Dres Hulk

[Friethjoph]

In the Dres Awarenes I proposed a Space Hulk mission. The original Proposal:

Spoiler

1. Send up a factory ship to KEO
2. Use it to set up an array of 7 KEO-stationary sattelites
3. Send Tons of supply missions to deliver Rocket parts to build a Hulk
4. Send more missions with Lithium and Liquid Hydrogen, food and other stuff to stock up the Hulk "Dres"
5. Send to Dres.
6. Go into DEO.
7. Build a scansat in Orbit, meanwhile do a basic scan for Kethane, Karbonite, Ore and other minerals.
8. Scan for Kethane with the scansat on DPO.
9. Construct a landing craft in orbit as we wait for the scan to conclude.
10. Land a mining operation.
11. To be determined.

 

To get this done, I use a pretty long Modlist, which at times results in extreme slowness, the inability to launch more than one ship in succession and spontanous crashing:

Spoiler

• Astroid Day
• BD Animation
• CIT Active Struts
• Extraplanetary Launchpads
• Karbonite (& Karbonite+)
• Karibou Expedition Rover
• Kerbal Aircraft Expansion
• Kerbal GPS
• Kethane Mining
• NearFuture IVA Props/Propulsion/Solar/Spacecraft Parts
• OctoSat
• OSE Workshop
• RasterProp Monitor
• Remote Tech
• Infernal Robotics (+Model Rework Beta)
• Stockalike Station Parts Expansion
• Toolbar
• TweakScale
• USI Core/Exploration Pack/Freight Transport Tech/Life Support/Survival Pack/Tools
• Kerbal Alarm Clock
• KAS/KIS
• MechJeb 2

 

So, Back to the mission. Or rather it's missian proposal paper in a nicely refined sketch:

 

As of now, I am during the Phase 5 - supplying the shipyard. Docking there is really a PITA by now.

 

Step 1: Getting a Factory ship into any orbit, then driving it to a circular a position where it can deploy the sattelites for the permanent communication array. Sadly... Started via CKan and not Steam, so no pics...

Step 2-4: Design the sattelites was pretty easy: command module, batteries, big sattelite dish, omnidirectional antenna, batteries and a resource scanner for the looks. Building them in situ was no problem at all, so deploying them on the final orbits with just a tiny ammount of xenon to correct courses was the most efficient way I could think of. To get to the next position of the 7, the apoapsis was changed to 3000 km for 2 orbits. Next maneuver is another circularisation, then the next sattelite is set free again. Phase 2: no pics Phase 3: unspectacular retrograde burns of Ar-Ion engines. Phase 4: No pics again, but fairly unspectacular...

Step 5: Supply missions - these take the longest. The more parts already make up the station, the longer the docking takes, as loading times go down. While the first 6 missions were sent up with a variant of the original rocket that brought up the main factory, the last 3 use a different setup, replacing the argon engines for the transfer burn with liquid fuel ones and a cockpit that does not return to earth. On the other hand, the sideways docking on these missions forces searching for a good angle before engaging the docking pilot. Also: Always use only one type of RCS only - attempts with mixed setups of 5-way and extra strong 2-way RCS enforced aborting one missionduring docking - it ran out of RCS in an angle and I had to revert to construction. Stuck here for now, as the redesign of the ship always crashes my game during launch or I loose tanks in a collision - Getting up a payload of 3 pilots and 40 Kerbals together with 80k rocket parts and supplies for a year is hard, and splitting it down to even MORE missions makes the station FAR bigger...

While I lack starting pics (I curse myself!, but HUGE ammounts of tanks tend to make the game crash... and I can't seem to press screenshot often enough) I have quite some of the docking, of the successes docking. Still working on getting 10 & 11 to fly....

 

EDIT: As the brackets and the imigur gallery adding do not work, the links...

Edit: Fixed pictures

Edited February 13, 2016 by Friethjoph

[Friethjoph]

CURSE IT! Something corrupted the savefile and all vessels were gone! BUT! The shiplist was still there... So... New try - tomorrow... Extracting ship files...

Retcon that - Found a backup in the folder as I was looking for the ship files! YAY!

Edited February 9, 2016 by Friethjoph

[Sanic]

That's a lot of mods.

Though I've always thought it better to use solars at Dres since that's the point were they are still useful. It's kind  of a way to respect Dres. Your call though.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Sanic

[Friethjoph]

Ok, hours or rearranging (and adding Scaled up Kickbacks in size 3) brought the transport into a stable orbit, even if it is almost deprived of fuel. At least they are safe while the sattelite network had started to move out of their positions...

 

REscue Mission with extra Fuel is in design...

 

Edited February 21, 2016 by Friethjoph

[Friethjoph]

Ok, Updating a few mods (USI stuff) resulted in my spacedock disappearing because of suddenly illegal parts...I still extracted the designs and hacked the craft file of the Hulk to remove the now invalid parts (the 4 stucturally required parts I replaced with non-illegal ones so I could replace them during Phase 0) and started anew! Totally Fresh! This time, I try to do more photos... So....

Phase 0 - fixing the messed up Space Hulk - took some hours to fix the ship, but with the updated mod, the thing got a bit nicer and more tidy. But yet no photos for security of this TOP SECRET project! A Security leakage however told that about 403.8 tons of materials and 101 tons of specialized parts would be needed to construct the cargo-tail and that this piece alone would weigh 504.8 tons and would carry more than 10 kilotons of materials to Dres. Including its cargo (which makes up almost the whole price) it costs an astonishing 1.8*10^8 Credits. The rest of the layout remains a mystery, but it is said, that more than 500 parts would make up the single ship, about 200 struts might be in use, and that the final assembly took about 10 to 15 attempts to add or move component groups to the right positions and strut them up. That a ship of these dimensions has to be built in orbit is obvious, even if 90% of its mass is comes from the cargo of its Kontainers.

Phase 1 - Launch a Spacedock. As the old dock became impossible, a totally new (USI) design was mandatory, and this time I have to transport 2 different types of materieals to construct the ships - Materials Kits and Specialized Parts - or the raw resources. To faciliate easier resupplying, a general change in the transport design is planned - instead of transporting hundreds of small containers, all transportation should be done in 5m Kontainers, the same ones that make up the CargoTail that leaked. To keep the station small, any subequent parts should be docked to a structural array, branching out. To ease docking and allow to move shipments from the rear end to an other dock, a pair of robo-arms is added - and already a relief mission is on the weay with the crew that forgot to get their bus to the launch platform, some RCS fuel and an emervency generator as well as food, so the Kerbals don't freeze as they work on the project...

 

 

Edited February 21, 2016 by Friethjoph

[Friethjoph]

Phase 2 - I did set up the KPS network by now (and forgot photos of how I did it - daaaam)...

Phase 3 - ..but now I never loose connection anymore when delivering a cargo up to the station, if I don't forget to switch on the larger antenna on the transports. But after about a dozen of increazingly weighted cargos (2500 Material Kits+2500 Specialized parts -> 5000 Material Kits -> 7500 Material Kits), I began to phase out rocket-transports. Why? I set up a ground base next to KSC and the USI logistics nodes on the ground and the space station handle the rest - the only problem is getting enough fuel to the ground base. A fuel rover Mk1 is sufficient for only 5000 Material kits, and up there I need 60k to build a 320k storeage to allow a break-free construction of the SH "Dres". Comes time, comes efficiency, right? Why do I use a ground base at all? The larger containers are near impossible top get up into orbit, especially the 160k ones. But bringing them to the ground base on wheels with only a 100k load per container and shooting the stuff up with the USI Module (and loads of LF-O) is much easier. Still, it is a PITA to get enough LF-O to the station. So the obvious solution: Bigger fuel rover Mk2 (75x red Rokomax tanks!). Like REALLY big. And a factory, just to test the item we will need on dres... Well, once we are in orbit there, we'll have to develop a skycrane landing stage... Dres has an atmosphere, right? Well, at least we don't plan to forget Mark Kerman (#15) there...

 

 

Edited February 21, 2016 by Friethjoph

[Friethjoph]

Phase 3 - Still hauling Resources to space - a 75 red rokomax was by far not enough. Then the supply station blew up - with our brave engineer luckily outside - so the new setup was smaller in parts count - who needs 12 solar panels per transport when a full side mounted battery is enough to bring the thing to the deployment place 2.3 km from the end of the runway? about 900000 Material kits and 160000 specialized parts were gathered to be brought to orbit, where storage for said 900000 Material kits already was present and those storeages for the other materials in construction... but even an extended, 90 red rokomax fuel transport only was able to shoot at best a third into orbit... well, rinse and repeat, isn't that the core of KSP? meanwhile the Technicans think about what other storeages will have to be brought up... the solution: actually none, because between finalizing the ship and releasing it, it can be filled up... But we will do so anyway - safer than storing 80k nuclear fuel on the ground, and we need to bring supplies to keep the Kerbals working. Still hauling materials to the re-setup ground base (yea, those things tend to blow up at times....) and then up... at least 'up' stores about most of the needed materials up to now...

 

 

[Friethjoph]

and, since I showed this as ReadPanda was streaming, a little sneakpeak to the actual SpaceHulk - you only see less than a half, maybe only a third of the ship! (still working on details - 554 parts atm, missing one essential one and possibly a few dozen lights)