I built a interplantaery spacecraft, but I'm worried I made a design mistake.

[Mikki]

Woah, way to many radiators! Unless those engines get pretty hot, you'll never need that many.

Looks good otherwise!

Luke

Yepp, Porkjets Nuclear Lightbulbs blow up with less, no joke. I did not put anything here in without purpose, nothing for the eyecandys!

@Warzous, yes it was painfull, i took my biggest launcher, some struts and went up quiet slowly... about 21 to 26 frames per second , take a look in my posts for pics!

Edited September 1, 2015 by Mikki

[DalisClock]

I want to thank everyone who answered and gave advice. I balanced out the landers on the front end and the ship can now go up to 100% and hold a heading without drifting. Now I just have to figure out the series of transfer burns to achieve escape velocity. I almost got it with two 13 minute burns but somehow messed up the ejection angle on the second burn, so my options were to retry or waste fuel trying to course correct.

[DalisClock]

Make sure you're starting the burn halfway before the official "mark". eg: 13 minute burn, begin firing at T-6:30, continue until T+6:30

I did that though I think the problem was that I adjusted the node for the second burn because it was no longer hitting a duna intercept. So I fixed it and burned again.

Unfortunately, burning for 13 minutes trying to break out of orbit feels like I'm messing up my trajectory.

[Ripper2900]

You could try to split it into 2 or more burns on sequential orbits. It's known as periapsis-kicks. Do half the dv at the node, then orbit around, and do the rest of the dv.

Then you should be on your way. Keep the same maneuver node for the two burns, but click the little button on the node that moves it one orbit ahead, after the first burn. You can also make tweaks to it at that time to account for inaccuracies in the first burn.

[Grumman]

Something else to keep in mind: if you have a heavy secondary-craft on one side and a light secondary craft on the other, you can rebalance your ship by draining the fuel tanks in the heavy craft into your central craft's fuel tanks, and leaving the light craft's tanks full. Just remember to refill the lander's tanks once you get where you're going.

[tbarcello]

Here are pictures from the VAB

Here are orbital pictures of how the landers are laid out.

http://i.imgur.com/nS59JsN.png

http://i.imgur.com/E7cus1t.png

That is a beautiful ship!

Take a look at my Duna/Ike mission I've just launched. It passed Mun trials in previous episodes of my career.

My advice for the future: assemble ship in the assembly building with landers, so you can judge CoM. Then launch separately.

Edited September 3, 2015 by tbarcello

[DalisClock]

That is a beautiful ship!

Take a look at my Duna/Ike mission I've just launched. It passed Mun trials in previous episodes of my career.

My advice for the future: assemble ship in the assembly building with landers, so you can judge CoM. Then launch separately.

Appreciate it. I'll keep that in mind. Part of where I went wrong is I planned to test out different types of landers on duna, which included that big ass lander(which could transport 6). Unfortunately, it was also a lot heavier then all the others. I replaced it with two other landers similar to the one already attached.

I kind of messed up the escape burn, though after a couple more burns managed to correct it. I also dispatched a tanker along the same route which will arrive around the same time, which hopefully make up for any extra fuel I had to burn in order to get to correct the trajectory and velocity.

So it will reach duna and hopefully have more then enough to return to LKO. But that's a ways out yet.

In the meantime, I'll test some of my base building on the mun and build a space-plane for crew rotation.

Edited September 5, 2015 by DalisClock
Omitted information.

[tbarcello]

Appreciate it. I'll keep that in mind. Part of where I went wrong is I planned to test out different types of landers on duna, which included that big ass lander(which could transport 6). Unfortunately, it was also a lot heavier then all the others. I replaced it with two other landers similar to the one already attached.

I kind of messed up the escape burn, though after a couple more burns managed to correct it. I also dispatched a tanker along the same route which will arrive around the same time, which hopefully make up for any extra fuel I had to burn in order to get to correct the trajectory and velocity.

So it will reach duna and hopefully have more then enough to return to LKO. But that's a ways out yet.

In the meantime, I'll test some of my base building on the mun and build a space-plane for crew rotation.

Great plan.

Looks like you got serious business going on there in your career.

You are doing other missions while Duna mission is on it's way. Good job.

Don't be a stranger, send some screens, will ya.