The Go-Anywhere*) Vessel

[Laie]

Hello,

I'd like to pose you the challenge of designing a vessel that can go anywhere*), over and over again. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the payload will be tourists (one or many, I don't care); I want to see your solution for getting them wherever they want*), and return them back to Kerbin. And then to pick up the next tourist(s) on the surface of Kerbin and do it all over again.

*) except Eve. Some things are just asking for too much.

 

Requirements:

• I consider this to be more of an engineering challenge, so I don't expect you to go out and actually land on every friggin body in the system ('cept Eve). I do expect you, however, to convince me that the vessel is up to the task.
• The vessel should work. It should be capable, not only of landing only Tylo and coming back again, but also of reaching the more far-flung destinations (and be able to come back, of course).
• You may ISRU as much and as often as you like. Intermediate stops are fine.
• Refueling at KSC will be alright, but  show that it's feasible. Craft should be able to land safely within a few minute's drive from KSC, without much saveloading.
• Please don't overdo it with the flybys. I'd rather see you take a refueling stop at some intermediate body than snatch a gravity assist from it. From a reviewer's perspective, "Refuel on Mun, refuel on Vall, Refuel on Tylo" is much easier to follow than a gravitational pinball game.
• Very stocky vessels. Reason is that I want to recognize the parts I see. This pretty much requires you to go all stock with the engines, and remain quite stock-like with the tanks.
• Your ISRU setup should "just work". By which I mean that one just needs to turn things on and wait in warp. If it requires frequent toggling, you fail the test. I also want to know how you find the ore deposits to land on ("I pre-scanned the system with Scansat" will be a perfectly acceptable answer, or even "I tried till I got lucky" -- really, I just want to know).

Submission Guidelines:

 

Show your work. Make sure to have some data displays (at least the resource panel, preferably also a dV readout) open in enough of your pictures for me to ensure that you didn't just use infinite fuel. If you prefer to make a video submission, please be so kind and provide a few stills with readable data to serve that purpose. Also don't always show your vessel from the same side: I want to see your design. Ideally one should be able to reconstruct it from the screen.

If some things are not immediately obvious from looking at them, a few explaining words will be appreciated.

Please don't spam a forum post with dozens of high-q PNGs. Use an external gallery like Imgur, or at the very least take the time to turn the PNGs into JPEGs.

Why?

Ever since ISRU is a thing, I tried to come up with such vessels. For some reason or other, I can't find many ways of solving the problem. (I also tried to make true go-anywhere vessels and found the results outright ridiculous -- hence the limitation to anything but Eve). Recently, several so-called SSTAs showed up on reddit which were anything but -- basically spaceplanes with nukes that could, of course, provide a shuttle service to Laythe and most smaller moons, but would struggle with reaching Moho, much less could they land on Tylo.

That brought me back to that old idea. But once again, my ships are variations on a single theme.

That's where you come in --  I'd like to know if my solutions really are the only ones or if I lack imagination. I hope to attract a few fellow builders who find this interesting enough to come up with and show their designs. Please understand why I don't show my own ships, at least not right away. Likewise, the "rules" are as fuzzy as they are because I don't want to send people down a certain path.

I don't have plans for offering a badge. I also won't keep this challenge going forever (don't see why it should, actually I'm afraid that it won't catch on at all). I do, however, promise to pay attention until the end of September and will post short descriptions in the OP, pointing out neat features, great achievements and the likes.

Edited September 1, 2017 by Laie
Some rewriting, though the gist remains the same

[sdj64]

Basically, a rocket SSTO that can make it to Minmus?  I have tried to make designs like that for a while, with the added cargo of a couple of exploration vehicles (plane, lander, rover, scan sat) and talked about my progress in the Megaship Engineers thread.  Moho would be accomplished with a stop at Gilly, but might not be possible with a chemical-only design.  This is not a submission but I would like to eventually go on a Jool 5 mission with a ship like this.

 

Several successful designs have been shown in the Jool 5 Challenge as well, which would fit the criteria for your challenge.

[sevenperforce]

Just one question: Can I assemble this ship in orbit?

[Laie]

3 hours ago, sdj64 said:

Basically, a rocket SSTO that can make it to Minmus? [...] talked about my progress in the Megaship Engineers thread.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a rocket. My working assumption is that a rocket will ultimately be a lot smaller / more reasonable, but then again, I'm not a plane guy.

Those specimens look good, though from the looks the part count must be scary.

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Just one question: Can I assemble this ship in orbit?

Do as you wish. It doesn't need to be an SSTO or a "single vessel" in the stricter sense -- but at some point it should be finished, capable of cruising the system forever without requiring any more parts.

Edit to add: my own vessel just ended up 100m/s short of a direct Minmus-Moho trip.

Edited September 1, 2017 by Laie

[sdj64]

4 hours ago, Laie said:

It doesn't necessarily need to be a rocket. My working assumption is that a rocket will ultimately be a lot smaller / more reasonable, but then again, I'm not a plane guy.

Those specimens look good, though from the looks the part count must be scary.

I meant using rocket engines rather than jets, which would not be able to land on Tylo.  Most of my designs are HOTOL in atmospheres and could be considered "planes" on Kerbin and Laythe.  Part count is not bad, about 150 for the mothership itself, although it carries 200+ parts of vehicles.

My main issue with vertical rocket designs for this purpose is that it's hard to deploy vehicles and recover them from vertical cargo bays, and horizontal bays on a vertical design lead to high drag.

[Kergarin]

Like this?

 

It's not exactly what you are asking for, because it includes Eve. Sorry

Edited September 5, 2017 by Kergarin

[Laie]

 

@sdj64 I, too, meant rocket engines. However useful jets may be when you can use them, most of the time you don't. They may not be much of a burden on the Mun, but once you also toss Moho and Tylo into the mix, I think it's easier to make a rocket ship work on Kerbin than take jets to all the places.

(the above was written, but not posted, a few days ago -- I've since played with jets a little and found that they're quite useful)

4 hours ago, Kergarin said:

like this

 

Yes, like this. It's very much a brute-force approach, but that's what you get for hitting Eve. For all it's bulk it's still quite shapely, I have to admit. Could you add some technical detail?

On interplanetary mode, I expect dV on the order of 6km/s at an initial 3m/s or so? How long does it take to refill, how do you find the ore deposits (do you even bother)? So much inertia and just a single docking port, how do you keep it from dangling like a church bell? I've been underwhelemed by autostruts on much less daring contraptions....

[Kergarin]

Thanks 

I'm playing stock an never had a dV display so I can't tell. I have a large drill and a large converter, so I can drill everywhere and don't have to care. The refill time varies between a few days or weeks. The lander slides in verry tight, but I think the main stability is coming from the autostruts. When autostruts came out, it felt like cheating to me. But since everybody uses them, I now think it's ok, if you use it to create realistic things.

[Laie]

For the time being, sevenperforce has hooked me with his Duna Mission. Still, I'd like to show what I've been up to. For starters, I'd like to give kudos to @astrobond for his ISRU Rhino Explorer which is my personal benchmark for a great combination of utility and attractiveness. My desire to do (or at least see) something that does one better has spawned this challenge.

As for myself, I like to do tailsitter rockets and arguably the best so far has been a asymmetric no-nukes design, which, sadly, still struggles to make it from KSC to Minmus without needing a gravity assist from the Mun. It also lacks the range to make a direct move to Moho, requiring a fuel stop on Gilly -- I'm not so fond of actually flying that I'd have started over, instead I went back into the workshop

A quick attempt at building a spaceplane around a M3 passenger compartment worked surprisingly well; that vessel can handle most places ('cept Tylo) but lacks ISRU; it would still require a mothership. Ultimately it suffers the fate of all my mothership-and-shuttle designs: moving from place to place while only landing the shuttle is the exception, not the rule. If nine times out of ten you need to land the whole shebang for refueling, why bother with a shuttle at all?

Anyway, after seeing a plane work I tried to scale it up to include ISRU. The result is a 200t frankenplane of a vessel, that can land (and drill) both horizontally and sitting upright. Again, getting to Minmus requires a gravity assist (though maybe I should try offloading more oxidizer rather than packing some ore for refining in orbit) but from then on it has the usual stats: well over 6km/s on nukes alone on 2m/s², with enough combined nuke+rocket capacity to make a trip from Vall to Tylo.  Boring.

Remember, they're that big because I wanted to include a sizeable crew capacity.

Of all these, the rocket still the design I like the most. I managed to match the offset CoM and CoT so well you don't notice that it's there. The gliding properties aren't anything to write home about, but fully sufficient to make it to KSC, pull it up into a stall, and then back into the parking lot on rocket power.

[AeroGav]

I recently built this - https://kerbalx.com/AeroGav/Starsailor

5 Seats for 40 tons.    As a liquid fuel only ship, it gets to Kerbin orbit with 2600dv left.     With full tanks (after IRSU somewhere) you have over 4800.    TWR on the twin nukes is fair, 0.3 to 1 or better, enough to do injection burns in one shot.       I made a test flight with it to Laythe via Minmus and Duna.   I'm a better pilot than astronaut so i like having all that delta V that i can get to Jool without fancy gravity assists.       Without chemical rockets however it lacks the TWR to go everywhere.

Vall is probably doable if you take off with less than full load - just enough fuel to reach Pol or Bop.  But not Tylo.        I need to build a mk2 version which will carry a small Tylo lander in its cargo bay, that should work.      Eve is obviously impossible, stock,   and as for Moho,  I'd surely have thought not,  unless you are much cleverer with gravity assists than i am.    I went there once,  in an  ion ship that had 18000dV in LKO.    The spaceplane that launched it actually gave it a 1000dv kick to start the ejection from Kerbin ,  we got gravity assists from Eve and the capture burn was split over 5 passes to utilize oberth.     Didn't have enough Xenon left to even land the thing at Moho :-(

 

Edited September 8, 2017 by AeroGav