Whackjob

Scoring details: Up to 30 Points for a realistic Nova-C recreation. (appearance, size, and mass all matter) Gah! Sabotaged from the start! I was going to go a little crazy.

Water tower for scale. EDIT: Good launch, great initial flight, BAD first stage booster dropoff. Mega-RUD.

Using stock boosters as separatrons to safely shove aside my custom made boosters. Close, but no potato. One more set of boosters, I think, and I'll have enough power to get there and land.

15 size S4-512 fuel tanks long and with 36 S3 KS-25x4 "Mammoth" engines, each, I've got a full set of boosters for my mission.

All my munar tower landers have the crew capsule at the lower end of the central assembly. This is the business end of the new one I'm working on. Main landing engines are tested and work well. Fun fact. Just after this screenshot, a RUD event happened. The cause is simple: That's a LOT of engine and a whole lot of empty soda cans it's pushing against. The whole thing will crumple. But, it's taking so long to calculate the mess that's about to happen, that it's still thinking it over more than a full minute later. Screenshot coming if it doesn't crash. Lesson's simple: Less throttle with less mass. EDIT: I had to reload the game to see what happened. Turns out, no RUD! Instead, I'm headed out away from Kerbin and will swing close to the orbit of Moho O_o

That's a sharp looking station!

Better than the pejorative I'm used to!

Ok, so right now I have 720 engines of the largest kind, and I'm tearing off the pad at a pretty good clip even at 2/3rds throttle with full fuel. I'm using a VAB extender, but I've hit the limit of how far that can go. I can't build more rocket, at least, vertically. So I might cut down the number of engines per cluster just for the sake of better performace. I know, I know. Although.... wouldn't landing be easier if I went more PiePlate with it? Out, not up? Hrm.

Not really, although if I'm gonna be honest, I wish I had the money to buy one of those. I'd strip the bucket off the back, then literally have a house built on the frame. It'd be the most badassed mobile home to ever have existed. For the work, I've built the rest of the way up, and took it for a spin. The new computer is so good I don't even get to 25% of CPU and RAM usage even during a slow sideshow launch. The software is the bottleneck for me, now. That is the tallest, heaviest rocket I've ever lifted off the pad, by a large margin. At this point, all I gotta do is add some solar, maybe fuel refinery capability, and oh, enough boosters to lift up enough fuel, because it only has about 4k delta-v. And legs. I have to build legs that will support that weight and I really don't know if I can do it.

Testing a new motor cluster's lifting capability.

Working on a new Munar lander during my breaks from my college work. The half of the landing stage that I built is flying okay. It seems I can go a little lighter with the bracing than I thought I would need. Then again, I haven't landed it yet...

I have never had this many engines on something, and I have never had something with that many moving parts launch. I just need to find a better VAB extension mod that'll let me build my 1km tall munar tower lander, and then I can get to work.

Yesterday, from another thread. 2.7 million kilonewtons of thrust. And, it flew before the game crashed and the universe died. How much motor is that? I used the humble S3-KS-25x4. And there are one thousand six hundred and eighty of them going in this picture. Brother, the 'Whack is back.

ARGH! The game crashed. But check this out. I actually launched that thing. Each engine cluster that you can see in the previous image had _240_ of the largest motors I could find. And there's seven of those clusters. I gotta do the math on that... So I'm using the S3-KS-25x4 engine at 4000kn each. Overall this thing had 1,680 of those motors, for a grand total of 6,720,000kn of power at launch. Now, I can't call it a SUCCESSFUL launch, but it did leave the ground and since the game crashed I guess I can say I killed the whole universe with it. Pretty spiffy! A good sign of good things to come. I'm getting away with a lot.

Over 3,000 parts, and that's almost entirely engine. I won't lie, it's running slow.

I got a VAB extender of sorts working. It's great, but I've been tinkering with how fast the scroll wheel goes just so I can scroll up and down without dying of old age. Got that working, but then it also affects how quickly I zoom in and out of my craft in flight. That's a problem I don't know how to get around. Anyone good with modding the CFG?

Long story short, my lovely wife has gifted me a small assortment of computer parts that formed the base of a good machine. Case, motherboard, processor. For my birthday, a graphics card. I spent some of mine own coin, for 32GB ram, a small NVME drive for the OS and such, nothing too fancy. Well, an old buddy of mine called me over, said he had some stuff. I got given a better graphics card (sorry honey, but thanks!) and more memory at a slightly lower speed. So, I've just gone from 12GB ram on the shadow remote system I've been using, to 64. Incredible. Oh, and if anyone's interested about the processor, it's an AMD Ryzen 5 3600. Six core, hyperthreaded. Whee! I've got college work I gotta do, so I can't spend a lot of time on this just yet, but boy, I'm gonna go for my biggest build in forever. I'm using a whole new operating system that'll take some getting used to (Linux MINT!) but if I can figure out how to record and such, hey, maybe some new Youtube vids. I can't promise, but I'm gonna try to produce. I can't figure out how to do a quick screenshot and slap it in here, so bear with me while I figure out stuffs.

I use a lot of those! Not that I'd say they were NECESSARY, mind you...

This picture is from a very long time ago but I think it might qualify. It's also my favorite and I'd consider it iconic of my work. And that is Duna.

Brother, for the last X number of years, I've been using a shadow client to use, and them's only got 12 gigs of ram. I'm about to have a system with 32. With an older, but still perfectly good graphics card. My wonderful wife bought it, for my birthday, at the end of this month. The power supply, ram, and M2 drive are coming in a couple of days. The last parts I'll need. I think. Seriously, the first thing I'm going to do is build something big enough to stress test it. Oh, and a 6 core Ryzen processor. Nothing expensive or crazy, but it'll do. Still a college student, but I'm at the midway point of where I want to be. An associates degree at the end of this very semester; It isn't much, but it's my first college something, and at my age, after this long, I'm probably gonna tear up at it. But I'm digressing. Anyway. For my first build and launch and flight, I *still* want to put a 1km tall munar tower lander on that mun. Not a new work, just an old screenshot I saved that I still like to look at. I can see multiple places I can improve it all. Within a month, and I can start again. Very nice, I hope it goes well!

I may soon have a machine that I can build big on again. So... hope. Maybe.

I want to put a tower on that.

Achieving engineering perfection. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery I never get around to taking things away.

The first time I visited Duna I did it on my first real tower lander. If I'm remembering right, it's been some years. Frightfully rough design, at that time, but she flew.

Well, if you want an alpha tester that can stress everything at once, you know where to find me. -ish.