RoboRay

I discovered that the giant inflatable heatshield makes an excellent ballute... I've got a relatively lightweight folding plane inside and the delivery canister kept tumbling because of the aerodynamic properties of a cylinder. This fixed it. Next up, probe planes to Eve, Duna, Laythe and even the depths of Jool! I've got a design worked out that can handle them all. I think.

The Smart Parts mod has a fuel-level sensor that you can put on a tank to trigger staging or an action group when that tank is empty. If you need to minimize part count, one sensor part may be able to replace several fuel lines.

Oh, right... I was only thinking linearly. You're absolutely correct about the spherical effects.

No. In the real world if you go deep below the surface, you will be pulled upward by the gravitational attraction of the portion of the planet's mass that's above you while still being pulled downward by the portion below you. If were able to make a hollow cave at the center of the planet, you'd be able to float in zero gee right in the middle, being pulled equally in all directions. Once you move slightly out of the center, you'll be pulled gently toward that side, away from the center. If you made the cave big enough, you could walk around on the walls of the cave as you would feel slightly more pull "upward" because you're closer to that mass than to the mass on the opposite side of the cave. Gravity is applied to a single point of the ship (the CoM). Individual parts do not feel gravity variations, so there are no tidal forces within a single ship. This is why you can't use gravity-gradient stabilization for space stations to keep them always facing the same side down at the planet (like the ISS does). However, if you tether two craft together with a KAS winch, the two craft do experience the gravity gradient and you can tidally stabilize them. I played around with this a while back.

In that case, I have no idea.

Change module = Strut to module = Part Way back in the KSP alpha days, there was some reason to use the archaic "Module = Strut" instead, but I don't recall why. It seems that KSP 1.2 has some changes that now prevent parts set up like that from loading. I've been applying this fix to a lot of old abandoned mod parts I still like to use.

Kerbin's atmosphere at 10km is about the same air pressure of Duna at the datum. And Duna's gravity is less, which helps with flight. So, if you can manage flight at 15 km on Kerbin, you're good for low-level flying at Duna. You may have to dodge some mountains, but you can get around.

Since the ion thruster turned out to be pretty inadequate, I looked into Firespitter and found there is a preliminary version for KSP 1.2. So, I redesigned my folding-wing Kite probe-plane for folding electric propellers. It can cruise at 15km on Kerbin doing 250 m/sec, so I think it will do well at Duna. There's enough LFO onboard to run the fuel cells for over five hours of flying.

Still doing better than ESA!

A rotating wing makes it a lot easier to design a plane that fits inside a fairing...- Well, at least the important stuff survived!

Contares, but it's also dependent on the new Retractable Lifting Surface mod. There's also a straight wing in Contares that rotates 90 degrees for stowing. Lift when extended, no lift when stowed. The tourists will love it!

I got distracted investigating alternative landing methods for capsules...

The config files themselves are fair game for updating and distributing (with the possible exception of the descriptive flavor text). There's a couple of abandoned mods that I would love to take over and redistribute, but the owner dropped off the face of the planet, so I'm limited to just providing replacement config files.

These trucks are intended for Laythe, where solar panels only have about 5% of the power output they do at Kerbin, so they are loaded down with RTGs. Most of them are tucked underneath the cabs or the running boards (which are the radiators, as you noticed), but the refinery truck has some more visible RTGs right behind the cab. The refinery truck also has a large fuel cell array on the back.

It came on, what 25 floppy disks? Anyway, I think I'm close to finalizing the designs for the mining trucks I'll be sending to Laythe. Here's some pictures of a mobility test near home... The train consists of one miner, one refinery and two tankers. They can split up while working, but link back up for moving to a new site.

Thank you for making KSP 1.2 great again!

Ah, you're a "one tree instead of the forest" kind of person. Noted! (There sure are some strange pictures in this thread for it to be about nothing but Kerbin launches, however.)

You asked "why would anyone want more than one satellite?" and I answered. If you don't want questions answered, don't ask.

The CC-BY 4.0 International license Ven used does allow it. It certainly would be appreciated. I'm willing to try to piece it together myself, but it may be a few days until I can get around to it.

I did. I used it extensively in earlier KSP versions, but FAR was just an endless stream of crash to desktops in x64. The stock aero is at least adequate now, so I'll take 64-bit KSP over FAR.

There are other gaps in the low-level coverage. Only one of them matters for launching, but if you do more on Kerbin itself than just launch into space, complete surface coverage is nice to have.

Yeah, you certainly can do additional passes to slow down more, as needed. In this case, I had plenty of excess fuel to burn in tanks that were about to be discarded so I just went for it. I sent a previous probe through a pinball-machine course of I-forget-how-many gravity assists to get hi/lo science data from all the Joolian moons for just a couple of hundred m/sec.

Here's a recent mission of mine... The craft is still out at the edge of Jool's SOI, but a flyby of Tylo completely captures the craft into orbit around Jool. An 88 m/sec burn after passing Tylo sets up a Laythe encounter, and another 525 m/sec is needed to capture at Laythe (whether by burn or aerobraking).

I designed a mining truck for my upcoming Laythe colony...

It's always amusing that so many people think if you simply install MechJeb, it just takes over and plays the game for you... Anyway, I find both KER and MJ together to be essential. There is important information that KER provides which MJ does not (like ground slope angles), and there is important information that MJ provides and KER does not (like RCS ΔV). My on-screen displays include HUD windows from both systems. Either on their own are inadequate.