Radial separators

[Warzouz]

There aren't stock radial separators

On one of my designs, I had to put radial satellites on a space station. Those satellites are meant to be deploy at mid course to target a polar orbit (example Duna and Ike), as the station would target a equatorial orbit.

So I needed a radial separator. I tried to fix 2 decouplers in reversed (using offset and sub-assembly), which I would fire in sequence to avoid bouncing back. But the whole piece was hard to fix on the satellite and to the central core of the station.

Finally I decided to launch the satellites to the front, so I used a 90° double decoupler using a radial decoupler, a small nose cone, and a small stack decoupler. These where much easier to fix on the station. But I was luck to be able to launch the satellites frontward.

Do you use radial separators ? How do you create them ? Are they light weight ?

[Superfluous J]

The easiest way to do this is to use the inline ones, but turn your satellites sideways. Use the modular girder segment or cubic octagonal strut to create a radial attach node, and then attach the separator (or a decoupler with the arrows pointing out) and attach our satellite to that.

You CAN get the radial decouplers to face backwards through clever root tool (the "4" key in the VAB) and subassembly doohickery, but it's complicated enough that I can't remember all the steps offhand and except in rare cases it's not worth the trouble. The only time I used it in game was for my Astro Glider 2, and I suspect it caused some light Kraken attacks.

[Sharpy]

This tutorial is for building radial separators out of the structural pylons. It's a bit convoluted process but it works "as designed", leaving the two crafts separated cleanly without any stubs, and the discarded separator floating freely.

[magnemoe]

I tend to use docking ports for this, note that you can put anything node attached like an engine directly on an docking port. Simply undock to release.

has the benefit that the port can be reused if the next probe has an docking port, it can be used for updating the ship.

Docking port on probe let you recover it for refueling or moving it to new location.

Yes this will have the probe standing out 90 degree to carrier but this is rarely an issue, if probe has its own docking port you can have it facing forward, this is beneficial with long stuff.

[sal_vager]

This works, mostly...

https://2.sendvid.com/behh2zzs.mp4

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One separator, gravityhack for your enjoyment.

(May require a fuel line.)

Edited October 20, 2015 by sal_vager