Mission – Mine Minmus

Thrusters are on and crew + ship is flying to Minmus.

This Mining Rig supports 3 crew members and has ore storage, ore processing, heat dissipation, and mining capabilities. Basically if this thing can get any ore it can load up and refuel. It’s the biggest ship we’ve ever launched at this point in time and we’re hoping to use it to travel to multiple moons and planets in 1 trip.

Landed in an ore rich field on Minmus.

After landing the Mining, Processing, and refueling was a success. Nothing exploded and the ship was able to balance on semi flat ground.

Returning to orbit of Minmus before launching to Eve.

After the cheering and celebration that we can refuel and fly this behemoth we realized there was no Mech-jeb installation unit aboard and thus our interplanetary desires were squashed due to player laziness (I’m sick of doing planetary transfer’s by hand).

We quickly built a add-on unit and launched it to Minmus to dock with the Mining Rig.

Also the ship was finally named:

The Graceful Kerbal

Launch 39 – Mining Rig

Mining Rig
Mass: 741.6
Cost: 316,741
Class: Mining Ship – No Atmo Class
Crew: Seats 3, none at launch

The most expensive ship launched to date. It has full capabilities of landing on a atmosphere-less planet/moon or grabbing an asteroid and mining it’s ore. It can then turn that into fuel so as to hopefully never run out.

We didn’t know if it would survive the launch so we did not put any Kerbals on it.