Wetapunga

Hey Taniwha I have a request for future updates Could we have a spacedock part designed specifically for expanding ships/stations? Often you want to build a new station wing, like another storage module on your orbital factory, you can build it from a spacedock but now you have the problem of trying to manoeuvre two enormous ungainly objects around and attach them with docking ports. Could we have a spacedock that lets you build out from it, and instead of releasing it can convert to a connection, just a solid strong piece with no dock functionality anymore. So if you want to expand your spacestation you can attach several of these expansion construction units, build out from them, and when complete it becomes a permanent attached part of the station Paint scribbles to communicate idea This functionality should be quite easy to implement and greatly enhances the usefulness of EPL when expanding existing structures. You could have a variety of these dock sizes, from great big ones for building mega station expansions out from an initial factory; down to little KAS attachable ones so you can surface attach a new little dock and build mini expansions out. In my current project my little self sufficient OKS station had the infrastructure to run an orbital dock, but not enough raw material or rocket part storage so I kept having to run several supply missions too complete a build. I decided it was time for an expansion Whare o te marama Station in its early days With only enough storage for 20000ish rocket parts and ore it couldn't build things bigger than itself So a large expansion was built over many months or shuttle transfers sending resources gradually to the station to build the new project, the expansion took nearly 200,000 rocket parts. The new expansion was so massive that docking it would be impossible. Instead I backed off the little station which weighs only 300 tons and carefully docked it to its new giant section. I definitely wouldn't be able to do that again with the station weighing about 20,000 tons with minimal cargo. There is now no practical way too add more sections, which is why the expansion dock would be very very useful addition. Almost finished now, Henkel the spider kerbal got bored of spinning his web (KAS can be rather tedious) so a few arms remain unstrung

What you need is an incentive to have these things mobile and move them about As it is currently in Kethane, EPL and the Roverdude mods, you don't need a mobile wheeled platform. You just build a big lander that can fly to orbit and back (as pretty much all your mining is low gravity airless moons) landing them ontop of a deposit or high concentration spot Your mod needs to break up these deposit spots into much more granular areas that become depleted or reduced in quality, so you have to micromanage your mining operations moving your mobile excavators and sorters/refiners to new locations. Wheels are impractical if the next mining spot is hundreds of km away, however they make sense if the fresh mining spots are only a few hundred meters -> few kms away Perhaps have a tiered system. Initially you exploit small surface patches of exposed ore, move about frequently as these are depleted. Then you can either move on looking for more exposed spots, or invest your mined material in some infrastructure. Remove overburden to expose more of the vein (basically uses lots of energy and time, produces lots of waste rock you have to store in tanks) this gives you more ore to extract, overtime this can become depleated and the strip mining means you produce lots of overburden (you get bored of making tank farms to store waste rock) So you invest lots of effort in building a shaft mining complex, static but it is high efficiency and permanent, produces much less waste rock than strip mining. Liquid resources could have a similar system where initial taps are close to surface and high pressure, easy to extract, as these short lived spots are depleted you can move onto deeper bores and pumping up the resources. Final tier would be fracking, where you are injecting a lot of energy and some resources into the ground to produce large amounts of resources from otherwise non-viable mining areas.

Sounds intriguing, I like the idea of different ore/mineral sources requiring different specialised extraction and refining set ups Like drill rigs for extracting liquid resources, regolith sorting for materials in the surface dirt, giant excavators and such I want a Bagger 288 in KSP Perhaps if you are confident enough to modify/create plugins you could have mining sites have to be surveyed and prepared. Send in exploratory drills that give you estimates of the depth and concentration of the resource; then you have to remove the overburden, then you can get into mining the ore. Really ambitious would be to have procedural terrain modification, or at least some indication of you are digging a big hole and piling up the unwanted material

So will this integrate into the USI mods? Perhaps as part of FTT ?

I'm more an in-situ resourcing kinda guy (EPL and Karbonite) So by the time I need such large launchers I have the industry to fabricate in orbit of the mun or minimus

Desperately trying not to land on the forbidden dark side of Kerbin where the shadow kraken dwelt

Hey Roverdude, regarding the very very useful logistics module, would it be possible to get a version of it for crew transfers? Currently I can use the logistics modules for a very extensive mining system linking my surface mines with orbiting factories I am building a very large OKS station and have to ship across all my kerbals manually This sucker is going to have like a hundred residents and it is only one section of the planned colony. It would be great if you made the Logistics module be able to texture swap between a cargo port and a passenger port. The cargo port looks the same as it does now, all utilitarian and industrial; the new texture mode however swaps it too being a passenger port with a few nice viewports, an IVA like an airport terminal waiting lounge, and the little transport modules turned into passenger shuttles Perhaps little shuttles like this: When in the passenger port texture the logistics module can only transfer Kerbals. Have the transfer cost fuel and some life support supplies What do you think?

Why not make the OKS module end caps into configurable tanks for life-support, parts, ect. Make them basically an attic for storage of random stuff. Like the Asteroid fuel hatches have it that you can switch through textures to choose what the part will store So instead of being a useless cosmetic item they become a very useful small storage unit to replace the ugly TAC life support tanks, blend in better with the aesthetic of OKS.