septemberWaves

Or Kronos would perhaps be a good name for the Saturn-style rockets. Speaking of which, are you just sticking with real Saturns, or will you be making designs inspired by some of the potential variants that never got built too? One of my personal favourite alternative Saturns was the stage-and-a-half design using just the first stage, and jettisoning four engines mid-flight to lower the thrust (and recovering them with parachutes). I've always thought that one might be interesting to mimic.

I think I built my biggest base on the Mun (well actually I built my biggest one on Duna, but if we're only considering moons then the Mun gets that honour). Minmus is the only celestial body (even considering modded ones) on which I've landed a large base with a single launch and a single landing (the whole thing launched as one piece and landed that way), although that method no longer suits my play style very well. The first moon of another planet I landed on was the moon of Asclepius from the mod of the same name, and the first time I did that in the stock system was on Ike. Ike is also the only moon where I've landed both before and after landing on its planet with the same vessel. I think the first moon of Jool I landed on was Vall (although it's been a while since my first Jool exploration so I could be mistaken). Tylo is one of the most fun to design a lander for, and of course Laythe lends itself to spaceplanes, making it an interesting destination (and I have some interesting plans for Laythe exploration when I eventually get there with my new mission architecture). Bop, Pol, and Gilly are probably the only stock ones that I don't consider too significant, although I still like to visit them whenever I'm in local space, even if it's just with an automated lander. One of my favourite non-stock ones is Tekto from Outer Planets, though I haven't visited it often. But I think in general it's hard for me to pick one moon that's my favourite, since I've done unique things at most of them and quite a few others have a special appeal even if I've yet to do much there.

Laythe is like a slightly smaller Kerbin. Any engine you wouldn't use for a Kerbin ascent is one you shouldn't use for a Laythe ascent. Terrier engines and Poodle engines may work on Duna, but they're thoroughly useless on Laythe. If you want to design a Laythe lander, build as though you were building for Kerbin and just scale down a little.

@Alpha 360 Currently I'm more interested in rocket-assisted landing for shuttles. Quite a few times in the past I've built a space-shuttle-like vehicle that works perfectly, except for the fact that I can barely land it because the safe speed for hitting the runway is too low for the wings to provide enough lift as it decelerates to that speed. So I thought that rather than redesigning the whole shuttle to have more wing area and subsequently redesigning the launch vehicle (which tends to be massively complicated and a challenge to optimize), it'd probably save some mass to just stick a retrorocket under the nose and fire it immediately before landing. Parachutes would probably work too, of course, but everyone uses those. In my testing process so far I started trying out rocket-assisted takeoff too just while I was experimenting (since I've had a few planes in the past too that could definitely have benefited from a boost at takeoff) but I started testing mainly for landing systems.

If you have a plane which needs a particularly high speed to lift off (or to stay in the air when right above landing), the KSC runway isn't always long enough for the acceleration provided by the main engines or the deceleration provided by brakes. The solution: sepratrons. I've been experimenting with putting forward-facing sepratrons in places like wing tips to assist with liftoff acceleration (they can also look interesting if placed well), and backward-facing sepratrons beneath the nose of the plane to provide rapid deceleration right as the wheels touch the runway. I still need to perfect the technique and figure out when it works well, and I'm sure it won't work for larger planes (unless I use the bigger seperation motors that SpaceY adds), but it's certainly a promising idea.

It's been a long time since I really bothered with recoverable rocketry. I'll be designing some new ones soon (ish) though. My 2.5m rockets will include recoverable boosters and possibly a recoverable first stage (all by parachute; not totally sure about the first stage) and my 3.75m Raven-series rockets will have a recoverable first stage (Falcon-style) but probably expendable boosters (though that's still undecided). For 5m and 7.5m rockets I very much doubt it'll be practical to install landing systems to the rocket stages (except possibly the heavy boosters), although a 5m spaceplane might happen eventually (though that's not in the realm of staged rockets).

The performance is actually very good considering the simulations being done, and being rude about it will do nothing to further improve it.

Best way to reduce launch costs? Sandbox mode. Though, in all seriousness, I find that designing a launch vehicle for a specific payload capacity and then designing payloads to use as much of that payload capacity as possible is a good way to go; it doesn't make the rockets any cheaper but it gets the most mass up there with the fewest overall launches. Of course, it doesn't always work (depends how many launch vehicles you want to design, and how much time you want to spend tweaking the payload masses, and whether you even want to use this approach) but I like to use it as a general guideline.

Small update: replaced the launch vehicles on the Alnitak Mk1 Hub Module and Alnitak Mk1 Science Module with the updated Quicksilver 2 rockets. Now requires SpaceY.

That's just regular physics really. Doesn't even have to be rocket science. If the resultant force vector passes through the center of mass, it acts with a moment of zero. Using simple laws of moments, you could have (for example) one engine twice as far from the center of mass as its matching engine, but at half the thrust, and it'd work perfectly.

Amazingly, I managed to complete my Kerbin orbit architecture in just today (not counting the Bellatrix CEV-1 spacecraft, which I designed some time ago). It's taken about 14 hours today to design, test, and upload all of the Alnitak station modules and trusses (they can all be found here).

Update The crewed Kerbin orbit architecture is complete. Find the Alnitak-series station parts, along with the Bellatrix CEV-1 spacecraft, in the original post of this thread. The station pictured above is something I built to test out all the parts; I tested fitting trusses together (the truss sections are designed to connect as near to seamlessly as possible) as well as launching and rendezvousing every module. The parts are designed for stations which will generally be somewhat smaller than my example design (two to five modules perhaps, rather than twelve) but I wanted to showcase all modules. I'll be adding the mod list, as well as flight instructions, to the original post in this thread soon.

Just a station I made with my new Mk1 station parts. Probably the biggest station anyone might ever make with these parts; anything bigger and it'd be more practical to use the next tier of parts (when I make them).

Not sure if this should go in this thread since it's almost complete, but it's still partly a work-in-progress: My new Mk1 station modules. Predominantly using Nertea's new station parts pack, along with a few other parts mods and a little bit of Tweakscale. Currently they all function as intended and launch vehicles work perfectly, so it's mostly just a matter of finalizing.

Did my first manual dockings in quite a while. It's always good to get some practice without the UI, or without any RCS (I can do either of those things individually, though I still cannot yet do RCS-less dockings with no UI either since I need to click the target vectors). In other news, my early-game station parts, rockets, and crew capsule are almost complete. I've spent most of today testing them all out; now the only things left to do are add action groups and upload.