OCAdam

I keep working on various spacecraft, but by the time I've finished, absolutely none of them fit the rules for submissions. Why? Well... B9, Interstellar, Karbonite. Oh and SCANsat as well. It's to the point where I've got a facility on Dres that contained all those mods (plus Kethane) in a single massive HX4 based structure, not to mention the troop transport in LDO that can carry over 600 Kerbals using B9 parts almost entirely... I might just decide to bow out and finish the few ships that only had MJ onboard and call it good enough for me. It's a little bit too bad for me, since I was planning to try to figure if Dres would make a nice home planet for production of my ships. Guess it's time to grab those screenshots and ship files and make some uploads soon. A few of those stock ships were fairly nice, IIRC. Edit: Adding my ship catalog here, since I've yet to do that. Also, ignore any typos you might see, some of this I was typing using my tablet, in which I turned off the autocorrect 'feature' due to massive annoyance at it destroying half my text. Actual ship files will be added later on, as I have some business to attend to later today. Armored Space Fighter Generation 4 This ship is designed for a wide range of duties, including long range fighter, light cargo carrier, and refueling tanker. The basic version is armed with 4 Rail Rods, 1 Hydra rocket pod, and 1 .50 BMG turret. There is a MechJeb unit placed in the frontal cargo bay, designed to enable fine control of the ship in the current forwards orientation. With a light fuel load, the ship has 1887 m/s dV, but can hold enough fuel to expand this to 4035 m/s dV. It is entirely possible to remove the weapons and allow this ship to be reclassified as an armored fuel tanker, though most of the fuel tanks are drawn from to power the engines. Care must be taken with operating this ship, as it can have an off center CoM very easily, though the SAS and drone units can help keep the ship pointed in the correct direction. 277 parts. Large Super Carrier Generation 2 - Armored Nuclear Snake The Nuclear Snake series of massive cargo ships are widely regarded as ISC's capitol cargo ship. While they are very slow, their range is extraordinary. Militarily, the Nuclear Snake has a wide variety of applications, ranging from troop transport (28 Kerbals), drone carrier, refueler, and many more. This version has been armored for use in combat zones. Care must be taken in order to protect the vulnerable engine sections, though. Kerbin orbit stats Empty: 7957 dV @ 0.35 TWR 120T: 4093 dV @ 0.22 TWR As shown, 558 parts. Each drone is 10 parts, 12 drones currently onboard. Pictures go here. Medium Cargo Freighter Generation 1 - Crew Transport Hyperstar The Hyperstar series of freighter is capable of carrying varied loads between planets. Most of the modifications necessary to change what the ship is transporting is located in the frontal sections. The large central fuel tank is capable of having extremely large docking ports attached to it, though the factory installed port is a mere 1.25m port. A nice feature of the Hyperstar is the amount of space onboard for extra crew. This can be extended with a setup for crew transport, much like this variant has been. An extra bonus is the 4m cargo bay, capable of containing a wide variety of extra cargo. A rear cargo bay is onboard, thoigh the ship's reactor systems are locared there; thus it is ill advised to replace the contents of the rear bay. This crew transport version can carry up to 42 Kerbals and has 5508 dV @ 0.40 TWR. 78 parts. Pictures go here.

So far, I've been working on a number of cargo ships. Nothing's really ready for viewing, but still! I just feel like developing cargo ships to make my manufacturer that I'm working on have a specialty (and somewhere to work off of for modifications). Speaking of my manufacturer... I'm thinking they should be based around building things on Dres (or in orbit of). I pretty much never hear much love for the little planet, yet that's still the ONLY place I've actually landed on out of Kerbin's SOI (and also returned from).

Okay, that perfectly explains the reasoning, and I understand it now. Guess I'd best go design a few stock weapons and resupply ships for said weapons! I think I've got a few ideas already...

I've been working on a large number of designs. However, they are all seemingly far larger than most of the designs I've been looking at here. My primary fighter ship (for example) dwarfs the size of some of the carriers I've seen around, and has a base dV of 2 km/s (and up to 7km/s with fully loaded wing tanks) while only retaining the minor armaments as required (.50 cal turret, one Hydra rocket pod, 4 rail missiles (currently under-designed and unreloadable)). That ship I've recent redesigned to have a base variant with zero capability (but modular capabilities to attach different 'wings' to enable a fighter config or carrier config). Another is a carrier containing some 8 drone fighters (each only armed with a single .50 cal turret), while yet another has the capacity for up to 40 tons of cargo (or up to 8 drones). The main things I'm starting to wonder are based upon simple logistics. The rules state stock only for capital type ships; however, does it make much sense for a capital ship to be unable to rearm its child ships (drones, fighters, etc) with more ammunition? The way the rules state, I cannot place ammo boxes directly onboard the capital ship, but rather must develop specific rearming logistics ships to then either dock the drones to or the capital ship itself (whereupon the drones would be onboard the capital ship). I'm not trying to find issues in the rules, I just want to figure out what exactly I can do so I can best develop my ships to better specifications and optimize their roles on the battlefields and such. Truth is, desthese ships is where I'm finding all my enjoyment of KSP currently.

Mm, seems my getting pictures was a bit unnecessary for the moment then. I'll be updating the design down to the .50 cal guns then

I have a few ships that are still in development, but I did have a few questions (in order to better develop them to conform to the specs mentioned in the original post): 1. Though the post never mentioned allowing it, what is your stance on the mod Modular Fuel Tanks? It should be able to help reduce the parts count of some ships by combining some tanks to be multifunction (ie, electric charge in a tank also containing xenon). My current ships under development haven't used it, but I know I can reduce the PC by at least a few through such use. 2. You mention trying to only allow the weaker turrets on space fighters. Is the 20mm Vulcan cannon (hidden variant) one of those? I've tended to use that one on all my ships so far, and usually in a pair. 3. I have a large space-only fighter that contains 2 of the 20mm cannons, a Hydra pod, and 4 stock rail missiles. Is that too large an arsenal? The rules only stated a max of a rocket pod and 2 turrets, but that only mentioned the BD armory stuff. 4. The rules on large space fighters mention your ship, the Buzzard, but I've yet to find a solid picture of the craft on the forums (my search-fu might be weak though). The space fighter I've been working on (the one I mentioned the arsenal of in #3) is fairly large, so honestly I dunno if it's truly a fighter, or more a capital-fighter hybrid. If it's the second, I'll likely try to remove the onboard weaponry and try to develop sub-fighters. I'll try to get a picture of my craft up soon, but since I have a class soon and a ton of exams this week (yay college)... I'll just try to have it up soon. Edit: Managed to figure out adding the imgur stuff and getting pictures of the craft in question. Note: While the ship currently shows 2k dV, that's on a light fuel load (it can actually run up to 7k dV if you load of the outboard tanks that really are only there for use in the shielded 'wing' structures (though they do have fuel lines to support feeding the nukes anyways)).

Maybe then hold off on it for 5.1 and see if you can't get it integrated with MJ's dV readouts?

I uninstalled every mod I had except the toolbar and RPM, but I can still get the Data screen to tell me my Stage dV. I thought it might have been some MJ integration (I've never installed KER), but yeah, I can not only see that dV, but the Isp as well (I had a KR-2L attached to this tester).

Maybe I'm just unable to figure where I can find it, but I know there's a screen on the MFDs that displayed the current stage delta V on the 'standard' MFDs included with RPM (or at least I can find it on the MFDs in the stock pods); however, I've yet to find such a line of info on that on the B9 MFDs. Was it cut from the B9 variant, or was it hidden on some screen I've yet to notice it on?

Kinda hard to figure another name than simply B9, but why not INT for Integrated (or internal).

Mod works very well in 32 bit (as it should), though I wish it were so for x64 (but know that it isn't supported). My laptop must be real special... ATM went bonkers last time I installed it and destroyed both SCANsat and RPM on their displays. Also, adding -force-opengl actually managed to cause KSP to never even reach the squad logo for loading (task manager says it was hovering at around 450-460k of memory use, and would reset down to 400k before slowly going back up to ~450k before repeating). Guess that only works for some, and not others. As for the actual content of the mod, it's a great lot of parts, though I know you (Chris) are working on HX cockpits for a later B9. However, what about a simple drone part or SAS? I don't suspect it's too hard to modify a current piece to be either, but I've not really looked at modifying the parts to do so myself (mostly because of installing the new commits every day or so). Of course, if the idea is to specifically want players to use RCS to control these behemoths, then that's fine (and actually pretty understandable really). What I don't get is the balancing for the HX1 size reactor and thruster (in the last commit I installed at least from yesterday). A small bit of math told me that the equivalent of one reactor was about 600 RTGs (would weigh about 48.xx tons). The cost being a bit over 2 million is actually pretty fine (though I didn't run exact numbers for this), but why does the reactor weigh about 50% more than the equivalent in RTGs? As for the HX thruster, I know you balanced it off of 35 Skippers and 35 LV-Ns, but that means it's far more efficient to literally stick on 35 LV-Ns (excluding the massive parts count now added) and 2 KR-2Ls. Having just 2 KR-2Ls only on that sample craft was giving about 4800 dV @ 5000kN, versus the 3400 dV of the HPD @ 5080kN (also a TWR of 1.9x versus 1.4x, in favor of the KR-2L). The HPD in plasma mode was basically the only place it was worth having (with over 7k dV, though with that minimal thrust, which I don't really mind). Maybe it's just how I think, but it seems more efficient to place 2 KR-2Ls and have a HPD that only had plasma mode, but weighed less (but then again, even more parts isn't an optimal solution either).