Mother ship Challenge

[DragonRage]

We have probably all built a mother ship before but have you ever sent one up whole?

 

Challenge 

Easy

Launch a mother ship up with at least 32 crew capacity. Launch the ship in one piece. No mods (except hanger extenders).

Escape pods for all crew. All science equipment. No refueling. Ship alone has to be over 30 tons. 

Medium

Launch a mother ship up with at least 64 crew capacity. Launch the ship in one piece. No mods (except hanger extenders).

Escape pods for all crew. All science equipment. No refueling. Ship alone has to be over 60 tons. Only liquid fuel and oxidizer for launch.

Hard

Launch a mother ship up with at least 100 crew capacity. Launch the ship in one piece. No mods (except hanger extenders).

Escape pods for all crew. All science equipment. No refueling. Ship alone has to be over 90 tons. Only solid fuel for launch.

 

Good Luck!

[PointySideUp]

Here is my easy mode submission, the Cuboid Mothership

 

Edited January 23, 2016 by PointySideUp

[Caithloki]

On 1/18/2016 at 6:38 PM, DragonRage said:

No mods (except hanger extenders).

 

So no kerbal engineer either?

[Caithloki]

 

Here is my entries for the Easy and Hard challenge.

[Wild Cobra]

Well, my first attempt blow up on the launch pad, but I will strengthen it and it will work. The eight passenger modules alone hold 128 Kerbals, and the 21 escape vehicles hold 7 each, or 147 Kerbals.

Edited February 6, 2016 by Wild Cobra

[Arugela]

When you say only Solid fuel for launch. Do you mean the initial launch or the entire initial circularization around kerbin?! When can you ditch SF?

Edited February 6, 2016 by Arugela

[Wild Cobra]

LOL...

 

I missed the solid fuel part for the 100+

 

I got mine in orbit just fine, but what's the point now?

[Arugela]

Maybe he meant including solid fuel. Or first stage?!

We need a rules clarification OP! 8)

 

And it only says launch. Not into orbit. So, are we just supposed to get it into the air... That is a little easy. I think we need it to say orbit or the moon or something else. And more specifics on the hard versions SF stuff.

 

Edit: BTW, I'm trying to do hard mode, but I don't understand the rules completely.

SSTO Medium/Hard?!: (Depends on how hard works. I can add SF rockets to get into the air quite a bit pretty easily.) 100crew with escape pods/all science. I could get more fuel if I didn't push the one side so far. And SF would give me alot more to possibly get to the moon or minmus. Refueling would make it reusable and an explorer.

Craft file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jcbb7bf7zu89rz/100 Crew hard mode.craft?dl=0

I think my escape vessels make a pretty good space amusement ride!

 

Edited February 6, 2016 by Arugela

[Dr.K Kerbal]

Dude. Some big motherships here!!!

It must really slow your computers down.

[DragonRage]

For hard mode you need solid fuel for the WHOLE launch. orbit and launch. But you have to have liquid fuel for interplanetary exploration. Once the ship gets into orbit it needs to be able to go somewhere. that you can use LFO for.

Edited February 7, 2016 by DragonRage

[DoctorDavinci]

 

On 2016-01-18 at 5:38 PM, DragonRage said:

We have probably all built a mother ship before but have you ever sent one up whole?

Yup, I launched 4 mother ships and sent them to Dres with the craziest being 1100 parts in orbit and a whopping 1376 parts with a refueling tanker attached ... You can see my mission report HERE

Imma gonna do this ... Escape pods and all

On 2016-01-18 at 5:38 PM, DragonRage said:

Hard

Launch a mother ship up with at least 100 crew capacity. Launch the ship in one piece. No mods (except hanger extenders).

Escape pods for all crew. All science equipment. No refueling. Ship alone has to be over 90 tons. Only solid fuel for launch.

Only solid fuel for launch meaning to orbit or ??????

[Wild Cobra]

First attempt at a 100+ launch that the first stage is sold fuel rockets only. The first stage is 369 sold rockets. It blew up at about 30 seconds after drifting off from straight up. I need more struts, but it already has 2517 parts. I don't know how many more I can add.

 

 

Edited February 15, 2016 by Wild Cobra

[Wild Cobra]

After several failures of the craft not maintaining pitch and yaw after about 30 seconds, I made one that lasted till about 45 seconds. I felt this would be a failure too, but I made it in the clear. It has 24 Mk3 Passenger Modules and four Science labs so it holds 392 Kerbals. It has 48 rescue vehicles so all Kerbals can be saved in case of a disaster if the population is limited to 336 Kerbals.

The craft has 513 solid fuel boosters for the first stage. My biggest problems were keeping it straight with no gimbals. Using wings for both stability and strut attachment points kept the craft stable at launch and in flight without gimbals on the rocket motors.

The craft has 2,345 parts at launch and weights in at 14,416.4 tons. Making any changes in editing was a real pain. One second of flight time with the first stage takes 46 seconds with this many parts on my computer.

With no thrust control, I was over 5 g's at 20,000 meters and the craft was getting pretty hot. I was getting pretty worried that it would break apart, and this being under 1 minute of flight and still on solid boosters, I'm already wasted 46 minutes if this fails.

At 28,000 meters, everything is red-hot. I still have several seconds of solid fuel, and at almost 7 g's of force. I'm surprised it's holding together still. I normally switch to orbit view far before this and adjust, but the time lag is real bad, and I have had glitches explode my craft wen going back to stage mode on occasion. I'm staying in stage mode until I drop the first stage.

My nine Rhino engines did not engage. I had to manually activate them. It was a slow process with the lag, and then I still had two not activated when I thought they all were. now I have a fuel imbalance. I had ended up with an elliptical orbit when I wanted a 200k to 250k circular.

Not all my solar panels activated using the action group. I had this happen before as a glitch. I cause another problem myself in that I have overlapping solar panels. I had it fixed before, but must have reentered this problem in a craft edit.

After losing the first stage and at 1,678 parts, one second is now 21 seconds.

After dropping the last stage for the station, it now takes 12 seconds for one second of game play to pass. My station engines ran out of fuel before I could get the desired orbit. I'm pretty sure if I didn't have staging problems with the size 3 decouplers and Rhino engines, I would have had a nice circular orbit.

With the station fuel empty:

336 Kerbals rescue capacity

1,534 parts

1,034.24 tons

I then filled one rescue vehicle with seven Kerbals and tested it with a successful splashdown.

 

 

Edited February 17, 2016 by Wild Cobra

[Arugela]

1 hour ago, Wild Cobra said:

The craft has 2,345 parts at launch and weights in at 14,416.4 tons. Making any changes in editing was a real pain. One second of flight time with the first stage takes 46 seconds with this many parts on my computer.

 

Now you know what my Orion mothership vehicle is like. How did you edit it succesfully. Mine starts going grey on the parts(The normal green highlight disappears.) and you can't edit them anymore. and it takes me hours to get into orbit. Can you fly this anywhere near normal speeds/fps?

Edited February 17, 2016 by Arugela

[Wild Cobra]

Your Orion is no sweat for my computer. At 365 parts, it does 10 seconds of game time in 19 seconds.

 

I have a i7-4790 processor and 32 GB memory on a win 7 system.

[Wild Cobra]

In four attempts, I wasn't able to get the Orion to orbit. I keep running out of fuel. Then I looked under the faring and wow... have you tried reentry to verify the Kerbals survive?

[Arugela]

My Orion is 2300+ parts. Not sure which ship was 365 parts. I don't make many of those.

 

OOhh. Nvm. I'm refering to another ship I made outside of this thread. It has a similar parts count to yours. But more stacked. It always took me forever to get into orbit. I was curious how your 2300 part ship performs for you.

 

I think I was getting 20 realtime seconds per ingame second in my personal main mothership(not this one.)

Edited February 18, 2016 by Arugela

[Wild Cobra]

On 2/7/2016 at 7:16 AM, DragonRage said:

For hard mode you need solid fuel for the WHOLE launch. orbit and launch. But you have to have liquid fuel for interplanetary exploration. Once the ship gets into orbit it needs to be able to go somewhere. that you can use LFO for.

Have you ever put something in orbit with only boosters? The insane part is they will stay in orbit as unwanted debris.

[Castille7]

@Wild Cobra Now we're playing with power!!  You sure have some computing power!  I may give this challenge a shot soon.