Immashift

The bendiness was just a strut problem I hate struts. Like really I do. All they do is up the part count, especially when you need high symmetry to make it stable. Also I absolutely hate the look a strut or a decoupler leaves when it goes. The little end points on the tank it was attached to I mean. I think reloading occasionally gets rid of them, but that's one of the reasons I like to do droptanks with docking ports. It also makes them reusable. The plan with this thing is to make it as modular as possible. Like I won't even take RCS down to the surface of whatever I'm at. Or if I do it'll be as one of those RCS tugs I need to blatantly copy off your videos So when I get back to the transfer ship, I'll take the tugs, dock one at each end, and move it around with them I'll be doing parachute modules too, since they just add weight going to the mun or wherever. I'm using a lot of mods, but I wanted to keep this as stock as I could in terms of performance. I'm using B9 landing gear for two reasons: It's powered and steerable, which means the WHOLE THING is a rover, and they're only like 130 in weight each, whereas the stock wheels are silly heavy at 500 each. Also using some B9 lighting because it looks nice I'm half tempted to try sticking some Rapiers on the back ports, put wings on the side ones and front, and see if I can make it fly around as a plane too. Swiss army dropship?

Thank you! I never knew you could do that. I thought it was just some inherent function of the ports I was ignoring. EDIT: On testing it's still draining incorrectly. It's like it's treating the rear tanks like a rocket and draining the stack before moving to the front, even with the lines. Gonna mess with it a bit more before I give up and make it available. EDIT2: So I gave up and redesigned the entire thing. This works a lot better.... However.... I think I need more struts

So I've loved these ships for a while, and decided to try and create one in likeness of the minnow from the ground up myself. I'm trying to make it reach orbit on its own, with the help of a couple droptanks. Now the piping in this image is messy, it's a WIP so I didn't care much about aesthetics. But there's this one problem I can't figure out. Either I'm doing something really dumb, or it's just not pumping the fuel right. Basically I want the fuel feeding from the outer tanks in, in symmetry. But if you look at the screenshot, the two rear tanks still drain out of themselves instead of the droptanks. The front ones are fine for some odd reason, but the rear ones refuse to drain from the droptanks. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong tell me I realize it also has the balance problem once it's down to the center tank. I'll fix that later. I may use a lander can with two center tanks, one front and rear. Anyway this thing has reached orbit as is, but I have a lot of stuff to cram on it yet so I'd love the droptanks to actually be droptanks Right now they stay with it till orbit injection because they don't drain properly Cupcake I'd love to know how you're getting the droptank fuel to plumb into the system without lines. Probably just a mechanic I'm oblivious to lol.

Hey I'd like to welcome you to the forums too! One thing I'd give here is my opinion on TAC LS. It's a great mod, don't get me wrong, but one thing that got sort of "meh" was how it keeps other vessels ticking down when you're not in control. Sure it's great for realism but honestly after refueling your space station for the third time during your interplanetary mission, it can get a little taxing. Anyway welcome aboard! Oh and there is an in-development multiplayer MOD. Can't remember its name right now though. KMP maybe? and lasers... check out Romfarer's lazor system.

Nice job OP! I think a lot of people start their landings with Minmus because of how forgiving it is. Especially the flat areas. I'd also suggest for a pile of science, take your minmus ship, and burn till you escape kerbin SOI. Do all your science, which then counts as deep space science. Then turn around and burn right back at Kerbin and go home. Interplanetary science without a Duna mission! \0/ Here's how I started out my career mode last night, perhaps you'll get some new ideas or something These can all be clicked for 1080p size. So after some orbital stuff, I put this together. It took off a little more... aggressively, than I had thought it would: That ship did successfully land on Minmus. Shows ya just how little you actually need: The first flight of the Mun lander wasn't -quite- as successful. Note Jeb in the corner Nor did its first landing go too well either: Final successful lander: Aaaaand almost got obliterated by my own dumped stage coming down: Somewhere in the middle of all this, I put a basic station up in orbit without any RCS at all (except the left pod, which is a life support delivery): Anyway that's been my career mode so far. I'm at the point where I really need to land on something interplanetary to get good science, or do a huge flyby of the Jool system. But career mode is fun. Especially doing things like stations early on, trying to make up for parts that aren't there. Like RCS, or the 6 direction port thingy.

Cute little ship. Nice design, and the range is pretty impressive. I'll use it as a crew shuttle I think. I know you call it heavy cause of the range, but it seems funny to call that heavy sitting next to the 4a

I'll grab the file. Can't test it till tomorrow cause like I said comp is in pieces right now. Just working off a crappy laptop that cringes if I try to launch KSP, so I gotta wait Definitely gonna install FAR though. I've been holding off because I keep wondering how much it'll mean changing all the craft I regularly use.

Well that idea is still ingenious. I'll definitely do it. I really dislike the look of engines pointing off at an angle while in space, so that's the perfect solution. Generally I had the VTOL motion bound to something so I could manually control the vector. Also makes gravity turns easy because you can just rorate the engines a bit more to offset COM and boom, shuttle starts turning without you actually inputting anything with WASD. I also have this thing against gravity turns with SRBs going. Usually they fight against the roll torque too much and all you can do is push it 5 degrees anyway. Unfortunately I think it comes from me running out of SRB fuel during my gravity turns, trying to ditch them while turning, and smashing into them with the butt of my rockets... My tests of my compact grand tour ship express why I hate SRBs This ship is finicky. Sometimes it ditches them fine, and sometimes.. this... Here I tried introducing a roll to see if it would help push them away on jettison.

Guess it's just trial and error then. I'd make a quicksave right before I refine my approach, and then see how much I had to tweak what I came up with to get it to work with FAR. Now I'm really curious how much FAR messes with that. I'd love to try it, but unfortunately my main computer went kaput and I'm awaiting new parts tomorrow I wanted to attach a massive heat shield to the vessel I use for my grand tour. I think it would look awesome aerobraking at Eve Course now I'm scared what it would do to the drag values Here's a part of that ship I was testing with. Can see how huge the heat shield is. It folds up too. EDIT: Waaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiit. Sovek, are you using the B9 engines' VTOL mode on your shuttle to vector your thrust to keep it stable? Cause that's freaking genious! I must try it! This was the best I could come up with back in .22. It had the same problem every shuttle had before tweakables, as fuel got spent, the COM changes and your thrust gets messy. I gets up to gravity turn height and then you're screwed. When I get my comp put back together the first thing I want to do is create a shuttle capable of delivering modules the size of an orange tank to orbit. That's gonna be a challenge I think.

Well bear in mind when you aerobrake your intention isn't to land. Your intention is to get back into space. The point of an aerobrake is to create a stable orbit around the body. So let's say I'm attempting to reach stable orbit of Eve. I come in at some stupid velocity like 8KM/sec. Orbital velocity is what, 2800 at 150km or something? Upon reaching Eve, my trajectory is hyperbolic, meaning I come close, and then shoot back out into interplanetary space. By aerobraking, I shed enough velocity that my highest point (apoapsis) of my trajectory is no longer in interplanetary space, but within Eve's SOI, so I therefore don't escape and can circularize the orbit, do science, have a picnic in the lander, blah blah... So skipping off the atmosphere is what you want with an aerobrake. But you want to come down deep enough that you slow down to orbital velocity. You can get real fancy with it too. I sent out a basic space station to Laythe, and to do it I did an aerobrake around Jool at about 162KM, and ended up at a perfect encounter with Laythe, refined it to 30km periapsis or something, aerobraked at Laythe, and ended up in orbit around Laythe, having spent a total of like 2% my fuel to do those maneuvers. The whole point of an aerobrake is to let the atmosphere of your target do the thrusting your rocket engine would otherwise do. Granted with FAR it would be a bit different, but I don't think FAR changes THAT much for aerobraking. It's just one of the tools you'll really learn to love using if you end up messing around out of Kerbin SOI a lot. Being able to aim at Jool, and really not care how fast I come in, is great. Course if they ever get around to adding damage due to friction, I'd be sort of screwed. With Kerbin, I find I have to come down to maybe 25-30km to get a proper orbit. 50 is just too thin an atmosphere. It depends on where I'm coming from though. I know with my shuttle/bus thing I send to Jool and back virtually every day now, I have to dip down to 27km for it to slow down enough to have a 100KM orbit at the end of it, which is where my station is.

Pretty sleek looking ship you have there. I like how low-profile you made it all. I wonder though if your wing blocks your cabin hatch

Well, you've done better than I did on my first attempt to get there. I remember trying to go to EVE, watching it from something like 45 million KM out as it sailed by, because I had absolutely ZERO idea how to aim for a planet before you get there. Anyway, I'm assuming this was your first interplanetary attempt? If so congrats, cause like I said you did better than I did my first time round. Also props for designing a working shuttle before going interplanetary. I still haven't come up with a great design all my own, and I've had this game since like, hmm.. .17? Here's my first flyby of Eve in career mode. The ship used had two more tanks top and bottom, they were shed halfway through the voyage there once they were empty. I also used the same design to go to Duna, again shedding the other two tanks before arrival: This is of course only to give you an idea of how little you actually need to go interplanetary. Ions and nuclear powered stuff is fun, but you don't actually NEED it. Both these missions the vessels returned and had enough fuel to burn for a few minutes while descending back to Kerbin. Also: Aerobraking is fun, and saves piles of fuel. My last aerobrake of Eve was at something like 61km, but that was a 200 ton behemoth I needed to slow down coming in from Moho. This thing, actually Just remember to fold your panels in before you try it Eve loves swallowing your ship up if you come down too low, but like Sierra said, quicksave before your adjustment burn and you're fine, so long as you don't mind the idea of quicksaves. If you wanna calculate what PE you need for aerobraking, might I suggest this: http://alterbaron.github.io/ksp_aerocalc/ Just plug in your values when you switch SOI to your target planet. Use it with a giant bag of salt though, because I've found it can be off a bit, especially with modded parts (drag values), so aim a little higher than it says. I think my fourth mission in career mode was a flyby of Eve, then a flyby of Duna with a craft I attempted to land with but realized I'd never have the fuel for it. Flybys are more fun in a way. Easier to do as well, since if you don't plan to hang around you don't need the delta-V to slow down. Good drive-by science. Maybe try doing what Scott Manley did and launch a probe that hits a bunch of stuff on the way out. I must link it: EDIT - After reading one of your responses OP. You said you got a 1.5M periapse and then anything you did further would make you hit the planet proper. The way I usually deal with that, is get it as close as possible, like your 1.5M on leaving Kerbin SOI, and then if I can't refine it more, wait till maybe half the trip, and try to refine again. As you get closer, your movements do less and less, which you can use to get a really refined trajectory. For example Jool has such a huge SOI, I got my PE to about 800km and waited till I actually had my encounter to lower my PE for aerobraking. Used barely any fuel to do, and was easier than futzing with nodes for half an hour. Honestly the vast majority of people really don't care if you use MJ. I personally dislike using it to plan EVERYTHING. I really enjoy the look of the readouts, and the fact that I can create a giant custom one with all the info I need on one screen. Plus, if I absolutely need autopilot, it's there. Like if I really need to go to the bathroom in the middle of launching something, or just really can't be bothered burning for 15 min on one of my motherships, so I can just tell it to point at a node, and walk away. That, IMO, isn't the cheaty bit. The cheaty bit is when you go to it for everything from launching to intercepts to everything else. Even then though that's your prerogative. What I'm a fan of is newer players using MJ to see how to do something. Like if you can't get anything to orbit, you install MJ, and actually WATCH WHAT IT DOES, as it pilots your ship to space. Then you can reacreate what it did yourself. It's honestly how I learned. I learned how to dock (roughly) by watching ORDA do it for me back in the beginning. Best sort of tutorial I could get IMO. Better than watching a video.

Looks pretty big! Would be cool to see shots of it during the day, maybe a bit more zoomed out. Landing something big on the mun was always hard-ish to me because of the gravity. I mean Minmus is easy, and whenever I use Kethane, I use a massive ship to mine/convert as much as possible in one trip. I did sort of what you did, designed a small station that could land. and support other spacecraft while in space like a station would. I think the next step at least for myself would be to take a large ship like that, and see if I can get it down to Duna's surface in one piece. These are the two most massive landers I've made to date. They both only took maybe a half hour to create each, so I think you definitely put a lot more work into yours. I was a fan of the one with tracks though, it was fun to rove around in.

Got all the way to the mun on a lander, and then attempted to land, only to find out at touchdown that I had landing legs on one side of the craft, but not the other, and there was absolutely no way to land it without breaking something I needed.

The ship I posted is the Amarr Titan (named Avatar) from EVE Online. I just thought the shape of your ship strongly reminded me of it

From B9 designs thread, page 14. (NOT MINE) I really, really haven't had issues with wobbly rockets. At least, not the ones I design myself. I also hate struts, and usually use either none or as few as possible. I still don't have problems. I generally design my rockets while considering the balance of the weight of all the parts I add, and ask myself what would happen with the physics of these parts were I to perhaps try turning rapidly, igniting an engine suddenly, or whatever. Usually doing that, and placing things intelligently, I come up with designs that don't bend, or shake themselves to pieces before orbit. The ONLY problem I seem to have regarding structural rigidity, is when I use very heavy rockets, powered by extremely large engines. The engine tends to offset itself from the base of the rocket as I increase thrust. Most of the time even struts won't solve that. I usually solve it by making that stage a pre-orbit stage that detaches and I therefore don't care if the engine moves a bit. Yes, KSP doesn't do rigid joints very well, but if your rockets are acting like well-cooked noodles, it's partially your bad design, IMO. Don't need strut spam to make things stable. Struts, again in my opinion, are a way to make up for your own bad design choices.

(All images clickable for fullsize) So first I started building big. Pack the largest size of everything because who knows what you might need This was my first mostly stock (only kethane) mothership. Lander had over half the capacity of the orbiting section. Was a dream to fly. 4x Physwarp with no problems whatsoever. Puller design made it extremely stable. The lander was Tylo-capable, heavily inspired by the lander Scott Manley designed for his Tylo voyage. The ship carried 4 small probes that I brought all the way out to Jool and further to drop off and hang around long after the ship had left. Then I came up with this - essentially the same as the first one, but more mod heavy. You can see it here arrived at Moho with over half its fuel left. After that came this - My attempt at making something more compact. You can see a reusable two-person (seats) rover at the bottom of the lander. The reason that ship failed was that the lander would spend 3/4 of its fuel to get to orbit from the mun, which meant very little if anything would be transferred back to the orbiter for the next part of the voyage. Most recently, I wanted to see how compact a craft I could make, capable of doing a grand tour. So I present my Tylo-capable lander and orbiter. It's equipped to go to any body, has something like 9k of delta-V, and can land on atmospheric/non-atmospheric bodies. Also, even at 4x Phys-warp, it's completely stable with that little port pushing it along. Here is its launch vehicle: I'm sure I can do smaller. Also: All I can say.

I like the idea for this thread. I've always flipped past that little engine because, as Scott Manley once put it - it looks like it has about as much power as a soda jet. That first lander really did surprise me with being able to land/return all that weight, even on minmus. What I'd love to see is a seat with a docking port and landing legs / wheels able to land and take off of the mun with an ant engine

I put my latest grand tour design into orbit and got it to the mun as a test run. Planning to video the entire tour Basically I decided that I was sick of using massive ships, and tried to build it as small as possible while still having all the features. The lander is Tylo-capable, the drive unit has around 9km/s. This should do everything except Eve.

I like it! I think you definitely beat out my smallest. I basically took the Aeris 3A and made it orbit capable. It gets up to around 28km before the jet becomes useless, but at that point you're going ~1700m/s and can just breeze up into orbit. Its fuel margins are relatively tight but I have docked it to a 100x100 station. I clipped the rockets so I guess that counts me out Anyway wonderful little design. Definitely going to test it out.

A few of my compact landers were very fun to fly. I have several SSTOs that I strapped legs to for landing vertically. Also try landing a space plane horizontally on its wheels with no atmosphere. I also had success with landers that were essentially large rovers with engines. I used the wheels instead of legs because I was having issues making a rover that could dock to a lander again to take somewhere else. Try making your interplanetary ship the lander. Give it enough thrust to get there and take off, and then you only need one ship. Perhaps create a base on a moon that a lander without legs has to dock with in order to land. You can use it to test your maneuvering / precision landing skills.

So I took the basic Strugatsky jumbo jet included as a stock B9 craft, and decided I wished to put it into orbit. Basically, I strapped about 80 tons of fuel into the cargo bay, pointed a mainsail out the back, and set off:

I'm honestly not a fan of landers with chairs. While they may save on mass and fuel, it looks a bit silly and it's not that practical in terms of real world applications. The advantage to heavyweight landers is also that if you've made it for Tylo, it's likely to be capable of landing on almost anything else. I also use my heavy Tylo lander for a fuel tanker and fuel storage at my Kerbin station. I'm a huge fan of multipurpose, as well as reusable ships. For example, the lander I mentioned does not drop stages on ascent from Tylo, but rather lugs them back up so the whole thing can be reused.

Perhaps I'm an oddity in that I perfer listening to Drum n Bass, specifically anything on the Liquicity channel while playing.

Okay, in lieu of having really epic looking screenshots, although I guess aerobraking always looks cool >.> I present these: The first is a test of the IonCross mod, on long term deployment - a Laythe station core. Simply two large fuel tankers joined end to end and flown to Jool: Next up is my grand tour vessel, the "KS Rigel" departing Kerbin for Mun orbit, on its grand voyage to every celestial in the system: Before departure, Rigel got its delivery of 4 interplanetary probes, to be jetisoned at various locations through the system: Landing on the Mun: Unfortunately, Rigel departed before I had started using IonCross, and so to continue Rigel's journey past Moho, it would require retrofitting life support to the ship in-space. Thankfully, this did not prove too difficult. Life support module was flown out to Rigel at Moho by remote control, and easily docked with the interplanetary half, once the Aquarius lander had separated. The remote controlled craft used to bring the module to Moho (actually a redesigned tanker), can be seen in the far right: