Pulstar

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.

Yes, they will inherit the flags. Flags are assigned per craft part of the vessel in the persistance/quicksave files as they get replenished every time a kerbal boards the specific part (just like EVA jetpack RCS fuel), that way if you dock a lander with a cruiser having a seperate flag neither gets overwritten. By default everything made and launched as one ship in the VAB/SPH has the same flag. So basically should you forget to change a flag in the VAB/SPH or want to set separate flags if it's a multilander mission (I know that's not what you asked about) you can just find the craft in the persistance file, find the crewed module where the dolts you want to have new flags are (or will be, you can do this even if it is uncrewed at the moment) and edit the flag filepath in it to the flag you want to use. However AFAIK flags are not stored in .craft (because it would create issues trying to share them when others don't have yours) and are assigned per launch, so it's best/fastest to either quicksave it while on the launchpad or in initial orbit, edit the save and reload if you want to do that. I think being able to change mission flags from the tracking station or vessel info screen in the knowledge base could also be a good idea for a new feature, but it's a very minor thing.

Fonso sounds pretty cool Nova, I imagine the mountain peaks looking like islands above a sea of fog with clouds floating somewhere within them. Quite alien and awesome, would love to put a surface base on the edge of such a "sea". I imagine it and brave kerbonauts in the twilight of the outer Kerbol System, gazing into the fog below as sharp mountain peaks rise over the "surface" of a gaseous pool and a ringed gas giant is hanging above the horizon. Now that would tell you you've gone a long way from Kerbin. Also glad to hear that the geyser prototypes worked. Hazardous surface environments are really something I would like to see, whether it is lava, geysers or scatter rocks with an actual collision mesh. Finding a safe landing site is too easy in KSP now. I'm eagerly and patiently looking forward to seeing you and the rest of the team try to implement that.

Career mode groundwork is good, I'm glad to see that crew management is finally making it in. Also the polish on the KSC facilities is another thing that's definitely needed. Resources being postponed more is of course disappointing but remember what someone else said in regards to that, and something which I agree with. Docking was a vital feature that had to wait for quite a while to actually get implemented. A lot of coding had to be done so that it could be introduced, like creating new vessels our of docked/undocked ships on the fly for one, the same thing applies to resources. We need part tweakables like being able to have empty by default tanks on the launchpad, set oxidizer/liquid fuel ratios ourselves (and finally have LV-Ns using no oxidizer) etc. for one so that they can be filled with different resources than just the two. I think that could be what the new part functionality is about as that's a feature that's been talked about for a bit. Or it could be something else but I am eager to see what the new functionality will allow both for the players and the modders.

The gravity doesn't just "take you" it still works on you when you're in orbit, indeed that is what keeps you from flying straight away into the unknown by keeping you in an orbit. What gets you down is the atmosphere slowing down your craft as it goes through it thus losing velocity and making you go slower than what you need to stay in orbit. Since in space you have vacuum nothing slows you down and you can orbit forever, as to remain in your orbit you just need to keep going as fast as you already are without adding more speed (in reality it is a bit more complicated and not really forever but in KSP it is basically forever). If there is no atmosphere you can have a stable orbit as low as you like as long as there won't be a nasty hill ruining your day in your way. Hence the limiting factor on those bodies is how high is the terrain over which you will be orbiting. So essentially the lowest stable orbit is the one where there is no atmospheric gas to slow you down. Mind you, depending how high you're orbiting it may take a while before the spacecraft falls from orbit towards the ground as more pressure=more gas=more drag=more lost velocity. And by a while I mean several orbits.

Rovers are pretty easy in general. I recommend building them in the Spaceplane Hangar as the symmetry mode there is better for surface vehicles. You want to have wheels symmetrically places on the sides of a main axis or body and all at the same height. Mind you you can have a front pair of wheels higher or lower than the back one but having them equal makes it a bit more stable. You also want to have the rover's center of mass be as low as possible so it doesn't flip as much during sharp turns, also I recommend making it a bit wide so it doesn't start rolling. Personally I place batteries under the body of rover to lower the center of mass, placing RTGs there (if you know they won't hit the ground during driving) is another good idea. The biggest problem is landing the rover. If you're landing somewhere with a sufficient amount of atmosphere you can just put parachutes on it somewhere, dcouple it from the carrier rocket after putting it on a descent trajectory. But if you need engines for a powered descent, well then you have two options. One is placing the tanks and engines below the rover, the problem with this is that you need to drive off the descent stage without wrecking the rover. It's doable but requires clever thinking so the decoupler below the rover doesn't hold you in place even after decoupled. The second one is placing them above the rover, this one is far easier because you just need to space out the engines above so they don't burn the rover. Sometimes people place them hanging on the bottom side of landers dropping them below so they drive out easily. Others build skycranes on top of them and detach them after they land so the rover can drive around without excess weigh on top of it (which is bad as you want your center of mass low on a rover). A good idea is to design the rover in the SPH first and then copy the file to the VAB and there add a carrier rocket and the lander/descent stage which gets it safely down to the surface. Because the VAB is better for building rockets (obviously).

It's not said outright in the game but the coastal bits in particular strongly hint that, also Mark Laidlaw and Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar confirmed that at some point. You have a harbor that's basically a beach with no water and piers just standing over it with rusted ships quite far inland. Either way I doubt kerbals have portals to teleport large amount of water from planet to planet.

KAS won't help him if the ships are already launched, it needs a winch with a connector on one of the craft and a connector port on the other. Also it needs a kerbal to plug the connector into the port. The lazor mod would also work as it allows beaming fuel between ships but he would need the specific lazor on one of the ships or on a third vessel. Easiest way is to simply make a quicksave in game with F5 and minimize to open it with the notepad, find the probe and set all fuel values to full (which is 100 as in 100% IIRC) save it and load the quicksave with F9. The hardest part is navigating inside the file if you never saw it before, but it's all grouped up neatly so search using ctrl+f for the probe's name and then look under it's part list for the fuel tanks. I recommend testing if you know how to do it on a test vehicle at the KSC first. Just make a backup of the quicksave (copy it to a different directory on your PC) if you want to reload an unedited state.

Ocean and atmospheric resources will probably be infinite, deposits in ice/rock are going to be finite but they're supposed to be in the "takes a long time to deplete" range. Even the combine in Half-Life 2 only managed to drain a few meters worth of sea-level in 20 years, I don't think Kerbals could do better as much as jeb would like to.

I disagree, producing fuel on site has been proposed for a variety of return missions most notably Mars Direct. It makes sense for a space program to use it as it reduces the payload and thus carrier rocket you need to get everything wherever it is you want to go. For career mode the most important implication is that reusable craft will indeed be reusable which within budget constraints is an important benefit. You have to remember that career mode will have limitations on what can you can design and launch which will be part of the challenge.

Well it is hard to judge a game that isn't finished yet.

I think it's a test resource (duh) for the knowledge base/detector or other functionality of the resource mining system. Those do have colors assigned to them on the resource pie chart last time we saw it.

Well it still won't be one omni-processor IIRC, more like a few processing combines. But my memory is fuzzy on that part, I do know there's supposed to be a smaller and larger processor since Nova made a model for the small one and it was shown in one KSP weekly and the larger ones WIP animation was shown on the stream. The key challenge will be finding resource locations that overlap so that you can refine them on the ground in one place. Although in the case of small bodies like Minmus, Bop, Pol or even Vall simply getting things into orbit and refining it there may be practical. Even with mining being just drill+convert with little input actually using those resources will require time and effort. There's a pump drill for that, I think a screenshot of it was even shown once. The second one on the left I think.

The chart is in some parts outdated, the current version of it remains a secret as a lot of the things related to how resources will work. Two things that we know are planned to be different are the amount of converter/processor parts is lower (it got too complicated and some functions got combined into single parts) and there being resources used possibly for construction pf parts/spacecraft (metals and kerbon). The latter is speculation, as in the screenshot of the WIP resource list in the knowledge database shows metals like Titanite and Alium, I assume they're metals functioning roughly the same as the real life elements they're based on. This is the old shot of the database resource list. The list could have less/more/different elements whenever resources get added,: What is known is that you will have to detect resources, but while there will be different kinds of detectors you won't scan the planet for them like ISA Mapsat or the Kethane detectors do. Not sure how they plan to do it (or I don't remember and the details got lost in the forum time travel incident of April), but it is known it's not supposed to be as uneventful/slow as scanning for kethane is. Oh and deposits are supposed to have random locations although they'll be restricted to specific moons/planets like the chart says. So no water on Ike. Overall though mining will look a lot similar to how kethane does it, at least for fuel although the specifics may differ (for one the deposit locations will be market in orbital view and there will be many kinds of minerals). Detect resources, land mining equipment at a deposit, collect resources, use refining/processing equipment to turn it into something useful (fuel, possibly spacecraft parts but that bit was never outright confirmed, the metals on the list may just be fluff).

I was asking about the debugger part, the one which can generate and reveal kethane deposists. You know, so that I can test kethane rigs and see that they work at the KSC.

Anyone got the kethane debugger for 0.20? Could really use it at the moment.

I land them attached to the bottom of a landing hanging assembly. Once it lands I just decouple it and drive away. You just build a wide structure with the engines and fuel above the rover. Kind of like this below only make the legs longer so that the rover can be taller. The idea is that the rover doesn't take the impact of the landing and doesn't get obstructed by the structure. You can put a structural fuselage below the 6-way node and then another pair of 6 way nodes and the legs proper. Preferably the thing should be H shaped when looking from the top so that the landing structure has a wide base.

Some of these are possibly coming in the future or in mods but either way: Nuclear Reactors, because attaching two dozen or more gigantor panels to power a ridiculous amount of ion engines is a bit hard not to mention probably heavier than a reactor. Big ion engines, basically scaled up. Fuel/power lines. This is the part of the KAS mod that I like the most, apart from the magnet/grappling hook. More lights, especially omnidirectional lights, nav lights and strobe lights. More space station/surface base parts. Hinges. Small wings and control surfaces for aerial probes. Also electric propellers in small and medium sizes. Bigger tile solar panels you can place on wings, to reduce the part count on my electric planes. Hot Air Balloons to make rockoons. Actual threads, wheels are nice but threaded vehicles would be nicer. Also there are no tank steer medium-sized wheels. Small radially-attached jet engines and ramjet intakes so I can place them on or under a wing without a huge nacelle. Small and radially-attached drogue parachute variants. Hybrid jet/rocket engine like the SABRE. Heatshields and payload fairings.

Due to the oberth effect burning from a Low Kerbin Orbit is definitely the most efficient way. As you mentioned the problem is that you need lots of thrust but there is a simple solution, you do multiple burns at the periapsis which will form where you burned. Still, depending on where you want to get to you may not have enough time to finish that. Then I recommend doing it the lazy and inefficient approach of getting into a bare-minimum solar orbit outside of kerbin's SoI and planning a transfer burn from there, at the very least those burns tend to be more accurate so you waste less time saving/reloading.

Two things that come to mind when I look at your ship: 1) The transfer/command module part looks a bit big and you're using a rockomax diameter engine (so either a poodle, skipper or mainsail). 2) Liquid fuel boosters are rather small in comparison to the payload. Also no SRBs. So basically you can either make the payload smaller or the first stages bigger, the former is a bit trickier while the latter is fairly simple (also I figure you are more interested in that). For one I think you could cut the rockomax-16 tank and just leave the rockomax-32 on the command module stage. If you're using a mainsail (I don't think you are) swap it for a poodle or skipper. You don't need a lot of thrust on the transfer stage, although granted nobody likes sitting 6 minutes doing a transfer burn (like I did recently with my single NERVA setup). Either way the mainsail is rather heavy and mostly dead weight for a transfer stage, it's ISP is also meh (but it's good for the heavy lifter that it is if you need thrust). Either way I split up my tips into two sections for both shedding mass and making a better carrier rocket. Shedding mass on the payload: The lander, now I'm unsure what I see there (don't have KSP on this PC to check the .craft). Is that a rockomax-32 tank or a hitchhiker storage pod+rockomax-16 below (well above since it's upside down) the lander can? A rockomax-32 tank would probably be overkill, to get a 2-man lander can into munar orbit for a return rendezvous (20 km altitude is what I use) from the surface you need less than two FL-T200 tanks worth of fuel (or just one FL-T400) and a single LV-909 engine. The problem though is landing there in the first place, but a rockomax-16 tank and a poodle should be enough for that. Still you want to get back and minimize mass you're taking back into LMO to rendezvous with the command module. You can do what apollo did and have the rockomax-16+poodle as a descent stage and a single or double lv-909 attached to the minimum amount of fuel for the return/ascent stage. Or you can experiment with external detachable fuel tanks. Landing on the Mun is far harder than getting back from its surface when it comes to fuel. As for the command module if it has a mainsail swap it like I mentioned. If not you can experiment with the LV-N as its efficiency greatly reduces the fuel you need for a transfer burn but you don't need to if you don't want to. Also you would probably need two LV-N atomic engines to have decent transfer burn time, possibly more (if you dislike long burns). Side-mounting them is recommended as bi/tricouplers+fairings have a few issues (inner fairings crash into your engines) with the stack decoupler attached to the bottom of the fuel tank they're feeding from. Carrier rocket Double orange rockomax-64 jumbo+mainsail is the way to go for liquid stages for those very heavy payloads. If they're still too heavy to lift that (having less than 1.0 TWR for 5-10 seconds while avoiding overheating is usually worth it, but longer is questionable). Do proper asparagus staging. You have 4 liquid fuel boosters all connected to the central rocket (unless I'm blind and can't see how it really is), you should split them into 2 pairs for decoupling while retaining symmetry (you just need to drag individual decouplers into new stages so it doesn't matter you placed them in 4-fold symmetry and they got grouped automatically). Then connect the first pair to get jettisoned to the pair that goes second and the second pair to the main stage. So you stage and drop 2-2-1 and not 4-1. It's more efficient but you lose on some thrust (which is usually irrelevant but may cause problems if you're really on the edge of 1.0 TWR). SRBs are your friends, strap as many as you can to the sides of your 4 outer liquid stages, symmetrically of course. Naturally have them all fire alongside your other lifting engines at launch, just throttle the thrust so you don't burn too much or accelerate too fast in the thicker lower parts of the atmosphere. I recommend putting a strut on the top of every SRB and attach it to the tank they're mounted on so that they're stable (assuming the rest of your rocket isn't too wobbly). If that's still not enough then add more rocket (also struts, space tape is very important). For my biggest payloads I launched them with 8 double jumbo+mainsail side-rockets (with SRBs) around the main one. All staging in pairs for maximum efficiency.