Voiding the Warranty: Arbsoup's Dubious 10x Sandbox

[arbsoup]

Hi all. Close to a year ago I decided to get back into the game, and after fiddling with configs, making patches, and checking and double-checking everything many times over as my install grew ever more complex, I'm finally at a position where I can probably focus a bit more on gameplay. So I figured I'd share that all with you here.

I'm running a sandbox game (career's broken beyond belief in this setup, and I'm still tired of biome-hopping from the last time I played a couple years back) in a 10x scale Kerbin system (plus plenty of extras) where I'm basically giving myself some gentle pushes towards certain styles — use USI Life Support (my fork!) for extra challenge, use chemical rockets (thank you SMURFF) for lifters even if I have all those cool nuclear engines, focus on relatively conventional approaches early on until I feel like I've earned the advanced stuff, build "infrastructure" even if I don't strictly need it, that kind of thing. I'm in mid-Year 2 now, and I've done a Duna orbiter+rover, sent out a couple probes towards the other planets for later, got one on the way to Eve, saved Kerbin from an asteroid on an impact trajectory, and built and ran a Mun base for a year before it was consumed by the darkness.

Today it was a pretty mundane launch: a scanning satellite for the Mun so I can figure out where to put my next project, probably some sort of factory-base to test various ISRU features. So this first post is less to brag about accomplishing a cool thing and more to introduce what I've got — since not a lot of people do 10x Kerbin at all!

I am voiding the warranty on all the mods here. Any reports are made in test installs; everything in this one is my bad.

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The Ausnan B is a lifter that sits on the pad at 240T and puts 7T into LKO. (Pretty typical ratio for my setup; I leave the SMURFF dials at 0.5.) I love building lifters, but this one is absolutely atrocious to fly. Fortunately I got a nice picture with the Mun and Minmus up there.

(All images are links to imgbb where the full versions are.)

 

Small bummer: the same fix for Firefly that starts the re-entry plasma at a reasonable altitude for real-sized systems also makes all my lifters glow as they ascend, with sketchy results.

 

Upper stage burn. The engines like to flicker, sadly.

 

And here's our ejection, nicely framing just how huge Kerbin is here. (The sun is KSS2's.)

 

SigmaDimensions' inflated ScaledSpace textures make the Mun look a little ugly on approach...

 

...but Parallax takes over when the Munsniffer gets a bit lower. (Honestly, I had originally installed it just to prevent massive lag spikes while in PQS range of the Mun — it's doing its job for that well, at least!)

One insertion later — mission success! Scans are in and the northwestern part of the East Crater seems to be our most favorable landing site for trying out ISRU with as many things as possible.

Edited March 14 by arbsoup