Triplchii Aerospace Innovations (mostly more futuristic yet realistic styled ships and stuff)

[triple cheeseburger]

Hello! I made a ship last night and wasn't sure where to post it, so I thought I'd make my own thingy where I can post similar style ships and stuff too. I hope that's okay.

Either way, here's some of the ships built by Triplchii Aerospace Innovations (TAI)

To start things off, here's the "Phantom" Orbital Patrol Drone:

This small autonomous drone, first designed around the 2170s, is primarily used around Jupiter and its moons to spy on other ships from a distance. It boasts an extensive set of communications and scanning equipment (the large organic lump sticking out of the side of the main fuel tank). It uses a simple hydrolox chemical thruster for propulsion and can deploy a large solar array to recharge.

Stats:

- ~4.5km/s Δv

- 14.833 tons mass

- 161 parts

- About 15 meters long (the widest part of the ship is made of 2.5m parts)

- Comes with RCS and a docking port too

- Actually works pretty well in-game, the assymetry can make it veer a bit while burning but mechjeb's SAS keeps it pointing the right way

Mods used:

- 90% of the ship is made using the procedural parts mod.

- There's also, as you can tell, a lot of decals involved. These were done using the custom decals mod, and the designs are custom flags I made myself.

- Besides that, there's a few near future stuff too such as the RCS, the engine, and the dish.

[triple cheeseburger]

Today I ended up building another ship I thought looked nice, so here's "unnamed interplanetary fusion torch thing":

Stats:

- Around 280km/s Δv when the cargo containers on the sides are empty. Can carry about 50 tons of ore, which drops the Δv down to 194km/s.

- 107.5 tons wet mass (again when the containers are empty)

- 91.2 tons dry mass (so a mass ratio of only 1.18)

- 221 parts

- 32 meters long

- Uses the Z-pinch fusion engine from FFT running in afterburner mode, by turning the thrust limit down to about 40% you can reduce how much cooling the engine needs - this saves mass on radiators. You can do this with all the FFT engines, it's quite a useful trick I've found for both Δv optimisation and aesthetic purposes.

- Can do a comfortable 1 gee of acceleration when fully fueled, which goes up to 1.2 gees when dry. (When full of ore the wet acceleration drops to about 0.72 gees).

- Has docking tubes near the top, also includes RCS. Using the electric RCS from NFP that runs on LH2.

- Works quite well in-game, its high thrust makes it much more entertaining to fly than a lot of other fusion powered ships.

Mods used:
- Mostly near future stuff of all kinds

- Some far future parts obviously

- Quite a few procedural parts (mostly for the trusses and structural bits on the ship)

- I used a rather large amount of part clipping for this too, basically the whole ship is built around the length of the Z-pinch engine. But my aim here was to make something pretty in sandbox mode, so I don't really care lol.

Here's a couple more screenshots from when I was sending this thing back to Earth. It burnt 40km/s to accelerate and about 40km/s to decelerate, which got it from Mercury to Earth in about a week.

Finally, if anyone has any suggestions for names for this craft, feel free to say

 

[triple cheeseburger]

It's been quite a while since I last posted in here, at the moment I've been busy with other projects outside of KSP (Sorta moved on to modelling spaceships in Blender now) but maybe at some point I'll get back to this game (and maybe get back to making mods for it too lol).
However, since my last post I did make a lot more ships I think look rather nice before getting bored of the game. For whatever reason I didn't post them here, so lets go ahead and do that.

This ship is more on the lower end in terms of technological prowess. A cheap transport ship that uses methalox chemical engines, designed for simple hops between gas giant moons or other relatively short trips.


Above the haze of Titan


A close encounter with Saturn's rings


Simple no-nonsense moon-to-moon transport for a low price

Stats:
- 2,972m/s Δv when not carrying any crew or cargo.
- Wet mass of 38.927 tons, dry mass of 17.084 tons.
- Mass ratio of 2.278.
- 115 parts.
- 17.2 meters long.
- Costs 33,334 funds
- Uses the DF-M25K "Owl", an orbital class methalox engine with a vacuum Isp of 368 seconds and a vacuum thrust of 430 kN.
- Wet TWR of 1.12 (Dry TWR jumps up to 2.56)
- Uses a monopropellant fuel cell to provide power, going off the fuel cell's claim of using 21.6 units of fuel per hour and the ship's 370 units of monopropellant this should last about 17 hours. A bit on the shorter side but I imagine the ship can go a decent while on battery power alone, plus there's always the engine's alternator.
- Has a docking port on the side with a slightly awkward tube leading into the main crew space.
- Designed to hold 3 crew, but has space for 5. With 3 crew it has 35 days of life support, but if the life support containers are maxed out that jumps up to 164 days.
- Has a small cargo storage tank below the life support tank, so it can carry about half a ton of ore or whatever else you can fit into those SSPX cargo containers.

Mods used:
- The aforementioned Owl engine comes from the lovely CryoEngines Extensions.
- The rest of the ship is pretty standard, a variety of Near Future bits and bobs, some conformal decals here and there, and a couple of procedural parts.

As with a lot of my ships I haven't thought of a name for this thing. Here's one more image that labels each part of the ship.

[triple cheeseburger]

This next ship returns to the realm of nuclear fusion, a high-end interplanetary transport that can zip across the solar system at lightning speeds. I'm headcanon-ing that this thing is used a lot in outer solar system regions like the Kuiper belt or Scattered disc.

Hanging around Pluto and Charon, certainly the skinniest ship I've made thus far.


Cruising through space at a leisurely 290km/s.


The business end of things, in reality at this distance you'd probably get fried pretty quickly from the radiation coming out of this thing.



Stats:
- 589km/s of Δv.
- Wet mass of 166.882 tons, dry mass of 118.806 tons.
- Mass ratio of 1.405.
- 172 parts.
- 74.4 meters long.
- Costs 2,066,324 funds.
- Once again using the FFT Z-Pinch fusion torch in afterburner mode, for an Isp of 176,800 seconds and 2,800 kN of thrust (That's a thrust power of 2.4 Terrawatts!). This time the ship has enough radiators to run the engine at full power too.
- Wet TWR of 1.71 (Dry TWR of 2.4).
- Powered by a small fission reactor able to operate at 65% power, though for most of the time it runs at only 25% power.
- Docking port at the front, uses bipropellant hydrolox RCS.
- Has room for 17 crew/passengers, with 101 days of life support when all 17 slots are filled.

Mods used:
- The custom engine nozzle is a mishmash of procedural parts and some radiators, it looks okay I think, but perhaps with more effort it could look better.
- The fancy colour scheme on this ship is thanks to SimpleRepaint, using some tanks and flag parts coloured red (the stock flag parts because Conformal Decals' flag parts can't be recoloured sadly).
- The rest of the ship is standard Near Future and procedural parts stuff, unfortunately there's a lighting bug with some of the procedural parts but I don't really think I can do much about that...

[triple cheeseburger]

Another fusion ship, though using a different engine this time. Due to its limited range (for a fusion-powered ship, at least) I'm thinking this one is used in the inner solar system, where travel times are not as large.


Charging capacitor banks around the moon.


Blast off!


Drifting above the clouds.


Meeting up with it's larger sister the Damascus-class, in reality this would be a bit of a sticky situation because both ships could easily fry one another with their engines.

Stats:
- 31km/s of Δv.
- Wet mass of 55.366 tons, dry mass of 46.056 tons.
- Mass ratio of 1.202.
- 72 parts.
- 25.2 meters long.
- Costs 519,450 funds.
- This time uses the spherical tokamak engine from FFT. Running in high thrust mode, producing 380kN of thrust with an Isp of 17,500 seconds.
- Wet TWR of 0.69, dry TWR of 0.83.
- Powered by a small fission generator tucked away near the back.
- Has 8 crew slots, with 4 crew life support can last for 96 days. Though both these values can be adjusted.

Mods used:
- Remarkably there's no procedural parts involved this time, just Near Future and Restock stuff.
- There's a bit of part clipping involved too, mostly around the engine. But that's pretty standard for a lot of my builds.

[triple cheeseburger]

This ship I made a few days ago, it's a bit lower on the tech tree than some of my other ships - a crewed nuclear electric propulsion ship.


It's wider than it is long, if you're confused the "forwards" direction is the direction the four tanks in the middle are facing.


And here it is with its array of ion engines running.


Slowly climbing out of Earth's gravity well.

Stats:
- 30,850 m/s of Δv.
- Wet mass of 169.948 tons. Dry mass of 103.795 tons.
- Mass ratio of 1.637.
- 202 parts.
- 19.3 meters long, 60.4 meters wide.
- Costs 3,244,335 funds (if you take out all the fuel that drops to 598,240 funds. this is why I don't use engines that run on xenon in career mode, lol)
- Runs on 32 of the AFTER ion engines from NFP. The engines are set to run at about 90% thrust so that they don't overheat (it looked ugly with another set of radiators).
- Wet TWR is 0.036, dry TWR is 0.059.
- Uses the 'Prometheus' fission reactor from NFE, producing the large amount of electricity needed to run this many engines.
- Apparently the inflatable habitat can hold 18 people, but I imagine this thing would carry less than that. With 6 crew the ship has 1 year and 280 days of life support.
- The ship is designed to rotate to produce artificial gravity, it's set up like this so that it can spin even while burning since burns with electric engines tend to take awhile. The arm with the inflatable habitat on it is about 30 meters long, at 3 RPM it could generate about a third of a g. So realistically this thing would benefit from being even wider, but oh well.
- Remarkably, the ship's com is actually balanced in the middle. There's some tiny ore tanks on the nuclear reactor's side of things that can be emptied as it uses up supplies, helping it maintain balance. The nuclear reactor is placed on a long arm opposite from the habitat for radiation shielding purposes.

Mods used:
- The usual, near future, procedural parts (the fuel tanks are procedural if you were wondering), conformal decals.

[triple cheeseburger]

Today I made another ship, I wanted to experiment more with making ships that have well-defined colour schemes. I would say I'm quite happy with how it came out.
This is the GX2 SP-26 Model A, an automated industrial cargo hauler. Its low refuelling cost and reliable nature allows it to exceed at long-distance regularly-scheduled interplanetary shipping jobs.


Stationed above Triton, after departing from a dock and being towed to a safe distance away from any orbital habitats.


The front of the ship while it charges its capacitors, repeated high-speed journeys through the Kuiper belt have scratched some of the paint, giving the ship a bit of a grimy look.


And away we go, the ship begins slowly heading out of  Neptune's gravity well.


The harsh environment of fast interplanetary travel and the radiation from the engine necessitates that the cargo is kept in a well-shielded bay at the front of the craft.

Stats:
- When not carrying anything, the ship has a total of 529km/s of Δv (Unless I state otherwise, assume all these stats are for when the ship isn't carrying any cargo).
- Wet mass of 129.275 tons. Dry mass of 105.889 tons.
- Mass ratio of 1.221 (Perhaps for future builds I should make an effort to pack more fuel...)
- 379 parts (That's thanks to the huge amount of decals involved).
- 68.3 meters long.
- Costs 1,412,049 funds. Most of that is in the radiators and the engine itself, which costs 730k funds alone. The cost of the fuel is only around 37k funds.
- Uses the inertial confinement fusion engine from FFT.
Fun tangent! The ICF engine in FFT seems to be based on this concept, which calls for an Isp of ~270,000 seconds and runs on deuterium-deuterium fusion. I use the patch that makes the FFT engines perform closer to what should be expected, but even that got the performance of this thing wrong. So I made a couple of changes to fix the Isp and make it run off of deuterium fusion, though it still has an alternative mode that uses DT-He3 fusion with increased performance.
- Okay, tangent over. The engine runs on deuterium-deuterium fusion at about 80% power to reduce the amount of cooling needed, yielding 32kN of thrust.
- Wet TWR is 0.025, dry TWR is 0.03.
- Powered by the two small fission generators sticking out of either side, they're placed as to keep the engine's radiators within their shadow.
- The section at the front is a cargo bay, it can open and store whatever you might want to store. I haven't actually tried this because I'm scared all the decals on the front will break if I open the cargo bay.

Mods used:
- The recoloured tanks were achieved using Simple Repaint, using a custom shade of cyan I added to the configs myself.
- The decals are done with conformal decals. Some of them are custom flags I've made myself (the checker patterns for instance), the grime and dirt are custom flags too (though in this case their textures I just found on the internet).
- The yellow lines are actually text decals, using the | character scaled up a bunch you can easily make painted lines with it. Furthermore you can easily change the colour of the text to whatever you want.
- There's a few procedural parts, such as the rounded ends and some structural pieces here and there.
- And then obviously there's near/far future and Heat Control and Restock and so on...

[TwoCalories]

I saw some of these on the Awesome KSP Pictures thread, and I figured you had a catalogue of some kind somewhere. Amazing ships!

[triple cheeseburger]

On 11/4/2023 at 2:34 AM, TwoCalories said:

I saw some of these on the Awesome KSP Pictures thread, and I figured you had a catalogue of some kind somewhere. Amazing ships!

Thank you!

[triple cheeseburger]

I made another ship today, or rather, this one took a couple of days because I spent awhile deciding on what sort of colour scheme to go with, among other things.
Here is the EF-OM Project 02 "Hildemar", a small NTP ship that I like to imagine is used for transporting people between habitats on or around Jupiter's outer moons.


Hanging out above Callisto, just after leaving an orbital habitat.


The ship's comfortable 0.12 g's of acceleration make it well-suited for folks genetically engineered for microgravity environments.


Two angled solid-core NTRs running on slush hydrogen propel the ship forwards.


Drifting above  the skies of Jupiter. I doubt the ship would ever really come this close to Jupiter, but it looks quite pretty.

Stats:
- With no crew the ship has 9,036 m/s of Δv.
- Wet mass of 115.013 tons. Dry mass of 43.605 tons.
- Mass ratio of 2.637.
- 315 parts (like last time, most of this is in the decals).
- 47.4 meters long.
- Costs 341,755 funds. The engines have had most of the enriched uranium they store removed, this saves 300kg of mass and about 24,000 funds.
- Uses two of the Neptune solid-core NTRs from Kerbal Atomics, each with an Isp of 950 seconds and a combined thrust of 134 kN.
- Wet TWR of 0.12, dry TWR of 0.31.
- Powered by a small fission generator near the back of the ship.
- Also has some RCS that runs on hydrolox, there's a small oxidiser tank inside the ship.

Mods and methods used:
- The main body of the ship is a structural element from Procedural Parts, and I used SimpleRepaint to change its colour. Now by default procedural parts aren't able to be recoloured for some reason, to fix this you can go into GameData -> SimpleRepaint -> IgnoreParts, and then into the IncompatibleParts.cfg - in here you can remove or comment-out the part titled "Various procedural parts", it should be near the top at around line 28. This now lets you recolour procedural parts, which is quite handy.
- The specific shade of red used here is a custom one I added to SimpleRepaint myself, I didn't like how saturated the default red was. The exact hex code for this lighter red is #C44D42 if anyone's curious.
- As always there's plenty of Near Future parts involved, and lots of decals from Conformal Decals.
- The logos featured on the ship are custom flags, I made the logos myself in Inkscape.

[davidmakurin]

need MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR

[triple cheeseburger]

23 hours ago, davidmakurin said:

need MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR

Recently I've been more into modelling spaceships in Blender... But perhaps in the future I'll play more KSP and make more ships in it, we'll see. Thank you though

[funnelton]

Have ya thought of posting some of those custom decals? They look fantastic! 

[NiL]

On 12/10/2023 at 11:50 PM, funnelton said:

Have ya thought of posting some of those custom decals? They look fantastic! 

Seconding that, crafts look absolutely stunning. I would love to use decals more myself, but don't have skills, patience or creativity to make good ones myself.

[triple cheeseburger]

Apologies for not checking here in awhile... I made an Imgur post containing the custom decals I use -> https://imgur.com/a/BUv1JFi

Feel free to use these in any of your builds, credit is optional. Simply download the images and drop them into your flags folder, Conformal Decals can handle transparent images and flags with strange aspect ratios just fine.

[funnelton]

Thanks a bunch!