merendel

I do something similar. I send 5 probes however. 1 probe usualy perched on the central stack is beefier than the rest and comes equiped with a small reactor and an antinna. I normaly land this one somewhere near a pole as it is over engineered compared to the rest. This one is the probe responsable for transmiting the data home. the remaining 4 are little more than a probe core, an RTG, the seismometer, and sufficient engine/fuel to soft land itself. those 4 are droped off 1 after another around the equator and soft land 90 degrees appart or close as I can get without puting MJ on there to do it for me. 4 probes makes things rather convenient from a symetry standpoint, both on the rocket and for landing. Impact drones are just a core with the small rockomax and a big enough fuel tank to deorbit. I find 8 symmetry is sufficient to get most of the science out of a planet. I could send more but diminishing returns are kicking in by that point. I dont even need to supply them with power as long as I dont kick them off the mothership till just before they begin their deorbit burn.

I've found it almost impossible to attach the thing with any kind of large vessle. My first attempt was on the end of a very large 2.5m rocket core built around a KSPI fusion reactor. That one took dozens of attempts before I got it to stick and I think it was more luck and persistance than any real technique that got a lock. On the other hand if you have it stuck to a small RCS drone you can push it right up agianst the roid and just sort of rock it in there while thrusting forward with RCS and it will normaly latch on eventualy. its really sensitive to being absolutly flush with the surface and you just cant swing the thing around with a big rocket accurately or fast enough to get it set before you bump the roid or the ship out of position.

Basic fusion should be plenty for a self contained return from eve. useing a 2.5 reactor with a thermal turobjet you could use atmospheric mode to get up out of the soupy part and then LFO to finish the clmib to orbit. Basic fusion rocket has about a 1.5 TWR on pure liquid, might not be enough to maintain a >1 on eve when you include the required fuel but adding oxidiser gives almost 4 times the thrust so should be plenty as long as your not too deep. Might want to check out that planitron mod to confirm you have enough intakes to lift off in air breathing mode on eve. you can stack as many as needed on for the initial climb and jetison any you dont want to carry back into orbit when you switch over.

I quick save frequently but mostly only quick load when something glitches out. Most of these end up being rapid unplanned disassembly of a ship for no apparent reason. As most of these happen after comeing out of time warp I habitualy quicksave before entering timewarp and will quickload if the ship blows up afterwards or if I manage to blow past the time I intended to exit timewarp by too much. these also serve as convenient save points in case the game client just shuts down suddenly. I refrain from useing quickload if I experience a rapid unplanned disassembly that is the result of an extreme speed docking/landing manuver (contact at 20+m/s) as thats my own damn fault. I do however occasionally employ simulation runs when trying to aerobreak to a specific orbit or landing location

With Whackjob limits are made for pushing up to and including the point where passing said limits causes componants to release the magic blue smoke.

Fair enough, I was just flabergasted when I sudenly had a ship pushing 4mil bucks by adding 1 part It was even funnier when I realized that I could adjust the price by omiting the oxidiser and runign off LF or decideing to just dump water into the thing and have a steam powered rocket.

Ditto for me. The other reason I came here is to mention that you may need to set a special case exception for the KSPI thermal rockets in your algorithm that recalculates cost by the ISP (at least I think thats what I read you did) Because those rockets have variable thrust/ISP based on the core temp of the attached reactor and by fuel type you can end up with wildly variable costs for the same part. When I was doing a quick test with a 3.5 fusion/rocket combo I was seing costs that fluctuated between 100k and 3 mil bucks for the rocket nozzle depending on what fuel mode I set it to. That much variation is a tad extreme and leads to the rather odd situation where you can launch a ship on the low cost fuel and swap after your in the air, boosting the value of your ship by an order of magnitude and then recover for a huge return. Didnt actualy try the launch/recover as I didnt want to mess up my save but the ship value changed on the launchpad as I swaped fuelmodes.

Considering what often happens on my more... lets call em inventive rockets I think The Star-Spangled Banner would be most appropriate. Particularly the part about rockets red glare followed by bombs bursting in midair

Asteroids are just parts, Like any other part that enters the atmosphere when physics are not loaded they dissapear at 20km or so. In short no not an asteroid that landed off camera unless you followed it in yourself. That said they have a silly high impact tolerance if you attach a probe core to them and then "Fly" the thing through reentry there is a very good chance that its terminal velocity will be lower than its impact tolerance and it will bounce when it hits the ground. will also probably crush the probe but the asteroid will be on the ground.

You can get quite far on very little dV if you do it right and are willing to spend time orbiting waiting for ideal windows. Send a mothership with a lander docked to it. Always leave the mother ship in the most ecentric orbit you can and send the lighter lander in to do landings and then return to the ship. Going to eve for example you can aerobreak to just bairly capture and spend a few dV to raise your PE out of the atmosphere and wait for a gilly incounter and send your lander to gilly. you might have to spend a few hundred dV on the lander but the same fuel will only be the equivelent of a few dozen on the mothership. return to the mothership and wait for an opertunity to do a burn at eve PE that will kick you down to moho. Agian ecentric orbit and land with the lander to save fuel. After moho do an eve flyby and get a gravity kick up to duna's orbit. After duna/ike swing by dres then up to jool. Agian gravity assists are your friend in jool, you can bounce up and down the gravity well on a handful of dV geting kicks off tylo or aerobreaks off laythe/jool itself. After your Joolian adventures get one more kick off tylo to throw yourself onto an encounter with eeloo. Say hi to eeloo and then head back to kerbin and aerobreak to capture and do your minmus/mun visits. Take along a lab on the mothership to reset materials/goo. Also since you have kethane bring along a scanner and some ship cappable of mining kethane and returning it ot the mothership for refining. with that you dont need to bring a huge amount of fuel as you'll easily be able to refuel along the way. Gilly, Ike, and the smaller jool moons make exelent pit stops

The problem I always have with this design is how to get it into space. once in space it works fine but if you need to put a launch stage under that central nerva it gets a fairing, when you decouple the previous stage that fairing blows the tanks on either side of it appart when it ejects. I've come up with a few ways to launch it without hooking to the nerva including launching that section upsidedown, launching 2 of them attached radialy to the lift rocket and even one system where I managed to attach a decoupler to the under side of one of the tanks so the lander was balanced over the the CoT and struted all over to keep it stable

Had no problems with scansat although I was on a break from KSP when 23.5 droped and theres a new revision of scansat out now that I'm runing. as to EL its very nice. If you can manage to get a bit of infrustructure in place you can easily set up a funtioning colony in any SOI you want. I'm a fan of colonizing the Jool system as you can get prety much anything there. lots of antimater for KSPI, an ocean on layth to get lithium/deuterium to power fusion. plenty of metal/kethane on bop/pol for easy ship construction as well as fission materials. I think the only thing I cant replicate out there is solid fuel for makeing sepretrons though they are not all that required when your constructing in space anyway.

FAR, DR, B9, IR, Kethane, Extraplanetary Launchpads, Interstelar, KAS, KEngineer, Lazor systems, Mission controller, Alarm clock, precise node, enhanced navball, Scansat. I also have a couple visual enhancement mods in (clouds and distant objects) I've used various life support mods but kinda gave up on them as too much busywork. I didnt mind haveing to think about keeping the crew alive but the effect tended to be I just packed excessive amounts of food/air/water on board to ensure survival for years. At that point its jsut adding to partcount and not being an actual challange so I droped em.

from personal experience trying to tow an object much heavier than my craft with a KAS winch theres far to much spring in the line. In my case I was attached to a container with about 300 tons of metal. even with the line streched taunt I ended up surgeing forward and springing back once I turned on the gas. if you are very very gentle on throttling up you might avoid that. The other problem is you still need to care about the COM of what your towing. if you are not flying strait away from the COM you'll swing tward it. if you were prety close it wont be much and you might stabalize although possibly off vector. If your further off alignment you'll swing like a pendulum and may not regain controll without crashing. your better off with a ridged connection to the object you want to move.

Without FAR or deadly reentry I've only lost ships on reentry for 3 reasons. 1 the ship was very flopy and the deceleration bent it in half 2 I came in so fast that the parachutes riped off when they deployed 3 I forgot to add/deploy said parachutes. Now I've had plenty of things riped appart by FAR or incinerated by DE. STock on the other hand I have to do something very very wrong to have reentry be a problem. I mean seriously I've come screaming in from eeloo's AP on a strait fall to kerbin and had the ship survive. it was a small/sturdy craft but still.

Talking non stock another nice option to have is either Kerbal Attachment System or quantum struts. QS in particular you can very easily lock on very tightly as soon as the claw grabs on. Set the struts on an action group and you can engage/disengage at will if you need to free the pivot and adjust slightly. Kas also alows you to add struts in flight but you actualy need to fly a kerbal out there to place them. Once you get it properly struted that joint is rock solid and you dont have any wobble when trying to turn a roid.

the 1000 is pre analyze, if you run the analysis it should be 1/3 the mass of the roid afterward. Unless its a positively tiny class A theres more than 1000 in there.

I like that puller design. I'll have to try pulling the roids instead of pushing them. That was also clearly better planed than my first capture. I went after a D class on my first try to avert the impending impact but I only had a pair of nukes on it. Changeing the orbit way out of the SOI was easy but capturing that bad boy took forever and I eventualy just sent up another flying fuel tank with a KR-2L to help circularize the thing.

I use the kerbodynes when I'm makeing a heavy lifter that needs the new 3.75 engines but generally not in space. Once in space efficiency is king and the new tanks just dont fit the bill. The mass fraction is worse than the jumbo so your loosing efficiency any time your pushing them around. They are OK for the rare times you need to use the huge thrust of the ARM engiens once in orbit but asside from trying to circularize an E class potato with anything less than a week of burning on a minimal part count they are just extra dead weight you didnt need to bring. Even for partcount reasons they are close to a wash after you include the needed adapters to not make them look outsized if mated to anything but another kerbo tank or the engines. tldr version, they are king for heavy lift situations but are not so superior once in orbit.

Geting to space in KSP is realy easy even on the low tech nodes. If we started out with a decoupler I could easily do a mun flyby (a landing and return might happen but its iffy) on the first mission. I could still do it with improvised decouples, AKA overheating SRB's, but thats a real design PITA, easier to just do a suborbital to get a couple nodes first. I also think its a bit silly that your compairing the SLS, a heavy lift platform, agianst a pile of the smallest SRB's in the game. Thats kind of like haveing a 5 year old throw the first pitch at a baseball game and then be dissapointed he couldnt even get the ball over the plate when its so easy for the profesional pitcher. not even remotely comparaible in terms of ability/design. Those little SRB's are at best for giveing a launch vehicle with low initial TWR a boost off the launch pad to get it heading to space. Nobody uses a huge cluster of them to launch 100ton payloads for any reason other than laughs. Heck you dont even need 100t lift capacity to go anywhere in the kerbin system. the ARM parts are a much closer comparison to the SLS and most people will tell you that those parts make nearly any mission trivialy easy.

I'd have to say dres for the simple fact that I always forget its there untill someone brings it up. Eeloo while it often wanders far is at least remembered, dres is not only alone but forgoten and therefor the lonlier of the two.

I know alot of people wont read it but you may want to include a small note about backing up the save files when upgradeing versions either in the readme or on the front post. A number of mods recommend deleating the old mod files when updateing just to be sure nothing is left over in there that shouldn't be. If folks are in the habit of doing this (I'm one of them) doing so with MCE wipes out any progress in the saves. I noticed and was able to restore the files from the recycle bin. Didn't realize at first that you kept the saves in the gamedata folder instead of in the savegame's folder (KSPI puts its own file in the save folder)

Most of the time somewhere between planing it in my head and winging it. Usualy the core gets a bit of planing to make sure docking ports are in a realitively convenient location for whatever the first module or two is likely to need. beyond that its mostly just stick modules on wherever they fit and if they dont fit I just send up an extra docking hub with apropreate extentions.

Most of lower gravity targets I use a single stage lander. Some of my designs to include an emergency stage, basicly a FLT100 with the small roco under it. This "Stage" is rarely used and is mostly for those times when I cut my dV margins too close and had insufficent fuel to make orbit or return home. Frequently it will get jetisoned along with the rest of the craft if I'm doing a capsule only return or remain intact if the whole ship is returning. Once I have docking ability I often design a reuseable lander where just the landercan/pod gets docked on top of it with a science package attached. The mission crew docks with the lander, refills if needed from the transfer stage, does the landing and reorbit, redocks with transfer stage and returns leaving the lander in orbit for the next mission. Transfers may happen at an orbital station if I've sent one to that location. If I sent a science lab the science package will be built into the lander frame itself and reset there with only the data being returned with the pod.

Hence why I called it unintended behavior and not an outright bug. Guess its more of a fringe case considering you wouldnt normaly have the pilot get back out on the launchpad other than that first time for EVA/samples. Exploitable but then agian if someone wants to cheat in a mod of a single player game thats their business.