Thunderbird

Its the MOAB http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=2750.0 if you try to use it and still do maneuvers,even correction ones,do yourself a favor and strut the engine to the fuel tank

I built this monster with pretty much half the modpacks linked in modpack index,so beware :-) From what i remember: C-7, tuned SAS, SIDR, MMI Ions, Aerospike engine (assorted hardware), and Firelark - should be all of it, not sure Stargazer Mk3 (still in testing, 'seems' to be working though) with attached double-airspike engine 'Sparrow' utility craft Its a multiple stage heavy ship designed for long hauls pretty much anywhere, provided you have the time,patience and willpower to steer something as incredibly huge as this (well,it does get a tad bit shorter after deorbiting...) Its not pretty, it might even get the job done, and i cant really test it because it grinds down my framerate like crazy. (old PC) Proper testing would take something close to 4 hours on my poor obsolete machine and i really dont have the patience for that >.<, so i only flown all the way through the atmosphere to try it (still took almost 15min for me), it had a slight drift of approx 3 degrees when i just left it running at full throttle with SAS online Its my FIRST really complex ship, take a look, test it out (pretty please), and tell me what i did wrong

Screenshot0 - earlier version,you can see the beginning of wobbling just as i dropped boosters Screenshot1 - latest incarnation of the Stargazer, craft file included, with my own design Sparrow shuttle on top (only tested flight), seems to be stable enough but i suck at atmospheric flight. What was happening,i think,was that the craft was beefy and short, and its ion engines were heavy and improperly stabilized... they were waving around just a tiny bit during flight, and the moment i hit stratosphere and the air stopped offering proper stabilization, it tilted the craft just a tiny bit, which tilted the whole 30k units of thrust just a teeeeny bit to the side... unfortunately this whirling effect was steadily and slowly increasing, especially when i dropped the empty SRBs New design is,as you can see, even bigger,has a additional 7x nuclear engine stage on a 5k fuel tank for 2nd stage ascent before the actual ion drive,and the Firelarks have oversized stabilizer rings on them,and no freaking boosters.... still keeps Jeb plenty happy tho 8) I should also note that Stargazer Mk3 has a ridiculous amount of SRS packs and fuel (didnt feel like downsizing it again) and the Sparrow has quite a few of them too,with the central fuselage actually made out of SRS fuel tanks... i might get around to redoing it later but it works,so meh... on the Mk.2 i was experimenting with using the Sparrow as a stabilizer, didnt quite work... I only tested it to the edge of atmosphere (which showed around 1 minute and actually took me like 10 with the massive game slowdown i get) and flight was stable with SAS,didnt bother using thrusters... Then i got bored and decided to test retro-thruster fitted Firelarks if it has enough power to tilt them away from me while still under power.... nope, i used 8 or 9 and only managed to get them to rake across the entire hull,rip off the ion drives and then cook the huge middle fuel tank. Atleast the explosion was nice but i stripped them off before saving the ship Someone please do me a favor and test the ship Also,if you guys have an idea how to safely eject Firelarks at full power without dying,im listening =P

but but but...... awwww damn! we NEED langrange points, theyre important!

add payload im really looking forward to the Mun - i want to see people deploy a space station in a earth-moon L1 point, cheaply, and then getting back.... that will be slightly more complicated

stupid idea here, you think i can just compensate that by adding m0ar wingy bits to the back? say slap them on the Firelarks and then drop them since it wont matter outside atmosphere anyway? I wanted a semi-glider design for the return stage,but i really suck at designing space planes, and swapping that for a different one would mean starting over :\'( Thing is the rectangular wingy bits between XC-40 the separate fuselages have a lift factor of 1 (long wings have 1.6 i think?) and i think i would have to remove them too.... comment: not sure if lift factor is the actual value to look for here or if just the wing total surface area counts

Ahhhhhh ok its the wings then... When i tried to fly it,it was barely pilotable, since i have the fps problem... I guess that means i will have to build a lander stage afterall, i wass afraid of that :-) Will try when i get back from work... Anyone tried to fly it btw? Awesome pic tho derhp :-D

Well,i got home,redone the ship like 3 times over,and ended up with this.... i have tons of inherent control problems on this design apparently,and i cant control it because i have like 1 FPS with that goddamn thing.... I THINK it can reach low orbit,or atleast get high enough for the Ions to estabilish it.... the smaller boosters are a temporary slap-on because i didnt know what to do... I used Tiberion`s slightly modified XC-40 (C-7 parts) Albatross as the 'return stage' (dont ask,i need lifting capability anyway) - Thanks Tiberius - i think that kind of contributes to the control problems because the XC-40 sure could be more stable... but not the main problem i guess The whole thing is built on top of a sixpack of Firelark Project boosters (maybe temporarily,no idea), next stage are the Ions, after detaching Ions you end up with a fairly huge tank of liquid fuel tipped off with a Omnipotent Bertha drive block, the Ion blocks contain a Liquid Fuel Aerospike Engine - 1 each.... Stargazer actually is capable of achieving orbit on this stage (80% thrust or you burn out the Bertha),all lower stages are there to lift the overweight Ion drive sections... The idea was to LAND with this monstrosity somewhere after detaching the Ion drive section, but thats somewhere in the land of dreams right now... i was thinking parachutes and low thrust, but meh. If i could do this it could probably visit 2 planets and return on the XC-40 stage alone... or use it for braking if i accelerate crazily enough somehow.... Please take a look on it, i completely lack experience to balance anything that is more complex than a 'standard' 3-stage rocket... and this has 11-13 stages,depending on configuration... I use a lot of mods,sorry apart from the already mentioned there are the fine tunned stabilizers also found on the XC-40 (small blue,big red,etc) Any help in stabilizing the damn thing,or improving the design in general,will be appreciated.... you can tell i like HUGE ships which can last long and go anywhere... i`d strap solar panels on it to be entirely self-sufficient too, but Ion fuel tanks wont take them and theyre heavy.... its still a prototype anyway ;D

Hello, i have a slight (read explosive) problem.... Im trying to build a real 'space ship' with Ion engines for in-space maneuvering, essentially i want to be able to get anywhere, no matter how far it is. Im also at work and cant provide screenies,sorry :-) The problem is not in the deep space/lander stage itself,but in how the hell am i going to get something so incredibly huge and bulky in space ;D I built a standard RCS/SAS/small liquid engine landing (or emergency) stage, and already found a problem there. Heavy decouplers,no matter how awesome they are, will not hold hull segments,so i had to attach (large) boosters on them in a 6-star configuration (very weighty stuff already), because the spaceplane fuselage couldnt seem to act like a solid hull and fell apart. I had to use 2 heavy decouplers to get the boosters far enough from each other for the next stage. The next stage was attached by hollow decouplers with 30 ejection strenght and retro-boosters, contained only a SAS module (i had to put something there) and then a adapter with 4 slots of the same size. These held the ion engine tank and the engine itself,with solar panels. The same 'ion drive module' belonging to this stage was also attached to the bottom of the lander stage engine. This gave me 28 ion thrusters, which was supposed to be enough to get anywhere really fast. There i ran into a problem... this contraption was,surprisingly enough,almost stable without having to use too much duct tape, but is surprisingly heavy and HUGE. There are no inverted 4-to-1 adapters to the 1-to-4 like i used to attach the ion engines,or i could not find any,i had no way of strapping on big enough ascent stage(s?) to get the crazy machine off ground. The thing i 'did' try however was attaching 6 incredibly huge (3-part) cone-shaped fuel tanks to the outer ion engines (im not sure how they are called atm,4-meters diameter on the bottom of the last one i think) and slapped on the biggest freaking engine ever (1100 thrust per one), and hoped for the best. When it DID work im pretty sure the lightly sideways push wasnt good for the parts either..... By now i think you have an idea what kind of a abomination it was... I used fairly large amounts of duct tape and wire to stabilize the fuel tanks and the separate stages, and i did actually manage to get it off the ground stabilized (cant duplicate it for some reason ), but the tanks tend to break off from each other or snap off, and if i put too much extra weight on it or put struts in wrong places, the whole thing buckles and explodes in a huge ball of death. So... my question would be i guess... do you have any idea how to make a stable ion drive spaceship and get it into space? A different shape than a star maybe, or where can i get parts to put the whole thing together better? The 4-1 adapter would allow me to put it together more sturdily i think,or atleast attach a proper fuel tank instead of the cone one... I always seem to have structural problems of the weirdest kind :\'( edit: i also tried attaching a Project Firelark instead of the first stage to test it,but that didnt even light off for some reason (tested it separately and it worked)

i try to make it a habit to enter atmosphere at moderate speed with a 'reentry stage' made out of RCS,SAS,fuel tank for the RCS,and a low-powered liquid fuel engine with a single fuel tank which i use also for final orbital adjustment, or deorbiting (with wingy bits attached ofcourse)... i try to aim myself in the proper direction,turn around and burn the engine at low power to slow down,or glide if i have big enoug wingy bits at the time... then blast off the reentry section before touchdown and deploy chute.... i know its unnecessarily heavy, but i just like it

my bad i guess... i heard about a ion drive that uses only its own components for a propellant, was some kind of a emitter cathode/anode that was emitting its own mass to be used for the reaction mass and had no external propellant tank... unfortunately i cant find it anywhere so i might have misunderstood whoever was explaining it to me

ok,well,technically they do,but its a electron emitter for example,or the wearing off metal emitter grid... lasts literally for years :-D

Hello, im a noobie here and still just only goofing around with rockets trying to figure it out,but i like your Ion Engines 8) as for the sound,Ion engines dont really have any sound,except for the sound the electronics make (a quiet buzz),and the exhaust is dim light blue ( at around 1:40) and they indeed dont use fuel,just energy, usually used to propel space probes,often with nuclear isotope battery (radioisotope generator) which is quite nearly limitless.Can i request you also make a Plasma Engine? Its essentially a more powerful version of Ion (still nowhere near a standard rocket engine), google 'VASIMR' if youre interested in it (as said already,theyre going to test it on the ISS soonish). This engine uses gas as fuel (almost any gas),also requires fairly large amounts of electricity,but is very economical and in the long run faster for IP travel because of the vastly longer thrust times possible. If you decide to make one, the exhaust is a bright blue fading out cone with a near-white blue 'blob' at the exhaust pipe,sound is,again,buzz of the electromagnets,but probably also the hiss of the gas exhaust (i dont think anyone ever tested it in atmosphere,i sure wouldnt )