NHunter

Dunno... I'd imagine there should be no meaningful difference if the cargo ship is the same, except the container contains not X kg of cargo1 but Y < X kg of cargo2. (yeah, you have more dV, but whatever). Swapping of cargo type as long as the mass of resulting ship does not exceed mass of the ship in certified profile should not require recertification. The possibility of crewed resupply mission should not be discounted. Especially if it's profile is something like that: Launch -> rendezvous with station -> unload cargo -> land at launchsite on the body you've launched from

Agreed. Though, perhaps, the efficiency should be additionally affected to a small degree by the level of pilot (if automated mission still uses a kerbal) / probe core level (if it's unmanned unkerbal'ed) with highest levels copying your last certified performance and the lower ones having some extra fuel wastage. Not too much to really matter if your mission has some safety margin, but if your rocket is using Stayputnik (or whatever KSP2 analogue it will have), you better give your resupply mission more than a few m/s dV or extra fuel. And, of course, if you radically change your vessel (e.g. you go from 10tons to 50tons LKO launch vessel), the resupply mission will need to be recertified.

At long last, the permanent Drozhe outpost is complete and crewed! (don't mind lighting artifacts). To jumpstart it, however, I had to disassemble both the temporary outpost and the cargo lander (after transferring useful materials from it) for equipment. Now, once it has built up a stockpile of resources, I can start local construction of probes for Kerbol system exploration.

Finally got around to deploying the stage 1 of Drozhe outpost -- it's pretty much just EL for the base proper, though given the slow speed at which it processes ore into rocket parts and then assembles them into stuff, it will be quite awhile before I have a more permanent stage 2 outpost up and running.

Sent a crewed lander to explore the area I've picked for my Drozhe output using ScanSat maps. The spot is indeed very flat (avg 0.3 deg slope) within like 70m of my landing site and has 9.68% ore concentration. It's very good for the mining/refueling/EL outpost, so the cargo lander with the base parts was detached from the interstellar cargo ship and sent to the surface at the location. Not bad precision, especially since I've apparently decided not to include RCS into the cargo lander design... Can't bring myself to do the tedious task of setting up the initial base right now, though... will do it sometime later

Haven't played much this last week, but my crewed interstellar ship has finally arrived to Drozhe low orbit. I've also mapped a pretty good spot for the local outpost: 0.1% avg. slope and 9% ore. Will send a lander there to check it out in person soon.

My interstellar cargo ship finally arrived to low-ish Drozhe orbit and released the four relay sats for local networking. You can see one of those hanging in the background here. Next, the ship will be moved to lower orbit where it will wait for the ScanSat scan to finish (need a good, flat spot to setup a surface base, preferably close to equator)

I think NF suite had attachable reaction wheels somewhere, but I don't think they would be powerful enough for the job you have in mind. Other than that... I can't think of anything in 7.5m size. The closest I can think of is SpaceY 3.75m and 5m half-ring reaction wheels that can be surface-attached on cylindrical parts (and can be tweakscaled as you need),

KSS Venture, the crewed vessel for the Kerbol exploration mission has arrived to the Drozhe SoI, where it will help setting up the local production and supply (surface) base. Once the base is set up and operational, it will deliver the massive relays to Kerbol orbit to enable permanent connection to Rhode space center and begin the exploration of the Kerbal home system. Meanwhile, the mapping satellite has already reached low Drozhe orbit and began scanning the planet, looking for a good surface base site.

After some trajectory correction for the main cargo ship, I've released the mapping satellite it was carrying. The sat will be flying ahead and, hopefully, have some useful data on the terrain and resources of Drozhe ready by the time the main ship arrives to the planet's low orbit.

My interstellar cargo vessel has finally reached its destination: Drozhe. The second ship carrying crew will arrive there in another 30 days. now I'm performing a 44km/s deceleration burn (thankfully my antimatter engine does have enough fuel for that) -- something that will take another hour.

There is a bug (or, perhaps, a not-always-intended behavior) where if you move cursor over a part in symmetry (e.g. 2x) while trying to place a part with (greater?) symmetry, your symmetry will reset to that of a part you've moved cursor over.

I've gone Interstellar (in Beyond Home)

I did a mission to Gateway: This is the craft I was using - a somewhat specialized OPT spaceplane with a pair of SURGE engines for atmospheric propulsion and plasma LFO engines for vacuum. Necessary power is provided by a nuclear reactor. In total, this thing masses just a few kilograms shy of 80 tons on the runway. That said, because it is more optimized for thick atmosphere of Gateway, it doesn't fly that well on Rhode and requires you to be going at 100 m/s to take off. Still, SURGEs are powerful engines and this monstrosity has TWR of 1.2 allowing it to fly through a victory of thrust over aerodynamics. Anyway, let's get to the interesting part of the mission. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arriving at Gateway. Will descend to a lower orbit of 1500km before performing the final deceleration burn and diving into the planet's atmosphere. Meeting the sunrise (?) in low Gateway orbit. Performing the final deceleration burn to reduce orbital speed to ~3750m/s. That's about the limit of what this plane can safely withstand: OPT parts might be tough, but even they have limits... Once speed is reduced to safe values, the spaceplane reorients itself to enter the atmosphere nose-first and deploys aerobrakes. HOT!!! Also, losing altitude at the rate of nearly a kilometer per second is scary. Thankfully, once below the cloud layer, aerobrakes quickly kill speed and the rest of descent is performed at a much more moderate speed. Land sighted! Due to the large number of spikes surrounding the islands in this region (you can see some of them in the distance to the left of the picture, behind the space plane) I had to change plans and land on a large flat iceberg rather than on proper land. And while this iceberg was quite big, the plane still was barely able to slow down in time to avoid flying off it and into ocean. Then I had to taxi it around the iceberg into a position from which it would be able to safely take off. Once there, the plane was put on parking break and the scientists disembarked to plant a flag, run some scans and deploy surface experiments. One of the pilots also decided to take a walk outside. The beginning of the take off. Climbing up... SURGEs won't spin up to their max thrust until about 60km altitude, so the early ascend is done quite steeply. Level up later on to build as much speed using SURGEs as possible. Burning towards heavens. And the circularization burn... Now I need to rendezvous with a "debris" propulsion module of the rocket that had delivered communication satellites to Gateway to steal the fuel it still has. Otherwise... I don't have enough to return home.

I've visited Voss Unfortunately, I've run into a very annoying bug with kerbals self-destructing the moment they touch planet surface (don't worry, everyone is still alive thanks to save reloading), so no flag planting this time. With this, the only landable body in Fate-Destiny system that hasn't been landed on by a crewed mission is Gateway. Gonna try to rectify that before I begin exploring Kerbol system.

Landed on Vasto: Undocked from the transfer tug and about to begin preparations for the deorbiting burn. Flying through some small-scale snow storm while killing horizontal speed. The snow effect might not actually be seen that well on the static picture, but it is definitely quite noticeable in-game. First Kerbal on Vasto!

Finished mapping Vasto and moved the mapping satellite to its moon, Voss Meanwhile, the crewed part of the exploration mission finally arrived to the Vasto system: "sunrise" as seen from low Vasto orbit

1920 x 1080 Jokes aside, I'll return to Kerbol and explore all planets and moons there in my BH career and I'll explore Grannus in my GPP career

Some more pics from Vasto:

I've finally reached Vasto (BH)

I'd pull Mark Thrimm and build a multi-body SSTO rocket around the engine using either 3.75m or even 5m cores. Something akin to what you can find in this video. Basically, you'll have your engine hanging down from the mounting point set between the launcher bodies (and strutted to it to avoid the whole thing from swinging around too much.

Are those converters functioning at 100% efficiency? I haven't paid attention to efficiencies in a long while, but don't stock converters get limited efficiency (and thus have lower consumptions/outputs than stated in part info) unless there is an engineer aboard?

Sent the cargo ship towards Kerbol. While its departure burn was 6 days later than that of the crewed one, it will arrive slightly ahead and start mapping out Drozhe, which was selected as the body where the outpost / EL base would be established.

While still not a stock solution, you can use Extraplanetary Launchpad or a similar mod to build the ship in space (bleh, you'll need to ship 300+ tons of rocket parts up there) or on a low-gravity moon and then launch it into orbit with decouple-able engines. Just like Dr.Lxweei suggested. With NFLV, you might be able to launch it by sticking it between 2-3-however-many stacks of rockets with mounting point being up and between stacks with Frisbee hanging down from there (with lots of struts to keep it in place until released in orbit). Yes, this is something that will not work in real life, but meh. I've actually come to love stacking three of those together using one of NFLV engine mounts and some offset tooling. Can get 0.1 TWR - yeah, not something to write home about, but you can play with that even without persistent thrust - for a 160 ton ship in reaction products like that with some quite good dV to boot. The only real issue with such a configuration is that it is somewhat attractive to kraken and depending on its mood might just shake itself apart as soon as you try to change ship's orientation in space. Nuclear smelter part allows you to rebuild ablator on the engine. Yeah, you'll have to lug around that big heavy part - and maybe some ore tanks as well - but it will let you refuel the engine. It works well in atmosphere, though, unlike most of the other engines offered by FFT. So, assuming you're okay with causing an ecological disaster (in roleplay, at least), you can make a single-stage-surface-to-anywhere NSWR-powered ship.

Finally got around to actually sending KSS Venture to Kerbol. To cut down the travel time to the (un)reasonable duration of 2 years, a massive burn of nearly 40km/s was needed. Thankfully, the ship pack so much dV that it will still have about half of the fuel after it arrives to its destination and decelerates.