Extrakerbal Refueling and Manufacturing, etc.

[Garoad]

New around here, I have a few modding feasibility questions before I start messing around with learning KSP modding. If any of these have been done already, I haven't been able to find them. Still trying to get a feel for what's possible and what isn't...

1) Refueling on another planet/moon via mining. The way I envision this working, we'd devise some plausible cockamamie "scientific" process for manufacturing liquid, mono, and solid fuel using just local drilling/mining and electricity. This would need to be done via EVA (need some practical uses!) or maybe robotically to gather resources & run any machinery needed to produce fuel.

1a) Prospecting and sampling needed to locate mineral rich areas to create stuff from?

1b) Possible to connect fuel hoses between fuel producing machines, base storage tanks, and vehicle storage tanks to facilitate transfers? Yeah, might be tough to make hose-like...

2) Towing or some other method of retrieval of re-usable 1st stage tanks/boosters/engines

3) Add new fuel/engine types (may be needed for the plausible cockamamie science)

4) A magnetic crane to move/build base components, or to fix up that mess of a "landing" the other Kerbals pulled off recently (i.e. point your ship upright after tipping it over)

4a) A physical "Grabber Thingy®" for a similar use as a crane, build/fix bases, etc.

5) Spawning/building base components using some manufacturing/production process similar to the fuel production concept above

100) Railgun style launches? +1000 points if you have to build the rail manually

[smunisto]

1 - Kethane Pack

2 - Kerbal Attachment System/Regular docking ports with wheels on tanks/space cranes( the last 2 achievable are stock, not a mod)

3 - Kethane Pack

4 - Kerbal Attachment System

5 - A few mods come to mind, none of them are particularily well polished

6 - Now this is the new idea, however the Unity physics won't like it.

[EndlessWaves]

A mass driver gets suggested ad naseum, almost as much as multiplayer.

It may be possible to make, but it's so far out of the game's level of technology it would be almost unusable without significant cheating. The one on Kerbin would just wreck ships as the atmospheric drag built and taking it to another planet would require so many launches to lift the required mass that nobody would bother. Perhaps when we see what sort of mass extraction rate the resource system has when it comes.

Edited April 30, 2013 by EndlessWaves

[Garoad]

Looks like I have some more searching to do. Only thing is I cannot find ANY "kethane" pack anywhere. Is it is under some other name?

[EndlessWaves]

I'm not sure why you're having trouble, it's currently on the second page of the plugin-powered releases forum.

[Garoad]

Thanks. I was mostly looking on Spaceport and I guess I somehow overlooked it in the one or two forum searches I tried. This stuff is pretty cool. Problem I have now is, I have no ideas for mods to work on. lol

[localSol]

New around here, I have a few modding feasibility questions

[...]

100) Railgun style launches? +1000 points if you have to build the rail manually

Here's a mass driver mod : http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/crashtest-inc-mass-driver/

Tracks would be fun, but what about digging a very deep hole (underground tube) in the polar caps and using the low friction ice in the tube as a good launching surface, possibly with a vacuum also? (partial variation of an idea by Andrew Nowicki)

I think it was Scott Manley who had a video that explained some fun stuff about launch systems like this, the big technical limitations/challenges/resource-and-labor-intensity of using them in an atmosphere. But for low atmosphere environments, I like them! Or just some kind of expensive drag tester in thick atmosphere..

Oh here's the scott video :

In my opinion it is one of scott's really great videos.

If you want a short funny part , watch from 2:45 to 3:12, it still cracks me up.