SlithyTove

That's a big herd of awesome. The Reliant in particular looks pretty slick.

I tried a skycrane on my first of these. Problem was, the thing I was asked to grab was too big for all my rockets to get around so I couldn't fly straight. I guess if you build a big enough skycrane that could do it, but you have to think large to manage all contingencies. My much easier solution was to put some wheels on a rocket with an over-abundance of reaction wheels and a couple stragically placed vernors. Then I can just drive up to the debris, raise the front end as I latch to grab it in the center. Then unlock the claws movement, and lift the back end off the ground to get things centered vs the COM and re-lock the claw. Then the excess of reaction wheels + strategic vernors kick in to flip vertical and voila.

My very first Mun landing. I was feeling pretty proud, standing there on the moon looking around. First moon landing in Kerbal is such a cool experience. Had a big grin on my face. Then my wife comes in and says "You should go to sleep" and walks out. I'm sitting there going... do you SEE me ON THE MOON? I mean... THE MOON. I'm ON IT. Who wants sleep? Sigh. She'll never understand. So then I walk my kerbal back over to the lander and realize that with the lander legs out he isn't tall enough by any stretch to get to the ladder. Hrm. I didn't know about the whole jet pack thing at this point in time. I scratched my head, then tried a jump. Hey, some height there. So I jump him to the base ladder and start climbing up. But.... the lower ladder and the upper ladder don't quite connect so he can't get back up to the pod. Hrm again. It's a rather tall skinny rocket. Not the easiest thing to land on this slight hill side, but it got the job done. I notice that if I jump from the side with the taller ground, the apex of the jump is right above the point where the ladder is disjointed... So if I can make that I should be able to crawl up. So I start getting running jumps and shooting for that. Takes a couple tries, but then I nail it. I breath a sigh of relief.... And then I notice that a kerbal hitting a tall rocket on a hill on the mun at running speed is juuuust enough to knock it off balance. And it is now beginning to plummet to the ground. I frantically crawl up the short ladder between my kerbal and the pod mashing B the whole way, then mashing z the moment my kerbal is in. At about 5 degrees from perpendicular with the mun the rocket, and salvation kicks in, though I do have some more panic trying to avoid the hill that I was then hurtling to. But, in the end, I prevailed and all was well. I build very squat landers now and test the ladder on the launchpad before every mission.

Yeah, didn't seem to matter much. I could have full everything with more than enough energy coming in through the panels for battery levels not to drop, full tanks fuel tanks etc. Tried some combinations, but nothing worked. It was intermittent and unpredictable though. Might work for a little bit and then 2.5 minutes into the burn it starts dropping thrust and then I'm into panic mode again. Until that fix that sucker I'll just run them seperately or only run them on a single engine craft.

Very nice. I just did a similar training run with my XP Bus. Yours looks to be much less expensive though....... As far as the name goes.... Foil for sure. Since a foil is in fact, a training implement to use to learn a rapier.

Sure thing! http://kerbalx.com/SlithyTove/Sisyphus-Wide-II That's the most tested design so far. Though I have some newer one's in flight testing that will likely replace it. My main issue with it is part count. Each probe is a mini-spaceship with just RCS thrusters, a claw, and some reaction wheels. Sometimes I add other things to try and pull weight off the main craft which is what is happening with the mining equipment on this one. The probes serve a few purposes: First, they spread the torque of turning the craft out over multiple claws. In this case 7. Less torque on each one results in less wobble and less crash inducing instability or kraken attacks. Second, they pull some weight off the main craft. The lighter the main craft is, the better from a stability standpoint. It ends up being more like the asteroid turns the mothership rather than the other way around. Third, they help keep it pointed in the right direction. No matter how hard you try to find the center of mass, you are always slightly off which causes sideways torque under thrust. If you just have one ship trying to compensate it will put pressure on the claw which will bend, then more compensation, then escalating oscillation then doom. But many competing sources of torque seem to do the trick. There is some wobble, but if I can keep it under a 15 degree cone of where I am pointing at, I call it pretty good. To keep part count lower, the mothership relies on the docked probes for RCS and most of it's reaction torque. When an asteroid is spent the probes just re-dock and the ship flies off to find the next roid. Flying unladen is a bit tricky, it is very large and can roll in one direction much, much faster than the other. When laden just tell SAS to find your maneuver node and wait, it will settle out eventually. Also, the arms are only built up to handle the mild torque of the nukes, so they can flap a bit during maneuvers. They settle out under load pretty quickly and easing on and off throttle helps. It is fragile on kerbin and a drag factory. To achieve orbit go straight up until you almost completely clear the atmosphere. If you try a gravity turn in atmosphere you will not go to space today. Also, as mentioned before, you cannot run the ISRUs at the same time as the engines due to a fuel flow bug in Kerbal code. It will throttle down one of the eight engines which will cause catastrophic instability if not caught quickly enough.

I do all my mining outside gravity wells. Sisyphus Wide MK II with deployed reaction/mining probes doing it's thing: And the first successful Sisyphus class the MK III: I have a lot of these things. It may be becoming a problem....

Here. Has Bill and Bob to keep him company. That lander leg is stuck in the ice cream but good. Going to have to send a rescue.

Thanks Claw! Every post I have seen from you has been impressively informative and helpful, and this is no different. Appreciate all the other input, going to drop this one to answered.

Oh, ok. I get the idea. How about this thing? I use a similar design on a lot of things because it basically removes the whole wobble problem. The rocket stacks work to reinforce each other. Payload is either completely in the middle, or, in this case, the payload is a combination of the middle and the top of each stack which then makes a nice, broad lander and a nice squarish spacecraft for maneuverability. This one is pretty simple, flies nicely and is easy to see what is going on. It's called the XP Bus because I slapped it together to take 9 fresh kerbal recruits and get them to level 3 in one flight.

One thing I can recommend: If you haven't read up on asparagus staging, do that now. Well, like a lot of other people mentioned, I don't have a "stock lifter". Most things I build are so specialized that they require highly specialized lifters. Like this thing which needs the lifters underneath spread out to support the length inside the gravity and atmosphere of kerbin. It has to go pretty slow and burn straight up until it clears the atmosphere. And, while still a WIP, here is my current 9-kerbal research base SSTO for juxtaposition. It's pretty much the opposite of the above craft for launches. Huge thrust and goes straight out at about a 45 degree angle off the launch pad. Design is pretty simple with the four radial mammoth stacks around the central payload.

Lag with high part count ships for sure. Time-warp kraken. No docking alignment indicator on the nav-ball.

Fun story, you have some great screenshots there. I'm looking into doing my very first mission to Jool in similarly epic hit-everything style, nice to see others having fun with it.

Well, I just did a trial run with a simple rocket stack with 1000 of the smallest batteries attached and compared that to the same rocket stack with 1000 of the small structural panels attached. If there is a difference in performance between the two ships it's subtle. Both were running about 8 fps with 3.5-4s of real time elapsed per game second. That is with all graphical settings turned down to the minimum. That's a bit surprising to me, as I can see in the aero overlay that each one of those structural panels has it's own aeroforce indicator, but the battery stack only had aero indicators for the main stack. In that case at least, a part is a part is a part more or less.

Thanks for some of the clarifications! Still, seems like under the new model the physicsless parts would still require less overall computation to keep running since they can't move themselves independent of their attached body and doing on calculation with added drag and mass on the main part is still quicker than a calculation on two independent parts. Or am I missing something?