Reusable Part Combination Concepts?

[troyfawkes]

Hey folks,

I was watching a youtube vid, can't for the life of me remember whose, and noticed that he had attached two or three boosters together prior to putting them on the radial decoupler. He had also added a couple separatrons to pull the large triple booster sections away. The net effect was that he used far fewer decouplers and the debris was more manageable (not a huge cloud of boosters).

I've just started using that idea and love it. I spent a good chunk of time putting together a perfect set of boosters in this pattern, saved them as a sub-assembly, and now I just re-use them whenever. Instead of having a hundred different launchers, I sometimes just switch out between these saved single, double and triple style boosters on the same launcher.

Prior to this I hadn't really used sub-assemblies except for the entire launcher.

Anyone have any similar ideas that I should look into? Any real launchers or space craft whose designs have cool ideas like this that I should look at?

Thanks in advance!

[Johnny Wishbone]

Back when I was doing my own NASA replicas, I saved every stage of the various rockets as a separate sub-assembly so I could interchange them as necessary. It wasn't uncommon for me to put the upper stage of a Titan II GLV on top of a S-IC booster (first stage of the Saturn V) or other combinations depending on what was being launched. I actually had the most fun mixing and matching a Redstone with my version of the S-I (Saturn I first stage, which was essentially a cluster of 8 Redstone rockets itself).

Sub-assemblys are also useful for more complex creations like capital ships. I've built a bridge section that I can attach to various body designs to create some pretty cool looking ships. One of these days, maybe I'll post one in the ship exchange forum.

[DancesWithSquirrels]

I have a set of Lunar Module style RCS thrusters in my subassemblies:

Built up with two stacked cubic struts, on the second cube an opposing pair of linear thrusters (from above, 12 and 6 o-clock, thrusting up and down when placed), and an another opposing pair angled up at 45 degrees (3 and 9 o-clock, thrusting forward/back/sideways when placed). Save as a sub-assembly.

Put four of them on the 45's of a Mk1 Lander can, and you now have RCS thrusters aimed only in the cardinal directions, no off-angle RCS waste. I'll try to edit in a picture of mine later, but for now the inspiration is this:

[selfish_meme]

I have an improved mk3 cockpit subassembly I was thinking of posting, they are just craft files, but in a different directory.