First let me say the mod is amazing. Extremely well done and organized.

I wanted to share my thoughts about early-game balance issues. I started on the moon which, I think, makes that a fairly difficult early-game bootstrap due to the fact your only power until the Hydrogen Engine is Alkaline batteries. I also installed Deep Ores.

Finding Ore

The small grid metal detector cannot find all of the ores you need to transition out of Tier 1 - Namely Cobalt (thrusters), Bauxite (containers) and Sulfur (rechargeable batteries). This necessitated a fairly early piston/hinge to large grid metal detector for me - which really became tedious in my starting rover due to the fact that I couldn't keep the rear rotor/hinge attached if I wanted to use the aft of the rover, and manually connecting the head requires a bit of time.

My suggestion is a modest increase to the Small grid range to maybe from say 250 up to 350 meters. I think this means you would barely catch those ores when you are right over them.

Not the end of the world as the large detector is a viable answer, but it feels like the small grid detector should, at least, be able to barely find those few.

Concrete

While I appreciate the dump for gravel into concrete and the subsequent savings on iron to use it for the building blocks, I think the density of concrete is way too high. You currently have it set to around 10 kg/m³ when it should be around 2.5 kg/m³. This makes concrete so heavy that using it in a welding ship is simply not practical in early game, which requires all of your early game base building to be done by hand. It is clear the expectation from this pack is that you will be processing a lot more stone than you would in vanilla. This means a lot more gravel, which means a lot of concrete and no sorters to keep it organized. My current base has concrete and gravel in every single connector/hole it can find. Being able to effectively use the concrete in early game from a ship-based welder would be a big boost.


Sorters

This one is tricky, but I would really like to see sorters accessible early in the pack. Without them your inventory is a bit of a freak-show. For example, my refinery currently stuffs all the iron ingots into the plate stamp inventory, denying it to other machines. This requires me to routinely drag it around to the 5-6 various machines that need access to it. Although the inventory stuffing is a common vanilla problem, it becomes more apparent with 5-6 machines that all need those resources.

The requirements for sorters are Tier 3 (advanced computers) which is a LONG time to go with disorganized inventory in a game that handles inventory very poorly already. It hard for me to stay motivated in pushing through knowing how much micro-managing will be required until I can make the advanced computers.

You have the cool new sorters you added, so maybe keep the higher requirements for those and make the base vanilla sorter only need regular computers? This would also help with the fact that you have to wait until Tier 3 to use Event Controllers.

Final Thoughts

I really love the hardcore aspect of the mod and I am not trying to trivialize that. These are just the things I found tedious that impact my motivation to keep playing through it. I absolutely love the fact that Solar is not something you make within 20 minutes of landing on the moon. I love the alkaline batteries. That is a brilliant boot-strap. The components are well thought-out and really make sense to me. I also love the production chains that must be setup. I just want earlier access to logistics and less tedium in early base construction and ore locating.

Thanks!