USI tanks that can be swapped to contain most different liquid fuels. Unlike the previous LSSPLs LSSPL-03 was built on the ground by Laythe city since now Laythe city has the capacity to build things of its size and it is also much easier to do fuel wise since the city already produces a lot of fuel. Once LSSPL-03 was fueled up it was launched off to orbit where it would rendezvous with the NSW freighter and finally give it the monoprop it needed to dock to Laythe station and deliver NSW to it. Pictures of LSSPL-03: I wanted to explore some of the anomalies on the surface of Laythe. For this I designed a fighter jet to allow me to quickly fly around Laythe and explore it. The design I came up with looks something like a combination of an F-15 and a J-20 and works remarkably well. It is extremely manueverable and can reach very high speeds at ~1400m/s (really just capped by heat as far as I have found out, it could probably go even faster but at that speed the heating becomes too much and it would just burn up). The only big downside of it is that it has somewhat limited range, although I plan on eventually making a fleet of aircraft carriers that I will be spreading around Laythe which will allow me to always refuel to fly further with it and all the other aircraft I will be building. This fighter is lots of fun to fly and I flew around a lot with it. Pictures of the Laythe exploration fighter:

Chapter 34: Nuclear Transport & Jool Scooping Laythe station is fusion powered, but I do not have any fusion fuel available near Laythe so the station has been unable to get power so far. To now fix this I needed to get some fusion fuel over, but the only fusion fuel in the system was that on the Pol colony ship, which is only really meant to run it. So I decided to actually harvest some since it can be scooped out of the atmosphere of Jool, one of the few places where you can actually get fusion fuel. To do this I needed a Jool scooping vehicle. Eventually I came up with a design that worked, but as you will see later it had a lot of starting issues. This Jool scooper uses NSW as fuel for its engine to have a good enough combination of ISP and thrust to get back into orbit from Jool once completing its mission. There is also not enough NSW around Laythe to fuel it up, so I needed to get some more. Luckily I already had a NSW production facility in the Jool system, the built-in refining equipment of the Bop colony ship. So I landed Bop colony ship on Bop`s surface and started producing NSW with it. Bop colony ship landing: I landed on a rather steep slope, but luckily the ship´s reaction wheels were able to keep it standing upright. Once the NSW was produced it just needed to get shipped to Laythe, where the Jool scooper was already built and waiting for its fuel. To do this I made a small dedicated NSW freighter that can ship large amounts of NSW to pretty much anywhere except interstellar destinations, but will mostly be used inside the Jool system. The freighter was built directly on the Bop colony ship, which lead to a weird launch as its EPL construction docks are on its sides, so the freighter was dropped down the side and had to quickly reorient itself to burn up and not crash into Bop(which was relatively easy thanks to Bop`s low gravity). Once it was stabilized it flew over to Laythe and docked to the Jool scooper. Picture of this part of the mission: As soon as the Jool scooper was fueled it actually needed to do its job: scooping Jool for fusion fuel. This is very difficult due to Jool`s thick atmosphere and the distribution of fusion fuel in it. Fusion reactors in KSP need two fuels: LqdDeuterium and LqdHe3, but can also just run on LqdDeuterium, although at lower efficiency and power. LqdDeuterium is relatively easy to get from Jool, it is available relatively high up in Jool`s atmosphere, but LqdHe3 is the main challenge, it is only available at below 75km in Jool`s atmosphere, which is very deep into it(the total atmosphere height is about 200km). At this depth you lose all orbital speed from atmospheric drag(when you are just scooping LqdDeuterium and don`t need to go in as deep you can point straight ahead and just shoot through the atmosphere without losing all that much speed, making it relatively easy to regain orbit afterwards) meaning you have to use your engine to fully get out of the atmosphere again, which is difficult even with the very efficient NSW engine. I also tried using a propeller setup to make it easier, but that was too unstable, weak and prone to kraken attacks (BG propellers really dont work well at large scale). What made this first run even more difficult is that the Jool scooper is also fusion powered, and as I did not have any fusion fuel available until scooping it with the Jool scooper I only had the electric charge that was stored in the battery bank of the scooper available, which made this mission very difficult as the NSW engine also uses quite a lot of EC to run, so I had a very limited dv budget despite having full NSW tanks and could barely use its very powerful reaction wheel to stabilize the flight. Due to the limited dv I also could not lower my orbit to just above Jool´s atmosphere and then go into it, I had to bring just my periapsis down from Laythe`s orbit into Jool`s atmosphere, meaning I had to deal with far higher speeds in Jool`s atmosphere. Because of this I could not get He3 on the first scooping and instead had to get just Deuterium, which was luckily already enough to get the Jool scooper working fully and to get some fuel to Laythe station. Eventually I will be doing more scooping runs where I will also be getting some He3 so the fusion reactors can run at higher power. Jool scooping pictures: After the Jool scooper got the first bits of Deuterium it flew back over to Laythe and docked to Laythe station to get it filled up with some fuel so it could start operating. Jool scooper docked to Laythe station:

Chapter 33: Duna Colonization In this chapter I´ll be summarizing all the Duna colonization since the base was started by the Duna colony ship all in one chapter even though it was spread out along a much longer amount of time since I do not have any pictures of any of the stages of colonization inbetween that, this is the oldest picture I have of the colony and it is rather new. Descriptions of the colony modules: 1. Main Module The first part of the base to be built. It houses command parts, basic life support, KAS connectors and storage, the planetary logistics module and communication equipment. 2. Storage Module Contains storage for almost all relevant resource types that is linked to planetary logistics 3. Agricultural Module Large farming module that provides supplies for all the Kerbals. Can also mine gypsum and process it into fertilizer for full supplies self-sufficiency. 4. Gas Module Filters usable gases out of Duna`s atmosphere and has the tanks to store them, as well as scanning equipment to detect gases. 5. Refining Module Refines raw materials from the Miners which can then be processed into components by... 6. Medium Production Module Processes refined (& some raw) resources into components like Materialkits, Specializedparts or Machinery. Can also recycle recyclables for increased efficiency. 7. Auxilary Mining Module Temporary mining module for some resources that the other miner does not mine. Will eventually be replaced by a proper dome with mining equipment. 8. Large Production Module Also produces MKT, SPT and MCH but much faster than the medium one. 9. Fusion Reactor Module Added after I found out that the power drain of the Large Production Module was just too much for the existing powerplant. Has 4 fusion reactors, so it should be a futureproof power solution for the base. 10. Ore Mining Module Mines ore and converts it into fuel Descriptions of the vehicles: Construction Rover First vehicle landed on Duna, can mine & refine ore, transport cargo, push around buildings and has the ability to construct things with EPL. It was used to build the first colony modules. Duna Passenger Shuttle Transports passengers between the colony and colony ship. Also VTOL capable(theres a VTOL engine at the bottom), it would not be able to land safely in Duna`s thin atmosphere on just its wings Liquid Shuttle Shuttle used to transport various liquids between the colony and colony ship. There is another one for solid cargo which looks the same except that is has cargo storage except the tank in the middle, but it is currently in orbit. Building Mover Almost the same design as the original on Minmus, used to push base pieces into place. Duna-Ike Shuttle The newest craft here, the shuttle that was sent over in chapter 28. So far it has only been used to ship materials down from the colony ship to the surface. (Not in picture) Duna Tunnel Mover Small specialized rover that can grab the base tunnels that connect almost all the modules from above and move them into position to expand the base.

Chapter 32: Laythe Colonization Part 2 The next part planned for the Laythe city was a large production module. This module was very expensive though with a cost over a million Materialkits, and LSSPL-01 can only carry ~200k per flight. The amount of materials were there in orbit on the huge spacefreighter with its reserves of 24 million MKT, they just needed to be brought down and LSSPL-01 was just too much effort to use, all these flights take quite a while to actually do and are quite tedious after a while. To fix this I designed a new, bigger SSTO, LSSPL-02. LSSPL-02 can carry over a million MKT in one flight. It uses my standard combination of OPT "Starwaster" and NF Aeronautics B.R.O.A.D.S.W.O.R.D. engines for main propulsion, but also has 2 vector engines at the bottom to allow it to lift off out of the water. It was built in the same way as LSSPL-01. Pictures of LSSPL-02: With the materials brought in by LSSPL-02 the new production module could finally be completed (the text decals sometimes bug out like this, it fixes itself next time until it breaks again, no idea what is going on there): The next major project was an orbital station for Laythe very similar to the orbital shipyard over Kerbin. It will serve as a traffic hub, a place to store fuels and cargo and an orbital shipyard. A large portion of the cargo from the huge spacefreighter will also be loaded into it so the freighter can move on to other Jool moons, and the orbital constructor is also freed up since the station can take over construction from it. The station was built by docking the orbital constructor to the huge spacefreighter and having it build the station with the materials from the freighter. Pictures of the Laythe station: The last part of the Laythe city for now was a large ore mining & refining complex. To push it into place a new building mover specifically for Laythe was also designed and built, previously I had been using the old Minmus design, but I needed something more powerful and better adapted to Laythe. Pictures of the ore mining building and Laythe building mover:

Chapter 31: Laythe Colonization Part 1 To colonize Laythe more resources were needed than those in the Laythe construction plane, and some orbital support. To do this I moved the orbital constructor from Pol over to Laythe after the gantry and ships there were built, and planned to use it to make a cargo SSTO that can ship resources down from the huge spacefreighter to the colony. But there was no LF on either of the ships in Laythe orbit since they both run on NSW, so I had to send up the old Laythe cargo SSTO from the first Jool mission to dock to the orbital constructor with some LF. The small amount of LF it could bring was just enough to deorbit the new cargo SSTO so it could then glide to the base and dock to it to be fully refueled. Pictures of this: LSSPL-01 is mainly a seaplane, as plane launches/landings on most of Laythe(including the area near the base) are quite difficult due to Laythe`s quite mountainous terrain and worse flight efficiency (0.6 atm to 0.8g compared to Kerbin´s 1atm to 1g). This allows it to land in the water next to the base, then use its intakeAtm fueled and quite powerful RCS to manuever and drive out of the water. Its engines are 7 OPT "Starwaster" engines for atmospheric flight, which are high-power engines with low efficiency for jets that work even at very high altitudes and 2 nuclear aerospikes for space. It can store X Materialkits or SpecializedParts (the exact distribution of what resources are stored can vary, the cargo is reconfigurable). Its first delivery went perfectly, it was able to deliver a full cargo hold of MKT&SPT to the Laythe colony to expand it. Pictures of LSSPL-01 in action: The materials brought from the huge spacefreighter by LSSPL-01 were first used to start setting up some mining equipment to feed raw materials to the Laythe colony. These miners are more general ones that were placed in areas where multiple resources are available in good concentrations, but rarely where they are at their highest concentrations, and can mine multiple materials at once. Later on in Laythe colonization they will be replaced with many huge, specialized miners placed in the absolute best locations. All the miners were constructed by the Laythe construction plane(LCP), which flew to the area picked out and built them there. During this I also noticed the many problems with the LCP. It is very slow, has a bad TWR which makes takeoff and climbing in altitude very difficult and a has a rather limited range. Picture of one of the miners, with the LCP in the background: With the miners now ready the colony now grew rapidly, and very quickly it no longer had enough Kerbals to man it. So now some of the Kerbals from the Apollo SSTO needed to be brought over to the colony. The question was then how exactly would this be done? A rover would take ages and have a difficult time climbing the mountain ,a plane is a bit too much and bringing the Apollo itself would be very difficult due to how unwieldy it is and the immense lag it and the colony together would cause. So I decided to make a small helicopter that could land on the Apollo SSTO, pick up the Kerbals and bring them to the base. Pictures of the Helicopter: After all this work the colony had grown a lot. The drill at the back of the original building had been removed and a USI Flex-o-tube was attatched there instead to attatch new base parts to. This is the state of the base after this chapter of construction, already self sufficient in supplies, with lots of hab time available and with some basic MKT, SPT and machinery production capabilities, but a lot more(and bigger) parts are to come for it!: https://i.imgur.com/jrA7yqY.png Chapter 31: Laythe Colonization Part 1 To colonize Laythe more resources were needed than those in the Laythe construction plane, and some orbital support. To do this I moved the orbital constructor from Pol over to Laythe after the gantry and ships there were built, and planned to use it to make a cargo SSTO that can ship resources down from the huge spacefreighter to the colony. But there was no LF on either of the ships in Laythe orbit since they both run on NSW, so I had to send up the old Laythe cargo SSTO from the first Jool mission to dock to the orbital constructor with some LF. The small amount of LF it could bring was just enough to deorbit the new cargo SSTO so it could then glide to the base and dock to it to be fully refueled. Pictures of this: LSSPL-01 is mainly a seaplane, as plane launches/landings on most of Laythe(including the area near the base) are quite difficult due to Laythe`s quite mountainous terrain and worse flight efficiency (0.6 atm to 0.8g compared to Kerbin´s 1atm to 1g). This allows it to land in the water next to the base, then use its intakeAtm fueled and quite powerful RCS to manuever and drive out of the water. Its engines are 7 OPT "Starwaster" engines for atmospheric flight, which are high-power engines with low efficiency for jets that work even at very high altitudes and 2 nuclear aerospikes for space. It can store X Materialkits or SpecializedParts (the exact distribution of what resources are stored can vary, the cargo is reconfigurable). Its first delivery went perfectly, it was able to deliver a full cargo hold of MKT&SPT to the Laythe colony to expand it. Pictures of LSSPL-01 in action: The materials brought from the huge spacefreighter by LSSPL-01 were first used to start setting up some mining equipment to feed raw materials to the Laythe colony. These miners are more general ones that were placed in areas where multiple resources are available in good concentrations, but rarely where they are at their highest concentrations, and can mine multiple materials at once. Later on in Laythe colonization they will be replaced with many huge, specialized miners placed in the absolute best locations. All the miners were constructed by the Laythe construction plane(LCP), which flew to the area picked out and built them there. During this I also noticed the many problems with the LCP. It is very slow, has a bad TWR which makes takeoff and climbing in altitude very difficult and a has a rather limited range. Picture of one of the miners, with the LCP in the background: With the miners now ready the colony now grew rapidly, and very quickly it no longer had enough Kerbals to man it. So now some of the Kerbals from the Apollo SSTO needed to be brought over to the colony. The question was then how exactly would this be done? A rover would take ages and have a difficult time climbing the mountain ,a plane is a bit too much and bringing the Apollo itself would be very difficult due to how unwieldy it is and the immense lag it and the colony together would cause. So I decided to make a small helicopter that could land on the Apollo SSTO, pick up the Kerbals and bring them to the base. Pictures of the Helicopter: After all this work the colony had grown a lot. The drill at the back of the original building had been removed and a USI Flex-o-tube was attatched there instead to attatch new base parts to. This is the state of the base after this chapter of construction, already self sufficient in supplies, with lots of hab time available and with some basic MKT, SPT and machinery production capabilities, but a lot more(and bigger) parts are to come for it!:

Chapter 30: Pol Colonization Beginnings In preparation for Laythe colonization the huge spacefreighter was moved from its orbit around Jool to low Laythe orbit. Picture: The first thing built around Pol was a medium-sized transport ship which is used to transport Kerbals and small amounts of fuel around the Jool system. After being built it was used to move Kerbals around between the two ships of the colony fleet in orbit of Pol (orbital constructor and Pol colony ship). Pictures of it: Once this ship was built the real colonization began. I did not have a real idea as to how to do a Pol base itself (haven`t come up with a unique visual style that fits Pol yet so its not just the same stuff all over again, I still have no idea at the time of writing this) so I started with a thing that I do have an idea how to do, a huge construction gantry that will build large spaceships for the Jool system (once a base on Pol is actually established to make the resources needed for construction) similar to the one on Gilly. This shipyard was built in orbit by the orbital constructor with some engines to land on Pol, which is not particularly challenging to do thanks to Pol`s low gravity. Pictures of the Pol construction gantry: A fuel tanker was also built, mainly to ship the fuel produced on Pol (from the old mining rover or the construction gantry, it also has fuel production) up to orbit to refuel the ships there, but it also has enough dv to go to some of the other Jool moons. Fuel tanker landing next to Pol construction gantry: Fuel tanker ascending next to Pol construction gantry, here you can also see the fully deployed radiator tower:

Chapter 29: Sarnus Exploration After deploying the Tekto zeppelin the Sarnus mission ship went on to explore the rest of the Sarnus system starting with its largest and most challenging moon, Slate. For Slate the Lander will require both of its stages, meaning the first stage will be discarded and the lander will fly around with just the second stage from now on, which is not really a problem since that second stage is still good enough for any of the other remaining Sarnus moons. Slate exploration mission: After Slate was finished the mission moved on to Eeloo, where the lander was used again and collected all the science data. I also found a surface feature, but the lander does not have a scanning arm so i couldn`t actually scan it. Picture of the lander on Eeloo: The final two moons of Sarnus are both very small with extremely low gravity, so I decided to not bother with the Lander (which of course has to be docked back to the main ship after every use, and doesn`t quite have all the possible science experiments) and just landed the main ship on both of them. Landings on both moons: Now that all the Moons of Sarnus were explored the ship returned to Tekto, where the crew of the zeppelin were picked up using the mission`s SSTO spaceplane. The zeppelin will remain landed on the surface until Tekto is properly colonized and a new crew can move in. With the exploration now done and all the crew on board the Sarnus mission was sent back to Kerbin:

Chapter 28: Duna Logistics During all these other missions I had neglected Duna colonization. The colony had grown a bit, but not too much(I don´t have any pictures of it from this time, youll see all of it in one batch soon). Ike colonization was also another major goal I was building up to. The plan is to make Ike into a major producer for advanced fuels, especially antimatter. To do this I needed a few new crafts, and there was not enough MKT&SPT left near Duna to build large crafts, so they had to be shipped in from Kerbin. One would be a cargo shuttle that could transport various materials from Duna to Ike or the other way around. Production of MKT&SPT is not planned on Ike, so occasionally machinery (which requires MKT&SPT to be built and most USI converters slowly consume it) will need to be shipped in. This will be the main purpose of this shuttle. The next craft is the Ike constructor, which does the same thing as the one for the Mun in the last chapter, it is just a different design and was sent to Ike. Pictures of the Duna - Ike transport shuttle (These are from sandbox mode testing of the design, there are no pictures of it actually in career from this time since they had not arrived on Duna yet, a Kerbin - Duna transfer takes surprisingly long): The two crafts were launched on the same SSTO rocket as the Mun constructor strapped together. Once they were in LKO they could use their very efficient nuclear saltwater engines to make the transfer to Duna Launch: Once the Duna logistics crafts were on their way I did something I have been wanting to do for a while now: refit the engine on the Jool exploration ship. The Jool exploration ship had orignally been equipped with a cluster of 9 stock nuclear engines, which gave it horrendous TWR. I wanted to keep using this ship, so I gave it a new engine. Its new engine would be a much more powerful and also more efficient Liberator Atomic Motor. To equip the new engine I sent out a Kerbal to disassemble the old engine cluster, then used the orbital shipyard(to which the Jool exploration ship was docked) to build the new engine. It had a stack of USI Konstruction ports on it, which could be compressed to remove the docking port parts and directly connect the docked things. Since the position of attatched thing shifts closer to directly connect to where the docking port it docked to once was a stack of multiple of these ports could be used to clip parts in flight(there is a tiny bit of clipping going on with the girders the solar panels attatch to and the fuel tanks). So the new engine(which was equipped with a probe core and some RCS) was flown over to where it was going to be attatched and a single docking port was removed from the end of the stack and placed onto the Jool exploration ship so the new engine could be docked to it. Once it was then docked the ports could be compressed and the engine was perfectly attatched and ready to be used. Mission pictures:

Chapter 27: Tekto Exploration & Mun Construction The Sarnus mission had now arrived at the Sarnus system. Its first destination was its outermost moon, Tekto, which is Sarnus` Laythe in a way, being the most interesting moon in the system and having an atmosphere. But while Laythe is very Kerbin-like Tekto is more like a green version of Eve. It has a very thick atmosphere, but unlike Eve it also has relatively low gravity, making launching from it or entering the atmosphere very easy compared to Eve. Exploring this moon was one of the main objectives of the Sarnus mission. To do this a zeppelin that could explore it was brought along for the mission, which itself was also carrying a small plane to quickly explore an area. As soon as the mission arrived in low Tekto orbit the Zeppelin was deployed and sent down to the surface, where exploration was started. Tekto exploration pictures: Right after this another mission I had not mentioned so far was complete, the Jool tourist mission. Some time ago I had a contract to send a couple of tourists around the Jool system, so I sent out a small mission to do this. The mission was sent out at around the same time as the Jool colony fleet and was very easy since I used an advanced engine and tourists do not need life support(the craft was also piloted remotely so no crew was needed). A landing on Bop was the final part of the mission, after that it was sent back to Kerbin and landed with parachutes. Final landing of the tourist mission on Bop, with most of the other bodies of the Jool system in the background: I also wanted to expand my infrastructure on the Mun. He3 can be mined on the surface of the Mun, and it is the more valuable one of the 2 fusion fuels. So a mining installation for He3 could allow me to make even more money and get half the fuel for my fusion reactors without having to buy it on Kerbin. So to build a mining installation for He3, and many other buildings in the future, I designed a Mun constructor. A spaceship that could travel around the Mun with suborbital hops and build things using EPL where it is. For this it also needed to have a relatively large crew to allow fast construction, and then the life support for them all. It could refuel and be loaded with construction materials by pulling it from planetary logistics when landed. The Mun constructor was launched on one of my standard SSTO rockets into LKO, from where it used its own engines to make it to the Mun and land there. Mission pictures: Once the constructor had arrived at the place with the highest He3 concentration on the mun construction was started and the relatively small He3 mining installation was built. This small miner cannot mine too much He3 and will probably eventually be replaced by a larger one, but it works for now as a start. Picture of the He3 miner: While the miner does have some living space for Kerbals there will not be any permanently on it, this is just for when a Kerbal needs to come over to fix some issue with the miner. The He3 is mined using a rotating miner that sweeps the ground for He3(yes I know this doesnt make too much sense as a stationary thing since the He3 in that spot would probably be mined relatively quickly, but I didn´t have any good ideas for how to do a rover to mine it so I made this).