Rune

Actually, on second thought, KIS/KAS will do for those that are bothered by the "unrealism" (like, say, me). Pick up the landing engines, and turn them into ejection engines: The experiment also shows that I need about ~150kN to make it spinny enough to break free... under 1G. Call it 250kN to be safe on Eve. That is a lot of separatrons (~20) to unbalance the thing, increase part count, and steal dV. I'm thinking no, but I will be sure to add a note or something. Rune. Yay! I can keep the simple construction and high efficiency!

That would be a lot of reaction wheels. The thing is heavy, and it's supposed to be able to be used in, say, Eve. And the ore module has a rather flimsy solar panel that likes to break. You gave me an idea involving separatrons and a leghtwise spin instead of the end-over-end tumble I used in previous CRADLEs, tough. Might be that way I won't push the corridors into smashing the thing. In any case, WiP, I might get rid of the solar panel instead. Rune. Not too happy about needing an F5 so desperately before starting unpackaging.

How much of a cheat do you guys think deleting a ship from the tracking station is? I have been faffing around with a beginner's-friendly Base-In-A-Box, and I think that is the easiest way of getting the modules out of the surprisingly simple and efficient disposable landing box. I mean, I could put thrusters that did the same thing, but it would be a real pain in the ass to make sure they worked on all gravities, and it would steal dV. As it is, the upper stage makes orbit with ~500m/s left, and the C.R.A.D.L.E. (Container Rated for Atmospheric Descents and Landings on Eve, couldn't help myself with the bacronym) has 1,2km/s, which should allow landings pretty much everywhere but Tylo with parachute assist. So yeah, I think that means Munar/Minmus missions should be a one-launch deal, and everywhere else just requires an additional docking to refuel (fully fueled, the upper stage gives 1,7km/s), or hitching a ride in a more powerful transfer stage. Rune. Because someone said making modular bases is difficult, and I had to engineer him wrong.

Hehe, yeah, I know, I might be 'a bit' more experienced than the average kerbal. But those things are just refinements of an idea I started toying with long, long time ago. They use to have kethane modules! (And be pretty cluttered and horrendous-looking). And with the tools be have nowadays (gizmos and such), modular bases are much easier to build, even going modless. Maybe grab some examples from KerbalX to figure how people sort things out (a bit of self promotion never hurt anybody), and a couple of reads or two on some nice forum threads about the subject, and you should be golden to try yourself. Rune. And here I thought I was (one of the) the SSTO guy(s).

*Whistles by* ...wait. So what kind of player am I? The contracts to build these things and expand them are also hugely profitable, in √/day. You can make millions on each calendar day by setting up big Munar bases, if the modules are cheap to deliver. Autostruts should be your new best friends. That, and disabling reaction wheels for all things landed and immobile. I've found that a combination of the two can stabilize even the most explosive builds. Rune. Not that making money doing such awesome things is the point, of course.

To summarize what everybody is saying here, and to add my two cents: go for the PC version, preferably on the KSP store. There are reasons! -Always the latest release (or the previous one, in case the latest is broken), without any extras installed, for win/mac/linux, downloadable at will anywhere once you have your license and your account. -Maximum possibilities of input/output: keyboard, mouse, joystick, controller, and display it on any monitor you can hook your computer to. -Even if you don't like them, it's always better to have the option to install mods. You might change your mind later. -You get the highest percentage of your money directly to the developers of the thing you enjoy. However good an intermediary Steam may or may not be, it's an intermediary, and they don't live off the air. Rune. So yeah, welcome to the community!

Welcome to the forums! That asteroid station is pretty impressive. For the camera to work the way I want it to, I usually just control for a docking port that I want to face 'upward', and then I just use SAS and patience to make it point normal (north). For inclined orbits, its trickier and I usually eyeball it. you could also try switching camera modes with 'v' and see if any of them suit you for a given screenie. Rune. The new SAS does wonders with humongous objects, if you give it time. I absolutely love that about it.

It is a bit complicated. But mostly because I am also trying to turn the potato into an asteroid base at the same time. See, the refinery module, the KIS container, and the cuppola tug, are meant to stay on the asteroid, docked to ports and stuff that is carried inside the KIS container, with the drills. The Klaw Pod is pretty obvious, you need a Klaw and it also moves the pieces around, with RCS and a hefty reaction wheel. And the Magdalena is basically the big buffer fuel tank that can keep the nukes happily fed during a long-ish burn, the fact that the nukes are on independent Drive Pods just means I can tailor the thrust to the mission (i.e: put more if I get too bored). Once on the asteroid, the refinery module and stuff can find their own anchors, and then I put the Klaw on the nose of the transport and push. A bit like this, which was the improvisation that led to the idea (an old unmanned miner had to be converted to manned because of the radiator bug): And yeah, aerocapture can be tricky (though aerobrake can be rather sedate, over many orbits), but capture around kerbin can be free even without it, if you use the Mun, just like any necessary plane changes if you are a good enough pilot. As I said, fancy navigation tricks. Rune. Doing this repeatedly has made me rather good at a) intuitively knowing how a gravity assist works, and b) fiddling with maneuver nodes.

Ah, ok, gotcha, 1000+200, that makes more sense. Then again, 1,200m/s to catch a rock sounds quite high. I've gotten rocks around Mun for about 500m/s... accounting for all maneuvers and without aerobraking. But of course, that takes a lot fine navigation. And yeah, you seemed to have scaled your game x10 with respect to stock. That is what I call a really heavy duty miner! By comparison, my latest is tiny: . As you can see, I carry the refinery as a module inside a bay (so I can leave it at the asteroid when I'm done and have a functional fuel depot), and the legs are provided by four drive pods with a nuke each. A whooping 240kN at a really high Isp, for maximum efficiency. I should still get ~100m/s out of each tank refill with your run-of-the-mill 1000mT class E. I like the fact that it is a repurposed general-purpose Magdalena class transport (MkII), with a few of my standard modules chucked in, plus a KIS container (which is where the drills are stowed). I'm getting all industrial-standardized on this. Rune. I'm so running out of places to park them around kerbin, I'm thinking about building a KSO constellation just for the lols.

Mmm... e^[(200m/s) * (1/9.8m/s2) * (1/350s)]=1.059997... So that means mass ratio of about 1.06 for a 200m/s maneuver on Poodles. Substitute 350 by your Isp for another engine. That means that to accelerate an object 200m/s, you need to expend 6% of its mass. Rune. Just how heavy are your tugs, compared to the rocks they push?

Only there is a bug, and untended drills overheat until they are working at <0.1% efficiency no matter the amount of radiators. So yeah, quite a bit more than 25 times faster. Hardly. Even if you use a 100% propulsive capture with chemical engines, the total dV is not going to be much over 1km/s, and at a mere 350s (i.e: a Poodle, a fine engine for this job since it also has a respectable thrust), that's works out to a mass ratio of 1.33. Meaning you might expend at most 25% of the rock's fuel, worst case, unless you really screw things up. And you can use much less, using fancy tricks like gravity assist and/or aerobraking. That used to be true, but then autrostruts happened, as you note. Solid advice if you don't use them, tough. I like to use the Mun for that. Fixing inclination is where the big dV expenditure is ('cause aerobrake), so it's always nice when you manage to make the Mun pay the energy bill for you. Rune. Note: in order to catch a rock in a solar orbit, the easiest way is to retrace its steps, leaving kerbin along the trajectory the rock will come in.

Yup, it has to be a bug. But it's the reason I said "bring a kerbal or two to mind things". The bug only happens on unmanned stuff, put an engineer in there and the radiators will suddenly start working properly (or at least at 85% efficiency with a lvl3 engineer). Otherwise, the thing overheats until you are pulling ore at <0.1% the rate. Well, you need at least a drill (the small ones will do, and putting many is counter-productive because you are limited by the converter speed), a refinery (use the big one so you don't waste reaction mass and can power the whole thing with fuel cells), an ore container of some kind, and enough radiators and electrical power (remember the asteroid will shade solar panels sometimes!) to keep things running nicely. Something like this, but attached to a manned ship that has the power to move around the big rocks: Rune. Hummm I might try the fix now that you've pointed me to it, @UnknowingTea. Thanks!

There is a point: not launching fuel ever again. And coolness, that too. Basically, they are giant flying fuel tanks (better than stock tanks at times, there are some with >90%fuel inside!), already full and in orbit. The second rock in the pictures? About 1,500mT of "free" fuel in LKO, for the price of launching a ~50mT miner that I have actually reused a couple of times already, then retired by taking it back down to kerbin (so technically, it was free fuel, I launched it on a SSTO). The trick is moving them to a usable orbit. To do so, you basically need a Klaw, good navigation skills, and a sufficient amount of thrust and/or patience. If you are smart about it, you can actually use the asteroid as reaction mass for the trip, if you pack a set of ISRU stuff (drills, refinery and radiators to keep things cool), and have a kerb up there to run things along (mining without engineers is about 100x slower these days). Rune. And afterwards you can install KAS/KIS and turn them into amazing space stations.

Good job! It may look a lot of hassle for little gain (in the future, I can kind of guarantee you will switch to single staging to LKO, since the dV is not too much and the whole thing is much more convenient), but this is one of those things everybody should try at least once. So much fun engineering it! Rune. Now the tricky question... what is the cost in √/kg?

Don't trust those too much, Tylo is murder. And even if you don't have the time to test it out on your own, I'm sure someone will be glad to take your thing for a ride... I know somebody did it for me! Rune. Credit for the 'I landed on Tylo!' image goes to @PointySideUp, with whom I had tons of fun running this test mission, and was the actual guy who did the deed.

Well, it might not be the best thing that ever took to the skies, but it's something that can be worked with. A couple of tips to turn it into a solid workhorse: - A Big Red can be taken to orbit with about four RAPIERs and some change, six at the most. You have enough power in there to lift much more, if you can make it sleek enough to go over 400m/s at about sea level. Alternatively, you could drop a lot of engine weight (at least two RAPIERs) and trade it for payload with the current fuel load. - Even with less engine weight, you might want to either move them forwards, or put a crew cabin on the nose, to bring the dry CoM frowards. It's very common in this kind of designs to want to put all the engines backwards and a lot of fuel on the nose, because it looks cool and pointy, but then your CoM will move backwards during flight, towards instability, so you need to have a lot of it at the beginning, which will hurt your handling just when you need it the most, with full tanks and the worst wing loading of the whole flight. Another option would be to put the ramp pointing forwards, and the fuel tanks onthe back, but then you would have the same problem with the payload as with the fuel. Rune. Always crucial to check how the CoM moves as you use fuel.

That reminds me that I never even got around to assembling in space for realsies my latest Grand Tour concept. The thing is, I'm pretty sure that if I started the mission, I would not end it. Certainly not in my career save with all the other stuff going on, and that's pretty much the only one I play. Still, it looks magnificent on the SPH. It's all ISRU-enabled, with the Lackluster on the back working as a universal lander, and deploying a small refinery rover, to free the lander to grab one of the ore tanks and become a tanker to refuel the mothership. You would need a dedicated lander for Eve, but everywhere else, this could grab a sample from and return it to Kerbin. 5km/s... with the kerbin-rated SSTO lander full of fuel at the end and aerobraking capabilities. Rune. Maybe I should put it out there for somebody else to use?

Quoted for truthinness. The RAPIER is the best (airbreathing) SSTO engine because it achieves the highest payload fraction in a run to LKO. The reasons for that are varied, but given that, the only reason to put other engines on a plane is to take it outside of LKO. And then you put RAPIERs to take it to LKO in the first place, so the in-space propulsion is just part of the payload fraction to orbit. Rune. Other alternatives are viable, just not as good.

And I like it a lot, just enough to do its job. Just one tiny tip, tough: if you used four four-way RCS ports spaced 90º (say, at the edges of the fuel tanks) you would not only have the same 6DOF translation authority, you would also have 6DOF rotation authority, just in case you run out of electrical juice during the night. Rune. Rarely useful, but when you do use the feature, it's to save your mission.

Putting chemical engines next to RAPIERs is a waste of a good engine. You are already carrying pretty decent chemical engines inside the RAPIERs, and if lugging extra nukes is barely worth it for the climb to LKO, I can guarantee you lower Isp engines will do worst. Bring an extra mT of LFO instead, and you will see that those extra 40 seconds in Isp are totally not worth their weight. Nope, if anything I'm known for low TWRs. Basically minimizing engine mass, so I can get a better mass ratio, which is the main thing on rocketry. And my usual flight profile is a straight line to orbit (don't touch the controls at all in some designs, once I set the speed run at sea level). In fact, I use no autopilot mods, so those >30% payload fractions I boast about were flown by hand. ...well, there's the Arrow, but that's a pure-rocket chemical SSTA that would do a vertical takeoff on Tylo and sees air as a hindrance. Call it an exception. So recapitulating, I can no longer remember what we were disagreeing in, therefore I will ask you this question: in what way are liquid-fuel only SSTOs better? Because for the life of me, I can't see any... other than the challenge in building them, I see no point in them. Judging by the exhaust, I'd say Vectors. Nice TWR and decent vacuum Isp. Right? I've been trying to make the damn single-RAPIER design I've been after for a long time, I can't replicate the payload fraction of my bigger designs, because drag on those things is seriously unreasonable. I was thinking I must have left some wonky open node at first... Rune. But they look so nice!

I'm noticing something very weird on unmanned ships, the drills not cooling at all, no matter the radiators installed, unless a kerbal steps in and then everything is fine (and working many times faster). I have a feeling it shouldn't be so (the temperature thing, not the increased efficiency). Is that the same for you guys? It's making me do weird things, improvising with what I have on hand. Now that's going to be a series of looooong burns. Rune. That must be one of the weirdest uses of an Orca in the history of ever. There are reasons.

Exactly the point I was making. High TWR at the start of the climb is really important, and LFO engines excel at that. High TWR in orbit is just dead engine weight. If you want to max out in-orbit dV, just put the minimum amount of nukes for TWR>0.1, and lift them to almost-orbit on RAPIERs. If you want the maximum payload on orbit... stick to RAPIERs only and put no nukes, both your total payload and your payload ratio will be higher most of the time. The proof for that last one is in the payload ratio challenge, which went over 55% payload on 6-1 RAPIER-nuke designs, with pure RAPIER designs a close second (and still over 50%). The nuke does have a very high Isp for a rocket... but it is barely worth it, because of the low TWR, for such a small dV expenditure as the suborbital->orbital transition. Rune. I'll be the first to say that is a very minmaxed design, but it is trying very hard to make a flawed premise work.

That is a very sensible ship, can't fault it at all. Might be a bit short on radiators, but OTOH it might very well not, depending on how fast you get the ore in (a refinery needs about 200kW of rejection at full use, and I only see 150kW that can act on it on the three deployable radiators). But that is only going to slow you a bit in the worst case. I'd make it a bit shorter, for looks, but the extra length could also make a tractor design work (you tow the asteroid behind you instead of pushing it). That is more stable structurally if you are suffering from a wet noodle syndrome, but then again, I should just recommend you the wonderful autostrut function, which can be activated mid-flight between, say, the docking port and the heaviest part (AKA the asteroid), to make everything solid as a rock. Oh, and make sure you have a decent amount of tankage in the stage you dock to it to do the pushing: you can refuel it between burns, but you need enough storage space to do a decent burn. This puppy is capable of about 50m/s pushing that 1,000mT rock, in about four minutes. This asteroiding thing is becoming downright easy for me, the trickiest thing is navigating the asteroid with such tiny burns spaced days apart, takes a lot of maneuver node wrestling and head scratching. Which, BTW, is the part I enjoy the most, I feel like the guys at JPL when I manage a good tricky maneuver like a gravity assist. For the next one (I catch all class E's that come nearby in my slow-moving save, so I have three missions going on right now in different stages), I have ditched the purpose-built ships and am trying to work out a modular architecture that uses pieces I already use for other things. More or less from left to right: a Klaw Pod, a Cuppola tug (I want to leave a local control point behind on the asteroid, and I need one to move the pieces around without losing kerbnet), a KIS container to start building on the way back that actually carries the drills, and a refinery module of the kind I put in space stations (the thing in the bay), all carried by a Magdalena-class transport (Mk2) to provide the muscle, powered with four drive pods (although I could put more). I think the whole thing looks much more stylish than the other one, too. I almost missed that. That is exactly what you want, so you can leave kerbin's SOI along the path the astroid is coming from. It will mean a pretty hefty burn to match velocities (~0.5-1km/s), but you can refuel just afterwards, and that will give you lots of time to change you approach to kerbin form very far back, which means you need a very tiny amount of dV to steer the asteroid anywhere. If, however, you plan to catch the asteroid in Kerbin's SOI, then it will just make the rendezvous trickier, but still doable, but then you also have to brute-force the asteroid into remaining in Kerbin's SOI, with lots of dV. Rune. I'm getting literal tons of experience doing this.

Actually, what is screwing with you guys is drag. You are trying to make work a really inefficient path to orbit. See, any spaceplane takes a pretty inefficient path to orbit. Nowhere near the 3,5km/s that a rocket needs, more like twice that, or more. The thing is, in an airbreather that doesn't really matter, because you have four freaking thousand seconds of Isp. With that Isp, you could build a rocket with ~40km/s, easy, compared to the ~4km/s that is hard to get on KSP rockets, and you could single stage your way to Eve's surface and back. See how OP airbreathers are? That is why you can say screw it, I will eat all the losses (aerodynamic drag, and gravity losses, AKA gravity drag) just for the sake of using this stupendous engine as long as I can. And that is all well and good until you run out of air to make your 4,000s engine go. Then, you are a rocket just like any other. That is critical. Rockets are severely limited in Isp, therefore they have to absolutely minimize drag and gravity losses. Adding 50% of dV to orbit would kill them, for example. That is when a high TWR (to minimize gravity drag) and a steep ascent to orbit (to minimize drag losses by getting outside the atmosphere ASAP) is crucial. It is also the reason why a RAPIER can get the most amount of cargo to orbit: good TWR on rocket mode, and the highest airbreathing cutoff speed. And it is also the reason nuke designs waste tons of dV getting to orbit: poor TWR once the airbreathers cut. All the extra dV of their high Isp goes into gravity and drag losses. And the shallower your ascent is once you have switched to rocket power, the more dV you will waste on drag. That is why I always make a point of switching modes on the RAPIER as soon as my vertical velocity starts to drop, even if I am still accelerating horizontally. Rune. The nuke-equipped design I showed earlier, with several times the payload of yours and the same amount of engines? 3,5km/s on LKO, thanks to carrying oxi for a high TWR climb.

In the extreme. The examples you didn't like were the best way some very inventive people tried to get close to a practical way of reusing stuff to go to Eve's surface and back. Turns out, it just isn't. The closest thing to 'practical' would be a ridiculously big rocketplane (because nobody can precision-land a rocket reliably), a boopload of ground support including ISRU, and maybe some space-based support fed off of Gilly. If you go modless, that is. And if you go looking into stock propellers, they do work... barely. Good luck strapping km/s of dV on top, or in fact any meaningful payload. Rune. Turns out the answer was rather simple. Now, if you don't like it, I'm afraid you will have to reject this reality and substitute your own.