WhiteKnuckle

Pretty sure the basic intakes don't work past mach 1

Correct, the camera will follow the root part. You can also break down your staging into two parts, or throttle down before you stage, that way your lander doesn't go shooting off into the wild blue yonder.

I love this design, simply beautiful. I'm making something similar, but much smaller to go to Duna: And I really like the Lackluster and it's little mining bot, he's so cute! And splitting off the drills and converter means you get to lift a lot of ore every trip. I hadn't really considered using the large ore tanks as fuel tanks, but I guess it makes sense since there are no large LF tanks. Is their wet/dry weight ratio in line with conventional fuel tanks? Dr Farnsworth, I'm glad you like the design. It's my first ring, and it's actually based on Rune's Von Braun station, so he might be the better person to ask about construction techniques. But what I did was pretty simple. 1. Make the core. 2. Make one arm from the core to the ring (doesn't have to be the right length right now) 3. Attach a fuel tank to the end of the arm and use the offset tool to get it line up correctly. 4. Attach another fuel tank to the top of the first one. Use Rotation tool (with angle snap on!) to rotate one click. 5. Repeat step 4, once you have a few tanks together you can use the alt+left click to copy sections of the ring and make things faster. 6. The ends should line up fine, but they wont click together so you'll need to hide a few struts in the tiny gap between them. 7. Add or subtract pieces from the arm to get the core centered in the ring, you may need to use the offset tool for fine tuning. 8 Copy the arm and add as many to the core as you'd like. Strut the ends of the arms to the ring. Done.

Are you docking, or just EVAing Kerbals across? If not then just skip the whole RCS system. Take a small battery and right-click it, you can then lock it out the same way you would a fuel tank, that way if you run out of power you have an emergency backup supply, at least enough to turn you towards the sun.

Possible, can you take some screenshots?

Finally got around to taking screenshots. First ship: Wound up being too part heavy. Lander. RCS Tug, Atmo package, Science Pod, Ore Tank, Main ship with Lg converter, Lab, and Heavy Pack at the front. The Heavy Pack is everything mounted above the batteries. It's needed to get off Kerbin and Tylo. Otherwise, the ore tank, and science pods would ride on top. Second ship was created with part count lowering in mind. Skips Kerbin SSTO ability, might make Tylo, everywhere else it should be fine. RCS Tug/Polar Sat/Main Engine Pod, Lander, Ore Tank, Interplanetary Ring, Fuel Tank Interplanetary Stage, still has second stage engine pod at the back, Tug is stored at the front, it's engine deactivated. I'm pretty proud of this multi role Tug. In interplanetary mode, it acts as 1/5th of the main engine power. When first coming into orbit of a new body, it will detach at a high Ap and go into a polar orbit to make a scan, then it rendezvous with the main craft when the miner comes up with a load of ore. Nether the Ring or the Lander have RCS, it's all done by this Tug.

So here's a few pics of my landers. First with nothing on it, then with a large ore tank, that would be brought to just about anywhere (problem worlds like Tylo, Duna, Laythe, you can add an extra fuel tank of any size on top with modular Sr. docking ports) Uses Aerospikes, meets up with Nuke stage in orbit, carries no RCS, has extra docking ports to add... well anything you want, science pod, crew, extra fuel, snacks. Should have a fuel cell knowing what I do now. Uses large converter cause aint nobody got time to mine 10x ore... ...Unless you're trying to get the whole mess off Kerbin SSTO style (ie anywhere but Eve) This one is nothing but fuel and engines. Heavy lift package at the top would be swapped for big ore tanks on most bodies. Makes a 100x100 orbit and meets up with it's interplanetary stage. Wound up being too part heavy, hasn't left LKO yet. Finally: My lightweight Duna Spaceplane. Fairing at the front hides an ore scanner, otherwise it's pretty self explanatory. Haven't tested on Duna yet, use inspiration at your own risk.

Thanks for the detailed info @fourfa, so basically a manned (engineer) miner, you can get away with using the small converter, but an unmanned op is going to require the large one if you plan on using fuel cells to power it. Good to know

Despite "aero" being in their name, no they work just fine in vacuum. Probably the "best" engine in the game, nearly the same Vac ISP as the Terrier, but with better atmo ISP and 3x the thrust. No gimbaling though so make sure you have other ways of control.

I'm pretty sure that since you need to mine 10-times the ore to get the same amount of fuel out of the small converter, there is no way you can break even using fuel cells to power it. You always burn more than you make. Even using the large converter you need to be on a good ore concentration and have an engineer with you. If you find lifting ore to orbit tedious, I'd start by designing a lifter that can bring a ton of ore in a single trip. When you say you were able to bring up 1400 units, is that including what it took to get your miner to and from the surface? (ie is it all fuel that can be used for the interplanetary stage, or did some of it have to go back into the miner for it's next run?) Aerospikes for the lander are key. They're efficient enough to not blow your dv budget, and their excellent TWR gives you the power to get a lot of ore off the surface. 8 Kerbals is a lot. I have no advice for you here... my design started with seating for two, I realized quickly that was decadent and foolhardy. Now it has a single Mk1 lander can, and he's lucky he's not riding a lawn chair.

I think there may be some confusion about the benefits of the Oberth effect vs. the benefits of a gravity assist. Honestly I am the wrong person to answer this. But just based on playing around with maneuver nodes last night, burning retrograde from LMO would result in being flung out of the Kerbin system for less than 300m/s dv.

Refuel at the Mun, then drop down to Kerbin. Solves the long orbit/high inclination issue and still gives you most of the benefits.

Aerospikes are your friend.

As someone who's been working on a few big ISRU projects recently, I can tell you, you're asking a lot out of a single ship. I'll go through your requirements one by one: "I need at least 2 drills to fill the ISRU" Small drills right? Don't tell me you're trying to lug two of the big ones around. More drills are a luxury, use as few as you can stand. "I need room to fit Tourists/ Training Kerbals (to get them from 1-3 stars). " How many? Use the lightest means of carrying them you can. "I need the whole ship to land; I can't do the land, mine, lift any more. I did that parked over Ike with a space station/ refueling Depot and I just can't do it any more. It's too boring to me as a player. It was the closest I got to simply hacking my safe files to show that I had done the work of landing and ascending with the ore to avoid doing that same flight 3-6 times to top all my tanks off. " How much ore were you bringing up with each load? From my testing on the Mun I was able to bring up something like 2700 units of ore, and wasn't even close to maxing out my design. Converting all that to LF and feeding it to a nuke gets you quite a bit of DV. Really it's a question of how you want to spend your time. Refining in orbit means you can use the large ISRU, have tons of solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, storage, the whole nine yards. You can set it and forget it, all the time is spent ferrying ore from the surface to orbit. Refining on the ground (along with your other requirements) means you're going to have to cut every gram of mass you can, that means using the small ISRU (which only turns 10% of the ore into fuel, meaning you have to drill 10x as much of the stuff) It also (I believe) isn't efficient enough to support Fuel Cells, so you're stuck with solar/RTG so you'll be running out of juice a lot and be stuck timewarping till dawn. Really it's just a lot of babysitting, personally I'd rather be flying things back and forth than sitting on the ground, but I can see the other side. "I wanted to try to do this as an MK1 or an MK2 1.25 meter build but packing the required fuel with the ISRU is just proving to be more and more of a bear. The Athena is still out there as my first full ship lander with all the "we're out here for the long haul" ship but I know I can do better than it. It's got a LOT of parts and really struggled to land on Duna safely (broke half my landing gear doing it, though my engineer was able to effect repairs). " Two options, one: Leave your transfer stage in orbit, even if it's just the nuke, a few fuel tanks and a probe core. If you did that you might just barely be able to pack everything into a 1.25m package. Option two: Wings This is from .90, but as you can see, a single nuke is more than enough to make Duna orbit, and this baby was able to be refilled on the surface and go all the way back to Kerbin. I'm currently designing something similar with a Mk2 cargo bay and all the ISRU gear in it, but I'm waiting for a transfer window to test it out. I can post a pic/craftfile if you're interested. "So now I'm building on the 2.25m scale or the MK3 scale and that's making one BIG ship requiring BIG engines. My last effort at a nuke engine powered ship had 6 Nukes on it and it would have taken 9 minutes of solid burn to get me into an Munar intercept. I don't want to think how long the burn would be to get me to Duna.... " Yup, nukes are slow. Water is also wet. It's the price you pay for efficiency. My Big ISRU ship took an 8 minute burn to get from LKO to the Mun, so yours sounds about right.

Thank you FancyMouse and especially to Snark for showing me where the fault in my thinking was. Since my edumaction in physics is entirely of the backyard variety (automotive and aviation) it was easy to miss the very important point that the reaction wheel doesn't act on anything external, and therefore are unlike just about anything we deal with on a daily basis, even though the application of torque is something we're experiencing almost constantly.

Now hold on a sec. I know reaction wheel placement doesn't matter in KSP, but shouldn't it in real life? Maybe I'm missing something basic here, but shouldn't increasing the moment from the CoM make a reaction wheel more effective?

Yeah my advice was more geared towards a "traditional style" spaceplane, and should probably be ignored in this context.

If you're exploding at 55k, ether something is wrong with your game, or you're coming in at interplanetary speeds... or your spaceship is made out of cheese. And if you start at a high AOA in the upper atmo, by the time you're into the lower danger zone (under 35k for me) you've already bleed off enough speed to not have to worry about overheating. And if you're having problems flipping over, you should look at your COM/COL when low on fuel (ie at the end of your mission). Side note: On rockets/capsules that were never really ment to survive reentry, I've found that putting the craft into an uncontrolled tumble will keep the heating on any one part bellow maximum. Looks stupid, but it works as a last resort.

I'd start by taking all the reaction wheels out and moving them to the top of the stacks underneath the nosecones. You say the problem started when you added them, and unless things have changed significantly since 1.0, the large SAS units were not very structurally sound, and would often cause rockets to break in half when you put one between heavy parts. My guess is that one or more of the stacks is actually breaking in half at the SAS unit, if everything is strutted up your rocket might not be flying apart, but the fuel feed might be broken.

1. Don't put anything heat-sensitive on the underside of the aircraft. 2. Always keep your nose pointed above prograde. Those are really my only hard and fast "rules" and are generally enough to get anything out of orbit. A few really heavy craft with relatively little wing area still have issues, but since I put airbrakes on craft like those anyways I find that you can deploy them high up (70k) down to about 30k without them overheating, then once they get into the danger zone of overheating you can pull them in to stop them blowing up, and you'll have bleed off enough speed that the rest of the craft wont overheat.

Check the leaderboard on the first page, mine isn't even close to the current record holder.

My design actually started out as a Jool-5 mission plan. I was originally going to hit Tylo last and leave all the ISRU stuff on the surface, but the more I looked at it, the less of a problem Tylo seemed to be with ISRU helping you out. So then it moved to Jool-5 without staging. So I tested a bunch of lander designs on Kerbin and found that they almost made it to orbit. So at that point it became an almost Grand Tour like mission... and that's how I wound up with a 300-part monster my computer hates. Damn mission-creep

Single ship, now that is damned impressive! What's the partcount like?

Spent the last week or so designing a lander/interplanetary ship combo that should be able to land and take off from anywhere but Eve, and refuel everywhere except Kerbin and Tylo (maybe Duna and Laythe too) So with some good piloting I should be able to bounce around the solar system indefinitely... Or at least I could until I died of old age, the combined ship had 330 parts and was a lag nightmare. So I'll be sending it off to the Jool system just to prove it can do can do Tylo, but I've already started designing a new ship combo that'll be able to do anywhere except Eve, Kerbin, and maybe Tylo, while keeping the part count reasonable. I'll post pics tonight, but I'm more interested in seeing what other ultra long-range craft people have been building, as well as having a place for people to ask questions about ISRUing in general, and self sustaining craft in particular.

Your ISRU gear is going to need more cooling than a nuke or two will, so it shouldn't matter much.