king of nowhere

Tried to run more necessary tests for my next grand tour. tried... and failed. lately, I've been working on a rss+kerbalism stock part grand tour. I have a workable ship with the deltaV requirements. However, it breaks the game First I devised the mothership; it's based on A'Tuin, but it's made so that it can be split in two, the heavy industrial machinery and high thrust engines left behind, what's left has over 10 km/s deltaV, which is required for a mercury mission. Here during the latest successful test: orbiting the moon. the test actually failed, the new ship has too little high thrust deltaV to circularize before falling down. But with the test data I did run some calculations, and I did establish that it would require way too much oxidier to land and take off on the Moon, and there are plenty of low gravity bodies where I can land with a fraction of the fuel, and so I should just cancel "can land on the moon" as a prerequisite for the mothership. Here in a previous successful test: stability on reloading. Nope, the alignment bug struck hard. Hence I put struts (manual struts, not autostruts) everywhere. I also discovered that, despite a 5 m docking port, the connection between the parts is not strong enough. I solved this by applying manual struts between the parts; the plan is then to detach them manually with eva construction every time I need to undock, and to replace them, again with eva construction, after docking. Here the part with the machinery. It took a lot of effort to fit all of that in the available space. And the two subships mated, without the outer shell. The upper part only has to carry life support for six, it's a lot less encumbered. And the upper part Then I did a survey of the solar system, and discovered there's no nitrogen in any planetary crust, nothing anywhere. Except on pluto, which is too far to be a convenient refueling spot. But there is nitrogen in titan's atmosphere, and titan has a low enough gravity. So I did devise a spaceplane that can land on titan, carry the industrial machinery to collect nitrogen, turn it into monopropellant, and get back to orbit. monopropellant is 87% nitrogen by weight, and it's a lot more efficient to store than nitrogen gas Here's the Nitrogenius as it's ascending titan's atmosphere by propellers. orbiting in rss is a weird experience compared to stock, because you need a crapton of deltaV, but you can get away with low thrust. To orbit titan you need an orbital speed of over 1.5 km/s, but local gravity is 0.1 g, so one can get away with a full nuclear thrust. Making sure it's redundant so that I can still orbit with a broken engine was a bit more complicated. Then there are a lot of moons - all four major moons of jupiter, among them - that require roughly 2000 m/s to land on. Doing it with expendable landers would be too much, so I did devise a reusable lander that could do it. And that could drop and recover a rover. Do notice the pistons on the rover's side, to lift the rover and bind it on the docking port. Mercury and Mars require even more deltaV, though. For mercury, I got away with an extra expendable stage. For Mars I had to get crazy; six inflatable thermal shields used as parachutes to drop speed from 3 to 1 km/s, then some powerful rockets to brake in the last few kilometers of descent. The normal lander can then lift off from Mars just fine. Had more troubles for Venus; the project is based on helicopterocket, flying on propeller power out of the atmosphere, then using a regular rocket. But propellers work badly on Venus; the atmospheric pressure is so high, the game goes crazy. I think the propellers are getting bent? Anyway, I could get a 1 m/s ascent speed at most, and I was fighting with the controls all the time. Still, I was optimistic there; I did make a plane that flies on venus, an helicopter must be feasible too. But in the last few days, I had a final flight test for the mothership: orbiting Triton - about two-thirds the size of the moon, but that one is a required landing to reach Pluto, it's the only moon of neptune modeled in the mod. And so I brought the mothership - now finally finished - on the launchpad. Cue 10 minutes loading time. Then I used alt-f12 to bring it on triton for the test. And waited. And waited. And waited. alt-f12 didn't work. And eventually the game crashed. Looks like the mothership is so complex, the game won't even manage to execute the alt-f12 change position command. I also got several seconds per frame. I tried many times, the game would always crash without letting me do anything. It's not the part count; it doesn't have more parts than A'Tuin. But every additional mod increases lag. Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis had as many parts, but it could be loaded in a few seconds, and the lag was barely noticeable. So, it seems I am finally defeated. I can't make this grand tour work. not because of any lack of engineering, but because my pc can't handle my increasingly bizantine requirements any longer. Is it the end of me playing ksp? In the past two years, I kept myself interested by pulling increasingly more complex stunts. This rss is the next logical step, and it looks impossible by pc limits. And without a big challenge, I'm just not motivated. But wait! Last minute update. While I opened ksp for the last time to take the screenshot without the external fuel tanks, upon removing them I noticed a misplaced, glitched part. I fixed that, and now the ship launched correctly, and alt-f12 worked! Currently on the surface of Triton. So, it seems I'm not done yet. I am still not optimistic about actually launching the mothership from earth. Though I will launch the two parts separately, and empty of fuel, I'll still need at least a 50kton launch vehicle. If the game lags and glitches that badly for the ship alone... and the glitches are not done yet; According to the sidebar on the right, all my tanks are full. According to the part menu, that tank - and all other fuel tanks - are not full... There shall come a day when the game will crash on me, forbidding me from more grand tours. But this is not the day! Today, I test orbiting Triton! (EDIT: the Triton orbiting test was successful. The "yes, it can actually do this with the available resources" kind of successful, not the "it failed spectacularly, but I learned something from it" kind of successful I was mentioning above for other tests)

it is not a flaw with twr or design, only with your manuevers. you can reasonably get in orbit around a joolian moon with 3000 m/s from LKO. With a lot of optimization and gravity assists, it is possible to more than half that amount. you are not getting there with 5000 m/s, your manuevers must be very inefficient. Let's see 1) how are you reaching Jool? do you use a proper transfer window? Do you make the manuever in LKO, to make full use of oberth effect? here a low twr may screw you up, though there are ways to compensate. Should take roughly 2000 m/s, up to 2500 m/s if twr causes you to be inefficient. A common rookie mistake is to exit kerbin orbit and then make the apoapsis raising in solar orbit. it's easier to see what you're doing, but it's a lot more expensive. Another common rookie mistake is to forsake transfer windows and just use more fuel to brute force trajectories 2) jool insertion. It should be reasonably cheap, a few hundred m/s at most. However, a jool insertion is not an optimized manuever either; you can get captured by a gravity assist from tylo or laythe. if your target is one of the larger moons, you can also go for direct intercept on the moon. here there are so many common rookie mistakes i can't count them. actually, navigating the moons is quite hard and takes experience. 3) reach a moon. Again, not very expensive. You should lower jool apoapsis until you touch a moon at apoapsis, this will result in the lowest intercept speed. A common rookie mistake here would be to cross a moon orbit in a full frontal collision, resulting in a much higher intercept speed From what you say, it seems intercept speed is your main problem. The most important thing to know here is that the more different are your trajectory and the moon's orbit, the higher the intercept speed will be. It's like a car crash, really; two cars going in the same direction and colliding laterally will only get scratched, while a full frontal collision will be devastating. This goes both for a planet intercept and for a moon intercept. So, first image is a good transfer. in this case it was with another planet, as I don't have readily available pictures from jool. But notice how the ship touches lightly the planet's orbit, and the two are moving in the same direction during the encounter. there is still an intercept speed because the planet is moving faster than the ship, but it's a lot smaller than it would be if the ship was moving slower AND in a different direction and incidentally, here's how a gravity capture on jool looks like. there are rules for gravity assist, the most basic one is that you pass in front of the celestial body to slow down and you pass behind to speed up, but this is something you can do with trial and error. just try to pass in front of laythe or tylo and play with the manuever a bit, you'll see. Finally, about direct moon intercept. I said that you have to touch the moon's orbit with the same direction. again, example from another planet but works. See that the ship is intercepting the moon at a time when they are moving in the same direction, and so the intercept speed is small (300 m/s) while here i changed things to show you how it canges if you don't get the moon at the right point; here it's a lateral collision, and the intercept speed increased to 450 m/s and here a full frontal collision, for more than 800 m/s And this is far more important the faster the moons move. Wal orbits a smaller planet from afar, its orbital speed is only 400 m/s. The joolian inner moons have orbital speeds ranging from 2 to 3 km/s, and the difference in intercept speed for a wrong manuever will be proportionally greater. Do notice that that's only the deltaV needed for capture. For circularization on a moon without atmosphere you need to rocket brake, and there is no trick whatsoever to avoid that, you have to pay the deltaV price. Still, do try it on jool. Your ship with 5 km/s vacuum deltaV can make it. P.S. To ensure that you hit the moon at the right time, do make a correction manuever where you burn a fraction of a m/s, or a few m/s at most, prograde/retrograde years before reaching jool. In a few years of travel, those few m/s going faster/slower will cause you to arrive a few days earlier/later, and you can use that to time your encounter to find the moons in the best position. Do perform this manuever in solar orbit once you've already left kerbin, it's a small manuever. Then use normal and radial corrections to get an intercept with the moon you want. P.P.S. If the rocket has 10 km/s deltaV vacuum on the launchpad and you only have 5 left once in orbit, you are likely also doing the launch inefficiently. it should cost about 3.5 km/s on a normal rocket - unless one has horrible aerodinamic issues or somesuch. P.P.S. 10 km/s on nuclear means a lot of fuel and few engines. twr is really a problem. it would be easier to have a higher thrust stage to reach jool. It would also be more efficient to split that 10 km/s with some staging mechanism or using drop tanks to shed some weight P.P.P.S. I basically told you that you are doing everything wrong. don't take it bad; rocket science is difficult, optimizing trajectories takes a lot of knowledge and experience. you won't stumble over them randomly, unless you already know what you are looking for

In addition to aerobraking at duna to get the capture for free, you can also use the mun for a gravity assist and save another 100 m/s. that's advanced stuff, though. for now, you should probably play it safe

that's way too little information to offer any help. what other mods do you have? how, exactly, did it got messed? please post pictures and describe how you got the problem as accurately as possible

it's a bug. i'd guerss that some of your 100 mods are interfering

yes, i figured that out early. problem is, if i want to make good use of the atmosphere, i must start retroburning quite late. and my engines are then not enough to stop in time. unless i add more fuel and more engines, but that increases the mass of the ship and makes the atmosphere even less effective at braking. my lander is already rather heavy, because i want to send kerbals on the surface with a small rover, and have most of that be reusable, and kerbalism forces me to add life support and to put redundancies, all extra weight. i was trying to be more efficient. well, i couldn't. i had to add 40 more tons to the lander to get six "parachutes" (inflatable thermal shields used as such), more fuel and more engines to provide enough twr.

i had that bug too. I fixed it by tampering with the saved game file, though in my case it was easier because i had an exact copy of that ship in a previous file

the answer from @Gotmachine worked, it applies to you too basically, you just have to get this harmonyksp (an updated version) and put it in gamedata too

A couple of questions: 1) I am building a mars lander, and I'm having a hard time dealing with the atmosphere. basically, i would like to use atmosphere to brake most of the way, hanging gently from a parachute and using rockets only in the last stage. like it's usually done for duna. like we do in real life when dropping rovers on mars. but i can't do that, because the pressure is too low for ksp parachutes. they do open up around 10 km altitude; unfortunately, most of the ground itself is at 10 km altitude - i did a bit of random scouting by alt-f12 a rover in multiple places, mostly in the northern emisphere because i know it's got a lower altitude all around, and I could find nothing lower than 7 km. so, parachutes open up just a few hundred meters before the impact, and they don't do any good. I did use some inflatable thermal shields as parachutes, and they help, but they aren't good enough. is there a way to get parachutes on mars to deploy on time? 2) is there a resource to calculate transfer windows, like the alexmoon tool? will the alexmoon tool work if I set into it the orbital parameters, or the changed gravity of ksp stock universe is going to throw that in disarray?

I don't know exactly how they are calculated, but certainly summing them up is not a good way. just because two planets have similar inclinations compared to the ecliptic, it does not mean that they are in the same plane. Take, for example, the bar \. This bar has a 60° inclination over the horizontal line. / also have 60° inclination, but it's on a very different plane from the other bar. So, just subtracting earth axial tilt won't help. the calculation will certainly involve other orbital parameters like longitude of the ascending node, but i don't know the actual formulas

I decided to do some recon on resources distribution; the good news is, there's water and uranium virtually everywhere. every small body has some water in some biomes, including the moonlets of mars, the asteroids, and every moon of every gas giant. Finding fuel won't be a problem - though the deltaV requirements for everything are still staggering. Nitrogen is nonexhistant, though. really, there's no nitrogen whatsoever in any planet, with the sole exception of Pluto - which is too far from anywhere to be a useful refueling spot. Tragedy! I need nitrogen to feed my greenhouses. Well, there is another possible source... Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, has a nitrogen atmosphere. I can't land the mothership there because its engines are vacuum-optimized, and it would be way too expensive anyway - the map states over 7000 m/s for a rocket. But a dense atmosphere with a low gravity is the ideal environment for a propeller spaceplane. So I went to design one such plane that could land on Titan, harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere, and carry it to orbit in significant amounts. All the while keeping up with the 6-part redundancy policy, where every critical part must have 6 copies - and be able to function with five of them broken - or must be exchangeable by eva construction. One thing in my favor is that the kerbalism modders have fixed the monopropellant fuel cell issue. namely, until recently, you needed a lot of nitrogen to make monopropellant, and when you used that to run a fuel cell you got back a lot less nitrogen. like, you got one tenth of what you put in. Now that they fixed that, and you get almost exactly what you put in, I can stop carrying huge, heavy, cumbersome nitrogen tanks by the dozen, and carry monopropellant instead. A'Tuin had 12 big nitrogen tanks, they weighted 2 tons and they stored 3 tons of nitrogen. A single large monopropellant tank stores 3 tons of nitrogen, it's a single part, and it only weights 400 kg. Even better, stress breakdowns can lose 10% of your current storage of a resource, which would be a big problem for a resource that's supposed to last decades. but monopropellant is exempted, so the bulk of my nitrogen will be safe from accidents. here the spaceplane during preliminary testing. It can rise up to over 50 km altitude on propellers. At that altitude, atmospheric pressure is 0.9 atm. On the right are listed the various processes # I don't like bringing down the whole setup of industrial machinery required for the process into a spaceplane that must go up and down from Titan - especially because making monoprop consumes water and oxidizer, that I have to bring down from orbit. But those two monoprop tanks hold 6 tons, my mothership holds 24 tons - it's a lot more compared to A'Tuin, but rss has much longer travel time and so I had to scale life support storages up. To get that much nitrogen in pressurized tanks, I'd need over 20 of them, making up for any weight saving. Worse, they are also extremely large, each one being almost as large as a nerv engine. Good luck fitting that with a good aerodinamic profile. And I do need a good aerodinamic profile, because Titan's atmosphere extends to 600 km, and it's still significantly dense up to 200 km. on the plus side, while a lot of deltaV is needed, little thrust is required, so i can get away with 3 nervs. So, first test was whether I could fly on Titan at all. It is easy, but I encountered a weird bug on OPM where propellers wouldn't work on Tekto, and rover wheels wouldn't work in some other places, and it would have mightily sucked had my mission depended on it. Second test was gathering resources. I did some tweaks until I had the right mix of resources and enough power to run everything in reasonable time. It took 8 days to fill the tanks. Third test, going to orbit. And by the way, titan is awesome those are hydrocarbon lakes. It should be possible to just put them in the tanks as they are and use them as rocket fuel. an unfortunate graphic glitch that, I guess, comes from the surface being a collage of multiple orbital pictures taken in different times and conditions. Fourth - harder - test, the redundancy test. See if the plane can make it to orbit with a broken engine That one was a chore. I had to load extra reaction wheels to keep the thing straight, and i had to fight the controls through all the ascent - which, being rss, took a lot longer than ascent in stock ksp. But not only I could arrive to a model that works, but I also could save four tons of fuel, so I reduced fuel load in the final design. Of course, those engines are mounted on docking ports, so that a broken engine can then be swapped for a new one. The plane has a dry mass of 27 tons, on the plus side I could remove 18 tons of nitrogen drills from the mothership. Good progress for the day. Next I may work on Venus # one may notice that there is a single life support, despite the 6 redundancies rule. That's because I don't need life support in this plane. It can go unmanned, do everything remotely. But I also need to bring a kerbal on the ground to plant a flag, and putting a crew cabin on the spaceplane i already need takes two birds with a stone. If life support breaks, I can still send one kerbal down to the surface, and then back up - it takes a day or so before CO2 levels in the air rise to dangerous levels. And then do the whole nitrogen refueling by remote control.

granted. i could make a challenge out of doing a grand tour with stock kerbalX rockets. I wish the game would not lag for kilopart ships

My previous project for a successor for mighty A'Tuin, capable of performing a kerbalism rss grand tour, failed the first testing for lack of structural stability. The docking port keeping the two parts together was too weak This shown here is not a botched docking attempt, the two parts are docked, it's just wobbling because the docking port is too weak to hold in place two subunits of several kilotons each. Not only that, but the ship was too frail. I tested by simulating a moon landing at 5 m/s, the external fuel tanks got detached. The landing gear is on the inner subship, and the weight is distributed through a narrow column up to the ceiling, and the whole courtain fall down from there, it doesn't hold the force. Lag also was horrible, despite the ship still missing a lot of components. I had a moment of despair when I almost scrapped the idea of rss kerbalism grand tour. then I started thinking how I could actually fix the structural stability. I was already looking at near future launch vehicles for bigger fuel tanks to reduce part count, but it also had something else that was necessary for this project: a bigger, stronger docking port (5 m). So I started again, this time with more concern for stability. I made a 5 m column at the center of the ship to hold the weight, culminating in the 5 m docking port. I also swapped out the expansive "ceiling" of 3.75 m parts (55 of them) with a lower number of 7.5 m parts. I made the whole ensemble a bit lighter, in the 6.5-7 kton range. The new design passed the stability test (holding under its own weight on the runway, being dropped on the moon at 5 m/s), and it passed the docking test, that entails just docking the two parts. The test is not trivial; there is a tight fit between the two. at the first attempt, the lander subunit got slightly turned and it touched the "courtain", failing the docking. But besides that, the docking is not difficult, it can be reproduced easily. In particular, while the first model had plenty of stuff stuck hapazardly that required a very specific angle to dock to avoid modules on the lander subunit touching modules on the cruise subunit, this time I made a point to not have anything higher than the docking port, so that orientation would not matter in docking. Also, I had to fit the two gravity rings inside 5 m cargo bays. There's some clipping involved, but I can justify it by claiming it's a solid load-bearing column and the rotating part is only on the exterior. Those gravity rings are too big and cumbersome to put them anywhere else. The docking port is still not completely stable; I'm thinking I will pack some manual struts and place them with an eva construction after docking. However, now it's manageable. Here shown in docked mode, this is how much it wobbles. This is still acceptable. At least, it didn't seem to be causing problems. A major problem is fitting everything in the lander subunit. it's the one with less available space, and by far the one that has to carry more stuff; 12 custom size 3 convert-o-trons, 12 size 2 nuclear reactors, and all the high thrust engines, 6 greenhouses. I barely managed to fit the dolphin escape pod. For lack of space, I moved away from a purely wolfhound-based propulsion and used some near future engine that's a slightly improved version of the rhino; TWR is currently about 0.45, which will be fine to land on the moon. The original A'Tuin could land on Duna and even on Wal, but with rss landing on mars is out of the table. Even if I could, it would be way too expensive to be worth it. Even landing on the moon requires enough deltaV that I wonder if it's really useful, or if I should just stick with the moonlets of mars, the asteroids, and the smaller outer moons. I still need to place all the smaller chemical plants, some gas tanks, all the drills on the landing legs, and some spare engines, but I have a good idea where to place them.

depends on how you define realistic. First of all, even though ksp is a pretty good simulator with a lot of complex engineering, it still leaves out all the nasty details of engineering. setting up all the pipes and pumps for the fuel, finding a metal alloy that can survive the extreme working conditions of rockets, setting up some passive heat transfer system to avoid your satellite being baked in the sun or freezing while shadowed.... there are dozens and dozens such problems that ksp simply does not address. however, we did practice with all that for decades, and by now we're pretty good at throwing stuff in orbit, so I would say that launching to orbit is indeed relatively easy... but terribly expensive. ksp currency is very easy to come by, in real life it takes tens of thousands of dollars to send a single kg of payload in space. And for that you need a spaceport, with all the personnel working in it, and factories with the required know-how, and all that is, again, terribly expensive. so, launching stuff in space is easy in the sense that if we want to do it, we can do it. but it has huge practical limitations. finally, you may have noticed that the game has much smaller planets than real life. kerbin has 600 km radius, earth has 6370. kerbin orbit requires some 3400 m/s, earth orbit requires 11 km/s. On the other hand, engines and fuel tanks are less efficient, to partially compensate, and the net result is that rockets work similarly, but it takes a lot less time to orbit - else a launch would require half an hour. however, this allows a lot of exploits that simply would not work in real life. from ssto rockets with 20% payload mass - which would simply not be possible if you need 11 km/s to orbit - to spaceplanes - which take advantage of using jet engines to accelerate at orbital speed, because 2 km/s is orbital speed, while on earth you can still use a jet engine to reach 2 km/s, but that's nowhere near enough for orbit. So, a lot of the more optimized ways of ksp are not possible in real life.

it's an eve lander indeed. pretty crappy, but it was my first. I called it FU Eve because, after putting a lot of effort into fancy propeller planes that failed every time, i got fed up and decided to just brute force my way. I don't know if it's more compact than yours; it may look smaller simply because docked with a gargantuan 4000 ton ship. the FU Eve is over 400 tons, for a single pilot. My second Eve lander was a lot more optimized than that, and it was 250 tons for 3 pilots. My third eve lander was a successful propeller thing, and it was only 45 tons, including plenty of redundancies.

I eventually decided how to make an even more convoluted grand tour than my previous OPM kerbalism grand tour. I've long considered using RSS, but I didn't want to deal with some of RO quirks - depowered reaction wheels would be a major bother during manuevers, if nothing else for the need to bring six redundant rcs systems everywhere, and I don't even know what happens with cryogenic fuel boiloff or if i run out of ullage gas. Well, i decided to do RSS with stock parts. Problem with RSS is that it requires a lot more deltaV than stock. Orbiting earth requires 11 km/s, landing on the moon from orbit requires 1800 m/s... basically, take what you need in stock, triple it, and you're roughly there. My old A'Tuin was an extremely good design, and I was hoping I could keep using it with minimal modifications. But 6 km/s is enough to get around in stock, not in RSS. The main problem is the mining equipment. Between the huge convert-o-trons, the dozens of drills, and the nuclear reactors to power them, it's over 700 tons. And I have to carry that to the target planet and back every time. So I figured, I must split the ship in a way that allows me to leave the mining equipment behind. This way, if I commit to returning to the same planet for refueling, I can leave behind 700 tons of mining equipment, 180 tons of high thrust engines that are needed only for landing, and several hundred tons of fuel that are only saved for landing. It halves the dry mass of the ship. I still need to have an external shell of fuel tanks to protect the ship from radiations from all sides while it's refueling. And this time I must put inside also the mining equipment, because I don't see other ways to dock the two subunits otherwise. So I started with this I actually started smaller, but every time I had to add new stuff and I had to increase the size to fit all inside.... why do I keep making my ships bigger? On the bottom I still have to work on the landing gear, but i tried to put the engines to see how it would look Here the subunits are shown better. The lower subunits, with the chemical plants and nuclear plants. It will keep a crew of 3, it includes the greenhouses for them The upper portion; once it detaches from the mining equipment, it's basically all fuel tanks. it can get to 14 km/s, which is more than enough to do everything even in RSS. I even left plenty of oxidizer just to supply the landers. Of course, the number will go down, as the ship is still missing the landers - and I have to figure out how to stick them around - and a lot of other stuff. And here is how it looks normally when the subunits are docked. It's really cramped. What I have committed to? The previous grand tour required six months of real life time, lasting 340 kerbal years. RSS is bigger and slower, and I'll use a bigger ship with more parts. Will this finally be the time I give up?

i downloaded the mods and copied it into the gamedata folder. i did not use ckan. i was told to get this harmonyksp, which i did. there was an harmony embedded into the kerbalism already, but it's an older version. now it seems to work. i see if it still works after i put in rss and the half dozen other mods

the mystery thickens. I took a new, completely unmodded ksp. i added to it only kerbalism and its dependencies: kerbalism, kerbalism core, community resource pack, module manager. for each one of those I made sure to track and download the latest stable version. I still get an error message, but a slightly different one what is this harmonyksp? the kerbalism page doesn't even mention it

Checked. folder is no special characters.

I'm trying to install kerbalism+rss, i got this error message this is the list of mods i installed. there's not much besides kerbalism, rss, and their respective dependencies any suggestion?

thanks for the nice words. i am flattered

one thing to account is that those processes are not 100% efficient, so your tanks will run dry eventually. but you can get away with limited supplies - though the greenhouse do consume a relatively large amount of water, something like 30 kg per year after all the recycling is taken into account. as for avoiding drying your tanks, unfortunately the automatization of processes does not have the option of start/stop something when a resource is close to depletion. I had similar problems myself, and the only way I found to tackle them relied on some processes stopping because some tanks were full.

Do planets have biomes in this mod? How many? I am exploring the feasibility of doing life support with local resources; if there's only one biome per planet, then it's unlikely to have all the necessary resources in it, while multiple biomes give a good chance that one of them will have everything

you need to press B while in map view or in the tracking station. But if you are using a custom solar system, it may not be supported with kerbalism radiation belts compatibility.

question on compatibility/balance with RSS: in stock ksp, times are greatly compressed. you need 6 hours to reach mun, and a year lasts one third on an earth year due to 6-hours day. kerbalism failure chances is balanced around that. if i install rss, will failure chance go down to account for the longer missions? or it is just part of the expected increase in difficulty? and what about food consumption? greenhouse generation rates? how does going from a 6 hour per day, 426 days per year calendar to our normal calendar impact it all?