NHunter

Bobert Gaelan deserves the "Balls of Steel" award: the guy has just planted a flag on Icarus. And, damn, this place is HOT. Even on the dark side, my ship nearly overheated in less than 5 minutes of sitting on the surface - by the time I took off, the crew module was at 97% of critical temperature. Barely got away from that place. And I'm not coming back, not even to check that juicy anomaly out. Meanwhile, in a galaxy star system far, far away Kerbals continue exploring the Jool system. The autonomous mapping satellite is entering the orbit of Tylo:

And here we go... Baikerbanur [transit time from Crater Rim: 12 minutes]: This abandoned space center is spooky. I had to reload a quicksave a few times here because I kept flying into invisible obstacles. And then there is no visible antenna dish, yet the ground station is fully functional. Planted a flag to prove that I went there. North Station [transit time from Baikerbanur: 30 minutes]: And, finally, back to KSC, home sweet home. Mission accomplished! credits earned: Mesa South Ground Station: 1400 Harvester Massif Ground Station: 100 Nye Island Ground Station: 100 Woomerang Ground Station: 1200 Crater Rim Ground Station: 800 Baikerbanur Space Center: 20 North Ground Station: 200 Total: 3820 P.S. Bob expresses his dissatisfaction with being forced to go on a mission for measly 240 credits/hour P.P.S. I meant I earn only 20% of credits - NOT 20% less credits - for using my set of mods

A few pretty screenshots from my Commnet Dish Inspection mission: 1. Speeding across the northern lands from Baikerbanur to Northern Station 2. Damn, it's really cloudy up here, in the northern regions 3. ...But once you clear these clouds, you get to see some pretty aurorae

Ah, you add them. (well, in retrospect, that should've been obvious... silly me) ----------------- Anyway... [Nye Island to Woomerang: transit time: 30 minutes] I believe, the Woomerang Ground Station should be somewhere around here... Someone stole it!!! Crater Rim [transit time from Woomerang: 30 minutes]

I meant this: And, well, those part are quite a bit more powerful than stock ones. Hence, the modifier to my score. Don't you need to fly there anyway to land at Harvester Massif? But, yeah, it was the easier of landing I've had so far. Definitely easier than Mesa one - thankfully didn't need to reload, but it did take me 2 attempts to stop there properly (I ended up "landing" against the cliff side and then taxing to the flatter area where I could put the plane on breaks in order to disembark)

Harvester Massif [transit time from Mesa South: 25minutes] (also, why a flyby worth more than land-and-photo here?) Nye Island [transit time from Harvester Massif: 40 minutes]:

@Klapaucius, you've inspire me.

Challenge accepted! Meet the creatively-named 'Observer' plane. Not the prettiest thing on Kerbin, but, whatever... Departing from KSC: Mesa South [transit time from KSC: 35 minutes] ...Damn, landing on that cliff was a challenge all of its own. Now heading for the Harvester Massif --------------------------- For the sake of being honest with how big of an achievement completing this challenge would by my plane (OPT parts), if you decide to include me into the leaderboard at all, please use a 0.2 modifier to my score.

Today, the crew of KSS Discovery has planted a flag on the surface of Vall

I'm still alive, apparently. And since I was caught unprepared for 1.6 update, I'll be playing my 1.4.3 OPM career while waiting for mods to update. And, here we go. First of all, KSS Discovery has finished her mission on Laythe and is transferring to Val. Even with nearly a 1 degree of thrust offset, the ship is still capable of keeping itself pointed at maneuver. Hooray for overpowered reaction wheels and high-gimbal-range nuclear engines! At the same time, a mapping satellite performed the first of five maneuvers that will take it from Bop to Pol: Meanwhile, nothing of interest has been happening with KSS Voyager. She is still drifting towards Sarnus, currently somewhere halfway better Dres and Jool. 380 more days till arrival...

It's pretty damn productive as it is. With mostly full data storage you can squeeze over 40 science/day from it.

Having completed my mission on Laythe, I'm moving KSS Discovery to Vall and the mapping satellites to Tylo and Pol. And while I'm waiting for the transfer windows, I went back to my GPP career and performed first Icarus orbit: I should probably curb my tendency to over-engineer my transfer stages and then perform very aggressive body approaches. 8k burns aren't fun even if your craft can pull 25 m/s^2 acceleration...

Today I went back to by stock + OPM career and finally landed splashed down on Laythe. What a view... Time to go home back to the mothership...

Sounds like a mass-distribution issue couple with bad rigid attachment/auto-strut. Or a bad version of SME that had the drills produce too much vibro (I personally never caught them producing any). My base is very heavy (I landed only an Extraplanetary Launchpad workshop and a few supplies of Rocket Parts, everything else was built on Ceti) and is about as immobile as a craft can be in KSP. With all fuel tanks and storages filled, it nets around 850 tons and even its dry mass is ~100. I still managed to launch it into 'air' a few times when coming out of timewarp due to bad alignment of cradles' legs (colliders extended under the surface when base was without physics). Once that was fixed, I had no issues with it. Do also note that my stack excavators are upscaled from 2.5m to 3.75m - to save on the part count.

Uhm... Let's see... Near Future Launch Vehicles, Near Future Propulsion, Near Future Solar, Station Parts Expansion Redux, Stockalike Mining Expansion, and a personal overwrite of MKS for the six ... things around the central tower. And I'm too lazy to remember where the radiators are from. Some tweakscale was applied I think, that's it.

Today, my probe finally arrived to Thalia. This is a first successful flight to another planet that I've performed in this career save. ...Approaching the cursed planet. ...Performing a 2km/s capture burn. You can also see Thalia's moon, Eta (below and slightly to the left from the sun).

I have OPT reconfig as well as B9 switcher (both via CKAN). The latter might be installed badly since, as you've mentioned it, I do have straight and slanted meshes of the intercooler showing up together. EDIT: apparently, my B9 works fine, it was my own patch to remove extra stuff that I don't need from the precooler that messed the model up.

A neat little spaceplane I've designed to haul tourists to the space hotel: This spaceplane has seats for 30 kerbals and enough endurance to perform a Ceti flyby. And, despite not using actual wings (only pylons and winglets), it handles surprisingly well in atmosphere. Problems of this design... well, it uses only deployable solar panels, so it can't passively recharge batteries while coasting through atmosphere. And, of course, it still suffers from J-sized "brick" aerodynamics.

I've been playing around in a sandbox, trying to design a better EL/resource refinery base architecture. Better = same or better functionality with less parts: current 99 part monstrosity I have on Ceti slows my PC to a crawl even when there are no other crafts in vicinity. So far, I've managed to reduce part count by 24 (actually 30, since I was using a different set of cradles for the sandbox-base modules). ...Now, I just need to figure out how to deliver enough rocket parts to Ceti to rebuild half of my base... That, and I need to figure out why my survey stakes keep exploding because they "collided with Ceti".

You aren't the one who finished their construction project today, man. I've finally finished building my Extraplanetary Launchpad base on Ceti by adding fuel storage module (and 2 more mining excavators): Even without extra drills, that thing had a dry weight of ~70 tons and took ...awhile to construct. Now I can store whooping 26k liquid fuel, 280k liquid hydrogen, 51k oxidizer, 12k monopropellant, 12 800k argon and 45k xenon to quickly fuel-up whichever ship I decide to build there (I still need to fill those tanks, of course)

Today, I've finally brought the first crew to my Ciro (Gael's sun) space station: Oh, and here's the station itself. Nothing really fancy here, but it was designed as a single-launch solution. Finally, I got the nuclear fuel plant up and running, and even bred some nuclear fuel to bring the reactor online. Now, the Ceti Outpost is fully self-sustaining AND is down to just 52 parts. I still need to build fuel storage module (and, probably, another set of mining excavators), but...

Dunno about the big one, but the small one will 'dock' only if it hits a surface that it is more-or-less perpendicular to. So, yeah, curved mk2 and OPT will have some trouble getting 'docked' with extensible crew tubes.

By the time sun rose over the Ceti Plateaus again, the outpost has already been expanded a little. Now it also features (currently-unfueled) nuclear reactor and a mining node (2x terratrove excavators + an ISRU unit). Still need to construct nuclear fuel processor and proper storage for fuels - currently can store only a tiny amount of LfOx.

It's already boosted as much as I dare to (otherwise, you'd be seeing only yellow spots on otherwise black pic).

I'm not sure why anyone would pay (and quite handsomely) to visit an industrial base that is still under construction, but, hey!.. Anyway, three tourists decided that they wanted to visit my Ceti EL base and since I need money to buy the initial lump of nuclear fuel for the (yet-to-be-built) reactor, I've accepted the contract. Also used it to bring a few more kerbals gaelans to serve on the base, as well as to ship a few extra KIS/KAS items. Sorry for the somewhat-dark image, but the base is currently on the dark side of Ceti. Original segment "base" was an EL workshop (the middle module among the three sitting around the central tower - the one with an antenna) with a docking port in place where a satellite dish currently is. You can also see the skycrane that landed the aforementioned workshop on the right. It will serve as a source of power until I get the reactor up and running. The central tower and the two other "horizontal" modules of the base had been built by the workshop using rocket parts shipped from Gael (currently awaiting the next supply-ship): I still need a sun-independent power source and mining/ISRU module before this base is capable of manufacturing it's own rocket parts. I also need to install lights on the tower...