Kurvy Miner!

[CrashTestDanny]

I was cruising the miners thread earlier today and a ship that looked a bit like this one caught my eye. So I put together something with the same basic outline and then set to adding my touches. I believe credit for the original ship goes to algwat, who posted the pic in the miners thread. Everything past that original pic was my doing - I hope you guys like it!

I found this Big Beautiful girl in a thread about miners and knew immediately that this was quality! Sure, she was under-utilized and under-appreciated. She had a Mk-3 command pod on top for the guys to just party in. Some other hardware I didn't recognize was stuck up there too, but she looked like too classy a lady to leave that way. So I took her back to my hangar and worked with her a little bit and here is the result. She sports 8 drills that can run virtually free in the daytime thanks to 8 Gigantors. At night, turn on her 8 fuel cell arrays and each one can power a drill. Make sure your highest level engineer is operating her so that you get the bonuses, She only has room for one Kerbal and she's looking for the right engineer to spend her life with!

On the ground, her eight drills can bring up an incredible 3600 units of ore per hour, filling her ore tanks in less than three hours! The on-board ISRU will need about 7 hours to fill her fuel tanks. Running drills and ISRU simultaneously for 7-8 hours should result in full fuel and ore tanks (assuming drill output is 1. for your actual time to fill tanks, divide this time by your drills' ore extraction rate, so if your drills are putting out 0.5, the time to fill ore and fuel will be 14-16 hours). A cozy living space is provided for her special Kerbal in a Mk-1 lander can. The airlock opens to a convenient walk-around balcony and ladders provide access to the surface or the top docking port.

Off the ground, 12 Thud engines provide her impetus while 16 Vernors provide 6-axis control. She can get where she's going and turn on a dime (whatever that is)!

She is powered by Gigantor solar panel arrays in the light or by fuel cell arrays in the dark. She carries her own ISRU, so you can spend all of that fuel on landing and be confident that you'll get home again. Want to go visit every rock in the system? This Big Beautiful Lady can take you almost anywhere (Don't try to land on Eve, Tylo, Laythe, Jool, or Kerbin). You might manage it on Tylo, Laythe, or Kerbin, but there would be no margin for error.

In vacuum, fully loaded with fuel AND ore, she has 1840 delta-V. Without the ore, she packs 3300+. If you launch with full ore tanks, get to orbit and convert all that ore to fuel, you'll have about 3k available, so your total budget without refueling is over 4800! Where can't you go with 4800 delta-V to spend!? TWR on Moho is 1.95 - enough to get you to a rendezvous at an orbiting refinery, space station, transfer vehicle, or whatever. Two axial sr. docking ports allow her to join up with a space station core and integrate into the station, adding her thrust and control assets to the station. Four shielded docking ports on her arms allow smaller craft to dock around the axial core.

Ore capacity: 8700

Liquid Fuel capacity: 11340

Ox capacity: 13860

Mass:

Dry: 60.585t

Wet: 188.246t

Laden: 275.246t

Thrust:

Atm: 1298.364MN

Vac: 1440.000MN

If my long-winded description of her has in any way diminished your appreciation for this fine lady, then my apologies to both you and her. Without further ado, I give you a rising star among miners, Kurvy Miner!

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Downloads:

Kurvy Miner alone

Kurvy Miner +LV

Danny. Let me know how you like her!

- - - Updated - - -

I cut that album down to 33 images. Note 2100 delta-V left after landing on the Mun. The LV got me to a Munar Periapsis of 19km with about 50dV left in the LV. Took about 250 to circularize and about 900 to change plane, deorbit, and land. Landing was uneventful. It was about 60m away from the target, but I think that is mostly because of the lower than normal starting orbit (I usually shoot for 28k). But obviously, this craft is just easy to deal with - I hope you guys enjoy!

Danny

[Camaron]

Very cool. Need more well-lit shots.

[Cupcake...]

Very nice! I like what you've done with the colours too.

Cupcake...

[CrashTestDanny]

I'll try to get some on Minimus - sorry about that...

I almost lost Catelyn and Kurvy a few moments ago and learned a valuable lesson. I fired her up to leave the Mun with her tanks up to about 3k delta V and a trace of ore left. The initial ascent to 8km went fine, but suddenly she started spinning like one of the engines had gone bad. I took her off auto-pilot, killed the engines, regained control, and started trying to complete the circularization manually, but the same thing happened. I recently picked up GoodSpeed's tank balancer and had the fuel tanks balanced, but the ore tanks were way out of balance. So I fixed that (balanced the ore tanks) and tried again, but still got the same result... WTH!?!? This time all tanks were balanced but then I noticed I was out of electric. I had a fuel cell array started up just to make sure I had juice, but I was still out and not getting any. Dark side of the Mun so solar doesn't work here. So I checked the ISRU and sure enough it is running trying to convert that last bit of ore - and sucking up the electric. I know I read something about how engines deprived of intake air shut down in order of placement or something and I figure the same thing is happening here. I had just enough electric to run some, but not all of my rockets. So I shut down the ISRU and tried again and no more problems.

So the lesson I learned is shut down the ISRU before taking off!

Danny

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks Cupcake! Means a lot coming from such a creative designer! Despite and (tongue-in-cheek) disparaging remarks I might have made about your Pickaxe (all due to jealousy I might add!) I love your designs. They are sleek and unusual while still being incredibly functional!

Danny

[FungusForge]

Definitely looks interesting.

On another note rapidly clicking through the album and seeing a successful mission in reverse was quite entertaining.

[CrashTestDanny]

Definitely looks interesting.

On another note rapidly clicking through the album and seeing a successful mission in reverse was quite entertaining.

You must have started looking at it right after I posted it! Shortly after that I noticed that and rearranged the album on imgur...

Here's a smaller album with better lighting. This is after the almost disastrous, but completely successful Munar orbit and Minimus transfer burn...

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Danny

- - - Updated - - -

... or maybe it's still messed up??? That's weird since it seems to be in the correct order on Imgur... It's also been trimmed down on Imgur, but oh well - I'm not gonna waste time trying to chase that - got rockets to build!!

Danny