Cavscout74

Didn't get too much actually accomplished due to Kerbal Launch Failure intervening for only the 2nd time in this career to blast my expensive Laythe floating base to pieces due to a booster engine explosion. Most of the base was recovered, but hazmat crews had a substantial radiation hazard to clean up due to the remnants of the core coming through the fairing base, heatshield, structural fuselage & decoupler to smash the lower service bay (with 2 RTG's & a small nuclear reactor). Several kerbals out watching the launch received high doses & turned into mystery goo, so at least R&D's goo supply was replenished Anyway, after waiting for the KSC pad to become available again (I restrict myself on how frequent my launches are based on craft mass - <18t = 1 day wait, 18-140t = 10 days, >140 = 20 days), I tried again & got to orbit this time. I still have to launch & dock a tug to actually move the base to Laythe. For scale - this is a 5m core with 3.75m radial boosters. The first pair has been staged & on of them is visible in the background falling away Clear of the atmosphere. I'm really glad the fairing pieces aren't persistent. And finally in a stable orbit, waiting for the tug to take it to Laythe. With the vets away on Duna, Summer Kerman is now my senior pilot & she took up a flying rover design I downloaded from somewhere* for a quick test flight over to the Island Airstrip. Flew pretty nice for what is basically a brick with wings - and folding ones at that. After that successful flight, Summer went on to test fly @Brikoleur's Super Kosmocopter. She did survive the attempt, but neither the copter or runway did. Trying to take off as a helicopter, the hub became unstable as blade angle increased, then the craft became unstable, then lots and lots of explosions happened, then there was a cockpit laying upside down on the destroyed runway with Summer and not much else. Apparently it was meant to take off from Kerbin with blades locked? Cause on a second attempt that almost worked till I over-rotated & lost the tail * I thought it came from KerbalX, but I couldn't find it on there to give credit to the designer & I'm not at my game computer to see what the craft file says. So if this is your design, it's pretty slick, thanks for sharing it.

Honestly, I've only used ever spaceplanes to move crews between Laythe surface & orbit. Everything else comes down by parachute, maybe with some small landing engines.

Welcome back! Don't forget the stock dV calculator & improved burn time indicator

I did some more tinkering with my new Laythe ocean base. It's starting to look like a base, and I also built a launcher for it that should make orbit with a few hundred dV to spare based on the dV calculator. It will be interesting to see how much is lost due to drag. Even in a fairing, it's pretty huge. I moved the panels out a little, put some walkways from the center & added a few folding ladders so the crew can go down to work on equipment under the base easily. Or go for a nice relaxing swim. I'm thinking about changing up the center, the science lab looks awful, but the rest makes a nice control center. I still want a science lab, but I think I'll figure out a spot for one on the open side of the base. Currently, it has two 3-man hab modules on the sides & an automated greenhouse + snack & ore storage in the back. Underneath with an engineer on the ladder: The only other thing I did was get my first long range crew cycler launched in this career. I had to rebuild the launcher due to some mod changes since my last career and it did an excellent job. I need to save it as an assembly, since it's basically the same as I've used for several other heavy loads lately. Pictured here with the upper stage circularizing at 165 km. The Avalon doesn't even have a mission assigned yet - I'm not ready to send a manned mission to Jool (or Eeloo), and those are the next two transfer windows coming up. But it will be ready whenever I find someplace for it to go, with just over 8.5 km/s dV to get there.

There;s a mod "The Gold Standard" that does something like what you are suggesting - I've never tried it, and it doesn't look like it's been updated in a while but it may still work. Also several mods add additional resources, some of which can be pretty valuable. Kerbal Planetary Base Systems has greenhouses (if you have a life support mod installed - works with Snacks, USI-LS & TAC-LS). The greenhouses have an option for "Conduct Plant Growth Study". Also, the mod Pathfinder is focused around inflatable bases that can be sent all over the Kerbol system & setup where needed. Not a mod, but there was an RSS 3-way space race being posted on the forums - each player played for a quarter & posted there results. Looks like they might be starting a new one also.

In my alternate KSP, I tested out Procedural Parts, and it turns out I can get slightly more supplies with a PP supply (or fertilizer) tank than using the truss tank of roughly the same size. In fact, the rounded cylinder PP tank fits (& looks) nice in the hollow hex truss. Thanks for the tip @Tyko Rounding out my Duna mission, I made a second Duna landing to investigate something shiny in the southern hemisphere. Val set the lander down <600m from the anomaly. Kelrik went to investigate, planted a flag, then everybody headed back up to orbit & docked with Duna station again. While this was going on, Jool Pathfinder entered orbit around Jool. It had a nice selection of science gear when it was launched, but is overshadowed by much better equipment now. In fact, it is solar powered because that was the only option I had when it was launched. For now, it will act as a relay until the next round of probes arrive, then it will probably get crashed into Jool. Finally, I experimented with a new Laythe floating base. I haven't unlocked a lot of the larger Planetary Base Systems parts yet (Community Tech Tree moves a lot of them to the 1000 point & later nodes), so I started work on a new design. It has four 2.5m short ballast tanks with fuel tanks below them at the edges plus another in the center. There is a 2.5m service bay in the center as well - I'm either going to add a few RTGs or a SAFER reactor to it for the final version since the solar panel isn't going to do much. I'm also thinking about spacing out the structural panels away from the core a little & adding a ladder so kerbals can climb down to check on stuff under the base. I still have to build the everything else too, but I ran out of time. And once the base part is built, I'm going to have to spend some time experimenting with the ballast in various conditions. Should be fun. Then will come the tasks of launching it, getting it to Laythe & landing it.

I didn't realize that, although the last time I messed with Procedural Parts, I wasn't using any LS mods. I'll have to check it out again. I'm probably going to keep the trusses anyway, but Procedural Parts might make up for a couple of other mods I'm trying to get away from in this alternate install. My wife wasn't feeling well this morning, so we just sat home. Other than waiting on her some, I had some KSP time so I got my Ike fueling operation going, set up the surface experiments, then got the crew back to Duna station. I also landed my second (small) Duna outpost on the north polar icecaps and got a satellite inserted into very low Moho polar orbit. Getting the fuel rover inflated & in position to fill up: Deploying surface experiments while the fuel rover gets refilled: Once the crew was back in orbit & waiting to rendezvous with the Duna Courier, I went ahead & landed the second Duna outpost. Landing went well, but my attempt to dump the landing engines went slightly off track - one of the engines flipped over & destroyed the self-destruct charge & fuel tank, leaving a pile of debris nearby. Finally, my Moho polar reconnaissance orbiter arrived & established itself in a very low orbit passing over the Mohole:

SXT Continued and one of the USI family of mods both have landing airbags and also flotation bags. Both are working in 1.7÷ USI is officially 1.6 but is still working good

So I figured out a workaround for this - I took two of the unneeded variants of the Near Future trusses (LH2O & Argon) & changed the resources to Fertilizer & Mulch (LH2O variant) & Supplies (Argon variant). The only issue I have now, after an endurance test of my crew cycler design is the greenhouse isn't actually making new supplies. On the plus side, the small nuclear reactors should be just fine for power - running for just over a year with one reactor & the RTG's as the only power sources with habitat, recycler & greenhouse running, it kept everything charged & only used ~2 units of enriched uranium (out of 125). It has 4 Gigantors for main power, but they are going to keep greenhouses & recyclers running out past Jool. Now if I can just get the greenhouse to make supplies rather than just use mulch & fertilizer, I'll be on the right track. Until then, back to my current career: After several weeks on the red planet, it was time to head back to the station, then on to Ike. Val insisted since Jeb got to land, she would perform the first takeoff from Duna. Back to orbit: After docking with the Duna crew station, they only had a few minutes to transfer over to the Duna Courier for the hop over to Ike. The hasty fix I made to add surface experiments to the Ike lander were a little too hasty - I forgot the second docking port, so the crew had to transfer to the lander the hard way Of course, the Ike mining base was on the night side. Jeb managed a fair landing (~180m from the base with nothing broken), and they performed a quick flag planting, but further Ike operations are going to wait for daylight. First up, Kelrik has to move one of the main solar arrays on the mining base - it was attached at an angle by some idiot (me) in the VAB and it clips one of the radiator panels. Then a nice spot for the surface experiments has to be found & get them deployed. Once all that is done, they may have time to go back to Duna & try to find another surface anomaly.

Typically, 4 sepratrons work just fine to get them clear. I landed a lot of stuff on Eve and a few sepratrons are generally enough to push the heatshield down & to the side enough to clear it with plenty of room I'm still baffled how the heatshields managed to destroy my base when they were staged away while the base was turned sideways to the airflow - meaning the shields should have been blown back away from the base by airflow. Instead, one went forward, then came back & slammed the base hard, destroying the drill & converter. The other actually started going back, then reversed course back into the station, but it didn't break much - just hung there with the sepratrons still trying to push it away till they burned out. The whole thing was pretty strange - especially after not blowing anything up when it turned sideways during entry.

That would work too. Actually, I have some nice grid fins in various sizes, those would give me the best of both worlds. Thanks for the idea I spent some time today tinkering with my alternate install. Part of what I wanted to do was basically impossible, so as a substitute, I loaded a trimmed down Near Future Construction & it seems like it will do nicely. I rebuilt my single-launch crew station design & my crew cycler design - the latter took a little work to get it where I wanted, and I'm still not quite happy. I'd really like some longer USI-Life Support supply & fertilizer cans - stacks of the short ones are racking up my part count, and I barely have enough for a trip to Jool. It'll handle 4 crew, but if I go up even 1 more it becomes marginal at best.

Yesterday, I continued my career with further exploration of Duna. I got my Ike mining base landed, but it won't be crewed till they are done playing on Duna. The fuel rover & fuel tanker ship are in orbit, but haven't done anything yet. On Duna, first came a small ground base with limited fueling capability, landed at the southern mouth of the Western Canyon on a nice juicy ~13% ore concentration. I have another outpost I can land somewhere, but it doesn't have any ISRU capacity. My intrepid explorers, however, were located at the other end of the Western Canyon, so a little rover trip was in order. Actually, it's the longest trip I've ever taken by rover. First, I had to land the rover nearby: Straight-line distance was ~190km, but the canyon has a significant bend in it, so actual driven distance was quite a bit longer. Most of the trip was driven through sandstorms, and they took a break roughly halfway through to wait for dawn. I already had too many close calls to try night driving, plus daylight allowed the batteries to stay charged better. The Lynx is primarily RTG powered, but it has some roof solar panels as well. Lots of rover pics: After that rover odyssey, I flew my Duna lander down to the base so I won't need to repeat that again. Until I want to pack up the surface experiments anyway. I also tried to land an emergency fuel station on Eve. I briefly thought I might make it. Then it turned sideways. Initially, I still thought it might survive - it was spinning, so nothing was overheating enough to explode. Then the drogue deployed & I attempted to shed the heat shields, but the sepratrons weren't strong enough & they heat shields smashed the base into pieces. The design has been modified with more sepratrons - and the staging moved to after main chute deployment - as well as adding robotic folding flight controls that will extend beyond the heatshields when deployed & hopefully will keep it pointed retrograde until parachute deployment. The next Eve window is over a year away, so I have some time to consider refinements before trying again. I may even make Eve my next large scale mission - the most recent transfer was eclipsed by the Duna mission. I haven't done much at Eve in several careers now, so it should be fun.

Docking ports jamming like you describe used to be pretty common. I haven't had it happen in a quite a while, but maybe I've just been lucky. There were a few options to fix it - one was editing your save file manually: Second option: Third option, there is a mod called "Undockinator"

I tinkered with my alternate KSP build some more, with mixed results. Some of parts I was trying to bring over from other mods are more complex than I thought & aren't going to work without the full mod installed. Others are working great, so I may end having to install more mods in this build than I planned, or just do without. In my ongoing career, more vessels of my Duna fleet arrived in-system, including the Duna lander. Once docked with Duna Station, the crew immediately transferred over & headed for the surface. A precision landing by Jeb placed them on reasonably flat ground near an anomaly. First up was planting the flag: Setting up surface experiments to monitor the anomaly in the future: After finishing, Kelrik went to investigate the anomaly close up. After checking it out, he decided to try out his parachute for the trip back On the way back, he spotted some blueberries to investigate as well. After a barely-survivable parachute landing, he was too shaken up to remember the F2 key:

I sometimes build multi-part stations in Kerbin, Mun or Minmus orbit. For interplanetary, I've come up with a pretty effective single-launch station that I use. My normal operations go like this (once everything is set up & running), using Duna as an example: 1. Send crew by spaceplane to transfer to a large crew cycler 2. Upon arrival in Duna system, dock crew cycler to the station & transfer crew. If it's really busy, undock & send the cycler up to a parking orbit until needed. 3. Transfer new crew to a lander to transfer down to the planet. I almost always have a small ISRU setup capable of refueling whatever brought the crew down to the surface. 4. While they are on the ground, if there is a separate ISRU facility on Ike, a tanker will bring up a fresh load of fuel to refuel the cycler if needed and top off the lander when it returns if that is needed. Jool/Laythe, I may also have a small transfer ship docked at Laythe station to shuttle crew between the various moons. My standard single-launch interplanetary station (around Moho with added radiators). It holds at most 11 crew (1 in cupola, 2 in lab & 8 in the "top" & "bottom" hitchhiker cans) Another one with crew cycler docked around Laythe. Note the 3.75m transfer stage is still attached, so most likely this one recently arrived. In fact, looking at the cycler design, this is probably the first crew around Laythe in whatever career I took this screenshot it

I typically use 2.5m - primarily for science labs (mostly for leveling up, they're ridiculously overpowered for science generation) & greenhouses for life support mods. If you aren't opposed to mods, I think there are some structural and/or station parts mods that have a nice range of parts in various sizes. Also, there are at least 2 mods (MOLE & USI-Konstruction) that have weldable docking ports to make permanent connections once you dock parts together which should help reduce both part count & wobbliness.

Like others have said, works great for boosters assisting a Swivel or even larger cores - I have a few designs that use a 1.875 or 2.5m core with 1.25m radial boosters powered by Reliants for extra thrust & dV. Also the Cub works great to cover other engines' lack of gimbal if needed, and give a slight boost to thrust

I haven't had a chance to get the update yet, but I continued with my career. The first few Duna ships arrived today - specifically the crew station & the Duna Express crew vehicle, along with a few other random craft. Duna station in Duna orbit: The crew got a fly-by of Ike on their way to Duna orbit, so Vall jumped out to get an EVA report & collect data from the science experiments

I know it's loads from cache once the cache is built, but I thought the more parts you had, the more RAM that was used? Regardless, post-BG is definitely running slower than pre-BG for me - it's not huge for me (as opposed to the OP), but it is noticeable enough to start trying to trim down my installed mods.

Spent some more time beating my head on the desk. The part that is kicking my tail is the Corvus CF nose - it's made for the Corvus 1.25m 2-seat pod (obviously) but I'm trying to get it to work with the stock Gemini pod. But the parachute only gets it down to ~9 m/s, which is too high. If I have anything more than pod & nose, it jumps up to 10-11. I kept adding to the the drag values with no effect. Then I tried copying the relevant sections of another mod's Gemini nose that I know has an effective parachute. Initially, that caused the command pod to explode upon chute deployment, then it caused the chute to not deploy. Then I got it to deploy and it slowed the capsule down to ~4 m/s, but it had no visible chute. Then I got the visible chute back, and speed jumped back up to 10-11 m/s. In my other KSP install, I did a few course correction maneuvers & sent an experimental lander to Mun - the Mun Reactor Experiment-1. Basically, it's just sitting on the surface, running the reactor for a few months, then I'm going to launch it back to Kerbin for recovery. I've had this reactor part forever, but never used it before. EDIT: HAHAHA!!! Success!!!!! I made one more set of changes, and now it slows down a 2-seat pod with extra gear to ~5 m/s (a little too effective actually), has a visible chute and doesn't cause any explosions!! I'll have to try to tune it to be a little less effective, but I'm just thrilled it finally worked.

It's really not bad - you just have to add in a single line to the existing save. That worked just fine, my issue was between two mods that didn't want to play nice together - which probably had nothing to do with Breaking Ground, just my career wasn't far enough along to discover the issue until after i updated.

1.7.2 & BG have definitely slowed my system down. Of course, on the load screen you can see at least part of the reason: Pre-BG, with all my mods, I had ~2200-2300 patches to load. Post-BG/1.7.2 it's jumped to 3500. My mods did not change, and very few needed updates (KAS was the main one). Actually, I've deleted around 100 parts since I got BG, it was originally loading ~3600 patches. I've just been dealing with it, but it is noticeable.

I don't remember specifics, but when I was still playing the demo version, I was down to just Vall before I ever made it to orbit. I don't usually forget parachutes, but I have a distressing tendency to get distracted during reentry and not actually deploy the chutes sometimes.

After getting an Minmus orbital rescue done, I spent most of my time doing the fifteen course correction maneuvers for my Duna fleet. Then I beat my head against the desk a lot messing around with some mods. I am thinking about starting a completely new career with a different mod setup, but there are a handful of parts that are just too useful for me to give up despite being in mods I'm planning on dropping, so I'm trying to get those individual parts moved into a single folder (no I'm not going to share this with anyone, just for my own use). Then load the game, discover the part didn't show up, exit, figure out what I missed & fix it. Load game, discover it still didn't show up. Exit, figure out what else I missed & fix it. Rinse, repeat. Then smash head on desk out of pure frustration. One down, I'm not sure how many to go yet. Maybe next month, I'll get everything just where I want it - probably in time for the next update. The really frustrating part is I started this process once before - and had several of the same parts I'm planning on keeping already done - because a mod I liked was having major issues for me. Then the mod updated & everything started working ok, so I deleted what I had done to that point. Ugh. Just a heads up, the new surface features won't spawn in a carried over saved game. You can edit the save file to add them in, there's a thread or 2 on here explaining how to do it. I initially did that with a 1.6 career and it worked, but I had a mod compatibility issue & ditched it for a fresh career anyway.

Take a look here: