gabyalufix

Not always true. I\'ve worn both steel plate armor and riveted-steel chainmail. The plate armor worn into battle around the 14th century or so was actually relatively lightweight (though tourney armor was much heavier). I\'ve seen people in plate armor outrun unarmoured folks (Now, the armored guy has to be a bit stronger and faster, and he has to REALLY want it). The plate mail I wore weighed just under 30 lbs. The same coverage in heavy chainmail would have weighed a lot more. Just a sleeveless shirt can weigh up to 12 pounds. Add sleeves, leggings, and a coif . . . It\'s a different sort of weight, too. Chainmail is more flexible, so it bends with your body, but with plate there\'s a weight-bearing harness inside that distributes the weight onto your hips. and shoulders. Spend a weekend running around in either and you will be sore as all hell, but in entirely different places . . .

Sweet Mother of Kesus, Shedao! The sun called, he wants all his power back. The farside mission had lowball station, a small (munar-orbiting) space station, but it\'s really only big enough for a few kerbins. It looks bigger because it still has the last-stage fuel tank attached. I think all the stations posted here so far have (a lot) more Kerbin-habitable elbow room.

Gorgeous work, sir tosh. Love it.

Build a big mun-base / lander, and land it, POORLY. Come in hot, and land JUST A SMIDGEN too hard. Have your carefully-crafted masterwork shatter asunder, scattering itself across the munar terrain. The only requirement is that at least one of your pilots survive. Bonus points for having as many different broken-apart pieces, and having your modules scattered as far and wide across the munar surface as possible. Extra super bonus points if some of your kerbalnaughts don\'t quite make it. A few examples, from my failure pile. This one didn\'t quite make it.

Wouldn\'t this allow planes? Heck, my Skybax can reach a kerbal escape trajectory, turn around, and glide back to an unpowered landing. Does that count?

Gorgeous work, RD. Love it. Awesome design. What are those nosecones on the centrifuge modules?

Mine isn\'t quite so 'space-station' looking, as the original intent was to land it on the mun. But right now, it\'s just a space station. But if you want big, then this is the place for you. Just getting it into orbit is really quite difficult:

Hey, Keuropean Center for Space Technologies: Are those solar array modules downloadable somewhere?

I\'ve often wondered something: I know that perigee burns are optimal for making a transfer orbit, but what about hyperbolic escape trajectories? Perigee is best until it goes hyperbolic, but once it has, what is the best way to improve your exit velocity? The way I actually did it in mine, is I accelerated myself to (almost) stellar escape velocity while still in Kerbin\'s sphere of influence. That way I mostly avoided the weird sun-tide / high velocity control wig-out problem.

@Asaman: Nicely done. I approve wholeheartedly. @Everyone else: I am disappoint. Are there truly so few amongst you that dare try their hand against me? The trick (I have found) to getting those really huge rockets up into space, is thus: Staggered Stages. My most recent designs have 3 layers, a ring of solid boosters, a ring of 2m liquid fuel rocket stages (with the hab mods at the top), and the central liquid 3m stages. I fire all the bottom-level stages on liftoff, and drop them off as they run out (starting with the solids, then the 1st stage outer liquids, then the 1st stage inner liquid, then the 2nd outer liquid, etc.), and immediately firing the exposed stage beneath. The gimballing keeps the ship on target (using asas, no RCS until you get into orbit). It\'s also important to keep making your stages lighter, smaller, and more efficient, as you rise, since up there you need more delta V out of each stage, but you don\'t need it to happen as quickly. Btw: the Kebylon lauchpad is part of the black sun pack. It comes with some uber-heavy struts to hold you upright long enough to hit spacebar. I\'m also a big fan of their heavy decouplers used for project firelark. They\'re heavy as all hell, but they are strong and they hold the part far enough out that they don\'t get in the way of your RCS and landing legs and such. Also they look much better than the other heavy decouplers. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=2750.0

Let\'s try this one last time, shall we? Kerbal\'s sun is going to go nova within a few short decades. Only you can save kerbalkind. The minimum viable population is around 3-6 thousand for most vertebrates. So you need to launch at least 3 thousand kerbins into an escape trajectory. And even then, they\'ll be facing some inbred 4-thumbed kiddies after a few generations on alpha kerbtauri. This is made vaguely possible by the development of Cryogenic freezing. Let\'s say a frozen human takes up 2 cubic meters of space each (giving enough space for refrigeration, maintenance tunnels, pressure seals, luggage, etc. Scaled to the 1/4-scale kerbins, that\'s 32 kerbins per cubic meter. This works out pretty nicely: standard 1m habitation mods will store 40 frozen kerbins each, and my 2-meter by 2-meter hab mods will store 200. So ideally, you\'d want to launch at least 15 big hab mods, or 75 lesser mods, or some combination of the two. Get them out of the solar system. Even if you can\'t manage that many, species have been known to occasionally survive surprisingly-tight genetic bottlenecks, if they\'re lucky. Genetics is anything but dependable. Also: maybe they can bring along a few tons of frozen kerbo-sperm, to add to the genetic diversity (though where, exactly, one would GET a ton of kerbo-sperm is best left to the imagination). But the bottom line is thus: the more Kerbsicles you send, the more likely they are to survive. All kinds of things can hit new colonies: plagues, predation by xeno-fauna (or -flora, they\'re alien, we don\'t know), accidents, cryogenic malfunctions, micrometeors. So launch as many as you can, and get them out of the doomed solar system. Bonus if you can supply power, bring extra fuel/air/luggage, etc. You should probably have a few habitation mods for the ship\'s non-frozen crew, also. Use the reasonably balanced mod packs. Silisko, Novapunch, KW, Down Under, Probodyne, C7 only for the hard points and RCS, etc. And yes. It is possible to save the species. See that star that has the lense flare? That\'s the sun. I\'m making a note here: Huge success. I\'m gonna leave this running on 10kx overnight, see how far I get. 12 (non-functional) NERVA engines were used as a placeholder for my nuclear reactor. I figured, they were big, heavy, and had a radiation warning on the side: CLOSE ENOUGH! Silly is my middle name. Also overkill. And 'Strut'. My point is, I have a lot of names. Also: I seriously love the kerbylon launch thingy. Best part ever. Stupid launchpad tower always breakin\' my stuff! No longer! I honestly can\'t believe I managed to do it. When I started I really did think it was completely impossible. Is solar escape velocity really that easy? Do be careful. Somewhere past 10k m/s or so, your controls may start to freak out. Apparently it\'s a known bug. Come at me, bros! Or not. Maybe instead, make a smaller, cheaper, more elegant design, that can be launched as a fleet. Or something else entirely. A ship that fires railgun ammo at the sun to punish it for nova-ing. A ship designed to intercept and destroy mine. A ship with a massive pile of fuel tanks on one side, to serve as a radiation barrier against the nova. A C7 plane with an ion drive, designed to eternally stay on the dark side of the planet. Whatever! Open call. Surprise me.

I would think a sensible rule of thumb would be: You have to go farther than you could go by foot, on a round-trip EVA. Otherwise you\'re just being silly.

By the way. Did some math: A 747 freighter has 858 cubic meters of cargo space. Scale that down by a factor of 4 to get 13.40625 cubic meters, a Kerbin-scale equivalent. My units are 2-meter by 2-meter, so the volume is 2pi, or 6.28318531 cubic meters. I\'m betting this hab mod could hold 250 kerbins, packed like sardines (to account for the extra 0.839879386 cubic meter, and the walls and life support and such). Just sayin. Volume scales with the cube of scale. Handy fact.

The station was just something I threw together to test the limits of my Skybax heavy lifter spaceplane. More pics here, down at the bottom of the first post: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=5690.0 I actually sent it into kerbalkerbin escape orbit with that thing. The plan was to try for a mun drop, but the lag was too intense. I was averaging 2 seconds per frame or so . . . Lotta struts . . . .

where\'d you get those short struts? (like the one that tank is mounted on, at an angle) They look shorter than the standard probodyne struts, and they look a bit different.

When it\'s empty, it has some unbelievable lift from those 3 wings. I\'ve gotten down to 20m/s without stalling. Once you hit the ground, though, you\'re gonna want to hit the drogue chutes, or it will (usually) tear itself apart. One time I landed without the chutes, but I think it might have been more luck than anything else.

Just because I thought it would look cool, I built a sattelite-pusher. I dub it: The MOTHERPUCKER! (Massive Orbiter for Transporation of Huge and Endless Rubbish, Plainly and Unabashedly Copied, Kerbalized, Expanded, and Relaunched) Not my best work, I\'ll admit. But really I was just in it to get pics of this: I did a bunch of runs, releasing the sattelites while spinning so they would radiate outwards. It was a surprising amount of fun. I also released one set while stable. Then rocketed through the cloud a few times. Weeeeeeee! The 2nd to last past might have been a little too fast. The last pass was WAAAY too fast. Forgot to take a pic of the wreckage though (there wasn\'t much left, anyways). The pic\'s really don\'t do it justice. You\'d need video, and I have no idea how to do that. I really do recommend giving it a try, it\'s a blast. I\'ve attached the craft file. You\'ll need novapunch, KW challenger, and probodobodobodobodyne. The biggest launch put 160 satellites into stable kerbal orbit. Crew expendable. 1600 points.

So, welcome to Gabyalufix\'s Quick and Dirty Miscellania. This is mostly just junk I threw together at the last minute, when I realized I wanted to stick something on my rocket, but none of the other mod packs had what I wanted. Get the pack here. The Prometheus LFT's: These huge tanks mount 7x large engines. They come in 7 x 3.75m, 7x5m, and a massive 7x7.5m. Decouplers: -Heavy radial decoupler. -2.5m, 3.75m, and 5m stack-radial decouplers. Landing legs: These are just stock rescales of standard landing legs. Placeholders until I can get unity working properly … -1.5x, 2x, and 3x scaled-up folding landing legs. -1.5x, 2x, and 3x scaled-up hydraulic telescoping/folding landing legs. 6 Nuclear reactors: They\'re big and heavy, but they provide enormous amounts of power. Can also be used to power laser or ion drives. Come in 3 sizes: 2.5m, 3.75m, and 5m. Each size comes in an inline and a endpiece variant. We also have two HUGE habitation modules. One is 5m in diameter, the other is 7.5m in diameter. Designed to carry 32 and 64 kerbins respectively, but can carry more in a pinch. Now I've actually got it functioning with a ladder and everything. No IVA's though, sorry. Finally, a next-gen VASIMR high-efficiency plasma engine. Currently it only works in high-efficiency, low-thrust mode. The efficiency numbers are taken from some best-guess approximations from some fellas at NASA. http://www.adastrarocket.com/VASIMR_for_flexible_space_exploration-2012.pdf Along with various other sources. The design is (very loosely) based off of this design. from adastra. Enjoy! And let me know if you use my stuff on anything fun!

Does KW challenger qualify as 'balanced'? (http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=2680.0) Also: does Down Under? http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3362.0

The lifter only requires a few (You\'ll need the C7 pack, the novasilisko pack (just for the rcs and the heavy struts), the radial-mount drogue chutes, and the water-landing skids pack.) The space station? Best just download everything.

For my first entry into The Spacecraft Exchange, I am proud to present to you: The SS-HLMS/MHO Skybax, Mk I! Not the prettiest belle of the ball, but she has wide, payload-bearing hips. Full title: The Skybax Single-Stage Heavy-Lift Mega-Shuttle, aka, the Many-Hyphenated One Built using classic Gabyalufixian construction doctrine, it is a truly colossal beast. It features three pairs of oversized wings mounted on six stacks of six Mk2 fuselage sections, along with a Mk3 ASAS, 3x mk3 RCS tanks, and 12x Mk1 spaceplane tanks. It is lifted by 28 high-efficiency LV-B20 liquid fuel engines. The idea was to make a huge, single stage, 100%-reusable space-plane, and lift massive payloads into orbit and beyond. I liked the idea of lifting from the front, as this improved the balance and allowed the Skybax to function as a Munar dropship. Therefore, Skybax has a huge 5-meter-wide cylinder-shaped empty space, behind the cockpit. The airframe is actually built around this cargo area, so that the payload can actually be nestled inside the plane. Do you have a space station that you just can\'t lift? Try the Skybax. My current record for payload is 160 ketric tons, composed of four 40-ton 3-meter fuel tanks (from sunday punch), fully loaded and released in low kerbal orbit, with a safe return for the plane. That\'s 40k units of fuel . . . No, that\'s not a stage. That\'s my payload. When it\'s tanks are empty, it glides like a dream. When they\'re full, somewhat less so, but it\'s still quite flyable. I\'ve attached the craft file. You\'ll need the C7 pack, the novasilisko pack (just for the rcs and the heavy struts), the radial-mount drogue chutes, and the water-landing skids pack. (I\'ll link them up properly once the website stops freaking out at me). It is capable of landing on land, I just prefer the big angled skids. Also: Using the skybax, I lifted my largest space station yet, sent it hurtling out at kerbal escape velocity, and returned safely to kerbal. The original plan was to land it on the mun, but I\'ve got some statistical simulations running in the background, and MS Word, and thunderbird, and eclipse, and mozilla . . . even my relatively-overpowered computer dragged down to 1 frame / second in the face of that sort of strain . . . The 2m habitation decks are something I modded up (with permission) from Slew in his Down Under Pack (I\'ll link to it when the website stops crashing on me). I\'ll post it to the mods section later too. Also: landing on dirt is possible but not recommended, and may void your warranty. Also: I went back and added fuel lines to the huge 3m fuel tank stack. I broke stellar escape velocity, with 16 tanks of fuel left over. That\'s my first time out of the system. Woot. So mods you need: C7, obviously: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=1172.0 Silisko edition HSTW\'s landing gear: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=4873.0 Slug\'s radial chute (I think this is the right version): http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=816.msg7619#msg7619 KW challenger pack (for the heavy struts): http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=2680.0 I thinkthat\'s it, but I haven\'t tested it yet.

Nicely done. It\'s starting to get downright crowded up there . . .

Oooh. That makes sense.

Not trying to be a buzzkill, but it might not be Kerbin\'s shadow. I\'ve occasionally noticed some odd shadow-rendering effects on the Mun. For example, sometimes as I come in for a landing, a weird round shadow appears as I land, almost as if my ship were somehow landing in its own shadow. I think it might have to do with how the rendering engine traces shade . . . I\'ve noticed other oddities with shade, too. For example, the sun-facing side of my ship is sometimes lit up, even when on the far side of the mun from the sun. But I could be totally wrong, too. Not sure how to easily test this, since munar orbits tend to go wonky if you ramp up the time too far. Has anyone ever seen a munar eclipse from munar orbit? Does it happen? When (relative to launch time, I mean)?

IT IS NEVER ENOUGH! MORE WINGS!!! Doesn\'t fly so well, though. Haven\'t managed to land it yet. Maybe if I run it out of fuel first? This was my closest 'success'.