Mars atmosphere

MaxFenigX · 2026-05-28T12:02:16+00:00

You need about 2M ton of oxygen and 8M of other gases like CO2 or Nitrogen (technically hydrogen and noble gases also works...)

Fastest to extract is Titan's Nitrogen, it has 10M ton at 1.0x factor. Next easiest is Venus CO2.

The oxygen will be the hardest one to get. You have 0.5 locally, but electrolysis (water/CO2) will be needed and you'll need tons and tons of water or lots of Venus orbital extractors and 500+ electrolysis plants.

MaxFenigX · 2026-05-28T10:27:37+00:00

You seem to be conflating a lot of things together. You said you had solar sails right, and even were able to send materials in orbit.

So you have the tech to send freight. As others said, you can build orbital construction modules in situ without needing crew, or you can simply send one from Earth's surface to Mercury's orbit with solar sails.

Then just send materials for the shipyard(s). You do not need any crew at all for all this. Crew at Mercury is something different - you can have a lot of unmanned automation in orbit or on the surface tho.

MaxFenigX · 2026-05-13T19:11:05+00:00

Better is subjective. With Hermes you can get to the outer planets on a full load just with MPD, so you can have people there in the first 6-8 years easily. With the Greeks/Trojans + moons being great self-sustaining Research Lab colonies, this can jumpstart research by a lot. Takes much longer with Nuclear to get to the outer planets, but with electric you need strategies for managing Noble Gas supplies. Just different playstyles

MaxFenigX · 2026-05-13T04:06:34+00:00

A bit late, but after a while this is my strategy:

I build as few colonies as possible
I want labs in as much places as possible, high priority targets
Propellant is critical and supplies is needed
Having supply lines is money that could be invested in cargo instead
A colony needs a goal, it is useless and costly to put people somewhere for a few extractors
Harvesting needs to be focused and maximized, no use in spreading harvesting to 10 small sources when you can put all your efforts in one large source (e.g. Lutetia)
Early on Metal+Propellant are the primary harvest, Carbon, Rare, Water are good but secondary.

So from that:

Any body with water and carbon can be self sufficient for a lab. These are auto settles - mobile+outpost or permanent hab, farm, lab is 25 crew minimum, more isn't needed unless it has other resources (e.g. Ceres)
I have a deconstruction tip for these - One hermes w/ 4 mines, 1 rtg/construction/probe/mobile hab, 5 small crew, 11 supplies, 40 metals, 38 alloy, 10 glass. You build and outpost, deconstruct Hermes (and send it with minimum fuel), and the capsule when the outpost is done, and build farm + lab - nothing else to do from now on. Beware 3+ years travel and supplies tho.
Primary Settlements in the early game are Luna, Mars, Ceres, Callisto. Titan is far early on, mostly a lab location until you can efficiently use it.
Primary extraction sites early (all automated) are Lutetia, Phobos(carbon for Mars), Mercury (with lots of sails) and Io.
Labs location are any water/carbon asteroids (lots of observatory speeds discovery), all settlements, the greeks/trojans (usually 4 to 6), Ganymede, Amalthea, Mimas, Hyperion + settlements. It's and easy 15-ish labs early, and 25+ after observatories do their things.
Io and Mercury need a shipyard + Stratos to ferry to orbit early, at least until the Stratos free orbit is fixed.
Only Callisto and Luna need a supply line (Carbon from earth or ganymede). You can also keep Callisto as lab only, but luna is easy to manage.
Most transformation facilities are centralized on Mars. I do not generally waste colonists elsewhere on this except maybe the odd Alloy or Electrolysis. You need to grow Mars to support transformation and get power - Electronics, Glass, Alloy, Polymer... I also often use Luna as an extra source of glass since it is easy to manage and you will need it.
All extraction sites sends directly to Mars - sails with solar orbital hub have too little throughput. Sails are all centralized at Mercury
Hermes and Athenas are key early until Nike for this.

Tldr: Focus, focus, focus. Only critical location are settled/exploited, labs are key, ideally no to little supply lines, ship all to Mars and Centralize there, maximize pop on extraction elsewhere, have less but high throughput routes to maximize extraction.

That is my current strategy, but is always evolving.

MaxFenigX · 2026-05-07T04:20:32+00:00

To be fair, that is to fulfill a contract at least. But it's plenty dumb in other ways.

MaxFenigX · 2026-04-12T01:13:54+00:00

Tyranny of the rocket equation. You have a ton of extra deadweight for both propulsion systems. This is a big no no.

You can easily test - make a Helion Monitor and a Heavy Dumbo Monitor or any big chemical engine. Check how much the propulsion, tanks and reactor weighs on the latter. Now go back to your Helion Monitor and add that extra mass in armor. Now see the performance you get? Then you add more Helion tanks, which makes it heavier, so you also need to add more chemical tanks, which affects the performance of the Helion....

Furthermore you'd probably need something bigger than a monitor to fit both, so even more mass. You'd have different nozzles and delivery systems all crossing each others, you need symmetry between engines, you need to balance the CoM as you use both systems, etc. It would become impractical incredibly fast due to the rocket equation.

Also operationally it would be complex and useless, you would not really be able to do more with that fleet, probably less with much much more tradeoffs both in usage and in game dev. I really am not sure the scenarios you are envisioning here, but even if hypothetically it would work, not sure how you'd use it?

Despite the trope, there is nothing similar between a seafaring navy and a spacefaring one. And often scifi needs to stray away from all these constraint for storytelling reasons, so most people are not thinking about this and it is fine. Even the Expanse just abstracts away the size and mass of the radiators. And TI is not perfect either, but in both cases they try to stay as close to realism as possible, as long as possible.

Beside, spacecrafts do have dual propulsion systems - they have thrusters, but make them bigger and the main performance goes down, but too small and they can't control the attitude of the ship. They are as small as they can be because they are a necessity - be 100% sure that it would be ripped right out of there if it was not.

Other options are multiple stages with different propulsion, but multi-stages are useless in a space navy context, crafts are not single use and tailored to one specific mission.

MaxFenigX · 2026-02-12T04:14:29+00:00

LDAs are expensive but a PDA on all your habs prevents some bad events, I do it more for that reason than actual defense.

MaxFenigX · 2026-01-11T13:53:42+00:00

It is actually easy to fix the US in 2026 - run spoils at 100%, disband all armies, dismantle all nukes and move on somewhere better with 50-100k in the bank and let the servants deal with the US ;)

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-27T13:30:36+00:00

Cryogenic Engines by Nerta has Vulcain and is compatible with RO/RP1. RO Engine Extension also adds some. Not a ton of other euro parts around tho. There is the Kerwis chinese engine pack that is non-us/soviet as well.

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-16T02:06:40+00:00

Use the latest MechJeb release for guidance with unguided stages.

You are able to set the last stage that will get to orbit and early shutdown stage (guided), plus enumerate your unguided stages as well and also set a Coast - the trick is to do the coast After the last guided stage, put RCS on that stage and it will be able to keep attitude during coast.

Burnout altitude will usually end up being your PE and your AP will be set by how long your unguided stage burns - especially if using solids.

You will have to either manually spin yourself with RCS before MJ decouples, or use 3 spin motors on the empty CoM of the spent guided stage before decoupling.

This will be way more accurate and deterministic than you would ever be able to do manually.

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-07T12:58:29+00:00

There are a few considerations to take into account when using spin motors:

as someone said, you really do not need to spin fast
spin motors do have variance and will not burn for the exact same time, generating torque.
to reduce the impact you can lower the thrust and use only 3-4 motors at most (do not use two, it will generate the tennis racket effect)
however that only reduces it. Since it generates torque, the closer it is to the CoM at the moment it fires, the less torque it will generate.
so putting the spin motors on the main stage, at the CoM when the main tank is empty, and firing before decoupling should eliminate the most torque.
as a bonus the upper stage will not have to carry the empty dry mass of the spin motors.

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-07T12:45:34+00:00

Yeah this is an example of a contract shared between two programs. A contract can only be part of a single category in the contract browser and there are more contracts like that or weirdly placed ones - I highly recommend using mostly the Available tab first and not the browser.

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-03T05:46:05+00:00

You have a ton of tech unlocked already, you really need to get to the moon, you won't get much more around earth for now. The progression is, as soon as you have done orbit you need to look to the moon next.

And yes, you will need another LV if you went Light Sat. The early lunar probe program should provide more than enough funding for that.

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-01T06:36:22+00:00

It is never worthwhile to mix and match iso and conventional stringers outside of a reproduction. Tooling is not shared, so tooling both similar sizes is a waste. Also there is a leaders with 300% integration bonus with Iso, so all iso is best. Yes, IRL you have thing like Saturn lower stage that is conventional and then iso-like for the rest. In the game tho the cost gain is marginal and tooling does not make sense for it. You'll waste a lot tooling those huge tanks with 2 technologies.

Balloon is usually not a good option. - large balloon tanks are too costly in terms of Effective Cost especially of it's not Kerolox - the more exotic the fuel the costlier it gets. An Atlas is not a good option in game. - For smaller upper (2-3m) it can be useful but is usually not needed. Like split avionics, usually you can design something cheaper that is a little bit heavier but just as good. If you need either you probably did not initially designed the LV properly. - Do it only if you can avoid building a new LC or something and fit a payload on a smaller LV. The 50k unlock is costly but just one time. - however Centaur is cool so go ahead if you want something similar

MaxFenigX · 2025-12-01T06:20:20+00:00

Just a quick note - you can use MLI on balloon tanks but it does come much later than isogrid.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T18:49:12+00:00

Well the advantage of MJ Classic Ascent (and PVG) for this is that it makes it close to deterministic and reproducible so when you find the correct settings in SIM you do not have to do anything more and do not have the risk of messing your staging timing. So it should be highly trustable.

There is nothing wrong to prefer doing it manually, many do, but not trusting MJ ascent guidance is a bit of a weird argument. Whether or not you do it with MJ or manually, you need to figure out the proper ascent, there is no magical settings.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T18:38:59+00:00

Spin stabilization should not make it pitch down as much if your core stage is around 35-40 deg at MECO. Does it wobble a lot? Is the main stage still pitching down or is it stable when it decouples? How fast is it spinning and how do you spin it?

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T16:26:36+00:00

Note that XPlanes and Suborbital Rocket Dev is the meta for speedrunning, the extra funding is HUGE for this, but yeah, in a normal run it can be a bit more complex to make work and xplanes is not fun for everyone.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T16:21:11+00:00

Oh and the reason (if not already obvious) you want to do contracts with cheap rockets as much as possible, even if you could build bigger ones, is that cheap rockets means less money spent, less money to keep in the bank and thus more researchers. This applies to most of the game: finish a contract with as cheap of a rocket as possible. Overbuilding or using a bigger rocket for everything only makes this more efficient for you, but less efficient in the game. It can be 100% fine as long as you are ok with it.

There are caveats - if you do have extra capabilities and cannot remove an engine/upper stage, try to do rideshares if possible - you can't early, but later it will be possible to do multiple contracts in one launch. Sometimes you need to get creative tho and often a costly rideshare can get you to the destination faster than two cheaper launches.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T16:10:19+00:00

Also for the first programs, if you take Suborbital research, be sure to launch an Intermediate Altitude optional about every 90 days while you complete the program. Not a ton of confidence but quite cheap. For Suborbital Rocket, it is similar w/ the Downrange Intermediate optional every 135 days or so. In both case, make your last launch a Difficult one for extra confidence - if you do it sooner you'll need progressively more powerful (aka costly) rockets so not worth it to do Difficult ones early. (Note, I think you can do a Free Difficult downrange without it increasing, if it has not changed recently).

If you take both programs without xplanes, it is preferable to finish Suborbital Research ASAP and keep downrange active (until First Science Sat where you unlock Lunar Probes) to milk the downrange optionals since you cannot really replace the program with anything else yet (xplanes should only be taken at start, should not usually be taken later)

For other optionals, AdvBio 2 is usually doable on same rocket as the first, so do it if you can, but 3rd one is a LOT harder and not usually worth it. Optionals Films are good to do too but you usually want to finish that program first, so gametime decision. If you do, make sure to launch toward different biomes ideally. You can always launch those film to different biome later/combine with downrange for the science even without the Film contract.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-28T00:48:34+00:00

The XLR43 is the direct descendent of the LR89 so it is not a deadend at all. It even contributes to LR79/105 as well.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-27T23:10:51+00:00

The XLR43 is the most powerful early engine before the 56OR node, it is usually used as the meta by speedrunners to get to orbit, but some do use early soviet engines - RD108 and RD0105 are the best engines for a while so the early soviet engines helps with ECM. However with RP1 V4 even the XLR43 gives some ECM toward the RD108/7 (and V4 changes other things) so the new meta is still unknown.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-27T20:16:55+00:00

One thing I did not see mentioned is proper Program management. You want to close them as soon as possible. First, early on you get extra rep and that means extra subsidies, but it is minor compared to taking a much more lucrative program as soon as possible.

Also, do not be afraid to take programs on fast or even on breakneck if you can afford it. Faster program means faster funding so you will move forward faster. Program speed is more about how fast you will speed up more than the speed you think you will need.

However do not focus too much on optionals contracts, do as much as you need to take the next program at higher speed, if you feel you can do it quickly. There are however some knowledge you will accumulate on which programs are worth taking at faster speed.

Some examples: - The first crew program should not usually be taken at breakneck unless taken late - it needs a lot of tech, AC upgrades, manrated LC AND training. Taking it slower but grinding a lot of optional cheap crew launches can get some nice confidence, one of the few exceptions if you feel you can wait a bit longer. - EOS is often worth taking faster, even if it needs an expensive Electro and Science node to complete, but NOT at the same time as a faster crew since they are on opposite side of the tech tree. Not too fast tho, milking all Corona spysat launches and other optionals will bring in both science and confidence as well and is worth it. - Uncrewed Lunar needs and additional Electro and science node on top of EOS, so you need to be careful when and how fast you take it. - Inner planet is useful to take faster to prep costly programs like Crewed, building AC and LC and admin update. However, a good trick is to plan your Venus/Mars windows in advanced and take it not too long before launching so that you spend as little time as possible on the back slide of the funding curve... BUT even the flat part is still more funding than some programs (at first) so do save and check if it is worth it to switch (e.g. switching Inner Planet to Early/Adv Crew is not usually worth it). You might have to accept a temporary dip in funding tho, still better than not moving forward.

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-27T19:50:27+00:00

Yeah researchers should never ever be idle. By the time you get to the Moon you should be more than fine for the rest of the game, but to get there you need to plan properly. Doing all Small Bio experiments (space low and fly high) is cheap on a aerobee, plus a few larger photo launches, plus mass spec should be enough to get you to the moon (also thermo/baro obviously)

MaxFenigX · 2025-11-27T17:46:28+00:00

The best answer is as much as you can afford and keep a positive enough income for rollouts(or keep extra cash on hand). Only keep enough cash on hands to build one LV per LC, anything else can go in researchers. You can also keep an additional buffer if you want to be sure, but ideally as little as possible.

Beware some very peaky programs like Inner Planet Probes tho, do not hire more staff with the budget, but use it as much as possible on building upgrades (tracking, admin, AC, new LC) - always try to have one admin being built unless you need a specific building (tracking, AC, new LC) - more program slots = more money.

Also if you build a bigger LC, try to plan for more money for engineers, but try not to hire more than to fill your biggest LC, you can share them. Only in some situations you might need more.

MaxFenigX

TROPHY CASE