Kerbal Space Program: Heavily modded Career Colonization of Kerbol and beyond

[Dragonking]

Chapter 44: Minmus Trading Infrastructure

First of all, sorry for the long delay in posting the next chapter. I had been struggling with a bug that prevented me from embedding images here for a very long time, which started with the changes to imgur, for some reason if I try to go to the images page on my main pc it shows that page as not existing, so i tried to use the links from the individual posts to get the pictures embedded, but for some reason that didnt work, now I have to use the workaround of writing this over my laptop, where I can actually access the images page on imgur. I still have no idea what causes it on my main PC or how to solve it. The other main problem was a Tweakscale bug which appeared some time after that that broke scaling for all converter parts, which is pretty fatal for my playstyle, so I was just unable to play on the save for months before it was fixed. The first couple of chapters I will be posting now are from the period where I was still able to play on the save but couldnt actually post about it due to no image embedding, after those it will be caught up with the at the time current state again.

So now lets continue:
After some time I noticed that the second Hale Miner I had launched in the previous chapter was on a much slower trajectory than all of the other crafts of the colony fleet. It was lagging behind so much it would arrive over a year later than the rest, which would cause major problems as as long as its not there the Hale Spire cannot start its production. The Miner had already expended as much fuel as it could while still being able to brake when it arrives at Sarnus and land at Hale though(I do not know why it wasn`t able to reach as high speeds as the first miner with the same fuel, likely some less efficient flying/it being launched at the end of the transfer window?). So I decided to opt for a very risky manuever: I would use almost all the remaining fuel in the transfer stage to accelerate the miner enough to arrive relatively shortly after the rest of the fleet:

but with just that small amount of fuel in the transfer stage+that in the miner itself it would no longer be able to decelerate into Sarnus orbit on its own. So the plan is to catch it with the orbital tug currently being used as a skycrane for the Hale Production Spire, which thanks to its Fusion engines has more than enough dv to perform this manuever. So the tug will have to seperate from the spire after landing it on Hale, dock to a grappling module which will have to be built by Sarnus Colony Ship(the miner does not have a docking port that the tug can attatch to, it will have to be grappled), and then intercept the Miner as it shoots past Sarnus and decelerate it into an Orbit around Sarnus near Hale´s, from which the Miner can land itself and start working.

After doing that I could only wait until everything arrives and hope the plan works out, so now the next step was to improve the Minmus mining & shipping infrastructure so I could get more funds for future missions again after the colony fleet had decimated the space program`s budget.

The first step for that was building a new Miner for ExoMin and RareMetals, as the small drills on the main colony had definitely reached their limit, which was easily done with the Minmus constructor with all the MKT&SPT that had been brought to Minmus on previous runs(although getting the Minmus Constructor operational again before that was quite a mess, I had ignored it for far too long and the supplies ran out, was quite the odyssey to fix it, dont quite remember everything though sadly):

Spoiler

The next step was building a proper spaceport for Minmus.
Before I had always landed right next to the main colony to pick up materials, but this had become pretty tedious due to the lag from it, so a proper spaceport was needed, which could draw anything from planetary logistics and use it to fill up crafts arriving there, without causing too much lag. I again built it with the Minmus constructor, although I dont have any pictures of the actual construction sadly.

After building that spaceport it still needed crew to be able to draw from planetary logistics though, and I wanted to have some nice support vehicles for it, so I decided to wheel out an old SSPL-07 and load it up with some Kerbals and 2 new Spaceport support rovers(that definitely weren´t stolen from the nearest city´s airport):

Spoiler

SSPL-07 leaving after the delivery was completed:

Due to not flying this thing for so long I somewhat misjudged the reentry into Kerbin`s atmosphere and ended up undershooting KSC by quite a lot so I had to fly for a while to reach it:

With the new Miner and Spaceport completed the Minmus Trade route should now be much more comfortable to fly, and have a higher capacity.

[Dragonking]

Chapter 45: Laythe Intermediate Miners

I spent some time in sandbox mode finalizing the design for the underwater miners which would be mining the majority of resources on Laythe, and all the infrastructure to build and deploy them. This will include a heavy lift cargo ship that can carry the miners to where they need to be, and from which they can then just roll off into the ocean and sink down to start mining, and a shipyard to build the ship, which is also quite a bit larger than it needs to be for that ship, so it can also handle any future ships that will need to be built. The cost for all this equipment is however in the tens of millions of MKT, making it all far too expensive to build anytime soon with the current mining infrastructure on Laythe. 

Little sneak peek at the miners, heavy lift ship and shipyard(this is all NOT actually built on the save yet, its all just sandbox testing):

Spoiler

To solve this problem I designed a new type of intermediate miner, these will be placed right next to the old starter miners and mine exactly what those do, just at a higher capacity, these can serve as a stopgap to provide enough raw material to build the proper miners, which have even more capacity and can be deployed into the biomes with the absolute highest concentration of whatever needs to be mined on all of Laythe.

The first step to building those new miners was getting the Laythe construction plane on site though, which caused some trouble as there were no supplies left in planetary logistics(which the plane needs to draw on to sustain its crew), so it ran out and all the crew got turned into tourists. So more were needed from elsewhere(luckily the plane has a probe core so I was still able to fly it).

After a quite long flight I reached Laythe airport, where I wanted to get more supplies and refuel, but then I noticed its supplies had also run out and its crew had also reverted to tourists, meaning it could not draw new resources either.

So now low on fuel and still with no healthy crew I just about made my way to Laythe City itself with the remaining fuel, where I was finally able to stock up on everything.

After this small odyssey I could finally start the actual work on building the new miners(I sadly only have a picture of one, I actually built 2 though):

After building the second miner I did have some problems with getting the Kerbal that planted the construction stake back on board the plane over the side ladders on the pontoons, so I had to lower the whole plane down and have him enter through the front ramp:

Spoiler

Also taking this chance to finally show off this Plane`s small interior, it even has a boat in there that can drive out on the landing gears it has into the water when the plane lands on water and be used for a little exploring, haven´t had a good chance to use it yet though:

After the whole supplies fiasco earlier I started planning out a new facility on Laythe, a huge floating garden that will supply the whole moon with supplies, using not only standard agroponics but also other recipes for supplies, as while the Fertilizer+Mulch-> Supplies chain has a slight supplies gain it is very minimal, which also means that the total amount of supplies currently available on Laythe is very low and it is all only being held up by constant farming to maintain and slowly grow the total amount. With these different recipes no mulch is needed(but some other ingredients in exchange), allowing more supplies production not limited by how quickly Kerbals turn your existing supplies into mulch.

In preparation for building this floating garden I made a scouting flight using LFIG-01 to find potential construction sites(and I also looked for some potential sites for another planned industrial facility for Laythe):

Spoiler

Potential site for the industrial facility:

Bit of a bad angle, but this bay could be nice for the floating gardens:

Edited February 10 by Dragonking

[Dragonking]

Chapter 46: Laythe City Fusion Reactor

Due to the kolonization value for Laythe constantly going up from the Kerbals staying there are constantly increasing bonuses to production, which has started to somewhat become a problem, as with the production speed of the factory domes on Laythe city now at around 2000% the power draw has increased so much that the old Karbonite powerplant was no longer able to supply enough power. Karbonite was a bit of a problematic fuel from the start as well, while there is some that can be filtered out of Laythe`s atmosphere the concentration of it is far lower than somewhere like Eve, so the powerplant always had some trouble running properly. So I decided to change the main fuel type, and designed a fusion reactor for the city which is capable of producing 320000 units of EC/sec, which should be a future-proof power solution for the city for a long time.

The reactor was then quickly built with the available MKT&SPT and pushed into position:

But of course that reactor also needed some fusion fuel, so I built a new tanker SSTO spaceplane to ship some down from Laythe Station:

But before any fusion fuel could be picked up it also needed to be harvested in the first place, while I had scooped some Deuterium on my first Jool scooping run I did not dive deep enough for He3 due to how much of a mess that first scooping run was. So now I needed to do another scooping run, this time much deeper to actually get some He3, as the plan was to use D-He3 fusion on the city`s reactor:

Spoiler

Departing from Laythe Station:

Jool dive:

There were some problems with this Jool dive though, while the scooper had made it all the way to the depths of Jool and back into orbit the amount of He3 gained was still relatively small, while it is enough to run the city´s reactor for a while it is well below what the scooper should be able to do. It seems that with some recent updates to SpaceDust(the mod that is responsible for the scooping functionality) the concentration has been decreased by a lot. While before the tanks filled up practically instantly as soon as the scooper went under 40km altitude now its way more gradual, but even at the highest concentration it still takes forever to fill the tanks. The scooper cannot stay down there that long as it does not have the fuel to maintain altitude and speed down there for an extended time and still be able to make it back up. So with the filled Deuterium tanks and small amount of He3 the scooper made its way back to Laythe.


Now the tanker SSTO could launch to meet the scooper and pick up the fusion fuel:

Spoiler

With the fusion fuel delivered the reactor was almost ready to begin operation, all it needed was a cooling unit, which was quickly built:

The cooling module should be able to keep everything on the colony that will ever be built cooled, as it uses very powerful atmospheric radiators. It also contains some atmospheric harvesting equipment as it simply looks good in the combination, and is a nice thing to have.

And with all that the reactor was finally taken online!