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Asparagus Staging Simplified And Illustrated.


Stormpilot

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Asparagus Staging is an easy way to save fuel in KSP. Here is how it works: All engine will feed from one tank, for example, lets say its two side boosters supplying all the engines. When the side booster tanks are depleted, the tank in the main booster is still full, just now your higher up instead of just sitting on the launch pad. To do this we use fuel lines (as seen in figure 1.1) In this example with the two side boosters, we will run a fuel line from the side boosters fuel tank to the main tank. To do this click on the fuel line part in the selection of parts click on the side boosters fuel tank where you want the line to start. Then pull it over until your mouse cursor hovers over the middle boosters fuel tank, then click (oh and remember symmetry. You can use the symmetry button or just press X on your keyboard to cycle through the types). It is important that you click on the side booster first, because the fuel needs to be flowing the right way. You can double check by looking at the fuel lines. The arrow indicates the flow direction.

Figure 1.1: 

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For ships with 4 or more side boosters, you need to run the fuel from one pair of boosters, to the other ones, and so on until your out. Then just run fuel from the last booster to the main tank, like in Figure 1.2 (arrows indicate fuel flow direction). It is important to remember that if you want to add more than two, instead of using for example 4x symmetry, use 2x symmetry twice. You can still use the number of symmetry of the number of booster you want, but its less efficient. 

Figure 1.2:

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Booster need to be jettison in the order the tanks run out, as demoed in figure 1.3 (you don't need to color code them I just added that for simplicity).

Figure 1.3:

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You can use Asparagus staging for more than 4 boosters, just remember that the fuel needs to go the right way, and the stages are staged corrected.

That all I really got to say. Now go out there and practice the arts of epic explosi- i mean space exploration.

 

Edited by STORMPILOTkerbalkind
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11 hours ago, STORMPILOTkerbalkind said:

That true, but if you want to use 4 tanks for example, and stage the pairs separately, you can’t. 

But you can.

Add the decouplers in pairs and set the fuel priority to drain the tanks in your chosen order.

So you can setup basically any form of asparagus without any fuel lines.

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Just to add to the good tutorial I can add that there's a related concept often known as 'hybrid asparagus'

FqpHDs8.png

Where you use SRB's but with LF tanks on top.

The idea is to have the 'drop tanks' run out of fuel just before the SRB's

It normally takes a bit of twiddling with the power of the boosters but can be highly cost efficient as a standard launcher.

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21 minutes ago, STORMPILOTkerbalkind said:

How do you even set fuel priority. I’ve seen people do it but have no idea how :/

You need to have Advanced Tweakables enabled in settings.

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Then you just right click on any tank and set the priority

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Edited by Curveball Anders
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On 3/15/2021 at 8:48 AM, Vanamonde said:

I find running fuel lines to be way, WAY easier than setting fuel priorities and crossfeeds.

KSP sets fuel priority automatically and it's usually correct. Then just turn on crossfeed on everything. I actually think that's easier. Plus fuel lines add mass and drag to crafts

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  • 5 weeks later...
On 3/15/2021 at 4:20 PM, Curveball Anders said:

You need to have Advanced Tweakables enabled in settings.

 

Then you just right click on any tank and set the priority

 

 

Small addition: tanks with higher priority (i.e. larger number) will drain first.

Alt+click modifies number by 10 instead of 1 (useful if you have complex staging that KSP doesn't recognize well and puts wrong priorities).

Also, using crossfeed and priority saves part count (though slapping fuel lines everywhere is quicker, of course).

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  • 1 month later...
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