Ring Station--Some assembly required

[Perry Apsis]

Took me probably around 30 launches to get all the pieces just right.

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It takes three launches to get it together if you get it all right the first time. One to get the core up there, and then two launches each containing three ring sections. The Kerbal engineers call them "Banana Boats" because they're not very imaginative--you've met Bill, right? When the interstage fairings blow, the capsule is free to re-enter with its tiny little rocket motor and fuel tank. The stage containing the ring sections has no reaction wheels or boosters, only RCS thrusters, which it uses to dock with the station. The robotic arm plucks the sections off the Banana Boat and places them into the ring.

The part I like best is the way the docking ports for the ring sections could be rotated using docking washers, so that it didn't matter how the section was oriented when it was attached. All you had to do was rotate the docking washer until the other end lined up and it would just click into place.

Okay, I lied. There's something just incredibly cool about turning on the motor and watching the core spin up and then slow down and finally become stationary as the RCS thrusters bring the ring up to speed. If I had the tools to capture video I'd have done so.

There seems to be something a tad wonky about the way the Imgur album is displayed. Sorry about that. I couldn't figure out how to get it to work better. If you click on the individual images it will load the whole thing, albeit rather small.

Mods including, but not limited to:

Vessel View

MechJeb (because 30+ launches is really enough)

Infernal Robotics for the arm parts (9 of them!), the station rotor, the docking rotatrons used to bring the ring sections into alignment with the second docking port, and to rotate the Banana Boat so that the arm could grab the sections

Kerbal Inventory System/Kerbal Attachment System for the electromagnet at the end of the arm and for the explosives I used to clear out all the parts that didn't fit or that I dropped while trying to grab or attach.

Procedural Parts for the spokes, the central tank (two "waisted" conical tanks, end-to-end)

Procedural Fairings for the Interstage fairings for the Banana Boat

RasterPropMonitor because why live without it?

Haystack Continued so I could find the target amid the crowd of castoffs, debris, dropped Space Spanners, and generally the mess I hadn't gotten around to blowing up yet

Docking sounds because it's just better

CKAN, because that's only a fraction of the mods I use regularly and without an awesome tool like CKAN, it would be a pain keeping them all straight and up to date

Thanks the incredible modding community, and to those whose examples helped me learn how to make something like this, and of course to Squad for creating a platform where all of the above can happen and for letting me buy the game for cheap a long time ago. :-)