Thanks!

That's the next plan, once I get some more money and can upgrade the tracking station I'm going after some asteroids to make some refueling space stations.

 

FWIW asteriods actually run out of ore. Thats why I setup on Minimus. I used to refuel there in earlier versions using mods (kethane or karbonite), then for interplanetary transfers I would fall from minimus, use the oberth effect near kerbin and slingshot to wherever. Makes for a pretty trick and efficient manuver.

 

 

Built my first actual working SSTO in 1.0 tonight. The new drag rules make this a whole lot harder than it used to be, but the RAPIER engine comes through. Got it into a 100x75km orbit with 200 m/s of delta-v left.



I deorbited it with the RCS fuel, but then the spaceplane aero converted a lot of the orbital velocity into lift instead of heat on re-entry, so it "bounced" over KSC and went out to sea. I had to turn it around and come back, fortunately there was a bit of fuel left.



Came in too high for the runway, but landed it on the plain nearby. Jeb had to walk a few km home.



The RAPIERs burn a lot more fuel in air-breathing mode than they used to, so I wound up with a bunch of leftover oxidizer, but only 1% of the original fuel.

Man I feel like a nerd now.

--Ian

 

This is good ****.

http://i.4cdn.org/gif/1436102955269.webm

 

Miater has been at the shop getting race seat and rollbar done, and I have actually had some weekends off, so time to play with some mods!

I setup this mostly self-sustaining base on minimus using the USI MKS stuff. The orbital survey map told me that there was uranite and metallic ore here, but only once I landed the drills did I find out that it was innaccurate. I got unlucky with the water, there is no water on the mun and only the highlands on minimus have just a spec of it, so I have to haul in fertilizer to stretch the supplies. The USI resources pack forces you to use water to make fuel (which makes sense) but the stock just needs ore, which there is plenty of.

Using stage recovery mod I was able to make a pretty efficient booster for the smaller units with the inflatables on top and attached that was about 150k per launch, recovered about 40k of that. The 3 larger factory modules seen cost about 450k each to get off of kerbin. Got 650k paid for by the gubermint thru a minimus station contract.



Some of the debris laying about is leftovers from the sky cranes used to land this crap in place. When there is a child part clipped inside of another one, or I broke a solar panel landing the skycrane it wont let me scrap the part. I am sending up some explosives to solve this problem soon. If that doesn't work then I will send some ulage motors up to strap to them and send them flying into the side of a mountain.

I did keep this skycrane (used to land those large units) and strapped some wheels, an EVA seat, and some science crap on it, including some survey equipment. With no heavy *** refinery to land its got quite the delta-V. I would send it to Duna, but the solar panels wouldn't survive reentry. Perhaps Ike.





Lastly, a little robotic miner for metallic ore\uranite. It doesn't have to hop very far to find something to mine, but I haven't figured out the proxy logistics in this mod, so I have to manually hop it back and forth. Since the base station makes fuel its no big deal, but its not very easy to land. When full its TWR is like 2, so you have to be careful bringing it in.



Next up I need to send an refueling tug that I can hop into orbit with and refuel stuff. Need to get some Commsats ready to head to Duna when the transfer window opens op, as well as retrofit my orbital resource scanner with a directional antenna, refuel it and send it that way. Going to try to transfer directly from minmus orbit, so getting all that timed out right will be interesting.

 

Hoooooooly ****

 

Watch some of Scott Manley's early KSP videos, he have a lot of ksp builds and many of the astrophysics videos are very helpful

 

KSP 1 will be "free to claim" on epic games between Jan 5th and 12th if you still somehow havent bought it.