Francois424

That looks a lot more like Ulysses31's Odysseus than mine did. Very good work ! EDIT: here's what mine looked like (The cupola would look the the middle section of his if looked from the front). The old 1.0.5 version of the "Odysseus" mothership with 11.5k delta-V, carrying a low clearance undercarriage rover and an ill-fated, oversized ISRU lander. The mothership was highly successful if prone to buggy disassembly and containing too many parts, making for bad 1/5sec FPS. That was 1.0.5 for you. I like your iteration better as far as looks go, but still proud of mine, given it was 99% stock (8x FTmN280 for engines).

I wonder if he mistook the Science Jr. Lab for the 2-Kerbal Scientist Lab that increases science yields (even tho I used it as a storage device in the first place myself). Shouldn't be too hard to mod anyways.

Yes, you right-click on the new 1.2 part and pick "Collect all science" you do not need to actually go out with kerbals or anything. If you have the big lab as well, you can then pick "Reset all experiments" from that one (hence me wanting both functionality to be on the bigger 2-kerb lab). I don't know about the pod's crew reports tho. I would believe it does take it as well, but I haven't seen anything about that (or didn't notice) in the Video. Here is the video (from Quill18) where I learned of it : Believe me, this will be the second thing on my list (First being to re-mod my antennas to work with the new in-game remote tech). Regardless, the small part will be awesome on planes/rovers, and the big lab modded with the functionality will be awesome for a mothership / large rover. I am very exited about 1.2 now. I shouldn't have watched YouTube vids/streams of it, but couldn't resist. A lot of good stuff is coming... and waiting for my mods to update and updating mine means more time will need to pass after. If any devs reading this, THANK YOU for that part. Although I never minded the little EVA's to collect the science, this is a very, very nice to have.

Is this functionality included in the big 2-kerbal science lab as well ? Just curious. Because if it isn't, by all means, it should be. No need to install science containers anymore... yay ! Going to love the part.

Today marked the 3rd episode of the 'Explorer I' series. After much discussion after the very successful Minmus and Mün landings, it was decided it was time for a more... daring destination. So Mission Control decided to send another Moho mission, the fourth since the 1.0.2 plan was designed. For some reason someone at Mission control really loves Moho. Times change and so does the agency's priorities I guess. So the plan was drawn and the window appearing in 45 days should please the crew or the 'Explorer I', giving them another month or so on the Mün to play/science around. Some at mission control worried that the 6'500 dV mothership could fail the mission due to lack of said dV... The last ship to make the trip back to Moho in the 1.0.2 plan was the 10.6k dV monster know as the 'Odysseus' and it had about a quarter of it's fuel left after making stable, polar orbit. So the KSC pulled out the info from Kerbnet and it actually put everyone at ease... The go ahead was given. So 5'040 dV needed (1k inclination burn included) and we have 6.5k... What could *possibly* go wrong ? The crew returned from the Mün for the last time, topping off the tanks of the mothership, and planned the upcoming burn in 45 days. The engine roared to get into a Kerbin orbit and then again a bit later to drop the Apoapsis so the Mün wouldn't grab the ship later. Everyone stood ready and was waiting for the Kerbin departure burn. After a few more days of waiting and enjoying their final view of Kerbin for a long, long time, the Crew engaged the engine for the 5min burn to Moho. The burn in question had the our engineers, Bill and Nicole, on edge... The FTmN2240 was still as a matter fact an experimental piece of hardware prone to overheating, regardless of the eight Radiators. And they were right about it. Multiple times the engine came close to serious overheating and very nearly blew off the small RTG giving electricity to the engine section about 5 times. Working with the engineers back home, Bill and Nicole were able to make some config adjustments to how the flow of LiquidFuel went thru the engine in such a way as to cut the Heat generation in half. It's not perfect, but it shouldn't blow itself from overheating only running at 50% anymore, no matter if it's a 5 minutes burn (which everyone agreed it's quite enough, for longer burns we'll just take cooling breaks). Because of these issues, the burn took 300 m/s more dV that originally planned for. After roughly 110 days, we got to Moho's orbit... but she wasn't there. That was planned however as all we needed to do was to perform the 1k dV inclination change. As luck would have it, as soon as it was done, there was a polar 100k encounter waiting for us... Very little tweaking indeed and we had a perfect encounter. Gotta love the KSP and their window planner supercomputers. We should be just above Moho's north pole now... but that's okay, let's enjoy the sunshine and wait for next orbit ! So about 220 days later, we are back where we started... but Moho's there this time ! A perfect encounter indeed. Let's perform the orbit burn. This is where things took a worrying turn. First the orbit burn maneuver was stated as taking a bit more dV than we had available... So much for the estimated 5k dV requirement. Even factoring the extra 300m/s lost in the original Kerbin escape burn, and the 1k inclination change (which went as expected so no issues there), why is it taking 1.5k MORE Delta-V than originally planned ? Big trouble ahead and not much way to get around it. What was done, was to burn enough for an elliptical orbit and try to use every bit of fuel left to do a suicide-burn landing on Moho with only the lander. It's a long shot, but mission control does not have anything else to offer. The only one that didn't seem to mind was Jebediah, everybody else was just freaked. Having no choice, everybody boarded the lander, decoupled it from the rest of the mothership and concentrated on where to land. From the earlier missions, KSC recommended the huge, flat crater in Moho's northern hemisphere. Not having any dV to spare, we waited in orbit until it was in front of us. It took the better part of two weeks given Moho's slow rotation period, but on the bright side, it was facing the sun when we attempted the landing.... I hope it does well. The crew made it safely down and deployed the drills. Man was that ever too close for comfort ! Everybody (even Jebediah) need a new pair of underwear. Had I planned a higher orbit originally, they where dead. Had I designed a slightly less efficient lander... they where dead. Had the mothership 100m/s less Delta-V ? they where dead. Had we attempted to land in a more scenic spot with gorgeous mountains and rocky, uneven terrain? We were dead. Had we attempted tp land in an area richer than the scanned 20% ore-cutoff spot we ended on? We were dead. Had we attempted to change the inclination to land in the crater earlier? We were dead... if fact, the landing wrapped up with ZERO dV. The Engine was at 100% throttle, flamed-out because out-of-fuel around 100 meters off the surface and the lander then violently hit the ground on the landing legs at 10,6 m/s. Nothing broke, and everyone was okay. But man. *whew*. KSC really needs to send @NecroBones's manufacturing plant of those landing gear a case of Champaign. Everybody there earned it. Next mission to Moho will have to feature an extra module with a tank or two of LF, just to be on the safe side of things. At least we're probably thru the worst maneuvers as far as Delta-V is concerned, as none of the other planets and moon have such high requirements. And most have tiny gravity moons to make landing for refueling much easier. Oh by the way on that last picture ? That white dot slightly to the left side ? That's the mothership. I love the visual effect of Scatterer/EvE. The crew will spend a while on Moho, it will takes half the lander's fuel to land, then uses half to get back to the mothership, so at least 5 refueling sessions if my planning is okay. After that, it's off to EVE (well, Gilly because this lander can't do Eve). To be continued !

KAC, KER and OPM are my main three. The new Visual enhancements by Galileo are really good, and easily customizable by editing .cfg files. So you could have multiple settings in the menus. As an example when he worked on Tekto, clouds started really close to the surface. After I modified them there was several layers from 80km down... but it really eats performances, my weaker PCs could not run it, but my man rig could. For me it's something I install whenever I do a serious run, either sandbox or carreer. But I agree it should be optional.

Things that IMHO would help tremendously : Cruise Control (That keeps the speed and heading no matter if it's going uphill, flat, or downhill), say 10 m/s on the Mün. Say, press "numlock" and the rover keeps the speed/heading unless you re-press it. Steel wheels (that do not bust tires) -- Sturdier and much heavier parts, but if roving all of the Mün's biomes with it's terrain... same for Moho which has wicked obstacles, well worth it. They also keep the CoM down which is excellent. Electric propellers (For boats, planes, and some interesting rover designs) -- with at least 2 sizes: 0,625 and 1,25. I've sometimes fit a prop on a rover to make it maintain a constant speed. Flying rovers are great for Eve, Laythe, and Tekto. A landing airbag... put the part anywhere on your rover, and it acts as an inflatable airbag on activation... in the VAB it could be like the procedural fairings, except in a Dodecahedral fashion (12-sided). Give it like 100 m/s hit tolerance, and let it bounce around until it stops. Then "Decoupling it" would slowly open the bag in every direction ( like a pentagon every 3 sec or something)... the texture could be the same as the inflatable heatshield. A lot of ppl have good ideas. I often just rove for fun, but the 2 worst are wheels breaking/busting and constantly having to trim/hold down "W" to go forwards.

Today I continued the 'Explorer I' mission yet again. Having completely fueled-up at Minmus, mission control identified the next Mün transfer window... And after a week we took off. Normally the Minmus part of the mission would have featured roving around on a RCS Low-G rover with primitive parts as I never really have anything unlocked (much) in a science game when I get there. Which can take a few Kerbal days, and a few hours of Real-Life to perform (waiting on 1.2 wheel/gear fix for this). So this being a Sandbox game, there weren't much to do but land, plant a flag, refuel, and move-on ! According to Mission Control, the Mün rendez-vous is only in 32 days. Lots of time for the crew of the 'Explorer I' to get to know each-other. People are getting restless, 1 day to go before the Mün encounter and capture burn. Jebediah keeps jumping everywhere and hogging the simulator to himself at Valentina's expense, Bill and Nicole are worried about the FTmN overheating later during the long Joolian burns, Bob and Daisy are just chilling in the Lab, wrapping-up the results of all the samples and readings took around and on Minmus. Then everybody turned to their windows when Valentina called it. From this distance of 16'881 Km both bodies look roughly the same size ! Only one day left before the Mün maneuvers and exploration begins... One day later, the 'Explorer I' gets in position, aim towards the maneuver node and wait for the appropriate moment. The contrast with earlier behaviors is striking! Everybody are at their post and professionally serious, give the crew something to do and they fall in line of their own accord. This bodes well for the multi-decade mission they just embarked on, and no last minute crew changes are planned. The AlarmClock signals go off... "three minutes before burn, two, one... engage !" The crew steps into action, and the FTmN2240 roars it's approval. Bill planned the maneuver to run the engine at 50% to prevent overheat. Polar orbit achieved ! The scanner having spotted a nice ore patch in the northern hemisphere of the Mün, the crew assembles in the Lander (no one wanted to be left behind this time), and separated the vehicle from the mothership. A quick retro-burn later and we can still clearly see where our landing area is. The crew admires the view and waits for the good moment to begin the near-suicide burn as fuel was calculated in such a way to maximize the ISRU gains and save on fuel. Really? a 90% Ore cutoff patch!? This almost sounds to good to be true... But we're landing there for sure. « Touchdown ! Would you stop freaking out Bill? So what if there's only 57 m/s left... I'm da man ! » -- Jebediah Kerman The crew started-up the automated ISRU operations, then stepped into their EVA suits to stretch their legs. There hasn't been a manned Mün mission since plan 0.90 was put into effect by the KSC, so everyone was very eager to go out and have fun. Very nice spot... heavy ore content indeed and stunning view of Kerbin in the sky. The Mün is now officially confirmed as seismically active, as proven by the cloud of Mündust that can be observed in the left side of the previous picture. Bob and Daisy both affirmed it must have been triggered by just that, a recent Münquake. Valentina planted the flag, being the expedition's leader afterall, and everyone got in position for the group shot in front of the Lander. Stunning picture featuring the lander, Kerbin, and from left to right : Valentina, Bill, Jebediah, Bob, Daisy and Nicole. A few days of mining will be necessary to recuperate the fuel expended to get to the Mün, but it should go much faster as the tanks are still 90% full this time and the Ore patch is much, much richer. After our business at Mün is finished, we shall see where we head out to. The three most likely candidates are Moho, Eve, or Duna. Eve does not allow to land at this time, and if the FTmN is to be tested for overheating I guess Moho would make the most sense... It's gravity is roughly equal to the Mün and it has some stunning landscapes. Mission control shall decide on that one later !

okay. Never called this contraption by that name, but in that case it's my favored method.

none of the above ? I box them in Engine-Fuel-Engine Beam - rover - Beam (or fuel instead of beams) Engine - Fuel - Engine The side engines (thuds?) are good for this... plus you can put parachutes on top of your fuel tanks if landing on eve/duna. You can attach a stack separator underneath the rover if you need a heatshield and/or a rocket to bring the boxed rover to where you want. A jumbo 6400 + a nuke goes a long way. This usually does the trick.

I can smell myself modding Ion engines to keep them relevant to my end-game from miles already... But in all honesty, I can see where they are going with this. Now suddenly you don't need multiple of same size engines, all that's good for engine number 1 (say thrust) can be added to engine #2 with vectoring. The only thing is weight. If more modern version of say, the Mainsail, makes it lighter... It's both good and bad. Bad because it strips the challenge of lifting off of Eve for example. But the fact you probably won't need the two 1,25m engine at the beginning (swivel and forgot the other) is a great thing to reduce parts count in the VAB list... if only by 20% or so. I love the Kerbal auto-leveling. I have yet to do my new career save (waiting for 1,2 and most likely my winter vacation, both for obvious reasons) but this is amazing. Wheels/Landing Gears are supposed to be fixed as well I think. I hope they fix the "aim to prograde/maneuver node/retrograde..." overshooting by like 60 degrees everytime. In RemoteTech2 back in 0.25 this was already fixed... and is annoying in stock (And would give purpose to pilot levels even more, even in late-game. You always need to maneuver !) Now all that's missing from stock is KER and OPM (imho). But 1.2 is really shaping up like a huge update. Almost as huge as 0.23 was when science games became a thing.

This is bad news for me. I like having Remote tech, but I always mod a couple antenna stations so that Kerbin acts as a single antenna. However with three it's like half of what I do usually. Looks like I might need a high-orbit antenna to relay the signal and that's all. Not so bad afterall.

Today I continued the 'Explorer I' mission : After achieving orbit around Kerbin last time, the 'Explorer I' needed somewhere close to refuel. See, most of the lander's fuel was spent escaping the atmospheric pull of Kerbin, and the engine section was only showing half fuel as well. Thankfully for everyone, Mission Control knew just the place ! Minmus is just overflowing with fuel if our scanners are to be believed. Just melt those lakes a bit and we'll find what we need ! After finding the sweet spot, landing coordinates were computed and the lander settled down on Minmus' lakes. It took the better part of a week (7 kerbal days), but the mothership and the lander were refueled. By sheer randomness, filling the lone ore tank did offset the cost of raising the fuel to the mothership, greatly speeding-up the whole process. The lander has about 3k dV when fully loaded with ore and fuel, but quickly convert that ore if the Refinery is not shutdown. With fuel alone it's 3.5k dV. The lander hard at work in a sweet Minmusian evening. Keep the solar panels perpendicular to Kerbol's path and the batteries will do the rest overnight. The 'Explorer I' is now ready to depart for it's next destination... wherever that might be. Maybe the Mün to test something with a bit more gravity.

OPM mod, Making and using some mods, roving around (either by roling or flying, especially with some electric propellers say for Eve, Laythe, Kerbin, and Tekto). I also get a kick of taking stuff ppl have built and trying to reproduce them myself. I still have to put that refueling station around Pol, and build my base on Tekto. Let's not forget Urlum (the Uranus analog), which was a personal goal of mine eversince 0.24... I wanted to build a mega station near the gas giant and refuel/maintain it by mining the nearby moons. There's always something to do... whether you feel like doing it or not is always another matter.

Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I put it back to 105k myself by changing the file, I just did not want to cause bugs or anything. Thanks for taking the time to keep the mod up to date, and I hope it'll be part of stock one day !

I've scrapped many designs for this exact reason. And scrapped many beautiful design because KSP can't handle 300+ parts very well (that is, if you don't mind each 1 KSP second taking 4-10 RL seconds, then by all means, build that 1000 parts station =). With modded parts, TweakScale, and procedural parts you can reduce parts count by 33-70% depending on the ship. So at least there's that to help.

Okay, so not being pleased too much about my last Grand Tour ship (The one with the mining Ring that can land, that had like... 345 parts), I decided to redo it from scratch. I had inspiration after seeing the big "Hermes Engine" from the AresExploration pack. See, On my previous mothership, I had 8x FTmN280's (for 2240 Thrust). So I modded the "Hermes Engine" into the FTmN2240 (Changed Ion to LF Nuclear and applied 8 times the stats of the FTmN280's, including power generation, but also HEAT Production... this thing needs 8 radiators and will blow-up if ran at full power for too long (estimation: about 5 minutes non-stop). It's so Kerbal and I like it. Weird that the other version with 8 smaller engines do not blow up, like ever. I guess it must have something to do with 8 parts radiating their own heat is better than one concentrated huge source of heat. I even managed to mod the FTmN's sound and exhaust to the Hermes Engine. So very satisfied. The engine section of the "Explorer I" mothership has roughly 40k LiquidFuel spread in 4 huge tanks (they attach just fine on the new long engine, aka FTmN2240). I also included it's own robotic control, 600 MonoPropellant, and a few ASAS to keep control. 4 RCS nozzles on the side of the tanks maintain perfect stability. The 4 Radiators are an absolute must, and not enough by themselves for long burns. More of them will come later. The engine section featuring the newly developed FTmN2240 opens the door to extensive exploration... One has to be careful of overheating it tho. Then I decided to redo my lander. The old one had 191 parts alone. This new one is more like 110, and looks better to boot. I went back with the Idea that the lander is the ISRU, and scrapped the idea of a small lander for Low-G worlds + Large lander for High-G worlds for ONE universal ISRU lander. This new one also features the main cockpit (6 kerbals pod, from the same "AresExploration" mod), a Nuclear Reactor (with only half load of Uranium since the thing is quite heavy), ISRU Refinery, 2 Trio solar panels, 4 more radiators, 2 Vector engines, 4 drills, and 8 MRS Landing Gears. It can do 3'500 Delta-V, which should be enough for Laythe, Tylo, Slate, and Tekto... to my knowledge the worst my current install has to offer. I can always refuel on the surface before heading out, so it's really perfect for many, many things... Including Biome hopping should I want to do that instead of Roving around (I prefer Roving). The bay at the bottom is the usual 7 science instruments, the next thing is the Thug, and the 10m heatshield was for Laythe but I repackaged it (see later). Both the soul and mind of the Explorer I, the lander serves both as the ship's command center, the miner and the refueller. It will now join the engine section in Orbit ! Assembling the whole ship in orbit went weird. The middle section (you'll see below) was insane spaghetti and didn't want to behave at all. I had to connect it while controlling the engine section otherwise it would wiggle all over the place ! It behaved really well once connected to both the Lander and the Engine section tho. I can push the engine to 100% with RCS spamming away and no wiggle from the mothership... thank god; I was worried like no tomorrow. So the Middle section features 2 stashed 10m heatshields, a Balka solar panel (why waste the Uranium if I can keep it for the Outer Solar System), a completely optional Science Lab (for role-play reasons + I like to stash the science in there, it's also less cramped for my 2 scientists), attached to the lab you can see the Origami antenna and the Orbital Ore scanner. Only after assembling it did I notice I will never get to use the 10m HeatShields. Well I can, but if I do I have to ditch the Balkas solar panel because it will the lack the room for it to deploy. Here she is, the Explorer I, in all her beauty: Totalizing 216 parts, 537 tons and about 6,7k dV, the Explorer-Class stands ready with it's crew of 6 valiant kerbals taking one last look at their home, Kerbin.

Those are FTmN280 from the old "Kommit Nucleonics" mod. It went abandon back in 0.23 (or was it 0.22?) and I had to fix them myself over the patches. More details here : Unfortunately, Kommit is still MIA and legal mumbo-jumbo prevents me uploading my parts pack to this day (unless someone here can overrule that since the guy does not appear to even want to come back). They where, and still are, my favorite engines in the game. Very good for parts count (One FTmN280 is worth 4 of the regular nuke, and weight less than 4) and obviously efficiency.

I finally came down from me being out of patience earlier, and decided to land the ring part of my mothership to minmus for some R&R and mining. Here is what she look like : Not as bad as I thought, tho not enough Oxidizer tanks to re-fill the Lander. She is modular, so I could replace the "Science package" (underneath the Ares Capsule) by a fat full Oxidizer tank... or Refuel in a couple landings. It's all fun and fine on Minmus, but on Moho it might not even be possible/worth it... So far it's been a success, but I think I'm going to stay with the miner/low-G world lander to refuel the ring next time. On another note: Looks like I was outdone today, this is a beauty right here...how many parts all fully assembled in Orbit ?

Having a very hard time getting my grand tour lander done. - I think putting the refinery on a land-able ring part of the mothership was a mistake, even tho it looks cool and I can roughly refuel the main part of the ship in just one fell swoop. - I also means that since it's a nuclear powered ring, I have mostly LF tanks, making refueling the lander (with LFO engines because THW on many moons/planet) a total nightmare. - Also, having a SSTO doing Tylo, without an ISRU unit makes for huge quantities of Fuel, a rather large lander, and little margin for error for that moon. Took forever and never a really satisfying outcome. - The game ***still*** lags from only 300 parts. I just don't get it. My PC is far from being a potato, and streamers had ALL announced that KSP performance had improved tremendously. I'm not seeing it one bit. I thought it was because I was using Procedural parts which is rather resource intensive, and I switched to MKS and FuelTankPlus and it's just not any better. This is sapping most of my fun away, I was getting 300 parts "yellow performance" back in 1.0.5, why am I not getting better performances from 1.1.3 ? What a drag... not happy about that one bit. Was/Is green clock 500 parts performance just too much to ask !? At least I don't run out of memory anymore, so 64Bits has at least delivered this much. - I am ready to set off, but I think I'll just scrap the idea, wait for 1.2 for the wheel fixes, and start a new career game instead of GrandTouring. But At least I docked my universal (barring Eve) lander to my mothership, totalizing 323 parts : Now I just need to refuel the whole thing, and I can start the Grand tour... Assuming I go ahead with it. Maybe, we'll see

I don't like leave "debris" behind, I'll usually evacuate the personnel, and give the "debris" enough fuel to crash it somewhere (say into Jool if in the system). My stations are meticulously planned, and each panel is installed by experts to make sure of the highest quality possible. Making makeshift stations seems... unlikely. But I've still done one or 3, especially in Jool. Full refueling is performed when the ship is deemed re-usable and will be used for another mission.

I started assembling my new "Grand Tour" ship... which includes OPM. Not sure if final or not, but so far I got this one (See below) which without extra fuel payload and the Landers, can easily make 5k dv. The Ring can actually land on low gravity world, and has 4 drills and an ISRU refinery, a Nuclear reactor and 4 Radiators (these radiators I am using are as powerful as the middle ones from stock). It also uses the AresExploration capsule with room for 6 kerbals (the trio + Valentina + 1 extra engineer and Scientist for the lab). The only mistake I have so far is the solar panels clips thru the nuke engines... so the lab module will only deploy it's panels when either disconnected from the ring or when orbiting while the lander is on a mission. This is sandbox game, so I could've used my end-game high-tech engines, but I stayed with the stock spirit of parts for now and went the ISRU road instead of the 30-60k dV mothership road. So now I am off making the Lander to anywhere but Eve.

Today I continued to fix Tekto from Outer Planet's Mod. I had noticed her atmosphere was reduced from 105,000m to 95'000m... so I went in the file and put it back to the former ( anyone know why it has been changed in the first place? @CaptRobau ?) Then using the config file @Galileo did for me last week or so, I started to play the wizard's apprentice. Galileo had told me not to put too much clouds... "it's going to drop your frame rates to abysmal levels", he said... Everybody knows the apprentice never listens to the master. So I put such thick clouds that I could barely rotate my craft when looking straight down to the planet (I had to look to space for decent frame rates). After a few tweaks, I was able to space the cloud layers enough as to encounter them between 80k and 30k atmosphere height. Took me a few hours of trial and error to finally get the correct mixture of "layer volume size" to get the effects I was looking for. I now get about 30% drop in my framerates in certain layers but I love the results. It makes my video card works, I can tell you this much, I could feel the heat being pushed out of my PC tower... I love that feeling. I also change the RGB values of the Green clouds to make them a bit more blueish (+20 to the Blue setting) which is extremely close to the original without being as much blue as them. So my config would not work on a worse computer. I understand why you did it that way now, Galileo. At least I was able to beef things up in the upper atmosphere. Not much interesting pictures today as everything happened mostly under the hood... but I guess I post a few, For eye-candy's sake. Just over the first cloud layer, around 90k : The first gap between layers around 75k : The Rusted-tint hued clouds around 52k: Another very thin gap just below the orange clouds, but before another layer of Thick green clouds (44.5k) : The final gap before entering the final cloud layer that will give on the surface... Around 18k: (Starting to get dark as I am getting close to the night side). On the Surface (Riding the dark oceans) :

It sounds absolutely gorgeous and amazing, and if to be added as another moon, it would be great. I agree with others that Laythe is too incrusted in the core game by now to be removed... I'd ask OPM ppl or Galileo to remake it and put it back if it was removed. But this new Laythe called "Silisko" (why not ?) could be a volcanic world orbiting Jool, or fittingly Gas planet 2 (or 3, or 4). Gorgeous moons are always welcomed. I just don't want it replaced (of if you DO replace it, move Laythe somewhere else. if not in the Jool system, to another system).

Short answer : YES, always My main reason to install mods has always been to get parts I feel are missing from the stock game. 4-6 man crew capsule (I finally got a working "AresExploration" 6-man capsule after months of searching thanks to @Felbourn) 2-Man cockpits/Capsules (At the moment I have the SxT Ke111 and the B9's M27 cockpit). I also use the Kn-2 cabin in some builds (a 3 man cockpit) I rescued the "Ion-Electric Hybrid Pack" from abandonware and turned it into my end-game, mothership engines. Something aking to the "Interstellar mod" for efficiency, but using Xe. I also rescued the KOSMOS Balka Solar Panels... Tho I don't really feel the stock game is lacking in solar panels, These make awesome Station/base panels. An Electric propeller, and an LFO propeller for atmosphere exploration... and FireSpitter core to make them work/sound like props. Nuclear Generator (Self-made with RL weight/efficiency per unit of Uranium... Having a physics teacher amongst one's friends is helpful for that ), good for Jool and beyond and I'll do lots of that. More landing gears, some LF tanks, some radial fuel tanks (some parts from MRS). Procedural parts for parts count (tho it generates too much lag in itself and defeats the purpose) it's still good for spherical fuel tanks, which I absolutely love. Rescued from abandonware "Kommit Nucleonics" (mostly for the 240 kn nuke engine, but I fixed all of them). Shaving 3 parts out of 4 for every ONE of the FTmN280 as opposed to stock nukes is too good to ignore. Then there are the Usual mods : AllYAll, KER, KAS and KAC for Core mechanics improvement. EvE and Scatterer for immersion improvement. And obviously OPM mod to complete the solar system and in my case, adding WEEKS of more playtime ( I usually go to each biomes with a land/air vehicle, on every moon/planets, EvE alone took me roughly ... 20(?) hours, but next time I'm bringing a plane there, which is 4x as fast). Then there's engineering the mothership that will make that grand tour grabbing kerbals/science from everywhere, but not send all the rovers (they will be shipped to the planets/moons in advance from another ship). I also use not critical parts mod such has different looking radiators / solar panels / wings and wheels, and the legacy parts from @NecroBones. Mostly parts with the same as most of you guys for the usual mods. I made a thread abuot some stuff that should be stock last year, and ppl still post in it, which cover much of what I think about the parts. I really think OPM should be stock as well. Such amazing work.