Sexy Lifters

[CrashTestDanny]

A few days ago I came across some of @Rune's new designs and @PointySideUp's stuff and was inspired by their pure awesomeness.  I thought, how could I get just a little of their awesomeness into all of the ships that I launch?  That's how the SexyLifter series was born.  But then I was trying to loft up this behemoth fuel ring that the God's own firecrackers would just run and run from.  The mammoth engine wouldn't even get me a TWR of 1 with the smallest S3 tank and I've been playing mostly without part mods lately, so I needed a new solution for a heavy lifter.  Well, not really a new solution, clearly people have plastered lots of engines on the bottom of a tank before, but still I think there's a certain grace and elegance in these particular designs, heavily inspired by the aforementioned and my good friend @Cupcake...   Anyhow, to cut this short, here is a pack of lifters and accessories stored as subassemblies for your building pleasure!

From left to right, we have:

1 - MainSail+ 

Two Big Reds on top of a MainSail with struts, fuel hose, raidal decoupler, and two separatrons.  Add tanks to the top to adjust per-stage TWR and add dV.

2 - Mammoth+

Two Big Kerbos on top of a Mammoth with struts, fuel hose, raidal decoupler, and six separatrons.  Add tanks to the top to adjust per-stage TWR and add dV.

3 - SexyLifter9k

Powered by a Mammoth 9 (another subassembly in this pack - not pictured separately), lots of fuel, stack attach.

4 - SexyLifter9kL

More fuel...

5 - SexyLifter9kXL

Still more fuel...

6 - SexyLifter18k

I'm really proud of this...  Building on the success of the 9k line, our engineers (ok, it was just me), decided that if we turned around the internal fuel hoses, we could split the side stacks of the SexyLifter and add a second Mammoth 9, providing a whopping 18kN of pure awesome THRUST!  Stick that under a huge payload (I lifted about 400t to orbit today) and add radial asparagus stages and you're good to go!

 

Well, KerbalX doesn't take anything but craft files and this is multiple craft files, so I put the SL18k on KerbalX, but the whole pack can be downloaded from my dropbox:

Click here to download the archive!

 

As always, thanks for looking!

Danny.  Ad Astra per Potentia!

[PointySideUp]

I checked out several of these lifters today, pretty nice!  I like the 9K and ended up making a few changes for stability.  I added a total of 5 struts hidden inside the tanks and reduced the gimbaling of the vectors to 50% outside and 25% for the central.  I also added 4 canards at the bottom for a bit more control and disabled crossfeed on the top Sr port.  I resaved it as 9K+ and will keep using it!

 

 

[CrashTestDanny]

1 hour ago, PointySideUp said:

I checked out several of these lifters today, pretty nice!  I like the 9K and ended up making a few changes for stability.  I added a total of 5 struts hidden inside the tanks and reduced the gimbaling of the vectors to 50% outside and 25% for the central.  I also added 4 canards at the bottom for a bit more control and disabled crossfeed on the top Sr port.  I resaved it as 9K+ and will keep using it!

 

 

Sweet!  Excellent to hear that it's getting used!  Check my next post to see what I did with the 18 this evening!

Danny