an asteroid ship?

[RocketBlam]

On 4/14/2016 at 8:54 AM, steuben said:

A better design would be setting it up as a puller design rather than a pusher. With the claw on free pivot the centre of mass takes care of itself.

That's what I did. It's not just lining up the thrust. The claw flexes so much that is is almost impossible to control. 

 

[ExtremeSquared]

On 4/20/2016 at 4:28 AM, Renegrade said:

Er, this "puller" business sounds a lot like the pendulum rocket fallacy... unless some wonky aspect of Unity/PhysX or KSP physics is making that actually work (which is entirely possible heh).  I've never used a puller myself, I always managed to get by with pushers.

I haven't read the story, but if you're talking about festooning an asteroid with controllable, useful parts, you can already do this in stock.  Keep in mind that the asteroid is in fact a craft like anything else - a single part, big, ugly craft.  Therefore, you can attach anything you want to it via claws and control it.

My pusher craft have little modules that detach that are basically a probe core, panels, batteries, RCS thrusters and a claw.  I re-attach these all over the asteroid with the claws, and then I have solar input and RCS thrust from everywhere.  Other uses could be made too - an almost-balanced aster-ship could be balanced more finely with some sort of ballast attachment, for example, or crew modules could be added, ISRU modules, etcetc.

The pendulum fallacy applies to rigid rockets though. The rubbery rockets of KSP end up bending out of alignment in compression, but tension acts to straighten them out. Using KJR mod makes the whole thing less of an issue.