Libra00

I have, for years, excessively modded KSP. I've seen very very long load times due to massive numbers of mods. This is different; it's one mod that takes more time to load than all the other mods I have installed combined, and it appears to be new to the latest version of KF since I have about the same mod setup now as I had before and it wasn't this way. So you can see why I might think something weird is going on.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but searching didn't find any mention of it. I just installed KF for a new 1.04 install and it seems to take longer to load than all my other mods combined. Especially diffusemap2048 at the beginning, but generally everything under the KerbalFoundries/assets folder just seems to take noticeably longer to load than other mods. Not sure if it's just big textures, something weird with my install, or perfectly normal, it was just a big sudden change. Anyway, love the mod, I'll keep it either way, just making sure I didn't break anything.

Wow, someone is resurrecting HL's mod.. fantastic! This has always been in the top 3 of my favorite mods in KSP, and I'm so glad to see it get renewed attention. This mod literally buoyed my dream of building a crazy massive airship-based kethane miner/refinery. My only request is, if it's at all possible, to add some kind of auto-balancing system. Multi-envelope crafts have always been super unstable. :/ Anyway, looking forward to what comes out of this.

As a general rule, it's a good idea to take Scott Manley at his word when he talks about orbital mechanics. I seem to recall he even has a video explaining why the Oberth Effect works, so that might be worth looking up because he's pretty good at explaining things.

Infernal Robotics can do a lot of the folding/hydraulics you mention, but that doesn't really help if you want to play mod-free. As for getting large/stable rovers to the target, it's generally a case of brute force. One thing to remember though is that with enough struts your rocket doesn't have to look anything like an actual rocket. I've seen (and launched) some truly massive rovers atop some seriously beefy rockets. In fact if you're looking for inspiration, search up the 'post your rover' thread, a lot of people especially with bigger rovers tend to post pictures on the launchpad/runway. The most common way to launch a big rover seems to be to put it flat across the top of the rocket so it's symmetrical-ish, rather than having the wheels stick out to one particular side. This is how I've done my very massive kethane mining rovers in the past before I realized that it makes way more sense to be able to fly between kethane patches than to drive.

I've been playing since around 0.13 and never switched to Steam, so I don't have any actual data to back this up, but.. at LEAST in the neighborhood of 1000 hours.

A couple words of advice on rovers, especially on low-gravity bodies. 1) The longer and wider your wheelbase the better. The lower the body's gravity, the more unstable your rover will be, so putting the wheels further out from the center of mass it will have less of an inclination to roll in any particular direction. 2) The heavier your rover the more traction you will have and unless you have some kind of RCS/rocket assist you will need the traction to get up those hills and turn without just ice-skating, especially on the likes of Minmus. Likewise, you can add artificial weight to your rover by, say, putting an ion thruster on your center of mass firing upward depending upon your energy budget. 3) Switch to docking mode so you don't induce roll while just trying to steer. Just have your mouse near the button in case you flip so you can reorient yourself wheels-down before you land. 4) Disable braking on the front wheels, so braking isn't as likely to cause you to flip. 5) Disable steering on the rear wheels. 4+-wheel steering seems neat, but it actually leads to more instability in low gravity as your center of mass sways out of line with its rest position in the middle of all your wheels. That about covers it for stock rovers. Modded rovers can go in quite a diverse array of directions for increased control and traction. I think my favorite system I've devised is to use Kerbal Attachment System winches with a grappling hook (front) and anchor (back) set to different action groups. Not enough traction to climb that crater rim? Fire the forward grapple and reel yourself in. It's a bit slow going, but it's pretty cheap energy-wise. Likewise if you're trying to drive down a steep hill and can't control your descent, drop the anchor (or more than one on bigger rovers) to slow yourself down and keep you pointed down-slope instead of rolling. As for trying to use a science lab on a rover, that's for people far more patient than me. I just built a heavy lander with a bunch of experiments and lab and hopped from biome to biome, came back from the Mun in less than a day with almost 2k science without all the wait and drive and struggle. I think next time (because that lab is so damned heavy) I'm going to orbit the lab and drop micro-landers.

I build anything bigger than an interplanetary lander via orbital construction, modular and docked together. As such they return to LKO and can be either gassed up for a new mission, or if necessary, the fuel tanks and engine cluster can be swapped out for special-purpose stuff. For example, my Jool probe-carrier was retrofitted into a kethane refinery and orbital fuel depot which currently (in my 0.21 save) sits in orbit of Minmus where its' numerous docking ports can host a heavy tanker, several light mining landers, RCS tugs, and the other machinery necessary to be the primary fuel depot for anything headed out of Kerbin's gravity well. Once I'm done with the science tree in 0.23 I plan to rebuild it with even more docking ports where, thanks to tweakables, it's really easy to haul up tons of 'disposable' empty orange tanks to keep outbound ships from having to wait around for refining. I build anything bigger than a one-target IP lander via orbital construction, modular and docked together. As such I return them to LKO, swap tank and engine clusters as needed, add new probes and landers, and send them back out on new missions. For example, in my 0.21 save I had a heavy carrier that came back from its trip to Jool I refitted virtually everything but the docking frame to act as the primary kethane refinery inside of Kerbin's SoI. New (much smaller) engine cluster, different tanks, huge on-demand refinery stack, tanker, mining landers, etc.

Hey, just ran into an interesting bug, not sure if anyone else has seen this yet. I'm using the previous (0.22) version in 0.23 so I'm not expecting any sort of fix, just thought it might be illuminating. So, I'm building a heavy lander in career mode on top of a 2.5m asparagus lifter but when I launch the main engines (skippers) don't work. If I take the asparagus portion off the final stage engine (atlas) works, but what fixes the stage 1 engines is, oddly, removing the MT4 RCS tank, but placing an MT4 anywhere on the rocket causes them to stop working again. I can't imagine what kind of code on RCS tanks might interfere with LFO motors, but.. *shrug* Just thought I'd toss it out there as a curiosity.

Jeb has just returned from his 3rd mission this in-game month, twice to the Mun (different craters), another time to Minmus. He's currently standing in the VAB disturbing the poor engineers by looking between the current 1.25m asparagus lifter and the pile of boosters while grinning in a most disconcerting manner. Bill and Bob are starting to feel like the astronaut complex is home, as they haven't been on a single mission yet. I have a feeling Jeb is waiting for them to get good and settled in before 'requesting their presence' on some crazy interplanetary suicide run. Just so he can be amused on those long transfers.

I would like (at some point) a proper aerodynamics model but only, as many others have said, if it doesn't significantly impact performance. And I say at some point because I don't even play with FAR right now, just haven't gotten around to checking it out, so aerodynamics are obviously not of paramount importance for me.

I've made a bunch of hydrofoils in previous versions and it's not hard to get them up to ~180m/s speed. The key is to use vertical foils to reduce drag (I use straight wing pieces) and add horizontal winglets (not the control surface kind) at the bottom to provide additional bouyancy. Think: Inverted T. The hard part is keeping the nose out of the water at low speeds, and keeping the whole thing in the water at high speeds. As speed increases and fuel burns they develop an increasing tendency to get serious air and there's no surviving that.

Yes, definitely thank you Squad for the attention to performance. I've gotten a noticeable FPS increase on large vehicles and loading times are a good bit shorter. Thanks! Edit: i5 quad 3.3GHz / 8GB RAM.

There are pretty much 2 reasons I set up a mining base: 1) Refueling rovers for long-term-ish missions 2) Orbital refueling stations for interplanetary transfers In the case of #1, I put drills and tanks on one machine and just leave it where it sits. I've only done a couple of these and not for terribly long-term missions, so maybe for a long term rover mission you'd want it to be mobile. Kethane generators are way better than fragile solar panels for long-haul roving/flying, though I tend to do a bit of both. In the case of #2, it seems to me to make the most sense to have drills and kethane tanks on a heavy duty lander that can go where the green stuff is and the orbital station is both refinery and storage. I tend to offload kethane and keep it in that state until I have a specific need, rather than trying to keep tanks full of mono/LFO hanging around. I sadly don't have any pictures anymore, but I used to have a fuel depot in orbit of Minmus using the spherical tanks (which hold something like 40-50k kethane each). I used kethane generators to power the stacks of refiners so an interplanetary ship fueling up for a transit wouldn't have to sit around forever waiting on the refining process and potentially miss its window. I'm currently working on a design using Hooligan Labs' airship parts (on .21) and KAS that can cruise around at high speed (using firespitter's electric props I can get up to ~200m/s on Kerbin) going where the kethane is. Once it finds a patch it uses KAS winches to anchor and lower drill pods. Only part I haven't worked out yet is how to land something on a moving airship to take the kethane back to orbit. I'm certainly not going to attempt mid-air fueling, and even more certainly not in the kind of volume I'd want to make it worth the effort.

I'm not sure if this is still up and working or not, but.. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/21641-Community-Voice-Server-In-space-WE-can-hear-you-scream!