Vanamonde

Some folks have asked for the craft files for my reuseable interplanetary ships, and I feel they've now been tested thoroughly enough for others to use. First, this is the Mk91c Locomotive class, which can haul cargoes to Duna, Eve, and Dres, and then return to Kerbin. (Pictured here laden with a payload, because it looks cooler this way.) The ship has several docking access points for attaching cargoes or bringing refuelling vessels to the ship, and affords good visibility for the pilot. It is self-illuminated for ease of finding and docking with the ship during cargo and fuelling operations. The ship has room for a crew of up to 5, or can be operated robotically with no crew aboard. It has been tested with cargoes in the 50 to 85 ton range. Aerobraking will not dislodge cargo modules, even on the side-mounts. The ship launches as a single piece (no orbital assembly, that is), and to achieve orbit, burn until your apoapsis has been set at 100,000m or more, then coast to that height while pumping the remaining fuel from the booster stacks into the ship itself, and then eject the boosters, and circularize the orbit with the fuel-efficient LV-Ns. The ship will arrive at orbit with nearly dry tanks, and will need to be refueled. Mass fuelled but uncargoed: 231.67 tons Part count: 99 Craft file: obsolete For more distant worlds, I use the IP-8 Comet class. It has flown ~70 ton cargoes to Tylo, Moho, Eeloo and returned to Kerbin. As a scaled up version of the Locomotive, the Comet offers the same features of crew 0 to 5, major cargo attachment point at the nose, 4 cargo attachment points midships, and docking rings at rear and top for fuelling and small craft carrying, and of course, self-illumination. The Comet must be assembled in orbit from the three segments of drive, cargo, and bridge. Since it is the most ungainly piece, launch the drive section first and dock the other segments to it. The drive section has a power/guidance module docked to the rear, and so is a controllable ship during launch and rendezvous. (The staging sequence ejects SRBs, then drop tanks, then large boosters.) Like the Locomotive class, you will need to burn to set an apoapsis around 120,000m with the Mainsail boosters, transfer fuel from the boosters to the ship while coasting to apoapsis, then eject the boosters, and circularize orbit on the LV-Ns. Then leave the drive section orbiting while you launch the cargo section. The cargo section also has a guidance/power module docked to its rear port, and flies to orbit on 2 sets of asparagus-arranged boosters. To be honest, the cargo section is a little squirrelly to fly on ascent, but fortunately you only need to fly it as a separate ship once, on its way to the drive section, and it is manageable while docking. After attaching the cargo section, undock the cargo section's guidance module and (to reduce space junk) de-orbit it using its RCS. Return once more to the KSC and launch the bridge section. ***IMPORTANT*** So as to leave the rear docking port free to attach to the rest of the ship, the bridge section launches and flies backwards (relative to the cockpit). You will therefore need, before launching, to "control from here" the uppermost docking ring, or SAS gets confused and your controls will be backwards. However, once that's done, the bridge section flies quite sedately to rendezvous and docking. The ship is now fully assembled, but there is some tidying up to do before flight operations. The bridge's launch engine and the drive section's control module should be undocked and de-orbited. Each is cabable of de-orbiting under its own power. The only unavoidable space junk generation occurs when you discard the decouplers which bear the RCS thrusters for the sub-assemblies. Incidentally, as an aid in aligning the segments during assembly, you will see that these decouplers on each segment carry antennas. These are provided solely as a visual aid to assist in aligning the segments during docking. Mass fuelled but uncargoed: 368.45 tons Part count: 137 Craft file drive: http://www./download/qg2eysl9w084a9o/IP-8d_Drive.craft Craft file cargo: http://www./download/15ql9i6iw5oaqyj/IP-8c_Cargo.craft Craft file bridge: obsolete I hope these are useful and fly well for folks.

You've been busy.

Okay, my other roundtrip ship has now been fully tested in 21.1. I loaded it up with 85.87 tons of payload and set out for Eve/Gilly. After wrestling the bigger ship to distant worlds, this one was amazingly responsive and easy to fly to Eve. There it placed a satellite each around Eve and Gilly, two small rovers landed on Gilly, and two larger rovers were deployed on Eve. And a small station core was placed in Eve orbit. Nailed the return burn (which I'm bragging about because I usually don't), and brought the ship home, ready to be refueled and sent out again.

Hello. (and some characters)

Look over the examples in this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/37952-Round-trip-ships Mine are in the 100-200 part range, and can make roundtrips to all the worlds in the game.

You don't need a vehicle to do a backpack hop over it:

So I just completed my first interplanetary mission in 21, landing Kerbals on Eeloo for the first time, and returning them safely to Kerbin. The KSP-10 Eeloo was assembled in orbit, fuelled up, and loaded with 82.12 tons of payload. Plotting the outward leg went well, requiring only a minor mid-course correction, and the mission arrived at Eeloo without trouble. Once in orbit, one satellite each was put into an equatorial and polar orbits. Then the two small robotic rovers were launched, and landed. And then the major phase of the mission, deploying the descent phase. The lander's engine moved itself and the station core to a lower orbit, and then the lander continued to the surface, where Genevin Kerman became the first (ker)man to set foot on (my) Eeloo. And the lander then returned to orbit and met the ship for the return leg of the trip. The crew transfered and the lander was jettisoned. However, the return trip was ugly. I could not for the life of me plot a Kerbin intercept from Eeloo. Not only was there the usual difficulty and inclination complications, but my orbit of Eeloo was so high and slow that I would miss the launch window while on the other side of the planet. Finally, throwing fuel efficiency to the winds, I launched to solar orbit, burned down to close to Kerbin orbit, circularized still in solar space, and then waited about 2 Kerbin years for an intercept. But an intercept was achieved, and eventually the boys were relieved to see the homeworld for the first time in almost 2000 days. Several aerobraking passes later, the ship settled into orbit, home at last. The crew will be rotated, the ship refueled, and a new cargo loaded for Eeloo's next mission. This is the 4th mission for this ship design, which has now made roundtrips to Moho, Tylo, and two visits to Eeloo.

From now on, we live in a world where men have walked on Eeloo.

Yep, Forbidden Planet rocks.

In KSP, both light and sound travel instantaneously. The vaporous-looking atmospheric effect appears in response to, I believe, some proportion of speed to air pressure. That is to say, the lower you are in altitude, the lower the speed at which the vapor effects appear.

Until you get within 2.25kms of another ship, it is just a moving point in space. When you do get that close, the ship is recreated as an object.

My original intention was to dock large ships in the middle, where the station modules would have views of it from their windows. However, the part count is alerady up in the frames-per-week range, and it was a struggle just to finish building it. Each edge connects at a tidy right angle to its parent part, but if I was slightly off on the rotation of the plane of the parent part to its own parent, then the far end of the L shape the two pieces make won't be in the right position to link up with others. A nudge only causes it to wiggle a bit and settle back down to the same wrong alignment. That's why I was saying I'd have to half-disassemble the whole station to get that one last corner to line up. I may do it at some point, but right now I want a break from station-building.

Actually, as I admitted in another thread, the far corner in that picture doesn't actually connect. I hoped if I got them close the docking magnetism would draw them into place, but it's not quite strong enough. To fix it, I'd have to half-disassemble the station and just hope that things line up better on another attempt. I may go back and do that, but I'm burned out on building stations right now because that's all I've done so far in 21. But I think it looks pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself.

Once you start trying it, you'll find that it takes FOREVER to walk a Kerbal just a few kilometers, even with RCS hops. If you're 1/4th of Mun's circumference away, that would be a project for days of real time. Save yourself a lot of grief and boredom and fly another ship there.

Here are some designs, though I have not tested them extensively in .21. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/35916-Small-Medium-and-Large-moon-rovers-from-Yeahletstrythatdyne

It's not such much an easter egg as a flaw in the way the game generates terrain. Most worlds are weird at the poles. Most have mountains kind of like that, but Moho has pits.

Today I completed Vertex Station. I am the greatest KSP player EVER! What's that you say? If you look closely, the far corner seems funky? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! No, I did not try to fix it three times but it just goes back to being frikking mis-aligned every time so I gave up and took the scenic screenshot from the other side! I told you, I am the greatest KSP player ever!

I grew up in a remarkable time. I could watch men walk on the moon on live TV, and at almost the same time, switch channels and watch the Enterprise visit farther places. I could go out in my backyard, look up at the moon, and say, "There are people up there, right now." I don't think anybody who was little then *isn't* fascinated by the idea of space travel.

Putting more struts between the same two parts isn't all that helpful; geometrically, 3 should be all you need to fix their relative positions. But if you link part A to parts B and C, stresses are distributed better and your ship will be more resilient and rigid.

Also, from your pic, it looks like you might be below 160,000m. If so, there's still a degree of terrain rendering going on.

If your orbit is very low, sometimes an orbiting ship will be eliminated, even if it shouldn't be low enough to hit the peaks of the terrain. How low was yours?

Docking ports can crush under a large load, but are surprisingly strong under tension and torsion. This is the result of a botched aerobrake attempt. Nothing broke off of the ship until it hit the "water," or whatever that stuff on Eve is.

I flew to every world at least twice in previous versions, so I decided to do something different in 21 and not leave Kerbin orbit until I had a large and fancy station. First attempt: Hoping that was due to a glitch, I started over. Second attempt: After a certain size, they just start ripping themselves apart. And since those were both total write-offs, I have now accomplished precisely nothing since 21 came out.

That's how I build all my stations: components that can be re-arranged by RCS tugs. Here is the small tug moving a strut. And the large one moving a lab component.