Camaron

They have to comply with seatbelt laws.

This creation was an idea I had while thinking of how I might carry a great number of Kerbals without the "2-and-a-half-ton habitat-per-four-kerbals" deal. It's all stock, and besides the intake spam, is entirely legit and viable. Gets into orbit with tons of its native fuel to spare. Includes a lab, front and rear large docks, and four expansion points on the sides using the double medium docks concept. Powered by four LV-N's after disposing of the jetcraft portions, and carries 14 Kerbals, "Bus-style". Fuel lines are configured in such a way that it will try to draw fuel from docked wings first. Prior to launch, a stack of four kerbal habitats sit on top. After you have placed all of your kerbals, the first stage uses two medium SRB's to haul the unnecessary Habs away and you're free to launch. If anyone's interested (and tells me how to do it) I will upload a craft file for it. Here is the craft file as requested! http://www.2shared.com/file/VFzWeSwa/Space_Bus.html If someone could tell me how to clean up that URL mess, I will. When opening Space Bus, please keep in mind that it is not a refined design! Please consider it a Concept Vehicle at best. Launch after the Habitats are ejected is typical of your average heavyweight Jet-powered craft. Make sure your Jets are up to at least 105 Kn thrust before unleashing the Red Struts. I personally recommend firing up the nuclear engines during acceleration in atmosphere, 10km alt and above. I have considered the idea of different placement of the habitats to make populating those chairs much easier and speedier, but I'll be honest. I'm playing Everquest NEXT, So I might not be back on Kerbal for awhile to post any new ships or make revisions.

Cool. BTW if you were naming this after the Star, its Antares, no I.

Well you succeeded. They do look great. I built an assembler practically identical to this one, the differences being two more SAS modules sandwiching the okto, 12 of the large bubble tanks of monoprop, five sets of four thrusters, and two generators. It was strong enough to manhandle whole cruisers like they were small parts - it was great. Actually I managed to find an old pic that features it (along with two of my all-time biggest cruisers)

The game really needs much better Intake options anyway. I spam them horribly myself. Cool plane. I like your grappler Craft. However I notice it has eight batteries and a few tiny solar panes. I personally find that one generator and 0 batteries works great for grapplers. (I find around 0.66 Generators per SAS module is typically sufficient for grapplers)

There's absolutely no way that this intricate leviathan of a space plane is your first ship to reach orbit. Do you mean it's your first winged craft/plane to orbit?

Sure would be a big show of power.

Its absolutely incredible. I would never dream of creating such a massive aircraft for lifting uses. My only question, however, is "Why?" Does it do something better than a typical disposable heavy lift rocket? Wouldn't a reuseable ship, serviced as a load- lifter actually be more difficult to deal with, since you have to re-land and refuel the craft each time instead of just preparing the next launch? All that said, I'll bet something like this would be an absolute godsend once a proper economy gets put in motion, and all these parts actually start costing something.

This craft is amazing but what's the point of the heatshield? Wouldn't something like that only serve as a massive deadweight? The only thing I can figure a starship like this needing one for is Aerobraking + Deadly Re-entry, is that it?

Well, it's about time someone explained how the Saiyan Capsules worked.

Amazing! It's like minecraft, except its in orbit!

I was realy curious but theres only one pic that isn't in total darkness. The sunlight is your freind during photo ops. Also, Use F2 to hide all the Interface stuff.

Lol, I'm loving the "Runway Light Probe" in one of the early pictures. (The one where the craft is coming in for a landing on the Helipad on the VAB's roof.)

Here are Red Giant and Supernova Seven. And here is the Quasar Fuel Tanker. And here is the Type IX Titan Fuel Carrier And last but not least, Just today I finally managed to build a lander I can be proud of - Meet Terranova, The lander that can put itself into LKO without a launcher and modularized dock-based "stages" and spare fueling, as well as being Kerbal-or-okto flyable and has three full sets of science equipment. it transitions between Nuclear and Toroidal engines. Pic one shows it dock-dropping some tanks, pic 2 is just as it is reacing a circular 90k orbit.

I won't lie, this looks like a very difficult craft to fly, extremely unstable, extremely heavy, extremely high parts counts. But don't be discouraged! Even if you find yourself having to totally scrap it, I personally went through THREE whole full scale stations like this before I came up with the formula which worked for me. You're bound not to get everything right on the first go around, because a lot of the important lessons you learn about space stations and cruisers come from building them. Meet The Red Giant (My final revision for now at 174 parts) and Supernova Seven (I keep it around because its awesome-looking). They are both self-launching "one piece" cruisers, meaning that the main core of the ship is complete without expansion. This means they are absolutely stable and have none of the wobble problems. And in this next picture, you see Supernova Seven Docked to one of my earlier experimental stations to absorb anything useful. Th station on the left is a wobbly, uncontrollable monstrosity, and took me a day and a half to put it all together. I learned a lot from it though, and ate all of its resources later, so it wasn't even a total loss. Supernova Seven then acquired a second experimental station before I made some revisions and launched a new one entirely. And then Supernova Seven ate Supernova Seven. Then I decided I needed to reign in the parts count after Supernova seven (the second) was completed, and I built Red Giant, which is essentially my fifth large scale ship of its kind, but the first to ever be put into actual service. The entire learning process took about two or three weeks.

My lifter for this ship got a fairly high part count. In the case of my 280T fuel carrier, the entire thing is experimental because I was working to lift a payload far beyond anything I had before, and had to learn some new tricks. However, and could probably be refined to weigh a lot less (in parts). Its currently 930, but I'm confident later versions could bring that way down. The cruisers are actually launched in a strange way. When I started building real space stations and ships I found that assembling ships had a few particular disadvantages, which only got worse with more weight. Simply put, the ships are rickety and wobbly. Even when this doesn't cause fatal problems, its extremely irritating and unnerving to try to reorient the ships when they just want to wiggle all over the place. So I came up with a new approach which has proven very effective. Build the whole main ship and its fuel core as one giant thing, at the cost that these designs typically reach orbit basically fuel starved.But with a few fuel ships, you can gas them back up and all is good. It's completely different from a typical lifter approach but my 3 main heavy ships are two cruisers and a fuel tanker (storage ship) The smallest is Red Giant, The oldest, (Original much higher parts variation) is called Supernova Seven with a max fuel capacity of 472T, and the Quasar Fuel Tanker, which has no engines or real capabilities beyond holding fuel, but carries nearly 1000T of fuel. All of these ships reach orbit with around 5% of their fuel remaining and need refueling basically as soon as they're born. Supernova Seven was actually the first - Red Giant was built as a conservative redesign and comes in at just 174 parts. How do I post images like you did earlier?

WOW! This is a really awesome lifter! (looks oddly familiar) I have some monstrous lifters of my own, and was just recently noticing that same pattern you mentioned where people like to call 40-80 ton lifters, "Heavy". As far as Super Heavyweights go, my crown achievement so far is a Fuel Carrier that is capable of dragging around 19,000 units of fuel into a roughly 150km orbit The resulting payload weight sits around 280 tons, and it took 3 days to come up with a design that could reliably accomplish this. I only finished it just yesterday. The lifter is not modular and couldn't be easily attached to any old payload, but I love it all the same. Given what I've learned from building this one, I am confident that I can soon breach the 300-tons-in-one launch mark pretty soon. Someone tell me how to post an inline image and Ill leave some pics of my Flagship "Super-Heavies". (I've got a few giant cruisers you might like as well - the reason for a fuel carrier that holds 19k)

I'll have to fire it up and see for myself what's going on. I don't seem to get it. If navigation only functions within the same SOI as the existing network, how could I ever visit any other planet? This confusion probably has to do with my own unorthodox and very "wing-it" style of playing the game and navigating the space. My usual strategy is to build tremendously over-capable crafts. I'm pretty sure most people would set up their path well before ever leaving Kerbin orbit, and many more go even farther and automate it with mechjeb.

I'm really interested in trying out this mod, but it looks very complex and I don't want to burn hours doing something stupid incorrectly, like whoever inspired the Q/A response explaining that GPS satellites need the transmitter. Whoever asked that question probably ate a whole day over that. So here's my top question right now. Somewhere it is mentioned that getting this network over Kerbin doesn't help you much over extreme ranges, like to other planets. I also saw an image early in the thread which showed both Kerbin and The Mun with their own networks completed. Is there some kind of accuracy degeneration over long ranges? If I have a full Kerbin Network completed and have total accuracy around kerbin, how far out before the signal degenerates? Is there a maximum amount of accuracy degeneration?

I agree that flags should not be counted as active ships. At the very least, shuffle them into the background in their own section like the debris parts are. That way, as I pile up tons and tons of flags, they aren't getting in the way of my active, real missions. Also, I had a flag explode after taking off once because my engine thrust grazed it. I really don't feel like flags should explode. Seems like something, that for the gameplay's sake, should be intangible and indestructible. I use them to mark where I've been and now that one is gone.