Connecting Surface Modules

[Kerbal7]

Hi gang!

I am not having much luck with building surface bases. I can't figure out how to connect surface modules together and manipulate ground objects.

If I land 3 or 4 surface modules close together on the mun, for example, how do I move them around and connect them all together? 

And, if I have 10 Kerbals standing around an object, can they pick it up and move it into position?

Any helpful, introductory links, to base building would be appreciated. I can only find advanced tutorials that skip the basic knowledge that I'm looking for.

Thanks.

 

[Plusck]

The easy way is to build the basic elements horizontally in the SPH.

Just attach the large landing legs with snap on, along the centreline of your fuel tank / crew module, attach a docking port either end, and you've got a guaranteed standard height for modules to fit together. Then add some motorised wheels (or landing gear + RCS to push it), making sure they don't touch the ground when the landing legs are down, drive up to the next module and put the legs down.

For example: https://imgur.com/a/Kv7el

Spoiler

Replace end tanks with hitchhiker cans or crew modules, and you have a base. Or put a science module in the place of the middle tank.

This uses ruggedized wheels but I've since started using landing gear + RCS instead. One important thing to do to make driving around easier is to change your key bindings so that wheels are not controlled by the same keys as RCS or attitude controls. I use numberpad 4568 myself.

Useful tip: when placing engines in the middle, use the translate tool (press 2 in VAB or SPH) with snap on, and try to move the saddle tanks/octagonal struts or whatever you use to attach the engines. It will snap to the exact centre. This makes it easier to keep the thrust dead centre, and also to attach other stuff symmetrically.

 

Unfortunately Kerbals can't move much around. I have managed to right a fallen rocket by making my Kerbal fall underneath it, and when he sprang up he shifted the whole thing, but these days that sort of attempt tends to cause catastrophic damage.

 

 

[Spricigo]

There are a few ways to deal with that issue.

1.Don't connect. Make each module self-sufficient (batteries, generators, antenna, etc). To transfer resources between the modules use a mod like Simple Logistics or Dmagic's EVA resource transfer.

2.Pipes and cables from KIS/KAS mod.

3.The Klaw or Advanced Grabbing Unit, which can 'dock' to anything without requiring a matching docking port.

4.Docking Ports need to be designed in such way that permit docking. 

 

More often I just let the modules separated and use EVA resource transfer.

For  when I want yo dock I tend to let a downward facing senior port and enough room for a rover with a matching upward facing port get under the module. Then the module retracts it's landing legs/gears to easily couple into the 'flatbad' rover.

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

If you want to build your base on the ground, the base (or bottom section) of each module is what's most important. If you build each of your modules with the same base, you've guaranteed that they'll all have the same height at the docking ports. This will ensure the ability to dock them all together.

 

 

Here, the landing legs have been retracted, and the medium landing gear has been extended. Now, the rover will attach to the far-side docking port (the one on the opposite side from the landing gear), and push the module around using its own wheels and the medium landing gear on the module itself.

 

 

 

Once the modules are connected, the parts that are no longer needed are staged away.

 

 

The end result can look like pretty much anything you want it to. It doesn't necessarily need to be in a straight line like this. It was my first base, and I didn't really know what I was doing yet.

 

 

This is the rover that moved the modules around to put the base together (it then becomes the refueling rover for the fuel shuttle afterward). Part of the problem I ran into when building this base was that the rover's docking ports didn't quite line up with the docking ports on the modules (I was saved by the Klaw on the other end, which I highly recommend including). I learned afterward that it was because of the difference in gravity between Kerbin (where I tested everything) and the Mun. Now when I'm testing things like this, I use Alt/F12 to hack the gravity on Kerbin and set it to the same as whichever body I'm travelling to. It helps keep nasty surprises to a minimum.

And I know people have run into problems with bases being destroyed, but in looking through my list, this base on Mun, and the one on Minmus are both 70 years old. My Ike base is 63 years old. My Gilly base has been there for 60 years, and the one on Pol for 57. My other bases were built and landed as single vessels, so those probably don't really count. Point being that none of them have been damaged in any way, and they all still work fine (although the Gilly base has always been more trouble than its worth). None of this kind of thing is really necessary. It's mostly just for fun. You can land a single entity base or, for simply refueling purposes, a mining rover combined with a fuel shuttle works great. It all really just depends on what you want to do and how much time you want to spend doing it.

 

[Draalo]

1 hour ago, Cpt Kerbalkrunch said:

If you want to build your base on the ground, the base (or bottom section) of each module is what's most important. If you build each of your modules with the same base, you've guaranteed that they'll all have the same height at the docking ports. This will ensure the ability to dock them all together.

Omly two things i have to add to his very good explanation:

1st: Test all modules on the grassland near the runway. Allways.

2nd: Planetary Base Systems makes a lot of things easier because many parts are designed for a surface docking. There are parts with attachmentnodes for wheels so the same hight of dockingports is guaranted.

See pictures here:

 

[RX2000]

9 hours ago, Cpt Kerbalkrunch said:

If you want to build your base on the ground, the base (or bottom section) of each module is what's most important. If you build each of your modules with the same base, you've guaranteed that they'll all have the same height at the docking ports. This will ensure the ability to dock them all together.

I've never made a real base in stock, but I've noticed that mods make all of this MUCH easier.

[Spricigo]

36 minutes ago, RX2000 said:

I've never made a real base in stock, but I've noticed that mods make all of this MUCH easier.

IMHO actually not that much easier, the 'difficulty' of stock bases is mostly lack of experience about what works and what don't work. Experiment a bit, learn a bit and 'proper' base build become second nature like pretty much everything in (stock) KSP

[Snark]

14 hours ago, Kerbal7 said:

Any helpful, introductory links, to base building would be appreciated.

A lot of different ways to go about it, as has been excellently described by the various folks already posting here. 

I'll go ahead and say that far and away my own favorite way of doing this is with the pipes/connectors from Kerbal Attachment System (KAS).  I love them, I wish they were stock.  The connectors are just a small, radially-attachable "port" looking thing that you can place just about anywhere.  So, to connect two vessels on the surface, all you need is for each of them to have a connector port on it, and have them parked within a couple dozen meters of each other, with the ports approximately facing each other.  Then send out a kerbal on EVA to click on a port, choose "Connect", walk over to the other port, click on it and "Connect", and bam!  you've got a "pipe" connecting the two craft, which the game now considers to be one craft, same as when you dock two vessels.  When you want to disconnect, it's easy; just send the kerbal out on EVA again to do the disconnect.

It's simple, it's quick, it's elegant, and there's no hassle.  I've tried the various other approaches people describe here... maybe that works for other folks, but personally, I found them to be an incredible hassle, seriously tedious and un-fun for me.  I enjoy difficult engineering challenges, but not when they seem "artificially difficult", i.e. difficult only because the game is lacking features to make it appropriately difficult.  That's a subjective judgment, of course.    It's just that if I'm playing a game where we have little green guys who can build ships that fly all over the solar system, "can't park two things next to each other and plug in a hose" seems like a ... rather arbitrary limitation.

Anyway, just wanted to give my +1 to the "KAS connector pipes" solution.

[Geonovast]

25 minutes ago, Snark said:

It's simple, it's quick, it's elegant, and there's no hassle.

Usually probably maybe.  I've had hassle.  I may have been abusing the feature, though.  I've had the pipe connections break or even move to a different spot on craft load (which would actually happen when connecting the pipes, since you're actually creating and loading a new craft)

You can see on the right that the pipe is broken.  I have to repair it every time I load something in that area.

[RX2000]

4 hours ago, Spricigo said:

IMHO actually not that much easier, the 'difficulty' of stock bases is mostly lack of experience about what works and what don't work. Experiment a bit, learn a bit and 'proper' base build become second nature like pretty much everything in (stock) KSP

Dunno with the one base mod with the K&K parts, you can just slap wheels on them & docking ports & drive them around to wherever you want & link them right up. Easy peasy. With KIS/KAS you can actually build the base or parts of the base wherever you want & then just link the parts together with pipes.....

[Spricigo]

@RX2000 maybe you didn't get to the point where stock mechanics are easy enough or (more probable) I have a lower expectation for how easy it should/can be. 

In any case its more a matter of how much I'm willing to mod my game to get a more pleasing gameplay and how much of a contribution each individual mod can do.  I don't find necessary to add yet another mod (that I will need to manage updates and cope with the eventual performance hit) for base building. However, I have at least one mod that give me a big advantage for base management and resource transfer in general: EVA resource Transfer (thanks @DMagic).

 

[Kerbal7]

Thanks for all the advice. I give them a go and find what works best for me.