MOTHERSHIPS! Post your pictures here

king of nowhere · September 9, 2021

Though it has no absolute definition, a mothership can be stated to be a ship that can release smaller ships to perform various tasks, and take them back again.

It is different from a space station because a space station remains stationary, while a mothership is supposed to move. Though there can be considerable overlap between the two.

The mothership generally acts as a logistical hub, providing fuel, life support, material, and services to the various sub-vessels. In turn, those sub-vessels can accomplish their missions thanks to the mothership offering support.

Motherships are generally used in ambitious exploration missions. Mothership provide habitation, life support, long range propulsion, fuel supplies, and they carry around their smaller landers, which could not do much more than land by themselves. Practically every grand tour or jool 5 or other complex, multi-objective mission makes use of something that can be defined as a "mothership".

I love motherships, because i love the exploration concept that's behind them. Launching probes is all fine. Sending a kerbonaut in a can for a 10 year mission conveniently taking advantage that the game does not track food and air is great. But I like to dream big. I like to imagine flying cities, equipped with every comfort, capable of supporting a large crew for decades, with the means to solve any unplanned problem that may arise during the long mission. Ever since I became good enough to make working models, my ksp has been nothing but motherships - and their missions, and their sub-vessels.

And yet there is no dedicated thread for it.I'm trying to fix this shortcoming.

Post your motherships! For all those who refuse to send a single kerbal strapped to a seat in a multi-decade mission and won't ever be caught dead running for a "lower weight" or "lower part count" contest . Bonus points if you're using life support mods and have been fiddling with ridiculously convoluted resource chains to make your creation as self-sustaining as possible, and to justify its exaggerated part count

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I said that I like to dream big, and therefore I'll start by posting the spaceship named DREAM BIG.

Made for a grand tour with the kerbalism mod, without using anything nuclear (less for extra challenge, and more because i was very worried about exposing my crew to radiation).

With all the sub-vessels docked, it reaches a mass of roughly 4500 tons. At 1300 parts, it's the most part-intensive thing I ever used. It took me over two months to finish the mission, mostly because of how badly this thing lagged.

Sporting 64 gigantor solar panels to get a reasonable power output as far as Jool (this beast consummed some 20 EC/s even in standby), but it also had several fuel cells for when it would transit in darkness. DREAM BIG has 32 greenhouses to produce food for a crew of 12, and enough gas and water tanks to last for decades. Actually the nitrogen mining system turned out to be basically nonfunctional, but good thing the starting nitrogen supplies lasted for the whole mission.

Maximum deltaV was somewhere around 4000 m/s. The main propulsion consisted in 20 wolfhounds, the ship also had 2 rhinos for when it needed a higher thrust at the cost of lower Isp

It costed just shy of 20 million kerbucks, including launchers. Most of the cost were the 130 high quality radiation shields, which were supposed to protect from solar storms. Alas, they were a mixed success at best.

DREAM BIG has a total of 13-15 subvessels, depending on how one counts them (does the single use tylo descent stage counts as 1?)

- 4 Diggers: 280-ton tankers with stock-isru capacity. For complicated fluff reasons, and as additional challenge, i decided i'd use them only on duna. besides getting new fuel, they also mined water and oxygen, and they accompanied smaller landers to their destinations. they are the big thing docked above and below the main body, those with the drills.

- 4 Dolphins: safety escape pods, in case the mission went bad. they have ion engines with 15 km/s worth of xenon, and a landing pod that can withstand a 8 km/s atmospheric reentry. This allows them to take high-energy trajectories to return to kerbin in less than 1 year from anywhere. they are the smaller things docked above and below the main body, with a a Mk1-3 pod at the end. At 15 tons each, carrying them around was no problem for the bigger mothership.

- 1 Eve lander: not present in the above picture, that was obviously taken after eve, it's the huge thing on the left of the first image, starting with that bunch of wings (which is actually an aerodinamic stabilizer, to keep that part pointing backwards). At 440 tons it was very inefficient, I later learned to take off from eve with much smaller crafts. The last stage of the eve lander doubles as tylo and laythe lander - a large part of the problems were caused by the bad aerodinamics of this arrangement

- 1 tylo descent stage. It is docked to the small lander (see below) and it will give it the thrust and deltaV to perform the tylo landing. Discarded halfway through the ascent. It's the cylinder covering part of the rightmost lower Digger in the image above.

- 1 Moho transfer stage. Because the DREAM BIG does not have enough deltaV to get in Moho orbit and return . It weighted some 30 tons, it could sustain three kerbals for almost three years, and it had 22 km/s. an exaggerated amount, but at the time i was still new to moho transfers, i was afraid of radiations and i thought i had to do everything super fast launching outside of proper transfer windows. i later learned to do it better. You can see it in the above picture, having just undocked from the main ship

- 2 Wings: small probes to perform various science tasks. You can see one of them in the above picture, stuck close to the engines, with the M-700 survey scanner. Those turned out to have too little power, and their solar panels broke soon after release, making them nonfunctional

- 1 the Can: small lander for all the low gravity places. It's just to the left of the navball in the above picture. its... curious... engine design was motivated by me wanting a redundant system if some engines failed. it was admirably redundant, but it suffered from low thrust and it was barely functional.

I put a rear-looking cupola just to see the engines exhaust. it was totally worth it!

DREAM BIG seen from an approaching Digger

Aerobraking at duna. Bringing a ship so big in an atmosphere wasn't appreciated by my poor pc. You can see some fairly curious effects, and rather than frames per second i was measuring performance in seconds per frame