CDSlice

I’m pretty sure the mere existence of this rocket is a crime against humanity

Although the Saturn-1B could probably use a small buff I'm not surprised that you are having trouble with Snacks installed. That will increase the weight of crewed vehicles above what is historically accurate which when you are using a rocket with such low margins as the Saturn-1B can really screw you over.

I’ve used SystemHeat (via the FarFuture parts) in JNSQ for a while now and never had any problems with them. FarFuture itself had some issues with not being able to gather resources in space because their weren’t any resource configs but the heating system worked perfectly.

After the success of Skylab, KASA decided to follow up with an even bigger station built using the same technology but designed to be expandable down the road. Introducing Skylab II The Skylab II core module is very similar to the original Skylab although with some obvious differences. A habitation and lab module created using the SII stage has been added to the rear adding a massive amount of space. This required bigger life support systems that require more power and cooling so double solar panels and dedicated radiator panels were installed. The original crew docking tube was expanded to fit a 1.875m port to allow for station expansion. Finally the Kane Telescope mount was repurposed for docking the power module. This was originally planned to launch preinstalled on the station but the size and weight of the power tower meant that it had be redesigned as a separate module that would launch later. Launch pics in spoilers Immediately after the launch of the Skylab II core, the Expansion and Docking Module was launched. As crewed vessels like the Kane can not dock with the station until this module was installed this mission and docking is entirely on autopilot using a Sarnus IC, KASA's main launch vehicle used for all but the heaviest or lightest of payloads. After a successful docking, the station was ready for both crew and future expansion modules that would connect using the 1.875m docking ports first developed for the MOL program. Using a next generation Kane capsule, 5 kerbonauts embarked to the station in order to finish setting up the interior labs and living space. The latest module launched to the station is a large power tower. With massive solar panels and batteries it will be able to provide ample power to both the core station and any expansion modules added down the road. Although a nuclear power module was considered it ultimately lost out since it would be far more expensive and require lengthy testing before it could be used on a crewed station. With the power tower installed, Skylab II is fully operational. Additional crew will be launched on Kane capsules although the station also has the capability to dock with true next generation spacecraft using the new international docking port standard.

Can’t you just autostrut it? That’s what I do and it seems to work fine.

You probably have an old version of SAF installed. You need to use the one bundled with the latest release of BDB.

It’s probably because you are using BDB, the vast majority of the rockets in that mod are designed to be able to get to orbit in 2.5x scale (because the real world rockets could). It also sticks lots of parts early in the tech tree along with lots of experiments so you can easily get Thor or Delta parts pretty quickly and get to orbit.

These are some beautiful crafts and pictures! I do have a question though. Why is the fly back booster manned? It doesn't seem to have any upsides since the crew wouldn't be going to orbit while keeping the downsides of needing crew to launch a cargo mission along with the risk of having your crew die if something goes wrong. Did NASA not think they could have autonomous landing technology ready at that point in time?

It could just be a problem with my installation, I’ve already had to reinstall MechJeb once because it was being glitchy. I’ve just never run into this specific problem before so I figured it might be worth reporting to see if anyone else has had it. So that’s where that one capsule in Near Future comes from, I always wondered what it was supposed to be based off of. Did ETS base theirs off of a real world proposal or is it completely fictional?

I’m not 100% sure if this is a BDB problem or a MechJeb problem but for some reason the new Apollo parts do not play well with MechJeb’s auto docking feature at all. For some reason MechJeb calculates a bounding box for the CSM that is massively too big which makes MechJeb never finish the “back away to a safe distance” phase and start docking. It’s not too big of a problem since I can just manually dock but I like being lazy and delegating that job to the computer.

So I decided to try out the Skylab parts and they are absolutely gorgeous, A+ to everyone involved with them. I do have a balance question though. When I launched it on a Saturn V with just the S-IC and S-II stages like the unofficial wiki said and even with only four F-1 engines and draining some of the fuel of the S-II stage I still ended up with way too much dV (about 900 m/s or so) after reaching a 150km circular orbit in JNSQ along with a very high TWR of almost 2 at launch. To be honest I don’t know that much about Skylab so maybe this is historically accurate but it felt like I was using a way too powerful rocket for the payload. Is this feeling correct or did I mess up somewhere?

That would be great, the SAF fairings are just so much better than even the Restock ones that it always pains me to not be able to use them.

Personally I love it, there are already so many parts in this mod that it is hard to scroll through and find the ones I want. Having the similar engines and other parts combined into one that you can select variants of helps with finding parts. In terms of missing parts I’d like to have, am I blind or is there not a 3.75m SAF fairing? There is a 3.5m one and a 4.125m one but I can’t find one for 3.75m. I wanted one for when I was messing around with the Saturn parts and tried to make a rocket with a 4.125m power stage and a 3.75m upper stage. I also would really appreciate having a 2.5m option on the 4.125m to smaller adapter. There is the petal adapter but it is rather tall and doesn’t really fit that well if you aren’t putting an Apollo up there. Also, having a shorter version of the adapter would be nice.

Man that is one ugly rover. Looks very Kerbal though.

What kind of monster payload are you launching that needs that thing? Looks gorgeous though