Wild Cobra

Have you ever put something in orbit with only boosters? The insane part is they will stay in orbit as unwanted debris.

I normally wouldn't use only SRB's for the first stage, but it was part of the "hard" part of this challenge:

I like doing things large:

In four attempts, I wasn't able to get the Orion to orbit. I keep running out of fuel. Then I looked under the faring and wow... have you tried reentry to verify the Kerbals survive?

Your Orion is no sweat for my computer. At 365 parts, it does 10 seconds of game time in 19 seconds. I have a i7-4790 processor and 32 GB memory on a win 7 system.

After several failures of the craft not maintaining pitch and yaw after about 30 seconds, I made one that lasted till about 45 seconds. I felt this would be a failure too, but I made it in the clear. It has 24 Mk3 Passenger Modules and four Science labs so it holds 392 Kerbals. It has 48 rescue vehicles so all Kerbals can be saved in case of a disaster if the population is limited to 336 Kerbals. The craft has 513 solid fuel boosters for the first stage. My biggest problems were keeping it straight with no gimbals. Using wings for both stability and strut attachment points kept the craft stable at launch and in flight without gimbals on the rocket motors. The craft has 2,345 parts at launch and weights in at 14,416.4 tons. Making any changes in editing was a real pain. One second of flight time with the first stage takes 46 seconds with this many parts on my computer. With no thrust control, I was over 5 g's at 20,000 meters and the craft was getting pretty hot. I was getting pretty worried that it would break apart, and this being under 1 minute of flight and still on solid boosters, I'm already wasted 46 minutes if this fails. At 28,000 meters, everything is red-hot. I still have several seconds of solid fuel, and at almost 7 g's of force. I'm surprised it's holding together still. I normally switch to orbit view far before this and adjust, but the time lag is real bad, and I have had glitches explode my craft wen going back to stage mode on occasion. I'm staying in stage mode until I drop the first stage. My nine Rhino engines did not engage. I had to manually activate them. It was a slow process with the lag, and then I still had two not activated when I thought they all were. now I have a fuel imbalance. I had ended up with an elliptical orbit when I wanted a 200k to 250k circular. Not all my solar panels activated using the action group. I had this happen before as a glitch. I cause another problem myself in that I have overlapping solar panels. I had it fixed before, but must have reentered this problem in a craft edit. After losing the first stage and at 1,678 parts, one second is now 21 seconds. After dropping the last stage for the station, it now takes 12 seconds for one second of game play to pass. My station engines ran out of fuel before I could get the desired orbit. I'm pretty sure if I didn't have staging problems with the size 3 decouplers and Rhino engines, I would have had a nice circular orbit. With the station fuel empty: 336 Kerbals rescue capacity 1,534 parts 1,034.24 tons I then filled one rescue vehicle with seven Kerbals and tested it with a successful splashdown.

First attempt at a 100+ launch that the first stage is sold fuel rockets only. The first stage is 369 sold rockets. It blew up at about 30 seconds after drifting off from straight up. I need more struts, but it already has 2517 parts. I don't know how many more I can add.

I made another large enough that I have to launch it from the runway. It starts with 2517 parts. It was my first attempt for the Mother Ship Challenge: I need more struts, but I don't know haw many more parts I can add before my computer blows up. If interested:

LOL... I missed the solid fuel part for the 100+ I got mine in orbit just fine, but what's the point now?

Well, my first attempt blow up on the launch pad, but I will strengthen it and it will work. The eight passenger modules alone hold 128 Kerbals, and the 21 escape vehicles hold 7 each, or 147 Kerbals.

It actually flew and landed quite well also. You like that, check these out:

I like the Rhino the way it is. Modifying it would break many of my designs. Make a new one, don't modify it. Mammoths burn finished, decoupling: Rhinos taking over: Just need a few SRBs to help:

That's my thoughts. I have a nice tower with Win 7 professional, 32 GB, GeForce 720, and the i7-4790. It's now 1 year old. I bough a laptop about 6 months ago with win 8.1. I knew I would hate 8.1 from what I saw already, but Win 10 was coming out. I upgraded immediately, and it works fine, but I like Win 7 so much more. The architecture of my laptop doesn't support Win 7, else I would have installed it. KSP works fine on it. No better or worse than Win 7. My laptop has the i7-4720HQ, 16 GB, and the GeForce 750m. I just don't like Win 10. I used my Win XP until it was no longer working with newer software. XP was the best.

That was cool. Thanx for sharing.

When it's too large for the launch pad, and you have to destroy the runway launching it:

It's not too hard if you use struts and keep the acceleration at or below 2 g's. This was a single launch:

Nice. I have the 3.6 ghz version. You can get about another 6% improvement for the game by disabling hyperthreading in the BIOS, with that CPU. I though about upgrading mine to that one.

I have one of the faster CPU's out there for single thread performance, the i7-4790. I get about a 6% boost by turning off hyperthreading in the BIOS. I have built craft over 2,000 parts:

It can be hard to align parts in space when docking and aligning large space stations. How hard would it be to add a "snap" option that would align the docking ports to the nearest of the 72 snap angles already used in the VAB and SPH?

OK, I rearranged the parts a bit:

OK, I launched another, I think this one follows the rules. Anyone think it's in violation? I can now move the modules around to where they should be. I'll do that another day.

Here: http://kerbal.curseforge.com/projects/gingercorp-stock-alike-station-hubs?gameCategorySlug=ksp-mods&projectID=220639

Mine? Mine likely doesn't count for two reasons. 1) It's effectively only two modules. The hub and the passenger sections. 2) The tug does not meet the "small" requirement. I made a "Part group C" by removing two passenger sections and replacing it with a cargo bay. Within the cargo bay are three sections and a small tug. I added two docking ports to each of the four remaining passenger sections to move and dock the seven escape pods (capsules) to. I think my design is complete, and I will launch it later. Out of time now. I may have to add more SRB's. I don't know if my mass increased or decreased. Making orbit leaves it with little fuel already. Struts are your friend...

I love this mod, but the nodes are a problem that last I looked are not fixed. I modified mine, and it works great. The bug with the original GingerCorp station hubs is the signing of the 4th to 6th numbers. Some don't match the signing of the 1st to 3rd numbers. This flips a node connector 180 degrees from what it should be. The original stationhub 5 is fixed by: node_stack_side0 = -0.9325, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 1 node_stack_side1 = 0.475, 0, 0.8227, 0.500011, 0.0, 0.866019, 1 node_stack_side2 = 0.475, 0, -0.8227, 0.500011, 0.0, -0.866019, 1 node_stack_top = 0, 1.0, 0, 0,1, 0, 1 node_stack_bottom = 0,-1.0, 0, 0, -1, 0, 1 The original stationhub 8 is fixed by: node_stack_side0 = -1.375, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, 1 node_stack_side1 = -0.6875, 0, 1.1908, -0.500011, 0.0, 0.866019, 1 node_stack_side2 = 0.6875, 0, 1.1908, 0.500011, 0.0, 0.866019, 1 node_stack_side3 = 1.375, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 node_stack_side4 = 0.6875, 0, -1.1908, 0.500011, 0.0, -0.866019, 1 node_stack_side5 = -0.6875, 0, -1.1908, -0.500011, 0., -0.866019, 1 node_stack_top = 0, 1.375, 0, 0,1, 0, 1 node_stack_bottom = 0,-1.375, 0, 0, -1, 0,

OK, the only change I made to my craft was add parachutes that I forgot. Looks like my escape pods on my original station will have to rendezvous with something else. I used two mods. The GingerCorp Stock-alike Station Hubs, and the Kerbal Inventory System for the reusable struts. First, the Gingercorp hobs have a node bug that I fixed, and I scaled the 8 port hub to a size 2 with appropriate mass and cost changes by a factor of 8. I have two "tugs." One, with just a size 2 docking port, but engine and fuel. The other has size 2 docking ports on each end. I don;'t do very many things small. It this a stickler? Just to show my design is sound, I launched it and here it is: