arise257

You are correct about the relative inefficiency of using these tanks, but considering that most people are flying and landing them in low-gravity environments, the weight-to-fuel ratio is mostly irrelevant. Also: style points. These things look awesome, no?

This doesn't work in the preview, so I'm hoping it works here. Here's my cross-tank lander design. From Kerbin on a lifter, you can make it to Minmus and back. If you're dropping it docked from a science station, you'll make it down and back up to rendezvous. When you go back to Kerbin, you can jettison the tanks and parachute down to safety.

Here is a rover design for you. If you like it, I'll shoot you a link for the craft file. Driving Picture Driving Picture 2 In flight with final stage of lifter It's designed to land on its legs, upright. Then you extend the wheels and tip the craft until they hit the ground. After that, jettison the legs, and take this thing for a spin. It's very light, so keep RCS and SAS on. The wheelbase is narrow as well, so plan your turns and take them slow. When you're ready to leave, bring it up to 30m/s on Mun, or 18m/s on Minmus, pitch up and take off. You can then jettison the wheels and fly back home.

To combat the low gravity, I use RCS and spam the "translate down" key when I break contact with the ground. The other thing you have to watch for is sharp turns, you have to roll into them in order to keep all the wheels down.

Better to use stack decouplers than docking ports for this purpose. The real reason to use docking ports is for Apollo-style missions, collecting science on other worlds. Also, you don't need one per tank, unless that's really your intent. Just stack your tanks up directly. Staging is best done with an engine after each decoupler. NEVERMIND: Honestly? Save your crafts and reinstall. I don't know why your parts don't at least connect to the tanks with stiffness.

I just finished a Mun mission that netted about 3600 science points once I finished. I sent 4 landers, 2 orbital science labs, and 4 fuel tankers. Each lander had a thermometer, Science Jr., and two goo canisters, and each did one biome at a time. Pretty excited to net that much without a complete set of instruments.

Put a popcorn-style probe deployer up around Mun, in polar orbit, then drop them to each biome as you fly over. These are are only good for transmits unless you equip them with fuel for a rendezvous. You could do something similar with a space station and multiple rovers. Consider assembling something big over several launches, then taking that to Mun, grinding, re-assembling, and returning.

And I stand corrected. I would be Mr. Poopy-pants watching that thing drop to the ground.

Test it. If it works, then kudos, but I'd NEVER do that. Flying them around space while docked is kinda scary because of the visible wobbling at the docking ports. With that said, I usually un-dock right at the edge of Kerbin's atmosphere and let each piece fall individually. If each ship is a similar mass, then they'll even stay close together during descent, giving you an opportunity to switch between crafts for whatever reason. My method takes some forethought though. You really have to make sure your chutes are up to snuff.

You will barely make it. As others have said, you'll need to find an efficient window to launch and then fly it flawlessly. Next time you go up there, you should have enough science for legs and radial decouplers. If you don't stray far from this design, use them. Put the legs on decouplers so that you can jettison them during your ascent. Also, an LV-909 would be a better engine choice. You can afford to gain the weight of that engine if you lose the weight of the modular beams acting as legs.

I cosign this 100%. Also, extra accomplishments on a mission should slightly raise the value of subsequent missions.

Yeah, that's pretty much all I want.

One more thing, orbital stations make it possible to do things like fuel drops for your rovers. For instance, I've sent a popcorn-style to orbit the Mun, and I'll drop little fuel pods for my rover along a specific path. Once my rover lands, I just drive it from pod to pod, docking up and refueling on my way to biomes.

The best reason to do it is to simplify the design and scope of future launches. Let me give you an example with Mun missions: I could do a bunch of separate launches with a lander to get EVA/Crew reports from multiple biomes, and similarly, get fly-over science with separate probe launches on different inclinations... ...OR... I could launch one orbital station with a mobile lab, set in a polar orbit. Then, I send up a rover, land it and collect my EVA/CRs. Then I dock with my orbital station, refuel, and then drop back down to the surface at a different spot. Rinse and repeat. Once I'm all done collecting science, I dock the rover to the station and fly the whole thing back to Kerbin. It takes significantly less time and effort to visit the surface from an orbital platform than Kerbin. Occasionally, I have to send fuel to the orbital station to keep things moving, but that's much easier (and less likely to kill Kerbins) than multiple return trips. I've been playing for about 5 times as long as you and not stranded or killed a single Kerbal.

Currently, if you take a barometric reading from a body with no atmosphere, the game tells you "A pressure scan can't be done right now". That's broken and dumb. Discovering that a body has no atmosphere IS scientifically valuable. The reading should work, give a value of "0" or "N/A" and reward the same science as a reading from an atmospheric body. I'm pretty irritated by earning enough science to get the part, then finding out the part is useless for over half the places I could visit.

You could deploy one or more small probes to Mun, polar-orbiting at a low altitude, something like 10,000km. Switch to them and observe the surface until you find a good spot. You could then de-orbit at that location, using your probe as a marker for future visits. Alternatively, you can keep a "mothership probe" in polar orbit, then release smaller landmark probes from it at good landing spots. Essentially, you don't want to be doing this with Kerbals because it greatly raises the chances you will strand them.

Here is one piece... I think this is the science module, with the launch platform attached. Sometimes I can't tell till I load them because I have too many ships. Science Here's the launcher by itself Launcher

Thanks! Actually, It's very finnicky, but I was able to get symmetry to work and built it pretty fast. You don't need the extra fuel lines running from the tank to the tri-couplers, it should feed fine without it. Here's what I've figured out about storing things on top of the tri-couplers: don't use liquid fuel tanks (unless you run a line to feed your core). If you don't specify a feed direction, the LV909's suck it down after the core, so you'll have mistimed engine shutdowns. Also, it can't be super-heavy or else you'll have to strut it back to the core or other parts. I'm mounting tiny amounts of monoprop there, only because it's a super-convenient spot for this core-mounted modular space-station engine. Also: OP WILL DELIVER. I fell asleep mad early last night, after Skyrimming til 5AM the previous day. The .craft will be up tonight.

Imagine replacing every one of the engines in my post with LV-T45's. This doesn't wobble or torque at all. Not in the slightest. Imagine doing that to a radial assembly like the one above. I smell a bad time. I do agree that when you start pushing this out past what I've done, you end up with a major problem. That problem is: the rest of your rocket takes off, and your engines+assembly are left sitting on the launch pad. It happened to me a few times before I figured out what was going on.

If you look earlier in the thread, I did the math that justifies why I'm doing it my way. What I didn't know is that you could remove so much from a radial assembly and still make it work. So while the old way may be a little lighter... Thank you...Yes, there are real advantages to stacking engines down low where your other parts aren't. Thanks for that additional info. I don't like to use those little cubic struts for anything but extending a cable strut down the length of fuel stacks. I'm a stickler for keeping things as close to realistic as possible.

I will post a .craft file tonight for any who are curious. I've done my own tests against my typical radial attachments and came out wayyy ahead of them. I will any alternative design mentioned and report back some results. Basic math should be able to rule out all assemblies which go over 1.2 tons, no engines. I'm predicting the main differences in what's left to be spin, stability, and durability.

I think you're misinterpreting the construction of my rocket. The quad-coupler (Q-C) is hosting 4 B-Cs, attached by one wide-end slot on the B-Cs. Those B-Cs are hosting a nuke on the narrow end. The other wide-end slot of the B-Cs hosts a T-C. The T-Cs hold 2 LV909s on their open slots. I will absolutely assure you that the inverted B-Cs are obeying the tree structure and are securely attached to the Q-C by one (valid) linkage. The only thing that could be vaguely defined as "dead weight" is the Q-C, since it's not directly hooked to an engine, just facilitating the connections. If you put nukes on the end of the quad-coupler, you just ended the stack, and there are no points left to attach anything beneath. That basically kills it right there -- unless I'm misreading what you're trying to explain. I've made sure to use the absolute minimum of parts for this design to work, so removing anything should guarantee failure. Where do I host .craft files to share? I'd be willing to pass this around for scrutiny.

That is a perfectly beautiful rocket, sir. I wasn't criticizing the technique itself, more some peoples' execution of it. With most (myself included), this sort of thing gets out-of-hand fast. Indeed, it looks like you've come up with an even more minimal solution than me. My question is, how does that fly? Any sway/wobble on those radial assemblies? It seems like you'd have some droopage/torsion acting on them everytime you made a piloting adjustment. I didn't know the cubic-octo-struts and fuel lines were massless in flight - thanks for the knowledge. I still think this winds up less efficient than my design because you wind up carrying empty tanks with no way to dump them (unless this is the final stage). Also, every part added adds drag, so that's something to consider, even if it is small. With that said though, this construction is clever - a blend of two approaches - a compromise of sorts. If it's just as stable and weighs less, then I'd use it.

Great idea, I'll implement it on my popcorn-style probe launcher. That should take it from 8 probes to 24 very easily.

Exactly the reason why I started experimenting with this. You can't stack stacks that terminate in multi-couplers, so you can't get hella thrust in orbit without a weight or stability penalty. Nothing saddens me more than carrying a full tank/engine up there without it doing any work - that's a waste of fuel.