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Station Design Guidelines


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This topic is to develop guidelines for optimizing a space station.  I would like to limit it to stock parts, since mods can easily change the rules that will apply.  So what makes your space station work well?

Some guidelines I like to follow:

1) Keep the part count as low as possible. 

This has more to do with performance than gameplay. This is just to avoid performance lag as you dock new parts/ships.  Keep this in mind as you add parts such as strut connectors, batteries fuel tanks, ladders & solar panels.  They all add up.  As rule of thumb go for the largest part you can manage.  For example, one Z-4K battery bank has the same capacity/mass as 10 Z-400 batteries but in a single part.

2) Keep the heavy stuff in the middle.

You have no doubt by now noticed that if you have a large station and dock something massive at far end it will flex so much that the station becomes difficult to control.  The farther you get from the center of mass the more the wobble will be magnified.  So if you have a central hub with six nodes it is better to dock six modules to the hub than to stack them on top of each other to form a lengthy chain.

3)  Keep it balanced

Same idea.  If you have something heavy on one side and something light on the opposite side, it makes the station difficult to control.

4) Keep one source of torque in the middle.

If you have more than one source of torque (remember, most command parts will have built-in torque), they can fight each other and create wobble.  The farther it is from the middle, the more wobble it will create.  Remember that you can disable torque if you have more than one source.

5) Don't overbuild.

While big stations are impressive, make sure you're building to its purpose.  So if you're building an orbital lab, do you need a Convert-o-tron?

6) Pay attention to tolerance

You want to have sturdy parts in the middle or an accident could cause the whole station to come apart.  For example, an adapter may have a tolerance of 6, while a girder adapter will do the same job but has a tolerance of 80 (and it's cheaper too).

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Try to assemble from as few parts as possibly. Rather 3 big launches than 15 small ones. This also saves on parts (docking ports for example) and adds to the rigidity of the station.

Plan your station ahead (build the whole thing in the SPH and then divide it into dockable parts). This also helps in avoiding docking a new segment and realizing that you no longer can extend a solar panel. This is especially true when you are using mods with lots of extendable parts like UKS.

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Thank you for this. I recently built a station with the MKS/OKS mod and put two huge fuel tanks on the end. It was fine. I closed and reloaded, and it wobbled itself to pieces. Heavy stuff in the center, one source of torque - got it. Not following these two guidelines probably contributed to the catastrophic demise of Omega Station...

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Another option for stations:  leave SAS turned off.

All of the bits of advice presented thus far are useful guidelines to follow when you're building a station from scratch, but if you already have a station and it's got wobbling issues, just turning SAS off can help.

2 hours ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

Make sure it's organized, for the most part. Having solar panels sticking out everywhere, and modules oddly aligned, makes things a lot harder to dock, and makes me a lot more twitchy :P

Yeah, it's a good idea to keep solar panels far away from where the docking ports are.

I like to put docking ports sticking out on booms from the center station-- makes it easier to dock stuff without worrying about colliding with nearby hardware.

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18 hours ago, worir4 said:

Don't over do it with lights. They look cool but for me at least, they are a big cause of frame rate loss.

On that note, also don't forget lights, on your station if not on all docking craft. Docking in the dark is possible but not fun.

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Some more guidelines:

As worir4 mentioned, too many lights will quickly kill your frame rate. I've found you can usually get away with 4 lights (front/back/top/bottom) as long as they are well placed.  When you build the station, try it out on the launch pad at night and see how it looks at night before you launch it.

Another thing you may have noticed, spaceships and stations tend to tumble around a N/S pole axis.  This makes it hard to dock unless the station's docking port is also along a N/S pole axis.  This way the docking port is always facing the same direction.

 

 

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You can use fewer solar panels if you align your station to the normal (polar) axis and place rotating solar panels vertically. Even if the station changes orientation your solar panels will auto-rotate to keep 100% of their surface facing the sun. If you instead placed your panels at a right angle to the polar axis then each panel will go through phases of increasing and decreasing its surface area to the sun, reducing your electrical efficiency. Though this is really only important for platforms that need a great deal of electrical generation such as an orbital refinery or that have low battery reserves.

Edited by HvP
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On 2/22/2016 at 7:41 PM, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

Make sure it's organized, for the most part. Having solar panels sticking out everywhere, and modules oddly aligned, makes things a lot harder to dock, and makes me a lot more twitchy :P

Oh!

You mean like MIR ....   :)

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Not saying that this station is a design classic (mine have generally just been a place to stash fuel), but one thing I like to do is to create a couple of docking hubs, one using the regular Clamp-O-Tron and the other with a set of Clamp-O-Tron Snr's.

Additionally I like to include lighting gantries to illuminate the docking ports. Obviously I could just attached lights to any ship that visit the station, but that's my preference.

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BTW... absolutely agree with Snark. Turning SAS off on all attached modules certainly fixed instability issues I had with stations.

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On 2/22/2016 at 7:41 AM, moogoob said:

On that note, also don't forget lights, on your station if not on all docking craft. Docking in the dark is possible but not fun.

I would love for docking ports to have low-power inbuilt running lights, similar to the long mobility enhancer.  Not enough to light up much, just enough to see them in the dark.  

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Go big...and remember to build in a way to go home!:

FD7B15AA7902456B60896E800C09564D47DFD334

I always include at least one drone core, and some sort of escape pods/life boats.

That way, if I need to get the Kerbals off the station, I don't need a mission to do it, and if I evac all the Kerbals, the station is still functional.

 

-Jn-

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Use a tug for construction. that way you can minimize part count on the station by leaving control parts and rcs thrusters on the tug, and keeping the part count of your modules to a minimum.

This might sound like common sense but It wasn't mentioned yet.

 

Edited by Mr. Speed
grammar
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24 minutes ago, Mr. Speed said:

Use a tug for construction. that way you can minimize part count on the station by leaving control parts and rcs thrusters on the tug, and keeping the part count of your modules to a minimum.

This might sound like common sense but It wasn't mentioned yet.

 

Good point. I try to have two, because it can be handy to bracket longer segments if you're trying to move them around.

In this image of the above station, under construction, you can see two way-overbuilt tugs on the top (the lit, grapple and solar laden monoprop cylinders). I also had a ridiculous orbital rescue/recovery vehicle (left) that later came in handy when my science section of the station ran out of go-juice on the way to rendevouz:

0FEC97F3F8EEFDE31DB81D029B22D0573EDFE9CF

 

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2 hours ago, Mr. Speed said:

Use a tug for construction. that way you can minimize part count on the station by leaving control parts and rcs thrusters on the tug, and keeping the part count of your modules to a minimum.

This might sound like common sense but It wasn't mentioned yet.

 

Don't forget to put a claw (advanced grabbing unit) on your tug as a means of attaching itself to future station parts. This gives far more flexibility than docking ports.

For example, you could attach 2 such tugs on mirror sides of a big module to ensure the total construction is balanced, even if you don't want any docking ports there

 

 

EDIT: Also a good, if somewhat obvious tip: Build your station at it's final destination. Unless you design it specifically to be movable (like making a single long cylinder), it is very hard to move a station

Edited by Sir_Robert
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2 hours ago, Sir_Robert said:

a good, if somewhat obvious tip: Build your station at it's final destination. Unless you design it specifically to be movable (like making a single long cylinder), it is very hard to move a station

It doesn't have to be a long cylinder, it just has to be balanced.   I've moved an 80-odd ton station that was shaped like a child's jack from Kerbin to Duna before.  (But I had KJR installed, and it was all fastened together with Sr. ports.)

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1 hour ago, DerekL1963 said:

It doesn't have to be a long cylinder, it just has to be balanced.   I've moved an 80-odd ton station that was shaped like a child's jack from Kerbin to Duna before.  (But I had KJR installed, and it was all fastened together with Sr. ports.)

Yep. If you're comfortable building big rockets, it's also possible to send up a large station pre-assembled. The trick is using an extremely inefficient launch profile so that aero and structural issues aren't so overwhelming.

Edited by Norcalplanner
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