Post some of your huge rockets for distant missions

[Kulebron]

Hi everyone,

I need a dozen of pictures, for a tutorial, of rockets that were made for missions like Jool, Laythe, Eve or Moho. Just to show how big they are. Tell us how difficult it was.

[Umlüx]

this is one of my interplanetary ships, the KSS Bilkis. 3 launches: a lander, a command module and drive section.

it visited (and landed on) duna and ike and came back with some dV to spare. i think this thing could reach jool and laythe too.

this is the second one, en route to laythe. but the mission is on hold at the moment. because of the offset mass, this thing is a little unwieldy. i think i'll redesign it first.

[Monkeh]

Mission to the Joolian system:

Beast of a lifter with 19 mainsails in lovely asparagus symmetry, so 2 tanks feed into 1 feeds into 1 feeds into 1 feeds into the centre stack.

Under the fairings we have the interplanetary stage and the lander with rovers attached.

[Guest]

My first real crack at the UR-700/LK-700. A couple nuclear engines on the manned portion and she could make it to Duna easily.

[blackfire83]

Jack Wolfe, that is one sexy rocket. Well done, good sir.

And Monkeh, I like the design of that interplanetary stage and lander/rovers.

I've got some building to do.

[Moar Boosters]

I've been making lots of "proper" rockets recently. I've given up on the asparagus barrel designs that are so popular in KSP, and went back to aesthetically pleasing apollo style rockets. All pancake staging, and no nuclear engines.

This is a small one. It can get to dres or Duna.

This is the big one that works. It can get to Tylo and back. I named it the Apollo Creed.

This is an earlier design which suffered lots of launch anomalies. After a while the explosions were expected, and getting into orbit became the anomaly. Still, it got up there once, and has enough power to visit Eelloo, Val, Bop or Poll.

Edited October 8, 2013 by Moar Boosters

[allmhuran]

Do you mean big enough to get there, or *unnecessarily* big? You actually don't need to build very big just to get to Laythe if you go with one or two nuclear engines and a relatively small payload... I think a single jumbo tank would suffice. But if you want to send unnecessarily large payloads (like a whole space station) on unnecessarily lengthy journeys (Dres > Duna > Laythe > Eeloo) you need unnecessarily large rockets

Once these are in LKO it's relatively simple to get them to their destinations... you have plenty of fuel to spare, and when using enormous interplanetary craft you can afford to spare no expense on your landers, so they can also be big and inefficient (ie, easy to land). But getting them into LKO in the first place can be... interesting. And the transfer burns can last for dozens of minutes due to the low thrust-to-weight.

Edited October 8, 2013 by allmhuran

[allmhuran]

Also, question for Moar Boosters: How does your central column not crush itself? I find if I try to go more than about 4 orange-tank-lengths high above a mainsail engine, the weight of the column causes it to collapse. Also I think a mainsail can only lift three tanks worth, but you appear to be lifting 4 or 5 tanks-worth with each engine.

[WillHop]

Deimos C1 sent to Duna, just to be sure I would get back I had more than enough fuel to get back, so I'm thinking a very slightly modified version should be able to get to Dres and back

[numerobis]

allmhuran: A 1500-kN mainsail with a 6 tonne mass can lift (1500 / 9.81 - 6) / 36 = 4.08 orange tanks. But that's at a TWR of 1.0.

The exploding rocket has a ring of Mark-55 engines on it, which I presume give it just the extra little umph required to lift all that mass above it.

[allmhuran]

allmhuran: A 1500-kN mainsail with a 6 tonne mass can lift (1500 / 9.81 - 6) / 36 = 4.08 orange tanks. But that's at a TWR of 1.0.

Yeah.. hence "lift"... not much good hovering 10 feet above the launch pad for 5 minutes.

[numerobis]

Nonsense. Eventually you get down to just lifting two tanks above, and your bottom stack runs through your upper stacks, so you get beautiful pictures of disaster.

But more seriously: real spacecraft launch with TWR not much better than 1, since the cost isn't so much in the fuel, it's in the engines. They start slow, and speed up as the fuel mass gets tossed out the back.

[SargeRho]

This is easily my heaviest rocket, based on the Saturn V with F-1 Liquid Fuel Boosters:

[Monkeh]

Feel I should also point out that you don't need to go huge to go far.

This neat little thing got me to Laythe.

[allmhuran]

Nonsense. Eventually you get down to just lifting two tanks above, and your bottom stack runs through your upper stacks, so you get beautiful pictures of disaster.

Haha, yep. This is why I just build out instead of up, I threw in the towel on the structural integrity of long columns several dozen failures ago

Also just noticed that the core of those rockets is actually hollow (can just see the central launch clamps in the liftoff exhaust cloud) which goes some way to explaining how it manages to get off the ground as well as why the core doesn't simply shear off and fall through on the launchpad!

Edited October 8, 2013 by allmhuran

[Kulebron]

Thanks to all, I have enough material! This was hilarious!

This is an earlier design which suffered lots of launch anomalies. After a while the explosions were expected, and getting into orbit became the anomaly. Still, it got up there once, and has enough power to visit Eelloo, Val, Bop or Poll.

It looks like Cremlin tower.

[Kulebron]

Feel I should also point out that you don't need to go huge to go far.

This neat little thing got me to Laythe.

I was calculating carefully and got a rocket of about the same size.

[Meltro]

My first interplanetary, Jebediah's Manhood with her two tugs and four landing craft

My latest, waiting for 0.22 to load with science modules for interplanetary tour

As was mentioned, building big is not necessary. What it DOES provide is a massive payload capacity, and in conjunction with smaller tugs can result in a single mission hitting every moon around Jool

[Van Disaster]

My launcher for my Jool system scan mission; it has five mapping satellites each with their own orbital insertion stage.

Looks deceptively small until you compare it to the size of the pad & the VAB. I don't have any stock launchers, I'm afraid.

[Moar Boosters]

Haha, yep. This is why I just build out instead of up, I threw in the towel on the structural integrity of long columns several dozen failures ago

Also just noticed that the core of those rockets is actually hollow (can just see the central launch clamps in the liftoff exhaust cloud) which goes some way to explaining how it manages to get off the ground as well as why the core doesn't simply shear off and fall through on the launchpad!

Ironic its you asking. They work because they contain allmuhran technology!

The stacks aren't attached radially, they've got thrust plates at the top of each stage so it doesn't pull itself apart through shearing. The exploding version lacked the thrust plate at the top, so the middle stages would suffer shearing stresses and collapse. It's not the weight of the tanks that's the problem, its shearing that pulls big rockets apart. If the first stage is only attached to the central core, then it pushes that core up, whilst gravity pulls the radial cores down.

With the thrust plates in place, all the engines on the lower stage push evenly into all 9 engines of the second stage so all the stacks are under a similar amount of strain. I'm at work at the moment, but when I get home I can post some deconstruction pictures if you like.

The exploding version is indeed hollow, but the apollo creed isn't. As well as the outer ring of 16 mainsails, it's got an inner ring of 8 and 1 in the middle, so 25 mainsails in total. In the screenshot of it dropping it's first stage you can just about see one of the inner ring, where that booster is falling off.

They've got extremely low thrust-weight ratios, the exploding one needed the radial engines to increase the thrust over 1. Like numerobis explained, with that number of engines it doesn't take long for them to burn enough fuel to lower the weight. The saturn V did the same thing. I've taken them off with a thrust ratio of exactly 1. They hover between the launch clamps for a few seconds before they slowly start ascending. It doesn't matter how slowly they start accellerating..... your car can do 0-60 faster than most rockets. The important bit is that they keep accellerating for a long time.

Like others have said, you don't need to build anywhere near this big to reach the various planets. The whole challenge I set myself was to build rockets that don't use efficient staging, or efficient nuclear engines.

[iStickyDuck]

SARA is still under-construction but it has a massive radar dish on it

I will post an image... when I manage to get the next part into orbit >.<

[llamatoes]

This was a prototype Moho ship- It failed as I forgot the first bit of the transfer stage and it was just too damn slow.

Kind of like the Lewis and Clark from the colonization books by harry turtledove. I don't have an image, as my Hard drive detonated

[blackopsman9999]

I over build my rockets, I built a rocket to the mun, missed it, and went to duna.

[allmhuran]

Ironic its you asking. They work because they contain allmuhran technology!

The stacks aren't attached radially, they've got thrust plates at the top of each stage so it doesn't pull itself apart through shearing.

OooooOOOOOooooh I didn't notice that in the pictures. Very good! And also even further explains the lack of internal collapse on the launch pad.

I might have to go back to trying to build some tall rockets, they look like fun. I gave up so long ago with the horribly weak orange-tank-to-orange-tank connections and limit myself to 3-jumbos-high almost without even thinking about it these days - I never bothered trying to apply I-beam webs to try to solve that problem.

[Moar Boosters]

The thrust plates pretty much totally resolve the internal collapse problems. TBH I don't think The Apollo Creed is anywhere near the upper limit of this design. It's solid as hell.....It's never exploded during launch....... the only problem is that it flexes during flight if you use the controls too much, and enabling SAS will cause major wobble issues. I think that can be fixed though by disabling gimballing on some of the mainsails, and possibly by adding more SAS units - the lower stages don't have any at all.

The Apollo Creed is basically just a redesign of the exploding orange one. I used less orange tanks. I think having shorter tanks enables the stacks to survive flexing better. 2 orange tanks undergoing X amount of stress will have all that force concentrated in the joint between them. If you use 4 of the half sized tanks, that X amount of stress is distributed between 3 joints, so less chance of breakage.

The main difference is I didn't use the small decouplers you like for your asparagus designs. They're not going to work when building vertically because they'll create a wobble point. I just built the upper stage/payload, put a large decoupler underneath, a 2x2 panel directly beneath that, and then attach the girders. You can then put another stack underneath that....... It actually looks like the stack connects to the decoupler and sort of magically sandwiches the panel in the middle. The part clipping isn't a problem like it would be with your asparagus designs because here the plate is beneath the decoupler and the plate gets discarded at the same time as all the fuel tanks attached.

The giant bottom stage is created by putting 8 girders on the plate in symmetry, then disabling angle snap and adding 8 more. In theory this stage could quite easily be adapted for asparagus.