Mun Was Just the Beginning: Space Station on Minmus [KSP]

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

In the last post, I talked about how my space program has grown and how I was able to colonise the Mun, which is one of the moons of the home planet, Kerbin. Today, I will tell you how I used a similar strategy and went even further and set up a space station in the orbit of Minmus, which is the second moon of Kerbin.

Once you know how to put your space station on Mun, it becomes easier to do the same thing on Minmus. Minmus is easy because of the extremely low gravity it has. If you compare it to Kerbin, it only has 5% of the gravity and almost 3 times less gravity than Mun. So, you have to spend even less fuel on landing and takeoff from the surface of Minmus.

The only challenge that I faced was the communication. Because of how far it is from Minmus and sometimes the Mun blocking the signal from Kerbin, it can be a little tricky, especially when landing on the surface. Imagine you are trying to land and get disconnected, and can't use your thruster to lower your velocity. That will be an expensive disaster.

Space Station on Minmus

Minmus has no atmosphere as well, so you can easily put your space station in low orbit. It only has the equatorial radius of 60km, far smaller than Kerbin (600km), and the mass is very low, making the gravity very weak. You need only 242 m/s of escape velocity, which is such a lifesaver. This means you can put a lot of cargo in your lander and land on multiple biomes on the same mission and still have enough fuel to get back to the station for refuelling.

I put a station with extra rocket fuel, a mobile processing unit, a signal antenna, two big retractable solar panels, a big tank of monoproponent for easier docking and a lander which can be undocked after I put the station into orbit. That was the lower half of the station in the picture above.

Emergency Repairs in Zero Gravity

I found out that the signal antenna was not that strong, and I ended up damaging one of my solar panels. So, I launched a new mission with better equipment like a stronger relay antenna and more docking ports, bigger batteries and more external seats for any stranded kerbals that can come up later.

This time, I was carrying a lot of repair kits and an engineer as well, who could repair the damaged parts.

Debfred Kerman looked very excited while repairing this broken solar panel. I can see why doing space walks is fun. They are not tethered to the vessel at any point, so if they run out of propellant, they could be left floating in space. But that never happened so far with me.

I love this next shot of Debfred floating between two extended solar panels while all of them orbit Minmus.

Btw, I have added some visual mods to the base game, and they were worth it. One of the mods even changed the control unit. So, you can now see all the data while piloting the craft. But it's too many buttons for my taste lol.

I love Minmus because it has interesting physical properties. There are frozen lakes here, almost perfectly flats where you can easily land any craft. Learning to land on these frozen lakes is the best tutorial you can have. You don't need a powerful booster to cut your vertical speed, and you can do it very easily.

I remember landing here for the first time in the middle of this perfectly flat surface. Its gravity is so low that you can jump very high in the air. Just like Mun, I have deployed a lot of surface science experiments here as well.

There are only a few biomes on this moon. The most challenging was the poles where the sun barely goes up from the horizon. Fortunately, I had enough battery capacity to even land in the dark and get back to the orbit after setting up the experiments.

These experiments passively generate science points for a long time, and occasionally send that science data back to the space centre on Kerbin. The mobile processing units and these surface-deployed science experiments were a great source of science in the early to mid-game.

My next target? Going interplanetary.