Strutless Monstrosities

[Bluejayek]

Struts. We use them constantly when our ships get too large to stand without, but too many causes all sorts of lag that we would rather avoid!

Therefore, I introduce the following challenge.

Design the largest possible functional craft without struts that is able to burn through all of its stages without breaking apart, or losing any parts unintentionally.

I imagine to do this you will have to make a very symmetric craft, and in particular no rotation imbalance will be tolerated (I find that any time rotation starts up, outer stages flex outwards and can break off).

Hopefully by the end of this challenge we will all have a better idea of what situations struts can be left out of, allowing us to have much less lag on launch.

Requirements:

Entries will be separated into modded and unmodded varieties.

Show a screenshot of the ship on the launchpad, and enough screenshots to prove that it did not break up.

Avoid extreme abuse of the fuel bug. I won't require full throttle or anything; you know when you have gone too far.

Mechjeb is fine to find the mass of your craft for either modded or unmodded entries.

Two categories: Maximum strutless delta-V, and maximum strutless takeoff mass. Delta-V is to be measured by a vertical takeoff in the direction of kerbins orbit, with no turnover. Speed at burnout gives your ranking.

Happy building

Leader boards:

Stock:

Launchpad Mass:

1) 311.4 ton Bluejayek

2)

3)

Delta-V:

1)

2)

3)

Modded:

Launchpad Mass:

1)

2)

3)

Delta V:

1)

2)

3)

I'll kick it off with a 311.4ton entry. Note that this thing cant be flown on a single burn, at about 40,000m it will start rotating for some random reason and you need to throttle down.

Edited September 1, 2012 by Bluejayek

[TheHengeProphet]

I think you might get better results if you place your decouplers more toward center mass of your discardable tanks. This is very similar to a design I use for the ascent stages of my Munar missions.

[Whatshtisthis]

Can we use mechjeb to get the rockets into orbit? I would love to try this but my piloting skills are a little... Well.. The first rocket I tried to get into orbit went on an escape trajectory from Kerbin.

[Bluejayek]

Sure, go ahead and use mechjeb What.

[EndlessWaves]

Are multiple stages mandatory or is a single stage sufficient to quality? Also, does the design need to make it to orbit or is a few thousand meters altitude good enough (provided it runs out of fuel rather than disintegrates of course)?

[Mindofscience3]

Here's an entry.

At takeoff 189.9 tons.

At burnout ∂V = 4250 m/s.

I'll mess around and see if I can come up with something better. This was hard enough to control, hopefully the next thing is more stable.

[EndlessWaves]

Well, assuming a single stage is allowed then this is my entry.

First some shorts of my MK1 prototype:

Sadly this proved to be too sensitive to the aerokrak and I had to nurse the throttle every 6km so instead of attempting to get it to orbit I decided to see if a redesign was any less vulnerable as I suspected it was the small flex along the line causing a fairly large deviation in position at the ends.

It's 65 copies of aerospike(1t) + Jumbo fuel tank(18t) + SAS(0.8t) so total weight is 1287 tons (65x19.8t). The middle three are the capsule and two ASAS modules but they weigh the same 0.8 tons as SAS modules.

It was at full thrust all the way with no sign of trouble so you could probably double or even triple that given sufficient computing power - this one is only 195 pieces so it doesn't actually run too badly. Craft file: [ATTACH]32407[/ATTACH]

[Mindofscience3]

Slightly more controllable and a much higher ∂V. I don't think I can do much better than this for the ∂V.

On the pad:

At burnout ∂V = 7610 m/s: