bloodgusher

Voicey99, Thanks for the detailed reply and info! If the auto-shipping of resources uses a Hohmann transfer, it will probably be too slow to be practical. For me, with all these colonies, money is not an issue. It's possible to build a big expensive 3-stage nuclear rocket and get stuff to Leto in around 9 years or so. So it would be nice if the auto-shipping feature allowed a tradeoff between cost and travel time. But I expect that would be difficult to implement.

Hi, I've build a bunch of fully self-sustaining bases on the Galileo planet pack planets but I can't figure out how to do it on Leto. I've scanned all the biomes and as far as I can tell, Leto has zero RareMetals and zero Uraninite. I can't create them from dirt or resource lodes since the planetary average is zero. Leto is in the middle of nowhere (it takes 44 years to get there by Hohmann transfer) so lugging stuff there is not very practical, it has no moons and there are no asteroids up there. BTW, MKS is awesome and I recommend trying it on some of the difficult and interesting planets in the GPP. For example there is Tellumo: a huge earthlike planet with 1.9G surface gravity and a 10atm oxygen atmosphere that hits you like a brick wall. It also has rings and a small moon embedded within the rings! Any hints? Thanks.

Hi, I'm having an issue with some mining outposts. Each outpost supports 2 kerbals and has 2 duna colonization modules. They have plenty of colony supplies and fertilizer and are nuclear powered. The colonization modules are turned on. Now if I switch to some distant probe and time-accellerate for a hundred days or so then switch back, I find that the colonization modules are turned off and the hab timers have expired and by kerbals are tourists. Everything else including all the mining drills are still operating, so it's not like the base ran out of electricity. Is this expected? Or is there some way I can avoid this? Thanks!

Saw the movie last night. Great movie, go see it! But I suspect I'm preaching to the choir. I had to suspend disbelief a few times. The gravity assist off the earth seemed wrong. They would be coming in faster than the earth so a gravity assist would slow them down (and possibly give them a little radial velocity). Useful for visiting Venus maybe but not useful for going back to Mars. Also Mars would be in the wrong position for a Hohmann transfer (assuming they had just arrived from a Hohmann transfer). You would have to add velocity and swing out beyond Mars orbit, making the transfer time much more than the 9 months they seemed to be saying it would take. Or maybe I'm missing something? Still, awesome movie, highly recommend it.

Sometimes you will find that you can't get enough delta-v in one pass to go from just under escape velocity to the desired exit velocity. In this case you will waste fuel as you will not get the benefit of the oberth effect for all of your burn. You would need a very low TWR for this to be an issue, for example it may happen when using ion engines to get a heavy craft to the outer planets.

Yes, this was the one. I remember it having some very silly stuff, like accidentally making a teleporter out of a particle accelerator and some cheddar cheese.

Hmmm, yes I guess you would need to get it up there gradually to avoid tearing the wings off. Who needs wings in space, anyway? It would take about 30sec at cruising speed (300 m/s) to get past most of the atmosphere if you go straight up. But wait, in the spirit of KSP, just add struts! Why put it up there? This was bad SF, I don't think this question is relevant. And the idea of a 747 in translunar orbit appeals to me for some reason.

Many years ago I read a very bad SF novel in which a 747 was put into space. Seemed pretty silly to me at the time but I always wondered what would happen if you strapped some really big boosters onto a 747 and tried it. According to the web, the cabin pressure in a 747 is set at about 6000 to 8000 feet and the max altitude of a 747 is around 45000 feet. So the hull has to withstand a pressure difference of something like 8.8 psi. This means that if you put it in space, you could have 8.8psi cabin pressure, equivalent to normal air pressure at around 13000 feet. Some ski resorts have peaks this high. I wonder how leaky the cabin is in a 747. In space, you can't compress exterior air and inject it into the cabin so you might have to carry air tanks to replace leaked air. And then there's radiation, but never mind that. Apart from that, seems like it might actually work.

I just completed this under KSP 0.19, taking off from a 4700m plateau. Pics here: http://imgur.com/a/D5x6F#0 The craft has plenty of delta-v to spare at each stage. The final eve ascent stage had 900 delta-v to spare, so it can probably launch from around 2500m given the right trajectory. Getting back to Kerbal under ion drive is slow but not terrible. Yes, I used Mechjeb. I could manage without it except form the Eve landing retro burn. My reflexes are not fast enough for that one.