FaceDeer

CKAN still thinks the latest version is 5.5.2 with the teeny Xenon tanks. Is that something that needs fixing on this end, or on CKAN's end?

That'd be nice, it'll make it easier to take or leave just the functionality that I'm interested in. In Kethane, for example, I always threw away that Kerbal-to-Kethane generator unit (ick) and it was annoying having to dig it out each time. And I have some trouble with the thermodynamics of Karbonite rockets, so I'd prefer to just have the mine-and-convert stuff.

You might like the real-life MOOSE system that NASA designed ("Man Out Of Space Easiest"), but sadly has never actually built and tested.

For some reason I'm obsessed with Moho. It's got a stark, barren beauty to it, and it's deuced hard to get to so I feel like I'm out there "on my own." I love sending big missions with ultra-long-range science rovers there, to spend months traversing the landscape gathering science without knowing for sure whether they'll get that payload home. And there's a creepy vibe to the place, I can just imagine the sound of rocks creaing and cracking at dawn and dusk as the temperature switches between ultracold to searing hot.

Yay, 0.23! Time to start building my ridiculously large fuel depots again!

This is much as I imagined a portable smelter would look, very nice. Perhaps a future enhancement might be to put side panels covering it that unfold like petals when it's in operation and have radiators on the inside surface? That would give it a nice analogous functionality to how the Kethane processor's radiators emerge during operation while not simply copying the design. Perhaps even make the furnace itself give a little glow of heat.

Nice! HexCans were a decent enough stopgap measure, but it's good to give a mod like this its own unique and recognizable visual style. Yeah, the number one thing that's held me back from going whole-hog with Extraplanetary Launchpads has been the models for some of the parts. I'm glad to hear that you're getting input from actual real-world engineers on how stuff like this would look and operate, I'd love to set up a bucket-wheel excavator on the Mun.

I don't know how versatile the Kethane DLL is in this regard, but it'd be fun if in addition to the big ore deposits there were also lots of littler ones scattered around. If that was the case then it might make sense to have a small ore scanner with a range measured in meters - you'd mount it on a rover and send it tooling around the countryside looking for nice-flavored rocks. I wouldn't be surprised if the resource distribution system in Kethane is going to get a revamp in the future to account for biomes, though. Those spiffy heatmaps Majir was showing off in the Kethane thread would go well with that.

Now that is a spiffy launchpad! I won't be too terribly concerned if the top connection node doesn't move when the launchpad unfolds, it looks like anything that remains connected there would be serious trouble either way when stuff gets built on it. So I would use it solely as a connection point for a sky crane or other such temporary gripper.

Heh. Maybe not the best time for me to suggest this, but I've been pondering base-building a lot lately and I think it would be neat if there were a version of the pipe in KAS that was big enough to serve as a crew passage. You'd probably not want the end points to be attachable, they'd be the size of clamp-o-trons at least. I know that currently Crew Manifest doesn't actually care about what intervening parts a Kerbal has to pass through to get from one pod to another, so you can in fact cram a Kerbal through the existing pipes, it just seems weird.

I've actually built support frameworks like that for spherical tanks out of stock girders and struts to make ground-based fuel depots, it worked quite well. A promising-looking mod I haven't tried yet (it hasn't updated to 0.23) is UbioZur Welding Ltd., it might prove useful for some of these sorts of cases. It takes several existing parts and combines them together into a single part. I imagine once spherical tanks has those mix-and-match adapters it'll be something I use a lot to fuse together the ones I use frequently, to improve structural strength and reduce part count for the physics engine. You could perhaps use this to weld girders onto the base to suit your needs.

Given that my intent is to manufacture these things on location from local resources, a texture that looks like concrete is actually ideal.

Eep, how embarrassing. I haven't been paying as much attention to the structural components that come with the spherical tanks, I forgot that those were bundled with them. That habitat dome is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of, it looks awesome. What wasn't releaseable about it? The only thing that looks a bit "off" to me is the brightness of the blue in the windows, might be a good idea to darken those a bit and crank up their specular reflectivity to make them look glassier. I'd love to plunk a few of those down around any major bases I've got groundside.

I've used the smaller half-spheres as "endcaps" on cylindrical tanks and other standard-sized cylindrical parts before, it looks awesome when I do that. The larger half-spheres have made for neat-looking "domes" as part of base-building activities on other worlds, I've used Extraplanetary Launchpads to make them from local materials and then used a rover with a KAS winch to drag them off the launchpad to wherever they're supposed to go. Speaking of which, what would you say to the notion of a variant of the large spherical and half-spherical tanks that hold Kerbals? Sort of an ultra-mega-sized Hitchhiker. Extraplanetary Launchpads has made me start thinking big and it'd be nice to be able to populate my ridiculously large stations and bases with similarly ridiculous numbers of Kerbals. I wouldn't care about an IVA or anything fancy like that, just slap some portholes on the texture and I'd be happy. I love your plan for separating the mount and tank models, adds a lot of customizability. If you go with that another nice thing to consider would be angled radial mounts. Here's a fairly common pattern I use when making use of these large tanks as part of a ship. As you can see, with stock parts this looks a bit ragged and for these Mainsails I had to trick the clipping-detection code slightly to make it work.

I haven't played around a lot with this mod yet, but I did notice what seemed to be one cause and workaround for exploding ships: it seems that the ship was spawning with the root part attached to the launchpad, even when the root part was deep inside the spacecraft. I used the "change root" mod to change the root part to a docking port on the bottom end of the ship I was trying to build (and that was exploding on undock) and it spawned just fine.