Urus28

Today I had to launch a "rescue" mission for Jeb who was hiding in a rover. A rover placed in orbit for a mothership assembly. The main problem was : Jeb is not supposed to participate to this mission ! I think it is difficult for him to wait for the next big mission, perhaps I will give him a tourism an training mission. I also took some time to make pictures of my big Mad Max rover....

I continue to explore the Mun. Two new monoliths found.

I don't have real rules for the name of my ships. But I have a a little rule for my present career for bases and space station, I name them after science fiction artists I like. For example my base on Mun is Moebius base, the base on Minmus is the HR Giger, my space station is the Manchu. My future mobile base on Duna will be the Chris Foss.

So the theories of hollow earth are true ....

I usually use Minmus as a refuelling base, for this purpose I have a large rover on the surface of the green mun : the fuel bus. The fuel bus is actually made of two rovers, one for the mining operation and one for the fuel storage. Both are equipped with docking ports to become a large rover. My rovers on the surface of Minmus around the HR Giger base. The two parts of the fuel bus have been launched separately but with the same rocket design.

Yesterday I landed a tourism ship on Minmus, you can see it being refuelled on the surface of the green moon. A small ship compare to my mining rover.

Now you can try this on Mun... High speed with low gravity a real challenge !

I tried this.... A rover is already difficult to control at 50m/s, with rocket engine you can forget any kind of control The slow was compare to a rocket or a plane. I drive fast rovers (for a rover) and it's extremely fun, in particular on low gravity.

Yes, this is exactly how I made it, no mod or cheat is required. =) Congratulations for the 121.4m/s, I never reached such kind of speed during the run No config edit, just press A and D to accelerate.

Ok, I mean compare to a plane.... I've built rovers able of 80m/s on kerbin =)

I agree with you that rovers are slow and would probably require an additional mechanic to give them more purpose. But, I already have a great fun with rovers, in particular with a big rover on Mun at more then 20m/s. Driving becomes a real challenge with the low gravity and the bad terrain, add a challenge to fill and it becomes a decent race game.

I first tried this challenge with a quite ambitious giant rover.... Very fast it can reach almost 100m/s but also very heavy with a mass of 50t... The mass of this rover was just too much for the wheels, explosions were very common during jumps in the hills. So I made the run with a far less ambitious rover ! But still a big one 13.897t a large fuel cell array and a J33 for water crossing, the rover is 100% stock and is quite fast. You can reach 80m/s (actually I reached 90 during the run but not on flat terrain) with it and can cruise at 70 without real problem (on flat terrain). The big wheels are strong enough to resist long jumps, a good thing when you cross hills at high speed. I reached the water crossing after 1h 11 minutes... Time to cross the water near of 33 minutes, clearly the slowest part of the run with a speed of 13m/s Crossing the desert and plain at 250km/h.... Not bad for a 13t vehicle ! Hills are always a difficult part with lot of jumps, the rover is quite difficult to control at high speed in this kind of terrain... The end is near ! One final jump is mandatory Final time : 3h 59 minutes 27 seconds ! This challenge was well... challenging ! I had hard time at the conception of a good rover and the journey was long and difficult. I'm happy to just have reached the end without exploding.

Actually I've find a mod to solve a part of the problem : time control. The slow motion option allows to increase the fps and make the game easier to control with big construction.

That's a great compliment ! Thank you ! I was not thinking to Mad Max when I made this rover but now I think I should try to make one real Mad Max style big rover. Thank you for the idea !

Thanks, I think the front needs a little bit of fine tuning on the lights position, just little details....

Since Jeb is away near Minmus my engineer team is working on a new fun rover. No aim for efficiency, science or something useful, just have fun with a big overbuilt rover. Perhaps I will try the Ker-ball run with it (with no hope of victory, just fun).

Merci =) Et bon du coup de quoi ça cause chez les francophones ? J'ai cru voir un patch pour avoir le jeu en français... Mais il y a quelque chose d'autre ? =)

Je fais le tour des forums et oh surprise un fil de discussion en français... Bonjour les gens !

First fly test for my Duna mothership.... Just to check that it does not explode directly. The ship is 107m long for mass of nearly 700 tons and almost 1000 parts. The final ship will be little bit bigger since 4 rovers and two tugboats were missing in this test. The test was a success ! The ship can move and fire its nuclear engines without twisting and bending (thank you autostruts).

Very impressive work, all my congratulations !

It really depends of what you like in the game. I like big rovers so I decided to launch a large mobile base to Duna with everything necessary to study the Duna system and bring my Kerbals back. One of my past ideas was to build a space line company with several space ports and transport ships. After my big mission on Duna I will probably restart a career but with mods for colonisation and more realism, so this will require to learn a lot of new things.

Here is the construction steps of my "Manchu Station" a large space station in low Kerbin orbit. First the central part with large liquid fuel tanks, the engine returned back to Kerbin. The next parts were more large tanks bring together in one rocket, they also came with the a tug boat for large parts I need more big tanks ! At this step there is no room for kerbals, the station is fully automatic. So it's time to bring room for more peoples with the laboratory. Quickly followed by the arms of the habitat ring. That station starts to look nice. But I need more room ! The ring launch has been quite stressful... Ring assembly with small tug boat. Since the station is not big enough and lack power I added more arms to receive the solar arrays. Unfortunately these arrays did not survive the stress of space and were destroyed... A new stronger design has been made and launch ! New circular solar arrays are now powering the station. The final parts of the station coming in a rocket SSTO, the station also have a supply ship with ore coming from Minmus. Communication arrays are the last parts added to the station. The final view of my station, you can notice that the supply ship left to return to Minmus. This station will for fuel supply during the preparation of large Duna mission with space station, mobile base, rovers....

Finally after many hours I finished my space station ! I named it "Manchu" based on the name of a science fiction painter I really like. The goal of this station is to provide the fuel for a big mission to Duna.

I really like the design of this ship, I saw it on concept ships. You made a great work at putting it in KSP !

I tried to dock yesterday a 200+ part ship to a 500+ part station and well... 3fps at best. It was just impossible to dock properly. KSP has a real problem with performance. I have also very annoying situations when building ships in particular when I have many parts, it becomes very difficult to place the new parts where I want and making merge or use sub-assemblies can be a nightmare.