freqout

I present to you The Dauphin. This is still a concept model and has a ways to go before it's fully fleshed out. Mostly I was just playing with the Lack Luster Labs parts for the first time but this will eventually become a fully-realized ship, to be built in orbit, complete with life support and drop ships.

First, I looove this mod. The Nerva engines seem absurdly efficient out of the atmosphere. I just put together a simple 7 part ship (including MechJeb), strapped it onto a booster that could get it most of the way to orbit and found myself in orbit with nearly 8,000 dV to spare. It has a single Nerva engine and 3 1x2 tanks and, for this test flight, I expect to park the thing in Jool orbit. Grantred it *is* an absurdly simple ship - doesn't even have additional batteries or solar panels - it's just my first test craft with the mod. Then again the thing weights in at all of 33 tons - I think it just feels bigger than it is.

This is from... 0.24, I think. The goal was to build a cost-effective (and cool-looking) probe and launch system that could get to any body in the system. It's a very tight squeeze in the cargo bay but it fits without clipping. These little puppies were so efficient that some of them made visits to two planets and so light that I was able to land one on on Eve without a chute. The plane flew great too. What you can't see here is that the probe was mounted to the bay on an Infernal Robotics pivot. To launch it the pilot would first blow a tiny stack separator that held some struts from the cargo bay wall to the otherwise-unconnected end of the probe. It would them pivot up 90 degrees and be ejected from the bay via another decoupler. It was pretty slick.For a demonstration, you can take a look at it's big brother.

This is my Valyard class heavy transport SSTO Spaceplane from my last 0.25 game, first in orbit on its own, then pulling up to the KerbStar 1 space station at its 200km orbit. The plane itself weighs in at about 200 tons and can readily loft about 100 tons of cargo to the station. This was a basic supply mission, to stock up all the MKS/TAC-LS raw materials. It can get a bit squirrely under power but, overall, flies pretty decently. I'm looking forward to creating a new version with 0.90's better VAB/SPH tools. The real problem, I ran into here was not paying close enough attention to part count on the plane and station. When successfully docked it has to then be undocked before you leave the scene. Doing anything that would cause it to be unloaded from memory while docked would lead to it basically shattering when I switched back to it. I will be smarter about this in future builds. Last, here it is docked with the station, while a Pralix class light SSTO Spaceplane transport lines up to dock as well. My frame rate was... well.. painful at this point, but it was highly satisfying.

Sorry these are kinda huge. These are my 2 most recent B9-based space planes. The second one has a custom-fitted long range probe and unmanned lander.

So, this little probe launches from a mk2 cargo bay and is good for just shy of 11k m/s worth of delta-v. You need to build smaller. Those bays are much too constrained to build based on the basic 1.25m cylinder with things sticking off radially - it just won't fit. So the lander here has the smallest sized RCS tanks hanging in pairs off a narrow structural bit. With them are a pair of monopropellant motors on the 2 free sides. The transit stage is a cluster of 3 ion engines at the end of a short stack of xenon gas tanks, again, with additional tanks hanging off the sides. This little guy's first run took it to Pol with something like half its fuel left after landing. The second one I sent landed first on Ike and then on Gilly and still had some juice left. Not bad for a probe made from all stock parts and weighing in at just under 4 tons, fully loaded. So yeah, it is tight but you can make it work if you get a bit more creative with the design and leave the 1.25m core design behind.

Well, it's not just the hubs, though it's most pronounced with them, for instance not being able to hang a generator off any open sides of hubs embedded in the structure. Also, I've been trying to jigsaw together pieces from the 2 sizes of HX parts to create a strong overall structure and then fill in the gaps with generators, engines, etc. I'm having trouble even offset-stacking basic components. It just won't let me connect them. It might just be a general game thing that's more pronounced here due to the different building style that I'm using.

First off, thanks for all of your hard work. This mod is beautiful and I particularly love being able to set fuel options for nearly every module. I am, however, running into a lot of issues with connection points on HX fuselage parts (at least in the space plane hangar, where I've been working), particularly if there are parts running in parallel alongside them. The universal hubs seem to have very specific but unindicated orientations. They often will not attach to each other or other parts on some sides. The generators will almost never attach to anything via their mount points. I have yet to successfully attach one of the angled structural modules to anything via it's wide-end connection point. At this very moment I'm tryiong to attach the top half of an HX-4U to a pair of adjoining hubs and it will not connect. So, is there something I'm missing about how the parts interact? I'm finding it very difficult to actually assembla an HX ship in the space plane hangar. All suggestions are welcome.