Crew: Unmanned
Status:
So I had been a little upset with Kerbal Space Program (and myself) due to losing a dozen or so hours of work on my last project, and hadn't bothered repeating everything in lieu of just playing other games for a good three weeks. A few nights ago, FlyingCheese convinced me that I should get back into it, and I gave myself a relatively simple goal: I wanted to go mining, and I wanted to be able to resupply my ships with megabokus of fuel. The choice was obviously Minmus, and I needed a few good mods to make it happen.
Parts Mods List: Vens Stock Part Revamp, Stockalike Station Parts, SpaceY Heavy Lifters, Near Future, Kerbal Foundries Wheels, Fuel Tanks Plus, Tweakscale, ScanSAT, UDK's Large Structural Components (for the power generator and battery) and Mechjeb
I first sent up 5 small unmanned probes - three for each of the ScanSAT instruments, and two for the stock scanners - the M700 and the M4435.
They all used the same basic design - an LV909 Terrier with an FL-T400 tank of fuel. Instead of showing all of them, here's just the M700:
Once I narrowed down where all the ore was, I sent an unmanned RCS hopper with a (tweakscaled) Surface Scanner to pin down ~exactly~ where all the ore was. Found some!
Checking my ScanSAT slope data indicated that the flats would be excellent for landing, and so it was.
I began by designing a huge f*ckin' lifter since I knew everything was going to be super heavy - thankfully a one-way ticket to Minmus is only about 5,000 delta-v, but when you're lifting 30+ tons, you need some serious lift. This is where SpaceY parts came in - the alternative would have been giant 100 part rockets carrying giant 100 part payloads and quite frankly, my PC is showing its age. The default lifter I chose (overkill by many standards) had 1 engine that took everything (separate launches) from Kerbin's launch pad directly to a Minmus orbit - the only staging was separating the giant-McLarge Huge SRBs (Thanks again, SpaceY!) For scale reference, the center tank and engines are 5m, and the SRBs are 3.75m. The basic design looked like this for just about every launch and consisted of about 20 parts, not including payload:
With my lifter worked out, it was time to begin launches, starting with the mining rig platform. This arrived at Minmus nearly empty, and with just a tiny amount of residual fuel left over, four Twitch engines were enough to gently lower it onto the 'Flats. Op success. If I was going to do this over again, I'd take only one ISRU - I almost never have enough ore to run both.
I started mining away, knowing that it'd be 9 or 10 days before the next part arrived. I knew that I needed a station and a fuel-shuttle, but one of the things that made my last (disastrous) project a failure was knowing that docking on low-grav planets can be really hard if you don't engineer everything perfectly. Since I am far from perfect, I figured I would do the next best thing - remove the need for docking all together! Thus was born the Fuel-Tank Tanker Tank. I showed this image a few pages ago, but since it was the last post on the bottom of the page here it is again:
Why tank treads? Because even the largest rover wheels kept popping on Kerbin and I didn't want to risk it happening on Minmus. Anyway, arriving at Minmus it was nearly empty but the four Twitch engines lowered it gently down, within driving range of my Minmus Mining Rig:
At this point, I was able to connect the nearly empty Tanker-Tank to my mining platform, and all of that converted fuel suddenly had a LOT more room for activities. Inside of a fuel-tank tanker tank. I could breathe easily, knowing that it'd take 20-30 days to completely fill up everything with fuel.
So, I started building my orbital refueling station. The aim here was MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF FUEL CAPACITY, and not so much aesthetics or living spaces. This was the only part of my system that needed a reworked lifter system, since it was basically a giant fuel tank already. Unfortunately it was a night launch, and I didn't get any pictures of it going up. I did my Kerbin launch and my Minmus injection and circularization with a slightly smaller 5m SpaceY engine that I could decouple.
Knowing I needed to use the docking port on the bottom, I thankfully added on some RCS Boosters, which would allow me to reboost my station if it started to drift too close to some of Minmus's highest mountains. Fortunate indeed, because this was something I needed to do or else all would have been lost. Here's the finished station in 9km orbit around Minmus:
The final piece of this tiny green puzzle was how to get all of that fuel from the surface to my station in as few trips as possible. At this point IRL, I was tired as hell and decided to sleep on it. The design came to me in my dreams....
This shuttle is capable of getting into orbit and succeeding at rendezvous for about 800 units of fuel - or roughly 1/12th of the entire capacity of the three tanks. If my station is 100% empty, I can refuel the entire station tank in three launches. I did all three launches with only a few small hitches, but only 1 revert due to a save/reload bug. Thankfully, exiting the game and restarting fixed it, or else I'd have rage-quit again. Four Thump engines are enough (just barely!) to get all 150 tons of fuel to a 9km orbit.
All filled up! 
The gang's all here! Thanks for reading!
Now to figure out where to go from here. Obviously.... TO THE STARS!
Otacon f*cked around with this message at 04:21 on Sep 1, 2015
