Curiosity Tribute [pics]

[mellojoe]

CURIOSITY TRIBUTE

All stock except for Procedural Fairings. A lovely little asthetic mod.

*Disclaimer: At this point, the savvy of you might realize that my launcher stage does NOT have enough delta-V to get me into orbit. This is correct. I've done dozens of asparagus style launchers and lifters, and this time I wanted something a little more asthetic. When the launcher ran out of fuel, I used the "infinite fuel" from the debug menu to push it up higher. Once I hit an apoapsis of 100km, I turned OFF the "infinite fuel" hack and went back to the rest of my rocket in stock configuration. My circularization burn was still necessary using regular fuel loads. I could have added a couple of asparagus stalks to make this work legit, but I was just tired of seeing them. This is more asthetically pleasing in this particular configuration. Again, to repeat, only the base launcher stage was hacked to get a high enough apoapsis. The rest of the stages are working as intended.

*Editor's Note: I wish I had changed the design of my heat shield a bit. After dropping the bottom of the heat shield, I wish the rover was a bit more exposed and visible. It is still hidden, and it isn't quite as pretty that was as I was originally hoping.

*Final Note: The keen eyed of you might notice that I'm missing a wheel. Hovering is tough! I had more lateral velocity than I anticipated. When dropped the rover the last couple of feet it landed and bounced once. That knocked off the middle wheel on the right side. The rover is still operational and sturdy without it, but I might consider a 2nd mission in the near future.

[Geschosskopf]

Pretty neat. Nice skycrane job even if you lost a wheel .

I'm a non-asparagus guy myself so I appreciate your efforts that way. For any given payload, count on needing 2 of the tallest tanks of whatever diameter you need combined with only the biggest SRBs that look good on that diameter of tank. Doing this will usually get the whole ascent stage at least part-way into the apoapsis burn, if not all the way through it.

[trippytripp]

Even if you DID use a debug hack, I still think you did an amazing job with this. The fact that you made something aesthetically pleasing out of STOCK parts still baffles me.

[PTNLemay]

@ Trippy

Except for that shroud, unless I'm mistaken.

But yeah, impressively done. I like his cute little singular light, like an eye staring out at the landscape.

[mellojoe]

Yes. the fairings are from a mod called Procedural Fairings. I only have 2 mods installed at the moment. Procedural Fairings and Crew Manifest. Both are simple, yet brilliantly done.