Building first large ship in orbit

[dellcom1800]

So I am finally comfortable enough with sending probes to other planets and their moons to navigate a larger ship with my Kerbals (none stranded yet!).

My design thus far is 7 modules assembled in Kerbin orbit

4 x 'Nuke Pack' modules (each have 4 fuel tanks and a Nuke engine)

1 x Engine Hub module (connects all 4 engine modules and the ship core)

1 x Core module (contains RCS fuel tanks, batteries, solar panels and a Gyro)

1 x Cabin module (contains a cabin, comms and more solar power

I think next will be a lander/orbiter docked to the Cabin module. Thinking of Eeloo for my first destination but maybe Jool.

I haven't fired the engines yet, hope it doesn't blow up or fall apart!

Edited November 7, 2013 by dellcom1800

[EvilotionCR2]

Looks good. Install Mechjeb or flight engineer to see how much DeltaV it has and then decide where to go.

[blackfire83]

I might need to construct such a behemoth, just.... cause.

[dellcom1800]

Yeah I have avoided the mods thus far. It will be an unknown and a guestimate if I can get there and get into orbit.

[soranno]

I often enjoy constructing large ships such as this one, and I almost always make the same (well what I have considered) mistake as here

in giving it a frankly gargantuan amount of RCS fuel. from the images I guess you have 2650 units of monoprop on there, I`ve not yet caught myself putting that much on.

Do you find you need it? I generally end up using about 5% of my monoprop on large ships.

[Guest links123]

I had constructed a large ship than this one. I have done it successfully.

[dellcom1800]

I often enjoy constructing large ships such as this one, and I almost always make the same (well what I have considered) mistake as here

in giving it a frankly gargantuan amount of RCS fuel. from the images I guess you have 2650 units of monoprop on there, I`ve not yet caught myself putting that much on.

Do you find you need it? I generally end up using about 5% of my monoprop on large ships.

You could not be more correct, It was far to much RCS fuel. I have decided I will replace the core with a new one that includes 1 RCS tank and a 720 unit fuel tank. I took this on a mission to Dunna, which it made it but it literally had exactly enough fuel to get into a aero-capture trajectory. Not ideal. Lots of lessons learned with this one, but hey that's the fun of playing this game.

Link to mission

Not sure I would go much bigger just from a computer performance perspective.

[700NitroXpress]

Not sure I would go much bigger just from a computer performance perspective.

Go big or go home!

[Exothermos]

holy moley! awesome. I bet you get about the same frame rate as these images have, though. XD

[700NitroXpress]

holy moley! awesome. I bet you get about the same frame rate as these images have, though. XD

With the first one, it's about 5fps, the second one is about 15 - 20 fps, so not too horrible. It's better than slide show mode.