Absolutely! I’m designing a new orbital construction yard (which I shall manufacture at my current orbital construction yard). Once that’s built I plan to ship it out to Dres and set up another orbital manufacturing system there. After that I might do another hop over to Jool and set up around a moon.
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Played a good amount yesterday, but since I’m on the CST clock I don’t see much of you guys.
I’ve been trying to keep my launches tame. Yesterday I tested a tiny manned lander that could hopefully de orbit from a 100km mun orbit, land, return to 100km and rendezvous with the station there. All this in preparation for a manned dres mission, towed by the earlier pictured solar-electric ship. Mass budget for that project was 600 kilograms. It… Almost worked. Pics and accompanying story on that one when I get back to my computer.
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So, requirements going in:
-Lightweight. 4 of those tiny probe radial engines provide the power. They’re fed by 3 Oscar-b fuel tanks.
-Docking capability. A clamp-o-tron jr. is under the lander, between the legs. 4 RCS blocks provide translational control, drinking from the same aerozine-50 tank the engines do. 4 might be too many, experimentation may change this.
-Autonomous. I like to make sure all my ships can work without a kerbal in them. Just in case. Since the flat probe core has no reaction wheels, I had to invest another 60 kilograms in an OKTO. Also required a tiny antenna.
This is what came out. VAB claimed it had 1700 m/s in it, which seemed close to correct for my needs. Since looking things up is hard, and because I make inefficient landings, only way to proceed was to test. I shipped it to my mun station (still a WIP) and drafted a brave volunteer. The landing was calm enough, but when I arrived on the surface and consulted my fuel gauges I found I was at 30%. There being no other landers in the area, I had only one option: Try anyway. The tanks died at 10 kilometers, still a hundred m/s or so shy of orbital velocity. Our intrepid pilot abandoned his vehicle, fired up the ol’ jetpack, completed his orbit burn, rendezvoused with the station and is now snacking with his buds.
TLDR; I forgot that kerbals have mass. With a kerbal on it the dv goes down by almost 150 m/s. Back to the drawing board!
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I never bother with mono-propellant and RCS thrusters on landers. Just control horizontal velocity with the attitude of your main thruster(s).
Normally I’m the same, but this one had to be able to rendezvous and dock with stuff in orbit, and the main engine isn’t so good for that.
Also, I don’t have to carry a dedicated mono propellant tank since the RCS and the main engines both use aerozine/NTO. All I have to worry about is the mass of the thruster blocks.
Update: tried another test. This one promised to be a much better design. Unfortunately, when I began my descent I failed to notice that the mun was being eclipsed by kerbin. I lost all rotational control when my batteries died and mad a sad little crater on the surface. RIP Weinern Kerman. I feel sure the game is conspiring against me.
I think I’ve installed all the necessary mods needed to join the server… Heaven knows what monstrosities I may create given that I’m not used to most of these mods!
Can I get whitelisted please? I should be using the same tag as here: Sab1e (will update if that doesn’t work)
Done, welcome to the server 
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May I have a whitelist as well? I’ll use the name ‘Cosmos’.
Welcome to the server 
The Orbital Construction Dock Is Open For Business!
I’m going to be launching off to Dres soon, building another orbital construction operation there. I’ll be using the Minmus dock to construct the mission, and launching a small fleet of ships (a mining ship or two, as well as the dock itself).
Once I’ve done that the Minmus dock will be totally free for people to use to build whatever they want! If you want to use it, there’s a few things to be aware of:
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The dock will build unfueled ships. To fuel your ship you’ll have to pump resource from the dock->your ship just before you undock it, there are only facilities for Karbonite, NTO and Aerozine50 at the moment. If your ship calls for other resources I suggest you launch it, and then immediately dock it again which will allow you to convert Karbonite->whatever fuel you want. We’re generally pretty short of Karbonite so if you’re designing something that requires vast amounts of fuel you’ll have to do a few fuel runs to the surface with mining drones.
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The mining drones collect Ore and Karbonite. They also burn Karbonite in their engines, which is pretty convenient. When you cast loose a mining drone it’s going to need about 1500 Karbonite (to land), and 800 Aerozine50/NTO (to dock again). It’s probably advisable to fill up on Aerozine50/NTO, just to be sure! The best place to land is the flat area which already has a couple of mining drones, if in doubt check the orbital mapping data.
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The station is fragile! Before you dock deactivate your engine, accidentally throttling up in the middle of a docking maneuver will most likely destroy your ship and the station. Also make sure you dock as slowly as possible.
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Before you build your ship at the dock I suggest you launch it on the pad (even if it’s not capable of launching). When you put it on the pad the server will tell you if the craft contains any banned parts (I’m still working on fixing that), it’s better to find out then, rather than after waiting 24 hours for it to finish building!
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Our intrepid adventurer continues his harrowing quest! Just entered the Jool system, with a comms satellite destined for Laythe a year or so behind.
On the to-do list for the future:
Orbit Pol and perform an EVA landing. Re-orbit and return to the ship after a flag plant.
Repeat for Bop.
Optional: Fly by Eeloo. The window looks nice. No prospect for landing though.
Depart the Jool system and dive toward the inner solar system. Skip Kerbin and make for Eve. Plant another flag on Gilly.
Possibly return to Kerbin and land on Minmus. Maybe then he can go back home. 
I’m having issues connecting 
(See Handshake Failure message)
Any ideas?
I haven’t been able to cleanly quit for the past day, also, crashing all the time on transitions to space center and VAB…
Anyway, added two escape pods to the KSS.
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I found what my issue is apparently. I deleted and reinstalled the mods because a couple weren’t working properly and it seems to have screwed up my multiplayer ID.
@Shingles: Basically what longbyte1 said, you’ll need to copy your old GameData/DarkMultiPlayer/Plugin/Data/(private|public)key.txt files over to your new install or use a new username. Unless you can get in touch with the server admin and get them to delete your old public key for you.
(From KSP forums)
Ok, I deleted your public key, so you should be able to connect now.
Literally all the time on transition from space center to VAB? What’s your memory situation like? Are you using ATM and force_opengl to reduce memory pressure?
Yeah, you weren’t joking about absurd delta-V were you? xD
Woo, thanks.
Edit: Solved my missing dll issue. Yay me!
Nope, that one’s not in the modpack. It looks like CKAN didn’t install something properly.
Perhaps try reinstalling RealFuels and Tweakscale via CKAN? If you can’t get it to work I can send you my copy of the DLL and you can just put it in place manually.
Using the KSS Rescue ship today I crashed every single time going back from active space view to space center, VAB or launch pad, happened about 5x, I was able to go back once it was docked at the station though. Otherwise, I think that about 90% of the time, closing the KSP window with the close button instead of going through the main menu, crashes the game. And there are some random crashes happening too.
My memory is fine, sitting at around 3.8GB out of the 16GB available, maybe I should run the 64bit KSP?
3.8GB is running really close to the limit! Since it’s only a 32bit process there isn’t really 16GB available, you can only use about 4GB. For reference my KSP uses 2.6GB, which is much safer!
I’d suggest using ATM if you’re not already (that will vastly reduce memory usage) and trying force_opengl (I’m not using this myself, but apparently it helps a lot).
martin, which ATM are you using? I’m using light, and forced opengl is required for it to run even then, and I’m not really ready to wait through the loading times required for switching to heavy ATM.
Also, since the selection chosen for realfuels effects which fuels are used by your engines, how does that effect things if somebody makes a ship with one config, and somebody with a different config jumps into the ship? Will it suddenly have no usable fuel?