The14th

Narcosis, does your Caged Canary Extended count? (as technically you don't stage until orbit). I only ask because I still use it! I tend to build ships in the VAB rather than spaceplanes, but there are enough great shuttle designs on this forum that I need never use the same one twice! (and that's something I try to do!) HOWEVER! Sometimes I just need to get sh...er.. stuff done. When I just need to get a Kerbal from an orbital rendezvous to the surface of Kerbin fast, I often still use your Caged Canary. Why? It's 10 times faster than sending an SSTO to fetch the Kerbal. It's so simple, light, and manoeuvrable, I can land on the KSC strip 100% of the time in the Canary - and usually I don't even need the engine once after the initial de-orbit burn. I don't know if it counts or not as multi-stage to orbit, but I did want to let you know that I still think it's awesome!

Nice. I like this - it works pretty well.

Hahaha that's awesome! Ideal for Kerbs waiting to transfer to another ship.

Impressive work!

With all this buzz regarding K-Drives, I thought I might have a go at creating my own prototype craft. To that end, I decided that if I was going to start playing with unholy forces, I was going to need to include some safety features for my test pilot. I wanted to combine the features of an escape tower with sgt_flyer's escape ring design - so that I'd have options for aborting both on assent, and much later on during the mission. I've also just recently installed Procedural Fairings. This is what I've come up with. I admit that I may have over-engineered this! Escape System Test Bed I started with a capsule and Orbital Escape Ring pretty much as described by sgt_flyer in the Open Source Construction Techniques topic. Then I attached the open node of an upside-down Interstage Adapter from the Procedural Fairings mod to the outer stack decoupler. I divided the separator rockets into two even groups, marked as © and (D) on the diagram. I set the the action groups as follows: To the ABORT group, I assigned: (A) - The inner stack decoupler - i.e. The TR-2V and not the TR-18A © - The first group of separator rockets. Also start up the pair of LV-1R engines that make up part of the standard Orbital Escape Ring. The next action group I call the RELEASE group (which I assigned to the 0 key) ( - Jettison the four fairings connected to the Interstage Adapter. (D) - The second group of separator rockets. © - Include the first group of separator rockets (might as well include them if they haven't already been fired off) Finally I set up LANDING group which just jettisons the usually spent Orbital Escape Ring, and deploys the parachute. SCENARIO ONE: Abort during assent. Activating the ABORT group detaches the upper section and fires the first group of separator rockets. Then, when clear activating the RELEASE group jettisons the escape tower fairings and fires the second group of separators to distance the debris from the capsule. I'm then free the jettison the un-used orbital escape ring and deploy the parachute at my leisure. SCENARIO TWO: Assent normal. The RELEASE group by itself is used to jettison the tower without detaching the capsule. All separator rockets fire (as none were used) providing more force in situations where the craft might be rapidly accelerating. SCENARIO THREE: Orbital Abort Required. With the escape tower gone, the ABORT group now activates the Orbital Escape Ring as normal. Of course, all that will be for naught if the drive tears a gateway to a universe of chaos and hell... Still it's the best I can do on a budget.

Thank you! It definitely looks pretty, from every angle! Also - for some reason I started seeing my test pilot's face on the back... and once seen it can't be un-seen!

It looks great - well done on getting it finished! I would like to try it out, but 2shared.com requires me to sign up to their site, which I refuse to do. It's better if you use hosting sites that don't have strings attached!

I'm using In The Clouds for my wallpaper right now - The Tadpole will always be one of my favourites! I'm sad to hear that you won't be with us for a while, but I think we all understand how hard it is to juggle... erm... life-balls. Anyway, we'll be right here when you get back! Thank you again for sharing your ships with us - each design has been tremendous fun to play with. Good luck with your studies & I'm very much looking forward to seeing the full video sometime in the future! Best wishes, The14th.

In my first few days of playing KSP I felt compelled to replicate the Liberator from Blake's 7, sans DriveSphere. She was, as you would imagine, a wibbly-wobbly mess - So hat's off to some of these designs as it's not enough to get the look, it has to be usable too!

Hmmmm, much like my pilots.

Cool, thanks for clearing it up.

Hi, I like the rover, but there seems to a be a little numbering inconsistency. I've previously downloaded the Tropis (probably from the rover mega-thread) which I thought was the Mk10 - but the .craft file is identical to the Mk13 link on this page - although if you open the craft file (downloaded from here as "Tropis mkxiii.craft") in notepad, it lists the name as MkX, not MkXIII! So... which do I have? I get it... this is a clever ploy to confuse the enemy isn't it!

Thanks for updating. I always keep this catalog bookmarked! They're all great ships, but I wish there were a few more Type-2 and Type-3s. While fun to fly, it doesn't seem that practical to ferry single kerbals around!

Holly molly that looks good... definitely grabbing a Parthog, thank you!

I like the improvements you made Narcosis - neat little ship! Just one thing I spotted, one of the tanks in the craft file still contains oxidiser ~ although maybe you kept if for ballast?

Well done! Much truer to the spirit of the challenge than some of the videos I've seen using a mother-ship and multiple landers. Spotted the Damselfly cameo! Also - nice hand-break turn!

Leve, does that version need any post 0.23 love per your nifty base model?

My Kerbals couldn't wait for an "actual mission", so we decided on a little Scrumpy joyride to Minmus... It seems to have gone down well!

Totally! /signed

I remain a RAPIER sceptic. To me it feels like "one thing doing two things, half as good." Plus, I'm bad at piloting VTOLs so the separate rocket engines come in handy as a sort of panic button! Of course, I await being proved wrong by some awesome design one of you guys come up with! Oh, I'm liking this idea of a new line of Tadpole Accessories! All those ports have been crying out for a series of modules/pods for different mission specs!

I know, right!? You know I forgot to mention that this just goes to show what an awesome little ship the Tadpole is. It's been a little eclipsed recently by Cupcake's newer advanced designs, but the Tadpole will always be one of my favourites!

I loved this! Especially the slalom with the Push-me-pull-you space bike! All in all a great series of vids. I think Cranium means the bit at 2:50 where there are two Kerbals on foot moving at the same time. I'm scratching my head over that one... my money is on DARK MAGIC.... EDIT: Cupcake's super fast replying skills render my last paragraph pointless! Oh well

Nice That's certainly a novel solution - I can picture the call from Mission Control: - "This is Mission Control. The lab boys have crunched some numbers down here, and we think your best bet is to ram your craft at speed, and try to knock some bits off...." Looking forward to the next vid!

Awesome, thank you!

Link still broken. I hope mrmcp1 comes back soon - I really like this shuttlecraft!