How do you assemble ground bases?

[The Tempest]

Ok the height of my rover was way too low and it wasn't working at all. Fixed that and it works just as intended

[Spooks]

No if you get the height down correct you should be able to dock the module to the base directly while it's still being carried by the rover. Of course there is usually a small amount of height mismatch (usually the module being carried by the rover will be slightly lower). What I do is I will switch to the base and lower the nearest pair of legs on the end of the thing I'm docking with. This causes that part to droop down slightly due to gravity and allow a smooth docking.

One other trick is just to bump the two ends together with some force. The magnetic attraction will be able to over come very small vertical misalignments when you bump.

This is the rover I used for base construction:

This is the result:

Parts do your base have ? if i make one its to big and to laggy and yours look good and nice

[Demetrious]

I've seen well-made bases built upon landing gears (which roll freely and don't provide much resistance) that are then pushed together by a dedicated "tractor," but that method of having the rover underneath the module, then having the module hike itself up on legs so the rover can detach and roll away, is really elegant.

I've started assembling my own base and... my solutions have not been so elegant.

Here's the Kerbin test prototype of what I wanted to do - add a vehicle service module to my Mun base core. I decided to do it by adding rover parts that I could then drop off once the module was deployed:

This gave me several challenges - move something heavy, (all that fuel for re-fueling surface vehicles/ships) and move something bulky (those big girder-legs) and move something asymmetrical (lots of RCS to keep stability under thrust,) and somehow take that load and transition from the transport/landing configuration to a wheels-on-the-surface-configuration.

Which is how I ended up with a ship looking like this:

I let MechJeb handle the landing, because precision landings near other structures are a pain in the rear end otherwise:

On the surface at last. Now, we need to deploy the vehicle, so Bufred Kerman has arrived to take control:

His expression here is priceless. LETS RIDE THIS BRONCO!

First, I decoupled the coupler holding the "nose" onto the truss structure of the landing rocket, then gave the lander (which had its own remote control pod) a brief jump of the throttle to lift it from over the rover and set it down on its side nearby. The "rover" was sitting on the flat base I made for it from a decoupler and a Rocomax adapter. Next, I decoupled that and gave it a brief forward jolt with the few RCS thrusters I'd placed on it, putting it wheels-down and ready for transit:

Then Bufred carefully backed it up to the Mun base, lined it up very, very carefully, and blew the couplers holding the transport legs and extraneous equipment, dropping it into direct contact with the base:

Docking is a little finicky; the game wants it "just so" in terms of distance before ships will come together. In orbit this isn't a problem, the natural drift of ships (helped by the "magnetic attraction" between docking ports versus the equal-and-opposite kickback when ports bump into each other) will mean they'll eventually drift into the "zone" and snap together. With a base, obviously, this won't happen as easily, but it takes very, very little to goose ports together: in my case I switched to the Mun Base core, which has an MK2 lander-can as its control module, and just hit the roll buttons a bit - even that tiny bit of wobble induced by the SAS was enough to nudge the modules into docking properly.

This is very, very inefficient - as evidenced by the fact that my first "vehicle" the vehicle service module will service is a tractor being sent up there to drag away all the extraneous crap lying about from deployment stages - but it does work, at least. If you can build boosters, that is.

[MBobrik]

I just tried to deploy multiple modules at once. Worked well, but I will have to practice it a little. Here is the raw footage from it. Next come rovers to carry them the last km to their destination.

[Goosexi]

[jscheiben]

i've been working on a mun base as well and have been using kas to get ports aligned on one of the modules. Screenshot can be seen here http://steamcommunity.com/id/jscheiben/screenshots/

[Kimberly]

How would you go about building a decent crane with KAS? I plan to use OrbitalConstruction to build my Mun base on-site, but it still consists of four modules that need to be attached, because the docking ports refuse to snap together in the VAB for some mysterious reason. I don't think I can use the rover method, because some of the modules are fairly long and don't have docking ports on the bottom. The weight of the modules is some 20-30 tons each, with a few lighter pieces.

[Spartwo]

No if you get the height down correct you should be able to dock the module to the base directly while it's still being carried by the rover. Of course there is usually a small amount of height mismatch (usually the module being carried by the rover will be slightly lower). What I do is I will switch to the base and lower the nearest pair of legs on the end of the thing I'm docking with. This causes that part to droop down slightly due to gravity and allow a smooth docking.

One other trick is just to bump the two ends together with some force. The magnetic attraction will be able to over come very small vertical misalignments when you bump.

This is the rover I used for base construction:

This is the result:

I do the exact same thing

[Attu]

@Spartwo and Temstar or someone who has the know-how too:

Can you explain to me, how you constructed the rover? My baseconstuctionrover has 3 problems:

-It's very hard to make him flat enough to fit under the base parts. (Okay I can fix it, but then there is not really space inside the rover to install some modules like batteries or electricity generators. I can only fit 2 radioisotope generators in it and a hand full of batteries in it)

-I can only dock with timely use of brakes, because the rover is only jiggling back and forth under the dockingport. (maybe a Xenondrive for a little bit lift? But then I get the height problem again...)

-After docking (and/or undocking) my rover can only drive forward and backward but he can't turn left or right. Well, actually he is somehow horizontally locked. When I'm driving down the angled sides of the launchpad, the rover isn't tilting at all and just hovers in the air with only one pair of wheels touching the ground.

I tried it for more than an hour now (tweaking the design or starting new from scratch) and I just can't figure it out. Every design ends with the same 3 problems.

[troyn123]

Add another vote/suggestion for modular bases with wheels, and testing it on Kerbin BEFORE you launch!

I've got a habitat module, a power module, a "science" module/rover, a vehicle that can transfer battery packs between vehicles/modules, a "junction" module, and tested it a bunch on Kerbin to make sure the ports all line up before I launched. Woo!