Wayfare

That's a really nice looking rocket! Not quite Munshine material due to the parts count but I like the look of that second stage in particular. I agree that the Mainsails probably have too much oomph, though Skippers under a 1.5-Jumbo don't really lift much anymore. Maybe replace just the outer engines with Skippers? It looks like an easily adaptable design too - just add or subtract outer stacks to increase or decrease the payload capacity. Maybe you could make a family out of it

Rated for 35 tons with a 10% margin, tested up to 40. One more prototype, this being more an evolution of the Munshine IV than the V: The three craft are really very similar in part counts and payload capacity, ranging between 44-50 parts and all capable of lifting a Jumbo to orbit with some fuel to spare. We'll need to do some more flying to determine which has the best flight characteristics before deciding on a release.

Another prototype on the pad: Basically a Munshine V stripped down to four engines per stage. We're weighing different designs against each other now and it looks like the family will have a new member soon!

Thinking about it some more, cutting a Munshine V down to just three or two sets of outboard boosters might do the trick, though payload stability might become an issue.

Courtesy of the ever-amazing Giggleplex777, an error in the Munshine subassemblies has been corrected: they were saved without empty stages, causing them to merge into payload stages when added from the subassembly menu. No more! This error was not present in the LT versions. I'll tell you, I've been putting quite a bit of work into a 35-40t launcher built on the Munshine profile but I could never make it work. The problem is that the Munshine IV sits on the edge of diminishing returns for the Skipper/Jumbo booster configuration. Adding another booster only ups the payload capacity to 30 tons or so, not really enough of a difference to warrant an entire design. I've played with a lot of variations trying to get one orange tank into orbit efficiently: - Adding a bit more fuel to the five-Skipper first stage design brings the first stage's TWR dangerously close to 1.0, causing severe control issues at liftoff. - Adding a bit more fuel to the second stage just gives the first stage an even harder time. - Swapping out the central Skipper for a Mainsail fixes the TWR problem but it guzzles too much fuel, even when "throttled" by using 0.23's thrust limit slider. - Adding some of the much-maligned Mark 55 vernier thrusters to the core stack does the same. - Swapping the outboard Skippers for clusters of LVT-45s balloons the parts count. - Building out the second stage (effectively turning it into a down-powered Munshine V rather than an up-powered Munshine VI) requires a more powerful first stage and again balloons the parts count. I've so far not been able to produce a 35-40 ton lifter that is lighter on parts than the Munshine V. Your design would push about 30 tons to orbit - certainly not bad, but as I said I feel it's not enough advantage over the Munshine VI to warrant inclusion in the family. I'm open to suggestions though as I do agree that there's an awful big gap between the VI and the V!

Back in 0.21 we built the MOdular Mission System (MOMS) that could pretty much go anywhere and bring anything. It hasn't been updated for 0.23 yet but the .craft files should be perfectly compatible.

That is one beautiful beast of a machine! I like the strutwork between the stacks in particular for some reason. It looks really cool.

Hey folks, we've just released the Low-Tech Pack of Munshines! These have been trimmed of most high-tech parts for use in Career Mode. They require you to have researched Flight Control, Specialized Control, Advanced Construction and Very Heavy Rocketry. Get them here!

Thanks guys, I hope you enjoy the craft

Yes we do! The download link for the old series is still active and these should work fine in 0.22, though you'll need to subassemblerize them yourself. This pack also doesn't include the 5, 125 and 165-ton lifters. True, these lifters are built mainly with Sandbox play in mind. I've actually been thinking about constructing low-tech versions omitting some of the stuff that's higher up in the tree like the big nosecones, probe cores and some of the structural parts. Given that Mainsails are a key component in many of these lifters, getting rid of the Jumbo tanks wouldn't help much (and the additional strutting required would really balloon the parts count). I probably should have stripped the large probe cores off the subassemblies though. Might update that Soon.

Saying something like that is a great way to pick a fight with a programmer, especially if you're in a hurry

Banner by drummerguy103 Awesome rockets for awesome people! Introduction Continuing our upgrade to KSP version 0.23, Wayfare AE&KA is happy to announce the re-release of the Munraker Apollo-style Mun rocket! Formerly known as the Munshine V, its name caused all sorts of confusion with our Munshine family of lifters so we went and re-named it after the very topmost sail of a square-rigged ship (and a fairly awful Bond movie). Key updates in this version include pre-set lifter engine gimbals, no external RCS tanks and a pyrotechnic Munar Module de-orbit system. It also has a lot of hyphens in the introduction! Its core strengths remain unchanged: less than 200 parts on the pad, a post-launch mission profile managed by action groups, fairly generous amounts of fuel in each part of the craft and potentially leaving zero debris in orbit once you're done. Notice: the Munraker no longer has the probe cores on the third stage and Munar Module that the old Munshine V featured. By using a free-return trajectory and pyrotechnic Munar Module jettison, the mission profile still leaves no debris in orbit. Download Munraker - 189-part Apollo-style Mun rocket with LES and rover. Action Groups Notice: the Munraker uses common staging until reaching a Kerbin parking orbit. It is highly recommended that you lock staging at this point to prevent you from triggering the "master mission stage" that will set off all kinds of mission-ending explosions. Abort. Shuts down all liquid-fueled engines, decouples CM from rest of craft and fires the LES boosters. 1. CSM Separation. Decouples the CSM from the MM and activates the CSM docking light. 2. Third Stage Separation. Decouples the third stage from the MM. 3. Cruise Mode. Decouples the CSM engine shroud, activates the CSM engine and extends CSM solar panels. 4. MM Descent Mode. Undocks MM from CSM, engages MM landing lights, engages MM descent engine, extends MM landing legs (you may need to press "G" to nudge them along as the action group trigger is bugged). 5. MM Surface Mode. Extends MM ladder, disables MM landing lights and descent engine, engages MM floodlights. 6. Rover Deployment. Engages brakes on rover wheels and decouples rover from MM. 7. MM Ascent Mode. Retracts MM ladder, disengages MM floodlights, activates MM ascent engine and decouples MM ascent stage from descent stage. 8. MM Jettison. Undocks MM from CSM, disengages CSM docking light and fires MM de-orbit pyrotechnics. 9. SM Jettison. Decouples SM from CM, retracts SM solar panels. 0. SM Parachute Deployment. Deploys SM parachutes, as its endearingly straightforward name suggests. Pictorial Mission Manual Launch & Trans-Munar Injection Set throttle to 100& and engage SAS, then STAGE to launch. Climb to roughly 5,000 meters and begin your gravity turn by tilting 10 degrees due East. Continue to turn gently, hitting 45 degrees as you reach 500m/s of velocity. STAGE to drop the first stage and engage the second. Aim to be horizontal as you reach 1100m/s. STAGE to jettison the Launch Escape System. Keep burning until your Apoapsis hits 120km, then cut throttle. STAGE to drop the second stage (it may still have fuel in it, that's OK). Circularize using the third stage. Lock staging at this point to prevent awful mishaps or you will not go to the Mun today. Burn for the Mun using the third stage. Achieve a free return trajectory if you wish to leave no debris in orbit. Transposition, Docking and Extraction Orient the craft either Normal or Anti-Normal (0 or 270 degrees on the navball's horizon). Detach CSM from the stack using Action Group 1. Translate CSM slightly forward, then yaw 180 degrees and dock back onto the MM. Separate third stage using Action Group 2. Translate backwards away from third stage. Engage cruise mode by using Action Group 3. Gently move out of the debris' path by translating slightly sideways. Munar Capture & MM Separation Perfrom any correction burns you feel necessary. Aim for a 35km Mun Periapsis above the equator (fuel reserves will allow more delta-v intensive landing patterns but these are untested). Circularize, then EVA two crewmen to the MM. Detach MM from CSM and engage MM descent mode using Action Group 5. Curse the buggy action group and extend landing gear manually (sigh). Gently translate MM away from CSM. Look at MM from CSM IVA and comment that "somebody's upside-down". Munar Landing & Surface Frolicking While on the far side of your desired Munar landing site, orient MM retrograde and burn to reduce Periapsis to 15km. Proceed to Periapsis and burn to de-orbit, keeping to the rule of thumb that every 1km of altitude equates to 10m/s of surface velocity. So at 10km, aim to be at 100m/s; at 9km, aim to be at 90m/s; and so forth. Watch the surface for the reflection of the MM landing lights, it will show up at roughly 1000 meters surface altitude. Manage your speed gently and eyeball the final descent. Once landed, engage MM surface mode by using Action Group 5. Depart MM, plant flag, say something profound. Make sure second man out deploys rover before leaving MM by using Action Group 6. When mounting rover, brakes will need to be manually activated and de-activated before movement is possible. Frolick about on the surface until ready to return to MM. Munar Ascent & MM Jettison Return crew to MM, engage SAS, throttle to 100% and engage ascent mode using Action Group 7. For best results, take off as CSM is directly overhead in a circular 35km orbit, turn MM to 45 degrees at once, halfway from there to horizontal as you reach 150m/s velocity, and fully horizontal at 300m/s velocity. Burn until Apoapsis reaches 25km. You should be able to get a pretty close encounter with the CSM if you burn at Apoapsis to 35km. Fine-tune encounter and rendezvous to within 700 meters or so. Perform docking maneuver with either MM or CSM. Transfer MM crew back to CSM, orient CSM retrograde and pyrotechnically de-orbit MM using Action Group 8. Return to Kerbin Return to Kerbin using a single burn, bringing Periapsis down below 30km. Once CSM is under 100km altitude, orient retrograde and jettison SM using Action Group 9. Come screaming through atmosphere inside a fiery shroud of burning plasma. Deploy parachutes using Action Group 0 once CM has slowed down below 300m/s. Enjoy teeth-rattling parachute shock and "soft" landing. Pose for awesome photo-op afterwards.

Can do - the lift capacities are also in the craft descriptions though, which are easily seen in-game through the subassemblies menu Yup, the heavier lifters in particular have a wide upper stage that makes a great platform for strutting your payload, and it stays like that all that way to orbit.

Banner by drummerguy103 Awesome rockets for awesome people! Introduction Wayfare AE&KA is proud to announce the 0.23 release of the Munshine lifter family! Expanded with another three designs, the Munshine family now features a total of nine lifters. Amazing advancements in the "structural skeleton" technology that was pioneered on the Munshine VII (formerly Munshine X) have allowed the family to grow to an amazing 165-ton payload capacity in case you really, really need to put that much stuff into orbit at once. We've gone ahead and re-organized the naming convention too. Where the Munshine lifters were previously named in the order they were designed, and beginning with V for historical reasons, they are now ordered by payload capacity for ease of use. All Munshine lifters are also provided as subassembly files with their payload rating in the description. Design credits go to Giggleplex777 for Munshines II, III, VII, VIII and IX, as well as his work on fine-tuning the designs of the family as a whole. Test Pilot Gojira is thanked for flying these monsters many times in the family's history, though he was sadly not able to test the current release yet. We've also added a pack of "Low Tech" (LT) versions for our Career-minded customers! These versions require you to have researched Flight Control, Specialized Control, Advanced Construction and Very Heavy Rocketry. Download Munshine Lifters - all Munshine lifters in one pack, featuring both a VAB and a Subassemblies folder to merge into your saved game. Munshine LT Lifters - all Munshine lifters teched down for Career Mode, supplied as both VAB and Subassemblies files. Pretty pictures! Key Features Serial staging - Shunning the complicated fuel routing and staging of asparagus designs, Munshine lifters stage serially from the bottom up. With the exception of the Munshine IX, none of them even use side boosters. Sleek looks - Tall, elegant lines result in some of the prettiest rockets around. Low part counts - The simple design philosophy of the Munshine family yields amazingly low part counts. Even the Munshine IX comes in at less than 200 parts! Proven in the field - All Munshine lifters have been tested thoroughly by the Wayfare AE&KA crew up to their payload rating (and sometimes a little over) to stable, circular orbits of 80km. User's manual They're lifters! Build your payloads on top of them, or attach the lifters underneath using the Subassemblies menu. Strut thoroughly and launch. Munshine lifters are designed to perform aggressive yet smooth gravity turns. Begin your gravity turn at 5000 meters to 10 degrees off vertical. Aim to be halfway to 45 degrees by the time you reach 250 m/s velocity; 45 degrees at 500 m/s; halfway between there and horizontal at 800 m/s; and horizontal around 1200 m/s. The lighter lifters (I through V) can turn a little sooner, the heavier ones (VI and up) a little later.

Quoted for truth. That humble little part makes so many things possible!

I had Billy-Bobbro in .18 or so - still the best name I've had in my games by a fair distance

Wouldn't a lab have been useful there to scrub out the goo pods and materials bays for re-use?

It may help to keep in mind that Resources were pushed back in order to work on Career Mode, not on Multiplayer. Also, that they were pushed back for review, not cancelled. I wouldn't be surprised if Resources (in some streamlined form compared to the overly-complex flowchart shenanigans seen before) will be implemented in Career Mode before Multiplayer is begun, because it would benefit Multiplayer: as the game stands now, there's not an awful lot to do in KSP that would benefit from having multiple people there at the same time. Having a Resource system might allow people to work together as surveyors, miners, transporters etc.

Please don't quote me out of context. I was responding to regex' suggestion that limiting different fuel tanks to different types of resource would add incentive to use different parts. I think it works the other way around - right now if you want to put RCS on your craft, you have to use a predefined RCS tank. If you could pick any tank you want and then fill it with monopropellant, you have a wider choice of parts you can use for that purpose.

The man has a point though when you look at the economics of it. In that view, the point of having (semi)permanent installations like bases or space stations is to save fuel by not moving around any more equipment than you need. As I understand Kethane, it requires you to mine raw material and refine that into fuel. That requires a refinery. If you integrate the mining equipment, refinery, and transportation all into one ship, you're always ferrying around stuff that could have stayed at the surface. By breaking it up into separate parts (for example: mining rover, refinery base, tanker shuttle) you only need to lift the refined fuel. All the mining and refinery stuff stays dirtside. Of course it takes more fuel to initially move three separate units into position rather than a single integrated one, but there's a break-even point after which the split set-up becomes more efficient. Another thing to consider is the hassle of it: the amount of hours you as a player are willing to put in, as well as the trouble of moving all that gear someplace else once all nearby sources of raw material have been exhausted. Fuel economy is currently the only real limiting factor. Things will get more pronounced when money is introduced to KSP.

That seems to work backwards. Say I need a tank full of liquid fuel for an airplane. That leaves me with only the pure liquid-fuel tanks to really choose from. Sure, I could remove the oxidizer from a bipropellant tank but that leaves me with a rather lot of dry weight compared to the amount of fuel I'm bringing. If I want to build an oxidizer tanker where SSTOs can top off for interplanetary flights, same problem. Allowing full customization of a tank's contents would allow me to use any tank for any purpose. Volume and shape would then become the deciding factor, rather than pre-programmed compartments. In terms of coding and user-friendliness the main stumbling block would likely be the odd ratio of liquid fuel and oxidizer that's used by rocket engines. The simplest fix for that is to change the LF/OX consumption ratio to 1:1. That, of course, would take some elbow grease in reconfiguring all rocket engines and fuel tanks, but in the end it would greatly simplify fuel tank logic: Tank holds up to X units of resources, fill as you please. For realism's sake, an individual tank's max values per resource could be set once the craft is moved to the launchpad/runway: no re-compartmentalization on the fly.

Congrats Rune! Building a successful Apollo-style Mun rocket is one of those things you just gotta do

Holy run-on sentences, Batman That's a very impressive design! I'm not a military builder myself but I do appreciate the great craftsmanship I see here. Do those clamshells hold up well during maneuvers? Either way I'm a sucker for modular stuff so +1.

We're on a bit of hiatus right now as "tweakables" may well break some of the company's designs. In the interim, I believe dropping the subassembly craft files into the ingame subassambly folder should work just fine!

I love the creativity that Career Mode's limited parts is inspiring in people Great job, I particularly like seeing how your designs have evolved organically. Even the last one still resembles the first in some basic construction methods.