Crawlerway Crawling Gantry Bridge Crane

[ElonsMusk]

Matsuma Heavy Orbital introduces

MTS-BCC60S and MTS-BCC90S.

Fully stock cranes that ride the Lv3 KSC Crawlerway.

Goal: Re-use boosters by stacking new and used upperstages on used boosters that land back on the crawlerway.

Problem with a simple static crane: it wanders quite dramatically over time.

Solution: Ride the crawlerway.

You can see in this gif that the heading is almost nearly locked (footage is at 10x speed) as it travels the rail. It also can re-align itself if it wanders slightly off, though it should want to correct itself by design.

More specs on Kerbalx page. I am using it to launch and reuse 2 3 and 5m rockets. I'm very proud of it, and potential operators should find it pretty easy to use. At current it handles up to ~78tons. For me this is plenty, but if you wish to expand you'll face more and more binding on the gantry rails thus the part count increases exponentially. I've sunk easily 100 hours into this crane design, and hopefully it's free of kraken baits. One iteration launched a booster 7 times before I broke my save file. The gantry is a work of art by EJ_SA on Twitch. and I wanted to add controlled axis in all directions and the Bridge Crane Crawler was born.

The 60m and 90m versions are 342 and 364 parts respectively. They only come with tiny power supply but users can add on or swap out for modded generation. It comes with a speed controller for speeds between 75mm/s - 1M/s. Below is the link to all images included in the Kerbalx page for quick viewing. Full album here on Imgur.

Spoiler

 

This is my baby at the moment, but do share your criticism as I'd love for it to be improved!! Enjoy reusing rockets!

EJ_SA's crane can be found here.

 

ps I have OCD (among other things) and have put off sharing this because I cannot get the 'release page' to be the way I'd like so I'm just typing this all out and sharing it because I think it's worth sharing! *proud kerbineer noises* I'll likely update this post.

Shouts out to the LaserDistance mod, without it I couldn't have made the measurements I needed, particularly of the crawlerway itself. I had screenshots of the Krew doing those surveys but they seem lost.