Whackjob

I actually played around a little bit for once. She doesn't have a name or enough delta-v to get to the Mun properly, so she'll be getting a catchy name and some boosters that should double or treble her thrust. Might hit a million with stock parts. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I will contribute.

Happy New Year! I'll cover the fireworks.

I used to send mine up in one piece like this.

I've never gotten to that level. Longest launch I ever did was two hours twenty minutes from ground to orbit. I had one that would have ended up at about four but the machine I was using at the time died from the strain of it.

Not sure what you mean by hpf range. I don't think we need to invoke the Kraken on this one, either. He's talking about heavy, full ore cans, held on with just one tenuous connection. This isn't a glitch, it's standard shearing due to lack of reinforcement. Truss cage fixes that every time. Can you post screenshots of the craft? I'm at the office, so I can't chuck it in KSP and see what pops out.

I'm grateful for the fun times, and the fantastic community.

Trial and error, mostly, though I'll note that if a 10m/s bump on tylo is enough to shear things off, then it probably would happen first at launch, where there's a worse torque on the parts due to acceleration.

So far as I know, I don't think area of contact matters. I suspect the struts aren't even "actual things". They're a visual indicator that there's a movement buffer between two things. That "strut" will prevent the parts moving more independently of each other, up to a point. There's no way I'm aware of, of putting some kind of number to that. For us, anyway. Are you having an issue with parts breaking? Because I'm the guy that can help there. I made a career a while ago of building really really big stuff, and I managed to find ways to prevent all the usual shearing issues. Specifically, the way you generally want to go, if parts and sections are shearing off, is the truss cage method. Rather than going tank-strut-tank, go tank-truss-strut-truss-tank: The struts have the rigidity and the end point connections of the trusses allow flexability. Aeons ago, I had massive issues with whole chunks of large machines just shearing away. This is what solved it. Oh, and it makes for nifty landing gear, too, for really big stuff:

Technically wingless! With enough thrust-to-weight ratio, everything becomes a plane.

Hit PLAY on this, then flip through the album. It's pertinent, if by technicality only. Happy New Year, folks! EDIT: Can't get the bloody album to embed..

Uh, well. If we're going to be entirely honest, I melted the processor out of the one I used to make that. That is not a euphamism or being clever. I literally killed an Alienware m17x gaming laptop. I remember the scene quite well. I'd almost achieved orbit with a 7,800 part monster. It had taken, in real time, about two hours to get to that point, and orbit hadn't been achieved yet. Then it all went black, and there was a cooking smell. Processor finally gave up the ghost. I've been gaming on the same emergency replacement slaptogether ever since. One of these days, I'll have to get around to putting a proper one together. Here's "An Exercise in Absurdity", the mark 8. The biggest one I have screenshots of. That still flew. Here's a landing gear weight support test. That's the hardest part of the big builds. Supporting all that weight. EDIT: Sad part is, me looking at that now, I can already see about a half dozen ways to seriously improve that design.

Launch vehicle: Arkingthaad Munar lander: Arkingthaad Little rover: Arkingthaad Big rover: Arkingthaad Huge rover: Arkingthaad Spaceplane: [expletive redacted] Probe: Probe

That one was probably 2000, or 2500-ish.

If you build your own booster system, you can get just about anything in space. I put THIS on the mun. Launched in one piece: And I did it this way: If there is a specific engineering problem you have, please let me know, and I'll be pleased to assist.

This is something I haven't - and probably should at some point - do. It could be interesting, seeing how large a space plane I could make, and more interesting still, whether or not I can actually achieve orbit. Or even space. EDIT: Closest I ever got was this, and it wasn't finished:

Summoning successful! Me, I think what I'd do is build a giant rover with a grabber on it. Then simply abscond as necessary. That's what I loved most dearly about this game, when I was more active. I could build and build and build, and nobody could tell me to stop.

I have a lot of possibilities, rifling through my imgur account. I don't know the weights. I never went by that, just the parts counts, usually. Putting in spoiler tags just for brevity and screen real-estate.

The funnest stupidest thing I ever did was deciding I wanted a rover built around the concept of bankrupting a modest developing nation:

Beautiful! The legs are really well executed. It looks dead on similar to what I myself did in the past: I have advice: If you want bigger landers, you'll notice you'll have more and more trouble keeping it attached to the motors below that lift it into space. What I ended up doing was making my own large boosters, but having them extend out from the sides, rather than below. That way you can shore it up with more struts. Here's the first design I made that did that: UGH. That one was so ugly. But, the teching-up, so to speak, then led me here, to honest-to-goodness Truss Caging. But there's something to learn here, too: Notice the 4x orientation? That's not optimal, at all. A better way to go is 6x: ... that was a test design where I was trying to greatly up the rigidy and strength of designs. A failed concept. Ignore all the docking ports, but instead look at the 6x symmetrical design. What do you see? Equilateral triangles. Now THAT is the way to go! Strong, rigid, durable. Good luck on the building big, man. Message me or reference me to get my attention if you have design questions. I've never kept secrets to my work, and I won't start that now. All my tricks can be your tricks.

I forget I have videos sometimes. Hah! I haven't done any in like a year or so. For me, OP, in the game, my whole thing was "Bigger, badder, probably not better, but BIGGER!" Why land a twelve part hundai munar lander when you could do a four thousand part planetary garnish? That was fun for me. Your experience may differ.

I'd love pictures of that! You can always, always build your own lander legs. I've never had something so heavy that I couldn't build a leg to hold it. I took off and landed this thing, even lost a couple of legs thanks to me getting to close to that tank. But she still held in this landing gear test. I think that's the "An Exercise in Absurdity Mk8"

I cannot build... efficiently.

On a side note, I think I'm gonna tinker around and redo that first one for the heck of it.