[PC Game] Kerbal Space Program (image heavy)

[Tinwhistler]

Still playing Kerbal Space Program.

The thing uses conic approximations for orbitals. It's actually quite good. Unlike the last time I played, there's more than the Mun and Minmus (the small outer moon)--there's a whole solar system. Duna is the Kerbin equivalent to Venus, and your first window of opportunity to visit (based on phase angles) is on day 54 of the game. I'm on day 41ish, so I don't have much time to prepare, because another window doesn't come around until around 200 days later.

Because the window of opportunity is so small, I want to launch everything I need to get there in one day. Thus far, I've been launching ,orbiting, and landing single spacecraft on the Mun and back. So, to practice, I launched the skeleton of a satellite into orbit, along with a bunch of fuel tanks. The satellite was about 60 tons, which is pretty much at the top end of what I can lift with stock parts. Each fuel tank was 62 tons if you include the delivery vehicle.

Then I had to manage capturing those spacecraft in Munar orbar, each about 10 minutes apart from the other. Once in place, I had to match each fuel tank to the satellite orbital plane and Hohmann transfer to meet up, match velocities, and then carefully bump the docking ports together. A big pain in the ass when you're dealing huge masses. This is definitely a game for nerds. I did it in two batches..once with three fuel tanks to prove the concept, and then the next with the remaining 6.

The satellite itself was the tallest thing I've built, and I actually maxed out my hanger height building it.

Liftoff!

The fuel tank component

Each tank weighs 36 tons full, plus the delivery vehicle. It really does take that many rockets to get into orbit. I'm using an asparagus style lifter, with each tank feeding fuel into it's neighbor in an S configuration. Each tank drops off in pairs until I end up with one single tank and rocket just on the edge of orbit for circularizing the orbit. Then I drop off all the big tanks and use the little lander to get to the Mun.

Juggling multiple insertions and orbital maneuvers.

Fuel tank and delivery vehicle, intercepting my already-placed satellite.

Separation of structural support and empty fuel tanks and rockets.

On approach. Slowing to match velocity.

Docking with RCS thrusters

Delivery vehicle separation.

Using RCS thrusters to fly retrograde until my orbit decays.

Crash! The unmanned delivery vehicle is no more, and no longer cluttering up my orbital space.

My fuel station in all of its glory 40KM off the surface of the Mun, with Kerbin in the background. This satellite configuration probably has enough on-board fuel to feed 20 missions to the outer planets.

Naturally, I plan on hanging one of these around each of them, too

 

[GasBandit]

When this game hits $10, I am so all over it.

 

[Dave]

I've never been able to get into it. I've tried but it's just not tripping my triggers.

 

[PatrThom]

I've never been able to get into it. I've tried but it's just not tripping my triggers.

Perhaps you want its sister game, Herbal Space Program?

--Patrick

 

[bhamv3]

The game looks awesome, but I just know I'm going to spend at least the first two days gleefully blowing things up.

 

[Tinwhistler]

The game looks awesome, but I just know I'm going to spend at least the first two days gleefully blowing things up.

Well, in the new Career mode, you basically start out with a manned pod, two solid fuel rockets with no gimbals, and no landing gear or parachutes.

So basically a manned bottle rocket, with no way to control or land the thing. I'm lucky that I hit the water in just such a way that the pod sheared off, and my Kerbal survived. But I got science for it, and so was able to upgrade to some better equipment pretty quick

 

[LordRendar]

How much math and science does one need to know to play this?
or is it more intuitive?

 

[Tinwhistler]

It is not intuitive at all. Seriously. But fun. It's kind of like Dwarf Fortress in how unforgiving it is..however, you can keep killing your poor Kerbals without losing the game entirely.

You can get by with intuition, but until you actually come to some understanding of orbital mechanics, the game will be pretty rough for you. Eventually, if you stick with it, you'll find yourself keeping an eye on thrust-to-weight ratio, Δv values for each stage of your rocket, rocket Isp values for space and atmosphere, etc. See this entry in the KSP wiki for an example of what I mean. Knowing all those formulas will really help your game play, but it's not really necessary to pull out the old-slide rule in order to get to the Mun and back. But if you want to do anything that requires more precision, like docking or dropping several components in the same few meters on a planet for a base, you'll need to do some math.

The game has added some very rudimentary tutorials to show you the very basics of prograde and retorgrade acceleration, and that kind of thing. But they only really touch the tip of the iceberg.

That said, the devleoper is very third-party add-on friendly, and there's a huge repository of them to choose from. These range from MechJeb, which almost acts as an autopilot of sorts, to add-ons that create new features like moon mining. I use couple of add-ons that keep orbital inclination, periapsis, apoapsis, surface speed, etc on my screen as I play, for convenience.

 

[Dei]

I know my husband uses a mod that speeds up time for when he does deeper space missions.

 

[Tinwhistler]

I know my husband uses a mod that speeds up time for when he does deeper space missions.

That's built in..no need for a mod

 

[Tinwhistler]

Oh, and though I don't use them much yet (having learned to play KSP in an earlier version that didn't have them), the new maneuver node system evidently makes things a lot more non-mathy

 

[Frank]

Wow, I've made it to the Mun, hell, I've landed on the Mun, but that orbital fuel station is an idea above my paygrade. Kudos.

 

[Tinwhistler]

Really getting into the maneuver nodes now that I'm doing inter-planetary transfers.

Lesson 1: Don't give yourself enough only enough delta-v to escape Kerbin and hope to hohmann transfer once you hit the Sun's SOI. While it worked for 5 ships to Duna, you can see two here that got re-captured by Kerbal and I had to give them a bigger push when they swung back around. Those two ships arrived like 30 days later because of the mistake. The takeaway: Try to delta-v all the way to Duna in one maneuver. If you line up the phase angles right, you can do it.

Lesson 2: Make sure you have enough fuel. My very first ship to Duna (the kethane scanner from the mining add-on) had enough fuel to get into orbit, but not enough to move to a meaningful position to scan the planetary surface. I had to send a tugboat with enough fuel to get the scanner to my refueling base.

(As a side note, my fuel satellite on duna looks so puny because I reconfigured the whole thing to be modular. Now I ship the head and tail seperately, and can insert as many fuel and docking sections in between as I want. For Duna, I just went with one of each so I wouldn't have to juggle as many ships.)

Lesson 3: This goes with lesson 2...Airbraking is your friend. Duna doesn't have much of an atmosphere, but any atmosphere at all will slow you down. Hitting Duna at 11KM (just a few km above the highest mountain range) can shave about 1100 delta-v off of the circularization burn. That's a lotta fuel saved. (That little orange splat is my maneuver node for circularization..they've very handy.)

Lesson 4: Bring enough resources the first time. I set up my mining base on Duna, but I didn't put enough power modules on the ship. I had to fly in a solar panel array and link it up (via the Kerbal Attachment System add-on) in order to have enough juice to mine for more than a few seconds.

Since taking these pictures, I've refined the ships a little--such as replacing the solar array with a 20-ton array of radioisotope thermoelectric generators similar to what we currently use to power satellites in real life. They don't provide much power, but 64 of them do the job, and they work at night

Now, I also have a whole mining set-up on and around Ike, Duna's only moon. My latest mission: Send a refueling satellite to Jool, the gas giant. I can't mine kethane there, so it'll just have to be an emergency way-point in case I get get stuck exploring the outer planets without enough fuel to get home.

 

[GasBandit]

I'll ask the crass question - how many astronauts did you lose figuring all that out?

 

[Tinwhistler]

I actually didn't lose any on Duna. I did all of my catastrophic learning on the Mun way back when I first started playing. My initial escape trajectories from Kerbal were so half-hearted because I was afraid of catapulting myself into an un-recoverable orbit. But because of that, they were completely recoverable.

After the scanner fiasco (I ended up with like 50 delta-v after achieving orbit...I almost didn't make it), I made big rockets, and refueled them in Kerbin orbit before sending them out. Most of them arrived at Duna with 3-4K dV worth of fuel, more than enough for my purposes. Duna's about 1/3 the gravity of Kerbal. More than the Mun, but I've got plenty of experience landing ships on Kerbal. My chutes didn't work as well as I'd hoped in the thin atmosphere, but I had plenty of fuel for rocket-assisted landing.

The big question should be how many Kerbal's I've killed trying to learn how to make flyable space-planes.

 

[WasabiPoptart]

My husband loves this game. I keep threatening him with starting an anti-Kerbalcide group. I swear he blows them up on purpose.

 

[Tinwhistler]

When this game hits $10, I am so all over it.

Not $10 yet. But 40% off right now ($16)

 

[GasBandit]

So I got mine yesterday, started playing. Man, science is hard to come by. I'm also going to have to RL research some rocket designs, I can get into orbit fairly easily, and my best suborbital shot gets me over 3km at apoapsis using an unmanned probe. I just read that apparently I'm expected to do EVAs in every biome on Kerbal, and the easiest way to get the "low atmosphere" EVA reports is apparently to make planetfall, get out, and jump up and down. And here I've been defying death with goo and Science ScootyPuffJr. like a sucker!

 

[Tinwhistler]

Yeah, I hear that verson .23 made science harder. For an old hand at the game, I could max the science tree in like 4-5 launches.My last career run through, I got to Duna in 4 launches, and came back with like 45,000 science points. Heh.

A beginner absolutely couldn't do that, though, so I'm not sure where the proper balance is there.

 

[GasBandit]

I did a flyby of Mun. Was kinda difficult with the tech I had, but paid off big time. "High above mun" goo, materials test, EVA and crew report netted me about 200 science, by far the most I've gotten from any mission thus far. Finally got solar panels and the science doohickey that lets you do more than just 1 experiment per pod, finally. Oh, and a thermometer, which will help too.

 

[GasBandit]

(Playing on my laptop currently, so the pictures are sucky)

So Yesterday I got a crew to the Mun.

TO the Mun.

They're still there. Had a little accident during landing and the vehicle tumped over on its side. I tried using the SAS reaction wheels to sort of angle it up a mountain and use that as a ramp to get back up, but it was no go, the friction was just too much. So, Jebediah and two redshirts I hired are currently Marooned on Mun. Maruned?

Incidentally, that Mobile Processing Lab that makes up the bulk of that lander's body is a bitch to get into orbit. Or at least it is when you don't have any good Rockomax engine parts or fuel tanks researched yet. Which I didn't. So how did I get that pig up there? Wellllll... Say hello to my "Mun Express."

Clocking in at 288 individual components and I don't know HOW many tons, the Mun Express is a hodgepodge solid rocket boosters clamped to a towering pencil of Rockomax X200-16 fuel tanks and "Poodle" engines. It's a six stage monstrosity that blows up on 75% of launches. But that one that goes well gets the job done... barely. It's a rokkit that'd do any Ork proud.

Pictured below: The Mun Express in a typical launch abort.

After a couple dozen or so more attempts to get a Mun Express back to the Mun to pick up the stranded Kerbals there (75% went as above, 20% were destroyed impacting the Mun, the remaining 5% didn't have enough fuel to escape Mun after landing), I figured it was just not going to work, and I'd best set about getting science some other way to improve my tech to the point that I could make a decent go of a rescue. So I went back to the drawing board today and made created the Mun Light Science vessel.

The MLS used new-to-me innovative ideas such as smaller solid boosters attached to the larger solid boosters that decouple in mid-stage once they're spent, and radially mounted liquid fuel tanks that are drained first and also are jettisoned once empty. Shucking the heavy and unwieldy Mobile Processing Lab (which enables the reuse of science equipment, othewise without one each facility can only be used once per mission), I resolved to make do with simply one Jr science lab and two Goo containers. The rest of the science payoff would have to come from crew reports, EVA reports, soil samples and the like. Furthermore, I decided to go to Minmus instead of Mun, as I heard it was easier to land on with much lower gravity.

Boy was it ever. I didn't take screenshots during the mission (because I just figured out tonight it was F1 instead of PrtScrn) The much lighter MLS had a much easier and more reliable time getting into Kerbal orbit, executing its transfer burn, and landed on Minmus with so much fuel to spare I was able to take back off and land somewhere else for another round of EVAs and samples. Then I detached from the science portion of the vehicle, and my command module with its tiny engine thrusted its way back home over the next dozen or so days. I gained just over 700 science from that trip, a huge enough reward to enable research of 5 4th tier disciplines, giving me access to my first truly useful Rockomax brand engine, the "Skipper," as well as a decent sized fuel tank, my first docking ports, a command module that seats 3, a hitchhiker container that can seat 4 (so now a real rescue craft that isn't sticking two guys in an empty science lab is possible), better solar panels and batteries, and actual lander components so that maybe I won't have to land the entire rocket Flash Gordon style next time I travel to another world.

Pictured below - what I left on Minmus

So now I'm building an experimental vessel to learn the ins and outs of docking and boosting stuff into orbit to stay there. I hope to build an orbital refueling station sort of like Tinwhistler, albeit on a much lower scale because I'm a long way behind him on research.

 

[GasBandit]

 

[GasBandit]

So tonight I discovered pushing fuel tanks into orbit takes about a 13:1 ratio at my current tech level!

This was, of course, after three hours of failed designs involving all kinds of intricate stages of both liquid and solid boosters. Finally I said "screw it" and just set up an asparagus-staged cluster of my biggest fuel tanks and engines. The above fuel tanks and nacelles drop off in opposing pairs as they run dry of fuel, which the first pair does pretty quickly because in addition to being siphoned off to the other tanks by hoses, ALL the tank stacks have their own Rockomax (tm) Skipper engines as well.

Here's what my fuel lifter looks like after two pairs of nacelles have dropped away. The top half of the central stack is the fuel tank I'm lifting. You can see the docking ports and reaction thrusters on the sides, and the ball on top is the Stayputnik (TM) probe controller which is steering the rocket, and later which will become the "brain" of the fuel can if I need it to reorient itself for docking later.
Here's the little bastard in orbit, finally.

As you can see it's a big floating fuel drum with self-orienting retractable solar panels on the sides to juice up the batteries that power the probe CPU and the running lights. There's a 100-unit tank of monothruster fuel between the main cylinder and the Stayputnik for the RCS thrusters.

So I figured, well, all very well and good, let's just boost another one up there and dock with it!

(Not pictured - CRASSSHSHHHHHH)

So today, Gas Bandit learns patience. Approaching the existing module at 50m/s is too fast to slow down in time. I got it down to about 10 but didn't reorient correctly and the second segment literally decapitated itself on the first, leaving the Stayputnik module to orbit alone while the rest of the second segment became rudderless debris and went spinning off into the void. Fortunately it didn't damage the first segment much, just set it spinning, which I got under control.

So, next time I just boosted the second segment kinda-sorta nearby, then went and designed myself a tug. Basically the same rocket only instead of the fuel station segment at the top, it's just a command module with a docking ring on the nose and a small fuel tank and engine on the back, along with the usual litany of RCS etc.

I spend the next hour catching segment two and getting it caught up to segment one. With that little tug, slow and deliberate is the name of the game.

Finally I get the suckers close together, and close the last hundred meters at less than 0.5m/s.

The tension is palpable. I briefly have to switch control to the first segment, to reorient it for docking, then switch back before there is a collision.

Below: Having spent upwards of five real hours getting to this point from design to docking, I begin chanting my mantra: "Don't fuck up. Don't fuck up. Don't fuck up."

"Don't fuck up don't fuck up don't fuck up..."

"DON'TFUCKUPDON'TFUCKUPDON'TFUCKUPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH"

CLANK!

Success!!! I proudly regard my first, puny space station, christened the Fuel Utility Station, and wonder how the hell Tinwhistler built his massive fueling complex without putting in a marathon 24 hour session.

At any rate, I spend another RL half hour pushing the station into a higher orbit so it goes slower and is easier to catch (I had to chase the damn thing around the planet a dozen times at 145km), and once I have it stable in a circular orbit at 300km, I push as much monofuel and regular fuel out of the tug and into the station as I can (all but just a few drops for the retroburn to get home), detach the tug and send it home.

Jebediah is as good as rescued, right?

Right?

(Also I can't believe there's not a science reward for docking a ship for the first time).

 

[GasBandit]

BREAKING NEWS - Headline reads, Hero Kerbalnauts rescued from Munar Gulag!

After about 2 game weeks of mucking about getting science and building orbital refueling stations, the Kerbals I accidentally marooned on Mun have been returned safely home, and even managed to scrape up a soil sample and some reports for science along the way. Also, I have my new computer now, so the graphical fidelity should be much better.

The Rescue Vehicle lifts off from the pad:

Really, docking with the refueling station is almost as much of a trial as getting to the Mun is. Especially since I placed the reaction thrusters in such a way that they're most useful in lander mode and not so much in booster mode. Eventually I just end up getting kinda close and then switching over to controlling the station itself, and maneuver the station to dock with the ship.

Having refilled the fuel and reaction tanks, the remote controlled rescue vehicle strikes out for the Mun.

Thanks to the abundant amount of fuel, I am able to position and land at the pole, near the crash site. In fact, it's only a 5 km jog from the wrecked Munar Express to the Rescue Lander.

The trip is made easier by extensive use of the EVA jetpacks. Though one of the junior members of the crew gets a little overzealous and manages to overshoot the Rescue Lander by over 500m.

It's a little bit of a race, as the mission operation area on the surface is in the shadow of a large polar mountain - and the sun won't come up for days. This imposes a time limit on the window of escape - the Stayputnik control module on the rescue lander won't function without electricity, and though I installed a generous amount of battery power, it won't last forever without the sun hitting the solar panels. If the batteries run dry, there's no manual override - the Kerbals will have to sit in the Hitchhiker module until the sun comes up and power is restored.

Fortunately everything goes smoothly, and the Rescue Lander lifts off with plenty of electricity to spare.

It turns out to have been a very good thing to have refueled in Kerbin orbit - liftoff and escaping Mun's gravity well uses up almost all of the remaining fuel. Fortunately from the great altitude, correction burns are cheap and fast. A course is plotted for maximum aerobraking as the ship will slingshot around the far side of Kerbin.

Everything goes remarkably well. The lander survives re-entry, the parachutes open and aren't yanked off. Jebediah can't help making a crew report from above the highlands - the one biome I hadn't exhausted.

The doughty lander and her crew of Munar refugees touches down in a bright, lush highland meadow. Weeks after their ill-fated mission, they are home.

Next time - Time to send them right back to the Mun again! HA HA HA HA HA HA!

 

[GasBandit]

Call me weak, I installed MechJeb. Whoo buddy.

 

[Tinwhistler]

Call me weak, I installed MechJeb. Whoo buddy.

I have a personal rule with mechjeb: If I can't do it by hand, I don't use Mechjeb for it. Once I've learned to do the maneuvers, and grow tired of the repetition, I have no problem letting the computer automate them for me. I do most of my orbital maneuvers now with the maneuver nodes and don't bother with mechjeb much except for the tedium tasks of taking off and landing.

I mean, I've launched hundreds (maybe thousands) of ships. The fun value of executing a gravity turn at 7K altitude grew stale a long time ago. But still, it's nice to have the skill, because sometimes you build a monstrosity that mechjeb can't fly right, and you just gotta muscle it up into space by hand. And if you don't know how to do that, you're screwed.

Some people look down on mechjeb, but I don't really care if/how people use it. KSP is a sandbox game, and some people like to do the math, and others like to build stuff and put it in space without a lot of tweaking. If you're having fun, that's really all that matters.

 

[GasBandit]

I have a personal rule with mechjeb: If I can't do it by hand, I don't use Mechjeb for it. Once I've learned to do the maneuvers, and grow tired of the repetition, I have no problem letting the computer automate them for me. I do most of my orbital maneuvers now with the maneuver nodes and don't bother with mechjeb much except for the tedium tasks of taking off and landing.

I mean, I've launched hundreds (maybe thousands) of ships. The fun value of executing a gravity turn at 7K altitude grew stale a long time ago.

Some people look down on mechjeb, but I don't really care if people use it. KSP is a sandbox game, and some people like to do the math, and others like to build stuff and put it in space without a lot of tweaking. If you're having fun, that's really all that matters.

Ok, I feel less lame now that I know you use it too. Plus, all the Mechjeb panels are starting to make it feel less "Apollo 13" and more "Star Trek." Which is kinda cool.

So far I've conformed to the same standards you do - everything I'm having mechjeb do, I've already done myself once the hard way. We'll see if I stick to that when it's time to visit Duna.

But in the meantime, I've been building a Munar Fuel Utility station, and have made a second successful foray both to Mun and Minmus. That friggin mobile processing lab is a bitch to lug around when you don't have mainsails or jumbo tanks yet. I've basically resigned myself to never landing one on the Mun, because I need the Munar science harvest to get the tech to get the capability to land the MPL on Mun-sized objects. So I'll probably have to live with one-shot science equipment until it's time to go to another planet.

 

[Gared]

I've had this game for a while now, but kept hitting a wall when it came to getting past the first science node. Now that I've finally figured out (aka googled) how to generate science, I might be able to get somewhere.

 

[Tinwhistler]

Fair warning, Duna's a bitch to land on. Even with Mechjeb.

It has considerably more gravity than the Mun, but much less atmo than Kerbin, so you end up with the worst of both worlds.

I ended up ditching mechjeb, and doing a suicide burn from 150K by hand. Basically killed all of my horizontal speed and fell straight down, kicking on the engines every now and then to slow my descent and aid the parachutes.

It'd probably help if I didn't tend toward relatively heavy landing vehicles.[DOUBLEPOST=1388694354,1388693940][/DOUBLEPOST]

I've had this game for a while now, but kept hitting a wall when it came to getting past the first science node. Now that I've finally figured out (aka googled) how to generate science, I might be able to get somewhere.

It took me 8 launches to get enough science for Duna in version .23. 10 to get enough science to get to Jool. At 14, I maxed the science tree, but probably could have done it two launches sooner due to mistakes like forgetting to get some EVA science, or spending points on the wrong trees too soon.

The key is putting multiple science modules on your ship, so you can get all of the far orbit, near orbit, and surface science in one launch. I usually put 4 or 6 of everything on a single ship, so that I can try to sneak in some extra science in on a moon flyby if I can, or hitting multiple biomes if I have the dV for it.

Then, when I am on my way back to kerbin, I eva, take off all the science from the modules, and move it to the command module (something you couldn't do in .22), and drop away the heavy science parts before splashing down.

 

[Tinwhistler]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8blkhb7bjbd7tg/Untitled Space Craft.craft

This is a link to a thrust-plate style asparagus lifter that I use to get large craft into orbit (or for smaller craft to ensure I have enough delta-v to get to the outer planets). You can put it in the VAB folder under your save game/crafts folder in ksp.

All the parts are stock (.23) except for a MechJeb module, but it does use mainsails and orange tanks so you may have to open it in sandbox mode to see it, depending on how far your research is. I've made a video so that you can see it in action as I push a 74 ton delivery vehicle to the Mun with it. Hopefully the idea it will help you guys out on the bigger missions. Once you have enough science to get 1x1 structural plates, i-beams, and fuel lines, you can build this kind of thing, using any available combination of tanks and rockets.



Forgive my crappy voice. I'm getting over a cold

 

[Tinwhistler]

started playing again a few weeks ago after the .23.5 version update.

This version was made in cooperation with NASA, and they've added asteroids to rendezvous with.

Pretty much the hardest thing I've ever done, and MechJeb's automations are pretty much useless. That said, the node editor made it a lot easier to line things up precisely, since the little drag-bars on the maneuver nodes are shitty for doing anything with precision.

I watched a youtube video tutorial on the procedure, and that was pretty much useless too. I pretty much waited until the asteroid was a few hours out from kerbin, made a tight orbit to intersect, and burned a shit ton of fuel to match orbits once I was close. After that, it was like docking, but easier, because I just had to hit it anywhere with the claw. I had just enough fuel left slow it the 100ms or so I needed to keep it in Kerbin's SOI.

Success!

After I captured the thing and got it in a stable (though heavily inclined and eccentric) Kerbin orbit, it was much easier to rendezvous with. I spent 3 large rockets worth of fuel pushing the thing in a circular, non-inclined orbit at 260K.

I only got 60 science for EVAing out and chipping a piece off. What a load of crap.

 

[GasBandit]

So as I mentioned in another thread, the new version of KSP hosed my save with the changes in the science trees, so I started over. Not that big a deal, I know better how to do things this time.

After a couple trips to Mun and Minmus, I'm tired of going all the way there and trucking the data all the way back for a biome and a half (I can usually swing two landings on one trip, but I can only haul around one materials lab). So to help me finish out the last eight biomes I need on Mun, I've built a better refueling station than I had before (still not as awesome as that one Tin made though of course)

Had to fly it up there in two pieces - the leftmost assembly til' the first bottleneck was the first one. Mostly just fuel, RCS thruster tanks, and 4 solar panels, though I forgot to put extra batteries on it. Then I flew up the next piece (the middle piece above), the science annex with a couple more solar panels, batteries, crew quarters and the all-important mobile processing lab which can reset scientific equipment to be used again without returning to Kerbal. The last piece (the one on the right with the nacelles) is just a refueling transport topping off the tank. The whole thing is whizzing around at a mere 40km altitude.

Now the plan is to get my lander out there one more time, then just hop back and forth between each biome and the refueling station, compiling all the data in the lander's command module and resetting the equipment and refueling for the next biome. Thus, with luck and patience, I should be able to completely strip the Mun of all its scientific value on my next trip out there

 

[GasBandit]

Also it's now SO useful that Mechjeb identifies the biome of landing sites as you mouse over them during selection. No more "is this highlands or midlands? Is this the east crater or the east farside crater? Guess we find out when we land."

 

[Tinwhistler]

Also it's now SO useful that Mechjeb identifies the biome of landing sites as you mouse over them during selection. No more "is this highlands or midlands? Is this the east crater or the east farside crater? Guess we find out when we land."

hah, it looks like it's time for me to upgrade. I was keeping this info in a spreadsheet, along with good lat/longs to land at.

 

[GasBandit]

hah, it looks like it's time for me to upgrade. I was keeping this info in a spreadsheet, along with good lat/longs to land at.

Well, I dunno about yours, but my earlier version of mechjeb stopped working entirely with that same patch and I had to update it to get any functionality whatsoever.