Project ABEI (Anywhere But Eve, Indefinitely)

[WhiteKnuckle]

Sorry no cool story line here. Just me touring the System for the first time. Ahead will be the mundane ramblings of a madman, lessons in minimalism and mission creep, probably more than a few stupid questions if anyone is around to answer, and maybe if we're lucky some pretty pictures.

Mission Goals:

-Step foot on every body in the system aside from Eve (Jool and the Sun obviously excluded)

-Rescue Valantina (stuck in between Duna and Kerbin orbits on an escape scooter)

-Don't loose any parts, be able to refuel in every system.

-Return to Kerbin, land safely.   

Settup:

Sandbox, no mods, no real self imposed conditions, minimal part clipping. No dV calculations done, don't have KER or MJ have no idea what it can do. Everything is SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)

The Ship:

Ramble Into Bramble 

The RIB is actually three ships, not counting the two uncontrolled cargo pods.

 The Ramble front and center, on the left the engines of Bramble are visible, and Into parked on the right.

Ramble: 

Ramble is the main interplanetary drive, living quarters, and fuel storage section. It comes up on a booster with Into which I'll document later, then docks with Bramble and heads off to the Mun to refuel (took about 18t of fuel off the first RIB... more on that later too. But it will need a small top-off to get to Mun or Minmus)

Into:

Into is a workhorse. It's a main engine pod, a polar scan-sat, an RCS tug, a personal shuttle, a fully fledged interplanetary ship if need be.

Into grabbing the Krayon, Bramble visible in background.

The idea is, upon getting captured by a body, when your Ap is very high Into will detach and put itself in a polar orbit to do a resource scan. When complete it will meet the other ships in an equatorial orbit to help docking (it is the only ship with RCS, although the others can be docked without it by a skilled hand) 

Bramble in next post...

 

 

[WhiteKnuckle]

Bramble:

The Bramble is the result of a lot of hard work. Four main designs and hundreds of test runs went into something that can SSTO from Kerbin, lift enough ore to refuel itself indefinitely, be easy to fly, not take forever to refuel, and most importantly: Low part count!

 Bramble with the Ore Tank on it's nose

Here it is lifting off the Mun with 45t of ore on board. Managed to dock with Ramble and only needed to convert about 2.5t of ore back into LF/O to be able to land again. So two trips should fill the whole RIB up from fumes.

Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

The Krayon:

The Krayon is the orange tank, it's nothing but that and a docking port, it has no control of it's own. Is needed for getting the Bramble off Kerbin without a booster, and will be used on Tylo, and anywhere else I need extra fuel to get into orbit.

Edited February 14, 2016 by WhiteKnuckle

[Just Jim]

Very nice ship design!!!

[Iago]

I really hope you can provide a download for this beautiful piece of engineering!

[LiveHereNow]

Awesome looking ship.  Would love to see some video of takeoff and possibly some of the docking/landing.  I'm fascinated by the power requirements for drilling/converting and the overall efficiency.  Please do share craft file (if you're cool with doing so).

[WhiteKnuckle]

On ‎2‎/‎14‎/‎2016 at 8:37 AM, Just Jim said:

Very nice ship design!!!

Thank you sir, it's obviously not as stylized as the stuff you make for Emiko. My computer gets laggy just looking at some of your pics! So I've tried to come up with a compromise that I jokingly refer to as "elegant industrial" Really it's just using the fewest parts possible in the most aesthetically pleasing way. The Ramble is pretty plain looking compared to my last iteration of an interplanetary stage:

 

Unfortunately it has 50 more parts than the Ramble, and getting the fuel to drain correctly was tedious. But I'll be revisiting the ring design at some point.

 

@Iago and @LiveHereNow I'm glad you guys like it. I'd be happy to put up craft files in a few days. A few small things to do first, one is I actually need to test it out. I'm thinking Moho will be a good testbed for both ships before I head out to the Joolian system to tackle the really tough places (Tylo, Laythe)

Another problem is, I don't have a save file for the Bramble. I was an idiot and was relying on the auto-save function while I was fine tuning the design. Then after I got it to orbit I launched a refueling mission and over-wrote the auto save. Hopefully I can dig into the save file and copy the ship without mucking anything up, if not I'll just have to rebuild her from an earlier version.

And lastly, for a release version I'd probably add more RCS thrusters. Using this ship requires a lot of docking and close maneuvering. Now I don't mind doing all that with an underpowered and hopelessly unbalanced RCS system, frankly I find docking to be an almost meditative process, and very relaxing. I know not everyone is deranged like that. So it's probably worth adding 8 or 12 parts to the count to have some RCS on the Ramble at least, maybe some on the Krayon as well so that if the Into is docked to the bottom of Bramble and the Krayon is on top the whole combined ship will have a somewhat balanced RCS.

But yes, one way or the other I will put up the craft files in a day or two.

 

Edited February 16, 2016 by WhiteKnuckle

[Mister Dilsby]

Very nice, modular design. I've no doubt you could put an Eve lander somewhere as well--of course you might have to lose some parts to get down and back up, but it might well be worth it  

[loch.ness]

Those are some very pretty designs.  I particularly like "Into" and the interplanetary ring tug.

 

I'll be coming back to "spy" on this thread next time I go interplanetary.  I'm currently smacking my head against the wall trying to get a base set up in the arctic for my mission report only to hit one bug/crash/issue after another and feeling a long way away from going interplanetary again - but these designs are truly inspiring.

[WhiteKnuckle]

17 hours ago, LiveHereNow said:

Awesome looking ship.  Would love to see some video of takeoff and possibly some of the docking/landing.  I'm fascinated by the power requirements for drilling/converting and the overall efficiency. 

I can take short videos, but I find that running the video capture software for any long length of time crashes my computer.

Balancing power production, stockpiling, and use is probably the hardest thing to get right on an ISRU ship that has low margins. Getting something that works on the Mun isn't that hard. But if you're going out to say Tylo, with high gravity and low solar radiation then you have to really think about every part. Since I haven't taken this thing out there yet, I'm not sure that I got any of it right. But I'm pretty confident.

The Bramble has no solar power. Too draggy, too part intensive, and out at Jool they barely work even on the day side of planets. It has 4 RTGs to trickle charge the battery banks, and two fuel cells for keeping the mining and refining going on the surface when needed. Fuel cells are fine on the surface as long as you're above the break even point for the converter, engineer, and ore-patch you're using. But in orbit they'll cut into your margins, so Batteries are key, the big 4k ones barely weigh anything. So when in doubt, simply add more batteries. That way even with a small amount of solar or RTG power you can convert a lot of ore.

Edited February 16, 2016 by WhiteKnuckle

[WhiteKnuckle]

@Kuzzter The thought had occurred to me. But I hate Eve, so skipping it in the name of not loosing any parts is no big sacrifice.

@loch.ness I too really like Into, and you can see his predecessor in the shot with the ring. That idea got spawned by the need to bring the awful high-altitude ore scanner. It's big, awkward, and needs a ton of power to transmit it's data. So it needs a decent sized probe, and lugging that probe all around the system was not something I was looking forward to. But by making it do dual duty as a part of the main engines made it a lot more palatable since it's not wasted mass when it's not being used as an ore scanner.

Into is big enough to be a ship of it's own really. I hadn't planned on docking the Krayon to it, but once I did I immediately saw the possibility of separating the whole mission into two ships if I needed to due to lag or dv reasons.

Edited February 16, 2016 by WhiteKnuckle

[WhiteKnuckle]

Haven't had much time to play recently, but did start working my way to Moho by way of Eve and Gilly.

In this shot you can see Into has just moved the Krayon from the front of the overall ship to the rear so that Bramble may undock and head for the surface. This was one of the key features I needed to test, but it worked easily, Into has more than enough authority to move the empty fuel tank around and dock it. 

"One small step for... dammit."

[FlyingPete]

Interesting design concept! Usually 'grand tour' type missions tend to have an identifiable mother ship, with various smaller craft docked to it. With this it's just several components of equal importance that combine to form a whole. I'm a big user of the 'function over form' aesthetic too

[WhiteKnuckle]

On ‎2‎/‎18‎/‎2016 at 7:08 AM, FlyingPete said:

Interesting design concept! Usually 'grand tour' type missions tend to have an identifiable mother ship, with various smaller craft docked to it. With this it's just several components of equal importance that combine to form a whole. I'm a big user of the 'function over form' aesthetic too

Thanks Pete, I think that the post-1.0 world killed huge motherships. At least for my computer. I'd love to have included a small spaceplane for Duna and Laythe, or an Eve lander, but I just can't deal with the lag. Even the RIB at 160 parts gets a little laggy during docking maneuvers.

The upside of course is that it's made me a better designer by forcing me to strip all the fat outta my ships. If 1.1 helps with higher partcounts then I can add more modules to give me increased utility, like a lab and a science pod that could be carried on top of Bramble. Modular design FTW.

[FlyingPete]

20 hours ago, WhiteKnuckle said:

If 1.1 helps with higher partcounts then I can add more modules to give me increased utility, like a lab and a science pod that could be carried on top of Bramble. Modular design FTW.

The thing about modular design is you can just add new sections to the existing ship by returning to Kerbin for refit, rather than having to launch a new one. On low-gravity bodies like Minmus or Gilly, you could just bring the lab down to the surface on top of Bramble and work there.

[WhiteKnuckle]

Leaving Gilly.

[Iago]

The lander can SSTO of Tylo, right? And also, does the whole thing have any cargo capacity (for transporting station modules and the like)?

[WhiteKnuckle]

30 minutes ago, Iago said:

The lander can SSTO of Tylo, right? And also, does the whole thing have any cargo capacity (for transporting station modules and the like)?

The lander can SSTO off of Kerbin and doesn't use any airbreathing engines, so I assume it'll SSTO Tylo... but haven't tested it there yet.

There's no cargo capacity, the lander does have a 2.5m service bay that is mainly full of fuel cells but you could squeeze some scientific instruments in there if you really wanted to. To carry anything big you could just put Sr. Docking ports on ether end of it and add it to the train. That's the advantage of a modular design. You're only limited by how bendy the ship gets (not too bad right now) and how low a TWR you can deal with (leaving Gilly last night with full fuel and full ore was... well slow is an understatement)

[WhiteKnuckle]

Success and Setback: The Moho Chapter

 

Spoiler

So... I lost the Krayon.

Well, I didn't lose it. It's giant and orange, and can't just roll away under the radiator to melt into a bright waxy puddle. 

I was forced to ditch the Krayon because I'm an idiot.

 

When filling up at Gilly, I left the converter on LF+Ox after filling up Bramble instead of switching it over to LF only. This caused the Krayon to fill up with 17 tons of useless Oxidizer. Plus an extra 8.8 tons in the upper tanks on the Bramble that I didn't need to land on Moho.

I then quick-saved. 

I tried three times to manage a capture. But it turns out the RIB just doesn't have the DV to carry an extra 25+ tons of useless payload to Moho. At least not with my crappy burn plotting.

On try number four I gave in and ditched her into a solar orbit. With Ramble out of fuel and in an eccentric orbit, and not even daring to bring the Ore tank, Bramble managed a landing with a little over two hundred units of fuel left over.

Without the Ore tank, Bramble isn't terribly efficient, but it was able to meet up with Into and the Ore tank, which were running on Monoprop, with enough left over for another landing.

This second landing gave me enough fuel to rendezvous with the derelict Ramble.

  

With the whole crew back together I was able to raise my orbit up and do a plane change to get me into an equatorial orbit.

So Now I'm filling up for the last time. I'm debating going after the Krayon, but it's just a fuel tank, and this isn't for a challenge. So I'll probably just send another one up and have it meet the RIB at Duna or somewhere else along the line. 

Overall I'm pleased with how everything is working, the only faults have been my piloting. 

 

 

 

[Mister Dilsby]

Well if you're not above a little shenanigans, you could always install hyperedit (if you don't already have it) and delete the oxidant. Or just edit the quantity to zero in your save file. Somehow throwing away a resource (as opposed to adding it) never seemed like cheating to me 

[WhiteKnuckle]

10 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

Well if you're not above a little shenanigans, you could always install hyperedit (if you don't already have it) and delete the oxidant. Or just edit the quantity to zero in your save file. Somehow throwing away a resource (as opposed to adding it) never seemed like cheating to me 

Yeah in perfect world we'd just be able to open a valve and dump fuel we don't want into space.