DMagic

I finally finished all the parts of my MinMus base and orbital refueling station. Here is the orbital station, it's all stock parts. I put it together with just 2 launches of identical parts. There are 10 orange fuel tanks for 28000 fuel, and 8 large RCS tanks for 6000 units of monopropellant. I wasn't stingy at all with parts, there are a ton of aesthetic touches, like the fuel lines, and the docking ports (6 large and 4 small) could have easily been stuck directly on the fuel tanks, but I think this looks better. After 7 or 8 refueling trips I filled it up, the fuel lifter is slowly drifting into the darkness at the top of this picture. And here is the ground base. Lots of mod parts, from HOME, Kosmos, KW, and Kethane. It was put together with 8 launches. Except for the central component and the fuel lifter everything was built with detachable wheels and landing systems used to move everything into place without adding to the total part count (around 250 parts with the lifter docked). After filling up the orbital station I have another 9000 units of fuel, 1000 units of monopropellant, and 14000 units of Kethane. I'm still not completely happy with it. The central component is poorly designed, the main section is just a useless Kosmos part, so it doesn't hold nearly as much fuel or kethane as it could. And the lifter could hold a lot more fuel. But overall I think it's pretty good.

From your diagram that's not really asparagus staging, that's just one stage feeding directly into the each inner layer. The wiki has a diagram of what it should look like. I assume that when you drop stage 1 all 8 outer engines fall off. In asparagus staging you should only be dropping 2 at a time (from opposite sides). So instead of 3 stages you should have 9, I think. It's a little bit trickier to set it up like that; things can be very unpredictable, but I have made a launcher with 4 layers of asparagus staging, you just have to be careful with ordering the stages. To better track your fuel flow try right-clicking on the fuel tanks during ascent. The inner tank should not decrease at all until all of the outer tanks have been dropped (assuming that the inner engine has the same fuel flow as the outer ones, which yours does). If it starts going down before that then something is off.

Another thing to keep in mind, at least with mechjeb, is that the delta-v values it gives are for atmospheric flight (I assume that means at sea level on Kerbin) and vacuum, but not in between. I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I think it takes about 3000-3200 m/s delta-v to get your initial apoapsis up to about 70km (assuming a good ascent profile). A lot of that initial delta-v takes place in the atmosphere, so I design my initial stages to deliver a little bit less than 3000 m/s of atmospheric delta-v. The circularization stage takes another 1200-1400 m/s delta-v, but that's all at vacuum, so it's easier to calculate. I have a few sat-map probes that work out almost perfectly for calculating this. The first stage is just enough to get up to 75km, the second stage is just enough to circularize, the 3rd stage is just enough to get to Duna, or Eve, and the all the fine tuning after that is done with an ion engine. I'll try to launch one of those later today and see just how much delta-v is needed for each part of the ascent. I assume there is an easy way to calculate this based on atmospheric density, ISP, and TWR, but it seems just as easy to monitor how much delta-v is expended at each step.

That's strange about the orange tanks being less stable than multiple gray tanks. I've always found the opposite to be true too. While trying to launch a fuel depo, essentially 5 orange tanks strung together, I tried dozens of times with 10 gray tanks and 5 mainsails on the first stage. Nothing I did could ever make the thing reliable, and different components were failing almost every time. No amount of adding, adjusting, or removing struts (sometimes more struts can make things worse) helped, but just replacing the 10 gray tanks with 5 orange ones worked on the first attempt. Do you always put a small gray tank below the orange ones to avoid overheating? Maybe that is less stable than using 2 big gray tanks.

Thanks, though I think I spent almost as much time testing the thing on Kerbin as I did actually assembling it. I only tried making a base out of separate components once, but I could never get it to look good. Everything was too spread out with no simple way to move; it wasn't very impressive or successful. My other method for base construction is just to say screw it and launch it all at once. This requires a totally ridiculous launcher, and it's a pain to move it around in space, but I think it worked out pretty well. From the painfully slow launch, to a successful landing on Laythe, even if it is on a slope.

I was just posting about this in another thread, but in short, test everything on Kerbin. Make sure everything lines up and docks properly on or near the launch pad. Also, put wheels on everything. If you plan on making a mobile base then leave them, but if it's meant to be stationary put them on detachable points to keep the part count down. It's also useful to make all of your landing systems detachable, you can save a ton of parts doing this, and I think it looks better. After putting everything together and separating the wheels. The mobile launcher is the only thing that needs to keep its wheels so that it can take off and return.

One of the tricky things I've learned to deal with is how to assemble off-world bases. The best way, I've found, is to test everything on Kerbin. It's best to use the subassembly loader, but even if you're pathologically averse to non-parts mods you can do testing without it. Lining up docking ports can be tough, and to make sure your base is really stable you have to be very accurate with their positioning. You can test all of your components on the launch pad, or near it if you aren't using subassembly loader. Here I've connected 2 parts of my Minmus base using subassembly loader and put them on the launch pad. Sometimes your landing legs will break if you try to deploy them on the ground. You can use your landing engines to take some of the strain off of them, but that can be a little tricky. The other way is to attach a few launch clamps, then drop the whole thing to the ground once the legs are already deployed, you might still need to use the engines a bit though, to slow down the descent. Here it is on the ground. The wheels are on detachable radial structural points, which is nice for getting them out of the way, and for keeping your final part-count down. To check if everything really fits well together try activating and deactivating time-warp. If your components mostly stay in place then your docking ports and landing struts should be aligned fairly well. Another way to check is to decouple the docking ports and see if they line up. The ports have been decoupled here, but they still line up almost perfectly. This part demonstrates a few other things. First, having a wide, detachable wheel base lets you drive around and dock to your base and get rid of unnecessary parts (the final component has just 12 parts, but the whole landing apparatus has 100). Also, those fuel tanks hanging on the sides help to keep the center of mass balanced, which is something that caused problems with the truss segment above. The problem with this is that those full fuel tanks make the whole thing way too heavy to test on Kerbin, the wheels will be destroyed almost regardless of how you deploy the thing. Which brings up the other thing that launch clamps are useful for, draining fuel on the launch pad. Just attach an engine if you need one and burn most of your fuel before you drop it to the ground, you might still need to use the landing engines for a gentle drop though. Now that you have the thing on wheels, you can just drive it off the launch pad. Take it all the way past the little drop off and you can put something else on the launch pad without clearing it first. Doing this, you can put together as many segments as you want without using the subassembly loader. It's also useful to see, not only if your docking ports line up, but if you can actually put things in position and dock them properly. That way you can put together something like this without actually going off-world first. Using this method I put together this eight-component base on Minmus on my first attempt (well, if you don't count the 2 or 3 times it took to properly land my first truss segment). Everything lined up well for docking, and nothing freaks out when I turn on and off time-warp.

I had the same idea for my Mun rover. I put a single RCS thruster on the bottom of the cockpit so that I could tip over gently. The fuel tanks were empty though, so everything was pretty light.

I'm not sure this base is so big, but it was put up in a single launch. The total mass after landing on Laythe was about 90 tons.

Hello, Bunga Bunga can only be used to throw parties, in space. With that in mind I give you the revised Bunga Bunga 3.0. I trimmed off about 100 parts without losing much delta-v. And perched atop this sits Quad Mega Base 2.0. With a final mass of about 90 tons, I have just enough power to get this baby out to Jool and land on Laythe. Liftoff was fun, 2 fps for about 10 minutes, but surprisingly easy. Saying goodbye to Kerbin and hello to Jool and Laythe. A harrowing atmospheric entry, but my 52 Kerbal crew made to the ground, even if it is on a hill. The base fully deployed. The Kerbals out, ready to explore.

I call this one Bunga Bunga, it somehow seems appropriate. It can simultaneously deliver 5 heavy, separate, payloads to several locations. This one is my second launch for my Mun base.

After putting together my Minmus base one piece at a time I decided to try something different on Duna. So I built Quad Mega Base. Once I managed to get the thing into orbit it was all surprisingly easy. I even managed to land at almost 3000m, on a slope, without blowing everything up.