Immashift

Sorta rude to dangle a good looking ship in front of people's faces and tell them they only get it if they personally ask. Well, here's my rendition of the craft. THIS IS NOT THE ORIGINAL. This one is made in Japan. The extra set of winglets on the top fixed a CoL issue I was having. I know now the original uses "swept wings" with some clipping for extra lift, I just did it a slightly different way. Craft is powered by a single RTG clipped into one of the tanks. there are 6 intakes present. GROUPS: 3 switches jets <-> NERVA and closes/opens intakes, 4 toggles nerva alone. click images for full size Shamelessly copying a good design and making it easy to access: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2gU8i82Ok0VTTNmSUM0SS1OdGs/edit?usp=sharing Notes: 1: It's not the best design in the world. My Aeris 3A SSTO goes faster and higher in atmo (1900m/s at 34km on JETS). 2: 3800m/s is complete horse pucky. He does say once in orbit... eh. Still, my rendition goes fairly fast and easily gets into orbit. Saw 1700-ish when I did my speed test. 3: I actually made it better by doing this, though it's probably missing the point of it looking as slim as possible. This is not in the .craft I provided and was just tested after the fact: 4: @Rune: Pugachev's cobra, or what I would call "air Tokyo Drift", or "I want to play HAWX", is usually a very skillful move... In KSP it's usually caused by having a CoL in front of CoM, causing small control twitches to make the craft flip out. I had it originally. I solved it by putting AV-R8 Winglets in the nose of the craft, again clipped in to hide them. Also... Dat cobra. *didn't crash after I did this.

Also wondering why you're not just posting the link. PMing it to people is just hassle for both them and you. However, if you wish to self promote by having people bump your thread just to have a craft... so be it. @Rune - As long as it goes as fast as his and handles better than a brick, go for it

All images clickable for full size. Turned the Aeris 3a into an SSTO: Landed my large kethane SSTO on the mun (yes, on the wheels, no VTOL ). Tried to land the right hand side of this space train on the mun, and realized 5 seconds before touchdown that I had only put two landing legs on it, which you can clearly see in the image. I wasn't paying attention (curse you symmetry snap).

Aeris 3A modified into an SSTO, screaming up to orbit. Image was taken at 35km going 1750m/s, in jet mode. Click for fullres.

Here's an Aeris 3A... IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE..... I was messing around with the stock aeris, and realized that a single saber and a few intakes will make this thing sail like a bullet into orbit. So I made a sort of utility version. Engine is modular using Fustek CBM docking ports (they're very compact next to standard clamps), and has rover wheels at the nose, so when front gear is raised, rover wheels contact the ground and can move the plane (tested to about 20m/s on Kerbin). Idea is to land vertically, retract two of the landing legs, fall onto the wheels, and roam around. Power comes from a single RTG. I removed the .6 tons of solar panels and the 1.2 tons of ion drive gear that was just exchanging LFO deltaV for ion deltaV. Was also gimping its ability to get to orbit. It now has a comfortable margin of error, and can maneuver around to dock/exchange engine modules. Also, what are the black panels from in this?

I'd guess the arm is used for grabbing vehicles to transfer fuel from/to, or just for fun

Pretty easily in fact. Just watch his video again and set with MJ the maneuvers he does. If you're really really new to the game I'd advise using MJ for what you don't think you can do, but don't use it as a crutch, or you'll never really learn. But watching it do something a couple times and then doing it yourself is how I learned. @Katateochi - Definitely wish I could use that landing site... If there was any bloody kethane on Duna.... I swear I've done all the way up to 50 degrees of inclination scanning for kethane with my grand tour ship, and there wasn't a single deposit... I'm not sure whether I want to reset the deposit maps or not. This could make a Duna base sort of interesting if I have to haul fuel in from Ike.

Docking ballet around the Mun refueling before landing: (click for full size)

My grand tour ship Rigel coming in from Eve to Duna, aerobraking at 10km.

My grand tour vessel, coming in from Moho to EVE, doing a fairly aggressive aerobrake. Was too distracted praying my periapsis would stay as it was to hide my ui I love their expressions - Bill / Bob flipping out as always during my maneuvers.... Jeb on the other hand....

LV-Ns are great if you have a low mass craft or have a ton of time to kill doing burns. Aerospikes are also good for ISP in the stock game, even after the nerf. Especially if it's the only engine on your craft. On my landers I use (for small ones) the LV-909 engines, and for larger ones it depends. My Tylo lander for example used a mainsail - even though it's got HORRIBLE ISP, simply because TWR for Tylo is a bit more important than ISP. At the end of the day deciding what engine to use is dependent on how much thrust you need, vs how much fuel your vehicle carries. Bear in mind that less fuel means less thrust required, and therefore you need a smaller rocket.

Puller designs are the most stable, and imo easier to launch. Here's my grand tour ship - it does use Kethane, but you can get to and return from any one planet without it. Lander is meant for Tylo, and so can tackle anything but Eve (LKO in a single stage, though it spends all its fuel to do so). This whole rig put together has something like 10k DV. The guy above me is correct. Have to disable all engine gimbaling if you do a puller design. This thing ends up drifting a lot if you don't, which matters when doing 22 minute burns.... My advice if you do a puller, or a pusher actually, is transfer as much fuel as you can into the aft of the craft. It makes it more stable and less prone to wobbling around. For the record, you don't need to make super massive ships to do this sort of stuff. They're just fun to make and play with. I used a single half-tank and poodle power for Duna - with perfect phase angles and a lot of tiny adjustments before leaving Kerbin SOI, as well as aggressive aerobraking, you can do it without much fuel at all: Also, 8 nuke engines is a tiny bit overkill. I used 3 with an orange tank for Eve to push a lander there and back, I think.

I'm aware of the physics involved in landing this thing. The plan is to come in butt first, and slow down till I'm sub 100m/s horizontally, try to kill vertical velocity as much as possible, and land on the gear, rolling BACKWARDS. The craft has rear wheels positioned far back for this particular maneuver. I have yet to try it, but in theory it should work. Lifting off again will have it take off rolling forwards, and pulse the aerospike in the underside of the nose to pitch up. Alternatively you can use terrain features to sort of launch off of. As for bumpy terrain.... well.... That will be fun to work around. I'll try to land it in a crater or something really flat. Minmus's ice lakes come to mind. Craft file as requested. Was gonna touch it up before I posted so don't expect perfection. This is a prototype. Needs: Mechjeb TT Modular Wheels B9 Aerospace Kethane Radial Nuclear Engines https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2gU8i82Ok0VNWpFaWMxLV9ycDg/edit?usp=sharing Yes there are RCS tanks, no there are no RCS ports. The RCS fuel is there to balance the 2 tons of gear on the belly. It wanted to spin downward out of control in rocket mode before I added them. Popup on launch will tell you what action groups do. Be warned, it's a bit of a bitch to get into orbit. Take off, immediately hit 45 degrees and park the pitch there for the ENTIRE FLIGHT. It has a tendency to dislike lowering angles to speed up. When you see it start to drift off center (usually happens around 20km up) hit 3 to switch to space flight mode, and burn till you get your apoapsis. This thing was unable to fully circularize at 100x100 and I ended up having to refuel it in its 70x100 orbit. I'll record a video of a mun landing using my strategy today and post it later. Good luck with my craft If you can improve on it in any way, post or PM me. I'd like to see revised designs.

I may give it a stock, serious attempt at some point, but I was happy designing a big blimp with rockets. It's actually moderately difficult even with mods to do.

The problem with your design is that rocket ISP in chicken noodle soup atmosphere is roughly on the bad side of ATROCIOUS. The more time you spend in the "I can drink this" thickness, the more fuel you burn fighting to get through it. My own return ship used piles of TWR to get through the thick crap ASAP. My ascent profile was something like straight up to 80km then gain horizontal velocity. The lift of your wings is never going to make up for the wading through the atmosphere your engine is forced to do. Not unless you can use jets. Problem is jets don't like running on purple soup. My current one floating in orbit uses Hooligan Labs airship envelopes to float up past most of it. You may or may not consider that cheat-y.

Okay so I'll admit I personally use the inefficient kill orbital velocity all at once and plummet straight down, then cancel vertical velocity when I think I have little time left. Now the approach in the video a few posts up is extremely impressive, but let's say you want to land somewhere specific. Like if perhaps you're using Kethane and need to come down over a deposit. How would some of you more skilled / crafty people land somewhere very specific? I've watched MJ do it, but I prefer manually doing things. Like the OP though, I tend to see the ground coming up mighty fast and jam on the throttle... I shall resolve to practice the elegant landing in that video at least today sometime practice practice practice is how I learned to dock... That and watching ORDA do it. Eventually stopped using it and even MJ I mostly only use for info screens now, but landing is something I'm still relatively bad at. Half the time I end up rolled the wrong way. And during the final few meters I pitch the wrong way and smear over the landscape.

It sort of looks like the Kraken attempted to eat it, but it refused to simply explode. What I really love about it is how it has so many boosters the staging UI is off the screen.

Cute little plane there. I might use a variant of that for rescuing stranded pilots, since that actually matters now. I've always wanted to try kethane on planes. The only problem I think I'd have is that I'm not that great at atmospheric landings, and might miss the deposit. Then again... it has wheels and can take off at will... so not really an issue. I actually took that a step further and made an SSTO which supposedly has enough DV to make it to other planets. Have yet to really test it though. Landing a plane horizontally on a planet/moon with no atmosphere is gonna be fun.

Been taking screenshots all along, and will be making a thread for it eventually once complete, I'll definitely PM you. My design changed to a more stock-centric one, but the goal is still the same, and I may well take the other one along too. For now, here's how not to do a Moho injection - through shear brute force I made orbit, probably shoulda paid attention to phase angle a bit more :/ and have around 2k liquid fuel left. Absolutely no idea if it's enough to land on Moho, but it's all I got. Took about 1k for the mun landing I think. We'll see soon I think getting a Moho injection is somewhat like trying to find a place to park at the shopping mall while driving past it at mach 2. EDIT: SUCCESS 100ish units of fuel left.

Please do! I like reading people's missions. Torque module.. hmm. That might actually work. I wonder if the physics of the game cause multiple SAS units to help each other. Anyway my ship isn't that bad, the lander has RCS ports (puller does not), and since it's on the very back, if I use its RCS, it swings the back end of the ship around pretty well. Doesn't use much RCS either, which is good. Probably has a dozen or more course changes in it before I need to refuel RCS. Enough to get to a planet and drop the kethane lander in any case. Docking probes to the hub of my kethane grand tour vessel Ion probes might have trouble with small solars, but I'm not really concerned. They're just for orbiting various bodies. I don't plan to need to burn much with them. EDIT: Performed my Mun injection burn just now. Used 950 units of liquid fuel, out of 11k onboard, and 23.4k maximum. Yeah I think we're good for IP travel What I think I might actually do, is build a second craft to fly in tandem with Rigel (the grand tour ship above). It would be a cargo vessel of sorts carrying extra Kethane if needed and tons of RCS. I'd refuel it with the lander as well and both ships would travel planet to planet.

Very cool to know it has the ÃŽâ€v necessary. I'll take a look at your design after I finish docking the probes to the hub of my ship Puller design was chosen because of unique look as well as stability under time acceleration. The only problem I see with my design is it needs RCS to turn at any decent rate, and I've only got the one tank and two tiny radials on the lander. I may have to stick a couple more tanks between the end of the puller and my lander. I'll do a test burn out to the mun first and see what happens.

Going back to mostly stock with this one. Lander capable of reaching Tylo's surface and mining Kethane, and an IP puller design capable of reaching any planet. Full redesign of my grand tour ship for less mods and less parts. Interestingly enough it should have piles more ÃŽâ€v than my original design.

I'm a comp science major but only in my second year. I have no knowledge of the way Unity works no, you got that right I thought it had to be parts chugging the engine and thus the game waits for part calculations or whatever to do its thing. So when I have 500 parts laying around (not even anything built with them, just loaded into the game) the engine just bogs down to the point where that lag spike every ten seconds lasts nearly a full second, making the game rather unplayable. Running 16 gigs of ram so it can't be the issue. It's definitely a processing problem. The basic solution for me would be to get a better processor. I'm runnung a 2.4Ghz Phenom 9750. It's a great processor, but it's dated and nowhere near top of the line. Granted if Unity was more optimized my issue would dissolve completely, but until then.... One of the issues is it happens in editors too, which I thought was weird, since it's not calculating phsics... Then again, perhaps background flights and such still chug it. I don't have enough knowledge to do anything other than theorize, but thanks a lot for narrowing it down for me. I've always wondered what caused those spikes, as a stock install plays more or less perfectly for me. Now I know ANYWAY, my new, mostly stock grand tour design! I MAY STILL use the heavily modded install GT design I showed here earlier. I love that design so much, but like I said I'm not sure how much the lag would irritate me, given how I'll have to dock that lander to it a billion times over the course of the grand tour. I burned out to the mun as a test with the GT rig, and I noticed a couple problems... First off, the lander's drills bugged out and wouldn't mine anything, had to reposition them and ship the new lander over.... Then I realized that the lander can only take about 1k units of fuel back up to the IP stage in addition to what it spends to get back up there, which is really crappy. The TWR of the craft is really low, and without quantum struts on it flips out at 3x physwarp, which is an issue when your burns are 15 min long. The final problem is that the entire craft doesn't quite carry enough ÃŽâ€v. I realized that problem when my mun injection burn used a quarter of my fuel. It also had a power problem, which I realized trying to do a burn on the dark side of the mun. I had slapped a token RTG somewhere and assumed it was good enough.. This is .21.1 baby! Everything nom nom noms through power! God forbid I install IronCross and try a grand tour... death by breathing his own Co2 sounds like a poor way for Jeb to go. Tylo (and LKO in one stage) capable lander, similar to the one Scott Manley used, cause I really liked how well his worked. One thing you can see with most of my designs, especially my landers, is that I HATE dropping bits of it during ascent. I'd rather bring the entire thing back up so I can leave it in orbit and use it again, rather than drop stages: Interplanetary stage - I wanted a puller design with enough oomph to get between any two planets. Lander will sit in the back, and there will be four small probes connected to that hub I plan on dropping at various places: Now to refuel the lander and connect it all together and begin my voyage ALSO, Katateochi - If you want testers for that command line tool feel free to PM me anything you want. @NeoLegends - So you're iffy on the B9 pack hmm? Let me attempt to sell it to you with this cockpit's IVA My docking-fu is a little rusty and out of practice here, but it's still a pretty view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHaruLzNCY8

Ah. I see what you mean. I only usually see thrust to weight to ISP ratios when I look at an engine, just as I only see mass to fuel storage when looking at tanks. Practicality or looks generally take a back seat to efficiency with me. Something I need to work on changing. I use far, far too many mods. With kw, np, and b9 installed (along with many others) I have something like 8-10 pages of parts on each tab. It gets a little silly. But I love all the parts, though I don't find myself using np very much. Recently I put together a grand tour ship combining most of the mods I have installed, and I realized when it made its first hop to the mun how bad the lag had gotten. I think the biggest problem is when you run tons of plugins, especially Mechjeb. I get these huge lag spikes in game that sort of drop frames for half a second every 10 seconds or so. I'm also running this on a good quad core with a GTX 690 so I doubt it's my computer as much as congesting the game engine with piles of stuff. So I decided tonight to start over, and rebuild my grand tour ship with as few parts and mods as possible. I'm still using Kethane, cause I love the logistics of it, and it saves time. Also using the procedural fairings mod, and then KAS and TAC fuel balancer and that's it. I think it'll be fun for once flying a serious mission without Mechjeb or any other assistance using 95% stock parts. Interestingly, stock designs very often have a way of looking more elegant than mod heavy ones. Most of my interplanetary stuff is all Swiss Army knife type craft that I throw attachments on for specific things, or rather, carry everything I could possibly need out there, and then decide what I wanna do Anyway my whole point is less mods is probably better overall. I'm really on the fence about the b9 cockpit though - the one with the offset node and the cab with all the windows. I absolutely love using it - especially IVA docking with it, but it's part of the massive pack, and looks out of place on stock craft I'm also a fan of how he packed his craft so tightly together. Guess that's what happens when you design a ship for one specific mission rather than cobble it together out of an existing design. Even his grand tour vessel was tightly packed. @Katateochi - if you have something like raw footage of the VAB design stages of your crafts, I'd love to see stuff like that. Great for ideas and I'd be interested in knowing exactly how long you spent designing and building that whole mission. I know you stated that the one landing you did took you a week to master (which was damn impressive by the way... Must have been painful at 10 FPS). The design of that setup must have taken at least close to that.

@Amphiprion - Already way ahead of you sir! I saw TAC got updated TODAY for 21.1 and immediately grabbed it. Started my grand tour, and am using it on my lander One thing I DISLIKE about this lander is its base isn't very wide. I may restart the tour with a larger lander capable of A) Holding piles more fuel, and a landing gear base at least 3-4x as big as this one. This thing's first landing was.... rough. I used the rover then to mark a flat spot to land at, and that works reasonably well.