VAB help!

[Bimdipidy]

I have been trying to build a large rocket, with probes that detach to travel to other planets, but I have been unsuccessful in mounting any more then one capsule on the craft. I have tried using the unmanned capsule to no success either. If anyone could either explain the building process here or link me to a tutorial that explains this, it would be much appreciated.

[austin4050]

Ever heard of a youtuber names scott manley? He produces some awesome videos that helped me and I am sure many others out his tutorials are located

, there're very in-depth and explain alot! Hope this helped Edited April 16, 2014 by austin4050
added a niceness effect to it

[Bimdipidy]

Thanks for the reply! I have in fact heard of him, and as a matter of fact I was spurred to ask this question through watching an interstellar quest episode where he has a set of Eve probes break off from an Eve rocket (ep 52). However I haven't seen any tutorials on his channel to construct a similar kind of rocket.

[Geschosskopf]

It's fairly simple to make "MIRV-capable" motherships. The basic method is as follows:

1. Envision the overall design, mothership and probes, especially how you will attach the probes. Your options here are stack or radial decouplers, or docking ports.

2. Build a probe. Then save everything except the probe's CPU as a subassembly.

3. Build the mothership including the parts the probes will attach to.

4. Attach the probe subassembly to the attachment point on the mothership.

5. Add the CPU to the probe subassembly to complete the probe.

NOTE: Steps 4 and 5 are for attaching probes radially or by their lower ends. If the probes are attached by their upper ends, you might have to reverse these steps. Also, if the probe design has parts both above and below the probe CPU, then you have to do some of the probe construction in the VAB while building the mothership.

Example:

(click pic to enlarge)

In this case, the probes were intended for Laythe so needed a parachute. This put the probe CPUs in the middle, so the probe subassembly was just the stuff below the probe CPU and their RTGs and chutes were added after attaching to the mothership.

Here, the probes are attached at their lower ends due to the chutes and because radially attachments can get messy with retained decoupler pieces. So on the mothership, there are girders sticking out. At the end of each girder, I put a cubic octagonal strut, then put a small blue stack separator on each of them. Then the probe subassemblies went on top of these: engine, fuel, science stuff, MJ, and landing legs. Next, I added the probe CPUs to all the probes, then the RTGs and chutes.

[Pecan]

How are you trying to build this at the moment and what have you tried that doesn't work?

Do you know that you can rotate parts using WASDQE in the VAB? With that the easiest way to have several probes on a single launch is to put a quad-coupler upside down on top of the core, add separators to each of the (four) nodes on top of that and build/place your probes on top of the whole thing. Rocket goes under the core in the normal way.

[thereaverofdarkness]

If you can't attach something somewhere, it is often because you are trying to attach something that only attaches to the green attachment nodes, but you want to put it somewhere that has none. The solution to this is to first put an item there that can attach to walls, that has a green attachment node on it. Docking ports are a sleek way to do this, and cubic octagonal struts are a minimalist way to do it. It's even possible with a fuel tank, if you can finagle it into a good position.

[SRV Ron]

Probes have to be built after you have constructed the mothership, but that construction needs to be with the mothership present and connected to it via a decoupler. Once a probe is built, it can be saved as a sub assembly and used on the current and other projects.

You will have to pay attention to staging when you mount them.

Once launched, you will need to switch control using the [ ] keys if close by, or map mode, in order to control them.

Close up of a Jool explorer with four ion probes and four conventional probes.

Ion probe with mothership in the background

[Pecan]

Good call chaps - pictures of mounting multiple stuff on a ship:

Or perhaps not; imgur seems to be asleep.