Pulstar

Yes, the Kerbal Alarm Clock is amazing. It allowed me to juggle between a land and return mission to Gilly, 6 launches to Duna and 7 (or 8?) to Laythe at the same time. Also it saves and restores maneuver node data which allows for much simpler and less time-consuming flight planning as you don't need to recreate those even if you exit the game and not play it for days. Really, this is pretty much the one utility mod the features of which IMO have to be integrated into the stock game. Well it and procedural wings.

It's because Duna is the easiest target for manned interplanetary exploration out of all. It's thin atmosphere allows easy aerobraking and landing while at the same time it doesn't make return from the surface too hard. Also it looks like Mars.

Don't vessel in atmosphere get automatically deleted unless on an orbital trajectory though? Or does the Airship mod prevent that somehow?

Not sure if it is a priority but you can get around it by using the small ladder pieces and placing them at an angle thus extending the main ladder so the kerbals stop climbing while on the platform. I always test my ladders on the ground before launching anywhere to be sure they can return after planting flags.

It's because the parachutes are attached to the bottom of the rover, ships rotate in atmosphere to face the prograde with the side that generates the least drag (good to know if you're doing extreme aerobraking so that ships don't break apart when entering the atmosphere the wrong way). Since parachutes work by generating drag and by pulling things they're pulling the lower part of your rover up thus flipping it. Always put parachutes on the top side.

Here, I made some screenshots to illustrate what I meant: Middle engine: Coathanger: Skycrane: Tipper:

Hence why I put a probe core on a decoupler at the CoM oriented properly and select "control from here" in the right-click menu, although docking ports can also be used for this. That also helps with docking if you put one on top of say a spaceplane rather than at the front/back. It shifts the Nav Ball to reflect the point the vessel is pointing at relative to the horizon and prograde/retrograde from it's perspective. I personally dislike using more than a single pair of centrally-mounted VTOL engines since it's hard to align them with the CoM unless you use copy-pasted sections. But it is also an option.

There are four ways I found to do this, the vertical landing "tipper" aproach, the landing "coathanger" assembly, the middle-engine approach and the skycrane. Unfortunately my screenshot folders seems to be empty of examples. One vital hint, always add a probe module on the carrier rocket and right click on it to "control from here". Saves a lot of trouble if the rover is upside down during launch and transit or if it is sideways compare to the rocket. In all you first build a truck (I usually build tankers out of a the big rockomax 32 tank), then you copy the craft file from the SPH to the VAB folders to build the carrier rocket and landing things using the symmetry in it. "tipper" - you attach a decoupler with landing legs, either regular ones or ones made out of girders ("I-beams")+flat panels and not-rockomax minonodes, at the bottom of the rover. Make the base as wide as possible, if you have parachutes always attach them to the top of the rover with a decoupler so that the rover orients itself with the legs being down when they open. Engines and fuel tanks can go to the bottom or top depending whichever is easier to place (usually bottom). What you do is you place the legs in an X shape so that you can tip the rover into one of the empty spaces betwen the legs (rotate the legs in the VAB using shift+rotation keys to do this). Decouple, tip the rover, decouple whatever was attached to the front of the rover. Usually the mass of the wheels shifts the CoM so that it falls in the right direction properly. If you use deployable landing legs you can only the front pair to retract and thus tip over the rover to fall on it's wheels. Risky for heavier vehicles and high-g planets, although you can use small radial engines attached to the front decoupler to slow down the falling front so it doesn't get damaged. Coathanger - you land the rover oriented horizontally but hanging from an assembly with landing legs and engines. Basically a scaffolding, but with enough area to fit the rover and allow it to drive out. Once it lands you just decouple it and drop it below, you need enough room between the wheels and the ground so that the assembly takes the force of the landing impact but not too much so the drop isn't big. Decouple dropping it below and drive away. Using this usually means the rover is launched upside down when on top of the rocket. middle engine - you build a tanker rover (or one using hithiker modules for kerbal transport) using two tanks or hithiker pods with a 6-way hub between them right in the middle. Use that to build your engines right at the CoM of the rover, using decouplers or not if you want to drag the engines around after landing. Use the same central node to add a lander leg assembly using structural parts connected to that node. sky crane - find the center of mass of the rover on it's roof, attach a radial decoupler there, now attach a radial attachment node on it, build fuel tanks, probe pod (important!) ASAS, engines, legs and all the other rocket parts on top of that radial node. Just space out the engines so their exhaust doesn't damage the rover. You land the rover using "control from here" on the skycrane, similar to the coat hanger but you land using the rover's wheels and after you land you decouple and fly the skycrane away crashing it at a safe distance.

That's actually what bac9 did with it for 0.21, we'll get to see it in the update.

Too many. 8 ships are going to laythe at the moment, the first phase of colonizing the Joolian system. Well rather establishing a permanent presence there since at best there will be a dozen kerbals there. One around Eve waiting for a Kerbin return window. A munbase, two space stations in Kerbin space and a kethane base on duna which waits for a lander, tanker and surface rover. Those three are still waiting for a transfer window. There's also a probe to Eeloo which will definitely not get into orbit around it as I forgot to adjust the delta-v for the highly unusual orbit of Eeloo.

The biggest improvement is that you can actually see where the deposit is on the surface. I think the deposits were roughly the same and they were fairly easy to land on the bigger the body is. It was just that there was no way to directly see their location and pick a site that has enough margin for error, especially if you had just a "rough" mostly incompletely scanned map.

Seniors work great for me, although you can't physics warp with them. Still seeing 6 NERVAs on a tug pull 3 orange tugs all the way to Jool was most satisfactory. Haven't tested how getting pulled by a mainsail level of thrust works on them though.

I think it wasn't as much promised as it was said that the work on flags possibly opened up the possibility to do that. Some of the code used to pick custom flags can be applied to decals, but there's still the issue of plastering it on top of a usually round surface correctly. And on a place that is determined by the player rather than on a preset area on a flag. So that will still need some work to implement it obviously. It's a cosmetic feature I would love to see but it's not as important as flags were IMO. Flags at least mark stuff other than just look pretty.

They're going out to sea at the moment, t-44 minutes. I wonder how far away will the launch be visible and what the trajectory will be.

It's also an issue of integrating and optimizing the code in the case of plugins, at times it might simply be better to just write everything from scratch since the developers have access to the source code. Modders don't so their solutions and features implemented may be a bit more bloated (as far as memory/CPU usage is concerned) than they could be and a bit less fleshed out than they could be with access to the source code. Since this is a commercial work in progress giving them access to the source code of the game is obviously not an option. EDIT: ninja'd by the post above

I use the KAS mod for my tanker rovers as well. It is a sane solution after all, as much as docking on the surface has the Jebediah Kerman seal of approval.

Kerbal attachment system or KAS for short is a great mod. For one it allows you to connect fuel lines between vessels which makes land-based refueling far less frustrating (land docking is very annoying to do), pretty useful if you're already using kethane. The crane parts are great as well, I built a rover crane which I used to assemble my Munbase out of separately launched modules. Kethane is a pretty obvious recommendation. While scanning for kethane is a bit dull and slow kethane opens up new possibilities for missions. Want to simulate sample return automated (or not) mission? Add a drill and kethane tank and mine it full then return it to kerbin. In addition you can do in-situ fuel production for return missions like Mars Direct wanted. Also designing mining and refining rigs can be a bit of a challenge due to the power requirements, unless you're content with just using the kethane-powered electric generator (but even then you need more drills to fuel the converters and the generator). Firespitter is a nice mod I recommend if you ever want to fly planes on oxygen-less atmospheric worlds as it adds electric propellers (in addition to helicopter rotors, VTOL propellers and other fun aircraft parts). Just remember, VTOL regardless if it's a helicopter or other VTOL aircraft, is hard.

I always thought there were far less islands on laythe than that. But that's probably because you only see the big ones from orbit.

How heavy is that anyway? I'm not familiar with any of the non-stock parts you use. Although it looks like you could use 4 more wheels so that the weight per wheel is halved.

At first I was like, why do we even need an electrical generator? Then I figured you can make self-powered kethane mining and refining rigs that operate in the night without using a ton of RTGs! And more compact rigs that don't need lots of gigantor panels and structural parts. Also kethane powered rovers. Mind = blown.

It really depends on the altitude you will be landing at and how heavy the landing craft is. Surface pressure on Duna is about 10 times lower at "sea level" (0m) than on Kerbin, this means far less drag and thus parachutes are less effective. However the gravity is about four times lower which lessens the negative effect of the thin Duna atmosphere on parachutes. In general though aim for the low lands since they have the highest pressure and thus parachutes are more effective there, the darker areas of the surface (marias probably, but what do I know of dunar geology) are the lowest ones. You also want to be coming in at a shallow angle so that the parachutes have enough time to slow you down as much as they can (also so that the forces when they deploy don't tear the lander apart, although strutting the parachutes to the rest of the craft helps with that). Either way in my experience, even with heavy landers, you can slow down the craft to about 30 m/s at least just using the parachutes. Usually it's just below 20 m/s for me, sometimes less. Few manage to slow down below 10 m/s although I did see it happen. Overall landing with just parachutes is doable for lighter and more sturdy craft (landing legs tend to break anywhere between 5 to 10 m/s landing speed depending on the leg type) but there are diminishing returns to adding more parachutes. The simpler solution to just adding enough parachutes for that to work is to just add a descent engine for the last 500>meters to assist them in slowing down the lander. You want fairly high thrust (for Duna, which is anywhere between 0.5 to 1.0 Kerbin TWR IMO) and just enough fuel for about 5 seconds of burning. That may not seem like much but the truth is the parachutes will kill all horizontal velocity, so you'll be falling straight down thus steering is not an issue, and you can focus just on pressing shift and ctrl while watching your velocity and nothing else. Just remember that it's called a suicide burn for a reason, so wait until you are close enough to the ground or the tanks will go dry before you are safely on the surface. That's why you need good thrust, to decelerate fast as close to the ground as possible and thus save on the needed fuel (since the parachutes did most the work). Still I find landing on the razor's edge so to speak quite fun.

With tidal effects from Jool and Tylo+Vall water seems probable, would explain where the oxygen in the atmosphere came from. But it could be just one liquid forming up the oceans.

Oh man, didn't notice the debug tool got linked to in the main post again. My apologies.

Is it possible to spawn/generate a kethane deposit at a specific location like you could when using the old debugger? I have a nice Mun base that's not on a deposit which I built after 0.20 but before the Kethane update and would like to add a kethane refinery to it without having to redo the whole thing on top of the deposit (I like the location, got a few flags around and a descent section of an old lander as well). I guess I could try editing the kethane.cfg file's random seed for the Mun until I get a deposit but I'm not sure if I can edit that and see the changes without a KSP restart or if that's from where the plugin reads the data about deposit locations. Also I could use that to just spawn a deposit under the KSC for mining rig testing.

If you want a full, mostly-complete scan at warp with minimal gaps then a polar orbit scanner takes about 30 minutes in my experience, usually though it's usable with far less than that. Depends on the planetary body though. Overall if you just want a refuel base and care less about location I recommend putting it in a low inclination orbit so it only scans a small belt around the equator, since it's fairly easy to land and get back from there. That should take a fraction of the time needed for a full map and you should have fully scanned deposits there anyway without major gaps in scanning area in the band. Likewise if you want to go for the poles (because drilling ice on Duna is cool, *badum tish*) a polar orbit satellite will always scan the poles in the most detail first.