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Well, here's the problem as I see it. Each of those wings from the OP has a lift rating of 38.18. Unless he's using clipping, That's 38.18 x 6 = 230ish. Now, if you're attempting this stock, to get the same lift, you'd need 230 wing connectors. ummmm no. Now, I've got an eternal flying going stock with 71 parts but not without SAS running. So, you want a leader board, talk to the OP about what it takes to do this. --Edit-- Oh, I was so gullible to believe this. I feel like a noob. See my next post.

Fractal, to break away from the bug talk for a moment: Have to given any thought to a steam-based RCS system? Bring along a tank of water and heat a small amount to high temperature and let it escape from an RCS nozzle like a propellant. Could use thermal power from a generator to do so. Normal RCS blocks use a monopropellant like hydrogen peroxide passing through a catalyst mesh to produce steam and oxygen via chemical decomposition, but this could be a neat tie-in with your reactor system and refill-able anywhere water can be found. (or anywhere you could get hydrogen and oxygen to combine)

I'm sure it'd be possible to write up papers so that only property/equipment is insured, with the pilot signing whatever needs to be signed to wave it. There is simply no way to impose regulations preventing this by law in United States. Of course, if SpaceX flat out refuses to launch a manned mission without certification, that's their right. Can we maybe talk to the Russians about launching with their rocket? A launch from Baikonur can put the bus on the rendezvous orbit with ISS. I don't think they'd let it get anywhere close to docking, but it'd be fun just to fly-by and flash the lights at them. I'd also honk the horn. They wouldn't be able to hear it, but I'd do it anyways.

I found this picture while looking up "short bus" on Urban Dictionary... Maybe you guys could talk to the owner?

That looks really neat! Love the orange talk battery on top. Could you list which mods and part packs you used?

You'll have to use the Infernal Robotics plugin to make this work. Go talk to Sirkut.

My long history of schooling: (note that the following is my history. I'm not necessarily proud or ashamed of it, but it's what happened [or as best as I can remember]) I started out (as far as I can remember, it's hard to be sure when your best source is your six year old self) going to a private school that used a weird system called the Montessori method. Essentially, kids were allowed to sort of pick learning activities and learn at their own pace. It was structured completely differently than any sort of school I've ever seen before or since. (this was approximately kindergarten thru first grade, although it's a bit fuzzy, both because of my lack of memory of it and because of the weirdness of the system) Next up, I started going to good 'ole fashioned American public school (in second grade, I think). I remember being light-years ahead of most of my classmates in a lot of subjects, and slightly behind in others. I also remember this being the most miserable time for me emotionally (largely due to a lot of other factors in my life at the time.) After that I went to a Christian private school. Naturally, we were all taught the Bible and that evolution was a big fat lie, but mostly we learned about how to do math, write proper sentences, histories of people in far away places (which bored us), the history of how our nation became [sarcasm] the greatest in the WORLD!! [/sarcasm] (which we enjoyed), and how cells work and plant reproduce and the like. In other words, we learned what other kids were learning, plus the Bible, minus evolution (well, we were taught about evolution, mostly how big of a lie it was). Of note here is that while we always heard about how "schools around the county had such terrible bullying problems", we didn't have any. Like, none. Pretty much all the time, we just got along. There were, I think, two reasons for this, one being that there were so very few of us to begin with (I think there were about five people in my grade, although we shared a classroom with two other grades), and the other was that that meant that the staff were able to much more effectively deal with problems that arose. Oh, and we got spankings, I mean actual physical spankings that hurt, when we did something bad enough (they had to have forms signed by the parents to do this. In my family, the rule was that if you got one at school, you were going to get another one at home. So, yeah...) I went here from about the second half of second grade thru fourth grade. Then, I was home-schooled for fifth and sixth grade. Not much to report here, except that I was really lonely. Also, I did a lot of goofing off and got all those weird looks at the supermarket that everybody talks about. After that I went to a different Christian school. This one was a lot like the other one except for a few differences. It was slightly bigger. It had closer ties to it's associated church, but wasn't any more or less religiously focused. It was structured more like a traditional school, whereas the other one had a "learning center" structure. I attended seventh thru twelfth grade here and learned [opinion]that you don't have to completely give up on religion to be a scientist[/opinion] This is my true story. My personal opinions are labeled as such, the opinions of those who have taught me are labeled as such, and I hope you have found it informative and interesting, and most of all, I dare you to find someone with a more complicated educational background than me. (most people I talk to have done one or two of the schooling types I mention here, but not all of them) Have a nice day/night! [p.s. This is kind of something that I have been wanting to get off my chest for a while, so... yeah.]

Presumably the oxidation of the dirt in the dirty snowball as it burns up. (go to 2 hours and 6 mins to 2 hrs 12 mins) to hear the SDO guys talk about oxygen.

No it isn't. In fact, as a moderator who has also been diagnosed with ADHD in the past, trying to use such things as an excuse to justify bad behavior will get you an even harsher lecture than usual. At most that type of disability gives you a slightly different perspective of the world and requires lifestyle changes to manage it, it does not prevent you from living an otherwise ordinary life and having otherwise ordinary interactions with the world. With practice you can use it as a tool to create some unique out of the box thinking, but it should not ever be allowed to define you as a person. However there are some advantages to home schooling, as well as a major disadvantage in that you miss out on social skills that are difficult to learn later in life. The thread has discussion value because of that, and if people stay civilized about the topic at hand and refrain from drifting to politics or discrimination we can indeed talk about it.

Talk about bringing back the dead.

Anybody knows how to establish comms between mothership and single kerbonauts on EVA or walking on a planet? The moment they leave the command module, they can't talk.

You are applying equations from Special Relativity to an accelerated frame of reference. That's a big no-no. If you turn around in transit, you have to use GR equations, or you have to treat everything from an external inertial frame. In either case, you'll end up showing that your FTL ship could not deliver information about consequences of event before it happens. You really do need at least two FTL ships on different trajectories communicating in transit. Like I said, I can prepare some diagrams if you think this will help. I just don't want to waste time on that if nobody is going to care. As for imaginary time, etc. Yes, at face value, using SR equations, you end up with ship heading in an imaginary direction, which should be a warning sign. Fortunately, warp drive resolves this issue. The ship itself is actually at rest with respect to the space in the bubble, so there are no issues with time doing anything weird. However, the really cool thing about the warp drive is that so long as there are no other sources of significant curvature*, we can forget all that. From perspective of exterior observer, the ship behave as an object traveling faster than light. The only difference is that time aboard the ship isn't governed by SR time dilation equations. In other words, all of the concepts about two FTL ships above can be applied to a pair of ships under Alcubierre warp metric. When we talk about the way the FTL ship under warp drive perceives the rest of the world, on the other hand, warp bubble cannot be ignored. Crew aboard such a ship cannot see a portion of the universe immediately behind the ship, and they cannot send messages to anyone directly ahead of the ship. Since two FTL ships required to set up time travel have to be moving in roughly opposite directions, they actually cannot communicate with each other as required to set up time travel. So Alcubierre Drive preserves global causal structure of asymptotically flat space-time, which is a really neat feature. * In this case, "significant curvature" means in comparison to warp bubble's own curvature. So if you are flying a warp ship through an event horizon of a "small" black hole, you'd have to do some very hairy math to figure out what's going to happen. However, even with a black hole, if it's big enough to have gentle enough curvature at the event horizon, you can basically predict how the ship will behave just by assuming it can go FTL.

The following is going to be a Wall-o-Text, it reflects thoughts that I have had floating in my head for some time. It is personal and close to the heart. Now that I am moving into adulthood, I have spent some time thinking about what effects video games have had on my life. The more I think about it, the more I realize that video games, even noneducational ones have taught me things. I would like to talk about just two games for now, they are not an exhaustive list mind you, just the ones I feel like sharing. If there is any other demand for more, I would gladly share them. These two games are Runescape and Call of Duty. Runescape: Probably the one game that has taught me the most about real life. How so? Mainly in two ways. It's economic system and it's skills system. When I first started playing at the age of 13 I had no grasp of the concept of opportunity cost To make money I would mine iron ores and try to sell them because I really enjoyed mining. Then, later on I started making my own iron knives and selling them as well to make money. After a certain time, I met a player by the name of KComet who would buy coal from me. He taught me that my time in game is worth as much money as I can make in game. If i could gain experience by buying materials, as long as it is less than what I make in an hour, I would be gaining skills faster. How do i apply this today? If doing something myself will cost me more in time than just working equal amount of hours to pay for someone else to do it, excluding extraneous circumstances, I don't do it and pay for someone else to do it. The second thing I learned, and I think this is the more important one, is that learning a skill has diminishing returns. In Runescape, getting to level 50 in any skill requires 100k experience points. To get to 99, the maximum, requires about 13.5 Million experience points. That is, it takes 135 times more experience to max a skill than to just have basic competence in it. Experience points in Runescape translate to time almost proportionally. Therefore, maxing a skill takes a WHOLE lot more time than being competent in it. This is the case in real life. It is much easier to be a competent employee than it is to be the best employee. It is much easier to be a competent father than the best father. It is much easier to be a competent student than it is to be the best Student. Now this might sound very disheartening, but it isn't. In fact, In Runescape, a player with 60-70 in any skill could be said to be a good player, those correlate to 270k to 730k of experience which is not unattainable. Me being a bit of a perfectionist, RS taught me that it is okay to not be the best at everything; it is actually remarkably easy to be competent at most things, and worth it to be good at a few things. If one wants to be the best, you have to dedicate ALL of your energy to accomplishing it, anything else is wasted effort. The second game I learned from is Call of Duty. Whereas RS taught me that it is very difficult to be good at everything, but easy to be relatively good at something, CoD taught me that one's abilities determine both one's speed with which one learns skills and that our skills are more or less capped by our natural abilities. I am by no means a good FPS player, therefore when all of my friends were playing CoD and were good at it I was lagging behind. Yet, I realized that there was a niche that my group didn't have covered. Since all of my friends were run-and-gun types they wanted to have all of the good killstreaks, no one wanted to be support. Therefore, I made a class that had an M16, with Hardline-Pro, a stinger missle, 3 Stun Grenades, extreme conditioning. My killstreaks were UAV, Counter-UAV, and Drop Package. Why did I do this? All I would day all game long would be drop easy UAVs, be the first one to shoot down opposing UAVs or Killstreaks, cover my teamates with Stun grenades, and run for any objectives. That is, while I was not particularly skilled I did use what little skill I had and I made a niche for myself. I was usually a favorite on my friends' teams because I did all the little things. How have I applied these in real life today? Well, as a 21 year old in the workplace, I am not particularly skilled compared to others. I do however have a skill that is slightly higher than others, that is computer skills. Therefore, I use my computer knowledge to leverage my relatively poor skills in other areas, while simultaneously trying to train them to a level of competence. Along the way, I have noticed there is a niche in my company for someone who is skilled in computers but also skilled in the day to day operations of company. I act as a sort of interface for two people in my company, our IT guy and our Office Services guy because I have skills in both areas. While I recognize that this level of generality isn't optimal in the long run, in the short run I have been able to find a niche that allows me to hold a job and learn skills important for the workplace in the future. TL;DR Video games can teach a lot more than just what is on the surface. If one tries to really dig deep and see things, one can learn anything from anything in life.

The clear lack of any background research into the field before trying to tell people about something is terrible. Here's a group of people who are trying to convince people that video games are bad or that video games should be carefully monitored by or played with parents, yet they fail to understand that a fairly large percentage of games are actually educational in some way, even if they were never designed to be. Take Minecraft, mentioned on the show. If you want to start complaining about video games and haven't heard of one of the biggest small-developer games ever made, then you should probably stop telling people what to do and look up some popular games before making what you intend to be an informational talk.

Well, the navs can be built on the cheap. Electronics wouldn't have to live long, and I doubt it requires better radiation protection than the pilot. So you could probably just use a laptop with a GPS receiver. Just needs to be one of these unlocked receivers that can operate at 200km+ of altitude and 8km/s. Software is easy enough to write. Ditto communications. The only parts that I can't think of how to do cheap are power production and propulsion. For the later, maybe talk to Virgin? See if they'd be willing to part with one of their hybrids from SST. It has sufficient kick, and it'd be a hell of a way to test it, as well as great promotion. For power, it'd have to be solar panels. Regular solar panels are cheap enough, but something tells me these won't cut it.

The revert button is to stop a problem with the KSP revert button. Without out to many people were running into problems breaking missions. Now they don't break them. Value is different because Kerbal Insurance does not get calculated until Launch Pad. The buttons take up to much space. I was trying to unclutter the UI. I will check this out as soon as possible. I would actually like to do this over again anyway. And make a better Finance sheet. To the Other Questions. Also I will continue to update this mod. What I meant was that I don't expect to update it much for this year. (holidays and stuff) And once some more updates for KSP come out don't know what the future will hold with that. But I will still update the mod until that day comes. Just not going to be every single week now. One major update I want to add is Purchasing Kerbals. I have seen the way Story Mission Does it, I will have to talk to the author to see if he minds me using his method of Hiring Kerbals or not. Been trying to do this for awhile, I just having issues getting it to work correct.

That's because FAR changes how drag works. (currently) MJ looks at stock values for drag but FAR sets those values to 0 and recalculates and implements drag itself. Sarbian / Ferram have (I think?) done some work in helping the two mods talk to each other better so eventually we should have better integration. (presumably what's needed is for MJ to check for FAR's presence and query it about drag) I know it's tough right now but the workaround is to let MJ do its initial de-orbit burn then abort once you have re-entry. Make sure landing prediction is enabled and check the map to see where you're going to land. Point prograde or retrograde as needed (really spellcheck? You know what retrograde is but not prograde?) and do a slow gentle burn to bring that number down. As you get better you need the map less and can just look at the landing AP GUI. Closer to the target and you'll need to use +/- radial burns to extend or reduce your landing distance. Normal burns if you're not quite lined up with the site.

Mining in space is moving from science fiction to commercial reality but metals magnates on this planet need not fear a mountain of extraterrestrial supply - the aim is to fuel human voyages deeper into the galaxy. Within three years, two firms plan prospecting missions to passing asteroids. When even a modest space rock might meet demand for metals like platinum or gold for centuries, it is little wonder storytellers have long fantasized that to harness cosmic riches could make, and break, fortunes on Earth. But with no way to bring much ore or metal down from the heavens, new ventures that have backing from some serious - and seriously rich - business figures, as well as interest from Nasa, will focus on using space minerals in interplanetary "gas stations" or to build, support and fuel colonies on Mars. There may be gold up there, but the draw for now is water for investors willing to get the new industry off the ground. Governments believe it has a future; Nasa has a project that may put astronauts on an asteroid in under a decade and on Mars in the 2030s. And if the costs seem high, grumblers are told that one day the new skills might just save mankind from sharing the fate of the dinosaurs - if we can learn how to stop a massive asteroid smashing into Earth. "We are dreamers," declares the website of Deep Space Industries (DSI), next to an image of a wheel-like metal station hooked up to a giant floating rock. But what the US-based start-up firm calls the first small steps in a "long play" to develop the resources of space are about to happen. A priority is using hydrogen and oxygen, the components of water locked in compounds on asteroids, to refuel rockets. Early in 2016, the first of DSI's exploration satellites, smaller than toasters, will hitch-hike into space on rockets carrying other payloads and start scouting for suitable rocks. The same year, another US-based venture, Planetary Resources, expects to launch prospecting craft hunting viable asteroids. "They are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system," said Eric Anderson, an American aerospace engineer and co-founder of Planetary Resources, which lists Google's Larry Page and Virgin billionaire Richard Branson among its backers. "They are just there and they are not difficult to get to and they are not difficult to get away from," he said. METALS Meteorites - chunks that survive and fall to earth after asteroids disintegrate in the atmosphere - yield significant amounts of precious metals like platinum, rhodium, iridium, rhenium, osmium, ruthenium, palladium, germanium and gold. Planetary Resources estimates some platinum-rich asteroids just 500 metres across could contain more than the entire known reserves of platinum group metals. Studies based on observation and meteorites suggest space is even richer in iron ore. Wall Street research firm Bernstein notes that a big asteroid called 16 Psyche, in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and measuring some 200km across, may contain 17 million billion tonnes of nickel-iron - enough to satisfy mankind's current demand for millions of years. But costs and technical hurdles rule out hauling resources down to Earth in the foreseeable future, experts say. The real value in asteroid mining is for further space travel - and so hydrogen and oxygen reserves are as attractive as any metal. "It's ridiculous to believe that asteroid resources will ever compete with terrestrial alternatives and Earth markets," said Brad Blair, a mining engineer and economist. Referring to talk of city-sized settlements on Mars, he said: "The reason asteroid mining makes sense is because people might be some day where those resources are. You can't put an 80,000-person colony on Mars without using the local 'timber'. "And if you're going to use chemical propulsion, it's going to take a lot of water to get them there." The energy released when hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water can power rockets. The presence of both elements in compounds found on asteroids offers scope to set up space factories to make fuel for missions to Mars and beyond as well as offering "pit stops" to extend the lives of satellites. "We're going to be looking at propellants for satellites, which is a multi-billion dollar industry to keep them alive," said Rick Tumlinson, Deep Space Industries' board chairman and a veteran promoter of commercial space development. "We'll eventually be an oasis, a place where you can get air, and we can provide propellants. So we're a gas station," Tumlinson told a recent seminar in London. "You can take the process leftover material, the slag, and use it for shielding, or concrete, and build large structures, and of course there is a percentage of precious metals." CAMERAS, LASERS DSI hopes to launch flying cameras it calls FireFlies early in 2016. Their images will let scientists judge the composition of asteroids they pass. They will use off-the-shelf parts in tried and tested modules, just 10cm wide. That first phase should cost some US$20 million (NZ$24m), DSI chief executive David Gump said, adding he expects about half to come from government and research institute contracts and half from corporate advertising and corporate sponsorship. A year later, larger craft would begin two-to-three year missions to land and take samples for analysis. Most dramatic of all, the company sees a "harvester" craft heading out in 2019 to capture and divert the most promising asteroids so that they settle into orbit around Earth by 2021. On these, Gump said, DSI would try to make propellant and mine nickel and iron to make the building components for new structures in space. "If we are successful producing resources in space then it makes what Nasa wants to do, which is going to Mars, that much less expensive," he said. "It costs a lot of money to launch everything from the ground." Planetary Resources plans to send telescopes into space to study asteroids between Earth and the Moon. In a later phase, it will send out craft carrying deep-space lasers to gather data on some of the thousands of more distant asteroids. "By 2020 we will have begun processing asteroidal material in space, and we will have our first interplanetary fuel stop," Planetary Resources' Anderson said. "A mission can leave the Earth and stop by the trading post and gas themselves up." And while commercial gain from asteroid exploration is drawing investors, the rest of humanity also has an interest. A shift in climate caused by a big asteroid strike may have killed off the dinosaurs and Nasa is taking the risk of another such impact seriously enough to go looking for similar threats. As mining expert Blair put it: "For survival of the human species, we have to address the asteroids, or they will address us. Because statistically a big enough one will come along that will scrub the planet clean and set it back to zero." - Reuters

This is the same nonsense you hear over and over again. There is no piss running down your leg, you are making a sensible decision to retreat. That has nothing to do with being scared and everything with knowing the statistics. You are more likely to get killed or hurt if you go on the offense. Those are the facts. If your own safety or the safety of your family is your priority, you should not go on the offensive. If you do, do that knowing you increase the chances of getting hurt. We can muddy this discussion with talk about how it should be and whatnot, but the fact is that things like this will happen, and that your most safe, sensible approach is to avoid confrontion. Be smart, stay alive. Edit: o, great, this turned into a gun control debate. That is it, I am out.

True, but that doesn't support the idea that you should let everyone be able to buy freakin' machine guns. It's sick. If you want to own a weapon, your criminal record should be clean and you should not be insane. That's the minimum requirement that no one can talk against. There is no argument against it. I'll say again, I'd never defend an idea that the population should be completely disarmed. That's just stupid, nanny-state policy. But if you want to own a firearm, you should be able to prove you're clean and sane. Every weapon should have a serial number and be registered and tied to a registered citizen of a state. That's a rational way of controlling this stuff. In cases someone is a gun nut and likes to collect tons of weapons and ammunition (with clean criminal and psychiatric record), a legal add-on would be great - every year you need to account for your stash. It should be inspected because there's a large potential of weapon dealing. I mean, if you buy a laboratory flask in some USA states, that's illegal, but if you own enough firearms and ammunition for a small army, that's ok, and no one asks you about it. That's thoroughly messed up and no way of running a country. No wonder there's a huge amount of assaults and killed people. I'd use a similar policy for dangerous compounds. If you want to buy few kilos of some oxidizer, why not? But if you want to buy a truckload of 50 kilo bags, you better be able to explain why and then get a licence.

ive seen those. ^ unfortunately you couldnt get one. they only manufactured a few of them, then stopped making them all together. i ended up getting the original sidewinder force feedback instead (this was the late 90s), and didnt regret it. those microsoft joysticks were top notch and way ahead of their time. same here. id rather use a device i have than blow a bunch of cash on something that i really dont have a use for. there are ways to get trackir data into the game. if absolute (not relative) look axes are implemented, we could just use it through tir2joy or freetrack (they had an old vision that supported trackir, to natural point's dismay, which i use because of its better configuration options) or some other utility (freePIE looks nice if you know python, supports everything). thats the problem with all these 3d input devices, they all have proprietary apis (the trackir sdk for example requires you sign an nda) that they dont want to see used by 3rd parties, forcing us consumers to suffer the deluge of 3rd party utilities to make things talk to eachother (the irony).

It's not like this is a mod release thread. If you want to talk about Kerbal mental health, have at it.

Well I do some videos of my attempts, and I figure the launching bit is very repetitive so having a tug in space will make life easier. I will also just send up refueling missions once it returns to Kerbin, most likely switch out the crew for other missions and returning the one who landed back to Kerbin. 700NitroXpress on here was kind enough to help me on bettering my design of the lander, and now it is atop its tug waiting to go into space. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/59747-My-single-crew-Duna-Lander-in-need-of-help/ is where my lander talk is going on right now, and everyone here has been very helpful showing me how I over planned the design. Below is the current state of the test vehicle, since I will not be home for most of today and tomorrow the project is on hold but always in my head. Not sure yet how I want the main lifter system to work, but it will come to me I am sure.

Garik Israelian can explain it better than me: TED Talk Garik Israelian: How spectroscopy could reveal alien life

Today I give you the Mun Arch Kethane Refinery and Fuel Depot. While I have always liked my Minmus Kethane base, I also feel that it had a number of flaws and could be greatly improved upon. Not wanting to simply recreate a different version of that base, I decided to locate my new base on the Mun and I figured that near one of the anomalies was a good place to put it. You don’t get those perfectly flat lakes as you do on Minmus, and it’s a bit tougher to land on the Mun, but it worked out ok in the end. The mods used here are primarily Kosmos for the structural base components (those Balka crew tunnels are one of my favorite mod parts), the solar panel, and the cylindrical fuel tanks. udk_lethal_d0se’s large structural components for the habitation modules and spherical fuel tanks. And the Kethane parts, obviously. There are also a number of mods used for other parts. KW is used for some structural parts and the boosters. Alexustas’ stack inline lights are used in a number of places. The SCANsat parts are used on a number of crafts for mapping. Engineer was used for all of my craft/flight info needs. Infernal Robotics was extremely helpful for making a system to dock the components together on the ground. And a few more for parts and plugins here and there. Here’s a few more shots of the base in action and a breakdown of the components. I have some pictures from the base planning and construction as well. Here are some of the surveyor probes used to determine the best landing spot. The first is my ultra-low altitude scanner, circling the Mun at about 7.5km in an 85o orbit. I used a lander to scout out a few of the anomalies but was ultimately stymied by the rough terrain around one of the Mun arches. For the last arch I used a small rover to get a closer look at the surrounding area and find a suitable base site. The area just west of this arch is pretty flat and has enough space for a base before dropping off steeply into the nearby crater. And now we have the launch for all of the base components. There were eight launches in all, ranging from the totally-reasonable, about 30 tons to LKO for the science and comms stations, to the, “are you sure these boosters don’t need any struts?†launch of the habitation, kethane drills, and kethane depot modules at about 100 tons to LKO, and finally to the “oh god, just get it into space†launch of the core module at about 230 tons to LKO and the “I don’t care how heavy it is, just keep strapping on boosters†launch of the two identical fuel depots. Here are a few shots of the base construction. The core module was the first to launch, as it lacked any movement system on the ground. The kethane drill segment came next, using my top-mounted landing and extendable wheels system for putting it into place and docking. The landing system was then separated and blasted off to crash into the surface some distance away. After a few more segments the base starts to look interesting. If you look really closely you can see that the decouplers are still attached to the top of the kethane drills on the left. Because I was stupid and did very little testing I managed to put those on upside down. Not wanting to be left with the blight of unnecessary parts I undertook the painful process of deleting those parts from the persistence file. This requires renumbering every part that comes after the decouplers and ensuring that every part has the correct connection references. It was not fun, test things first people. The final two components are put into place. I got really good at precision landing with bulky, low TWR crafts doing all of this. I’m not very efficient about it, but at least I can do it now. With the base complete I sent out the crew transport vehicle with a rover strapped onto the bottom. Once they arrive, Jeb, Bill, Bob and some other guy set off to study the Mun arch. In answer to everyone’s question, yes the Mun arch does have kethane in it. Jeb takes the opportunity to jet up to the top of the arch and claim it as his own. Unfortunately a tragic accident took the life of the four Kerbals. They got a little carried away and flipped their rover, smashing all four of them and sending the rover on an improbable, ballistic trajectory into a nearby crater. They will be mourned. Here are a few detail shots of the completed base. But wait, dear readers, we aren’t done yet. Don’t think I would frontload this post with all of the good stuff. For what use is a base full of fuel if it’s stuck on the ground? We need something to get all that stuff back into orbit. For that I present the Nostromo (ok, I know the Nostromo was just the tug, and this thing doesn’t really look like that or the big refinery ship it was pulling, but that’s somehow what I had in mind when I came up with this). Coming in on the launchpad at just over 2900 tons it was powered by five of the largest, Griffon KW engines (there is a fifth booster hidden behind all of the flames in the center), sixteen of the low thrust, long duration Globe X5 SRBs and four of the high thrust, low duration Globe X5s for a total of around 900 parts. This was a take-a-break, find-something-else-to-do kind of launch, running at around 3 or 4 FPS. After some tricky separations maneuvers (those internal SRBs are a little scary when they come off and bump into each other) the four remaining engines push the tanker most of the way into orbit and drain it down to about 12000L of fuel. The main orbital engines push it the rest of the way, eventually getting into a stable, 300km orbit around Kerbin. Here are some detail shots, showing some of the six NERVAs used as orbital engines, and one of the four main landing engines. A network of forty RCS blocks provide control authority during flight, and help correct for any mass imbalance. Here the command tower is visible in the center. The six large spherical tanks are flanked by seventy-six of the cylindrical tanks of various sizes and twenty RCS tanks. The tanker holds a total of 77328L of fuel and 11020L of mono-propellant. Two of the docking and guidance towers are also visible here, cutoff on the bottom left and in the distance near the center. Here we can see the orbital pilot station and another of the guidance towers at the front of the tanker. The front-mounted fuel tanks are used to offset the mass of the NERVAs in the back. These use standard tri-couplers which don’t allow fuel crossfeed from the bottom, while all of the other tri-couplers have been modified to allow fuel flow. I tried to make the struts come out decent and symmetrical (I couldn’t use actual symmetry placement most of the time) to avoid that strut-spammed look. And most of the utilities parts are hidden away in the middle; there are around thirty or so reaction wheels, several batteries and RTGs, and some foldable landing legs made out of the standard, mid-sized truss pieces and Infernal Robotics hinges. After a three-burn transfer from Kerbin to the Mun the Nostromo begins its descent to the surface. By carefully coordinating the orbital engines, the main vertical thrust engines, and the RCS thrusters the tanker homes in on the Kethane refinery. Raycott Kerman gets a close view of the Mun arch from his perch at the rear guidance tower. The Nostromo comes in for a very gentle landing, fine tuning its position with RCS thrust, and running out of fuel less than one meter above the surface; talk about a close call. The landing blocks performed admirably though, absorbing the impact of the now 190 ton tanker at a little under 1m/s. With the tanker connected to the base through KAS pipes the refinery cranks up and begins producing fuel. The base is, unfortunately, not stable with a full load of fuel and kethane. It tends to develop a case of the death rattle and shakes itself apart after a minute or so. That’s no matter though, I can just start up everything and finish the fuel production and transfer during time-warp. TAC Fuel Balancer is supremely useful here, considering that I have seventy-six tanks to fill up. Now that the tanker is fully fueled the crew begins preparations for liftoff. After Seebin Kerman detaches the fuel pipe he watches as the lumbering tanker, now over 1000 tons, begins to slowly rise. Using a combination of the lift and orbital engines the tanker blasts off into a 50km orbit around the Mun. Around 25000L of fuel and 2000L of mono-propellant were used during liftoff, but there is still another 50000L of fuel remaining in the tanks, and around 9000L of mono. With the Nostromo in orbit I’ll end with one final shot of the Mun Arch Kethane Refinery, taken just as the sun is setting on the horizon.