Stock fairings are heavy indeed...

[Kermanzooming]

So I was designing my PROMISER (PROspecting, Mining, In-Situ Extraction and Refining) mission to Minmus, and had to wrap my gigantic rover (those are the huge wheels) with a 3.75 m fairing...

and the fairing only weights 15 tons!  

I was wondering if those procedural fairings I see everybody using on their KSP videos are lighter/more realistic...

[Palaceviking]

Not that unreasonable, you have to use the largest wheels?. 

Not sure about other fairings but a cargo spaceplane could neatly sidestep the problem. 

Or KIS/KAS and assemble en route.

[Streetwind]

You can actually tweak the mass of the stock fairings to your liking with a simple ModuleManager config. Both the mass of the base, and the mass per area of fairing wall. Look into the part configs of the fairing bases for the relevant fields you need to change.

Do note however that they're a bit heavier than normal for gameplay reasons. A real fairing may weigh less for the same size, but you need to carry it for much longer due to Earth being 11 times Kerbin's size. It's the same thing as with the stock engines having anemic TWR and the stock fuel tanks being too heavy for the fuel they contain: using fully realistic figures here would make getting into orbit way too easy. Beware of changing too much if you value the stock experience... or, if you want things fully realistic, consider Realism Overhaul

Edited September 9, 2016 by Streetwind

[Kermanzooming]

33 minutes ago, Palaceviking said:

Not that unreasonable, you have to use the largest wheels?. 

In my Kerbin testing the next smaller wheels kept breaking when the Ore tank was fully loaded, and were barely able to move the whole thing, so yes, I think I'm stuck with the huge wheels. 

34 minutes ago, Palaceviking said:

Not sure about other fairings but a cargo spaceplane could neatly sidestep the problem. 

Or KIS/KAS and assemble en route.

I'm pathologically unable to make planes; not spaceplanes, but any kind of (functional) plane. I tried once to create a Space Shuttle and had to give up... 

KIS and KAS could be an option, could send the wheels separately and attach them on site... although that presents its own set of challenges.

34 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Beware of changing too much if you value the stock experience... or, if you want things fully realistic, consider Realism Overhaul

I'm afraid Realism Overhaul is too real for me, I like the fictional setting of the stock experience.

[Val]

4 hours ago, Kermanzooming said:

In my Kerbin testing the next smaller wheels kept breaking when the Ore tank was fully loaded, and were barely able to move the whole thing, so yes, I think I'm stuck with the huge wheels.

Or you could make bogies instead of using single wheels. Improves grip and power enormously.

Quote

I'm pathologically unable to make planes; not spaceplanes, but any kind of (functional) plane. I tried once to create a Space Shuttle and had to give up... 

The Space shuttle is the hardest of all spaceplanes to make in KSP, because of it's inherently unbalanced design and asymmetric thrust.

[Aegolius13]

I have never found a use for the bigger fairings.  Too heavy, draggy and expensive.  I just launch big wheeled vehicles uncovered.  Not realistic, but it works.  You may want to do a more gradual gravity turn to compensate for the uneven aerodynamics.

You could try clipping the wheels closer to the vehicle, but that may invite the Kraken.  The big wheels are also a pain to drive: slow and hard to steer.   The smaller ruggedized wheels would probably work with that rover, and they're much lighter to boot.

Sometimes you can get the 2.5m fairing to fit wider loads, but it may suffer from the same problems at max size.

[eonmoon]

if your going with mods, bill and bob have their extraplanetary launchpads and uks systems, ship in the parts needed and build that big rover on  the moon or planet of your choice. even make the parts at the moon if you have enough resources. im still working at mine, but these are lovely rovers.

[N_Molson]

Real-life fairings are quite heavy, even though they are made of composites. They simply would tear off under the dynamic loads if they were thinner. As said above, the values in KSP are Kerbal-scaled, so I'd say that 15 tons for a huge streched fairing like yours is ok. That would be like putting a huge fairing atop a Saturn-V in real life. The result would indeed be very heavy.

[Kerbart]

I can live with heavy fairings. Most of the time my rockets look like flaming darts once they hit the 20km altitude and stay like that for a long time as the flight profile is nearly horizontal at that point. So my theory is that there's just a ton (literally) of ablative material on them.