Show off your Kethane Mining Designs!!

[JedTech]

I have 2 Kethane miners which I've just created this week (Heavy and Jumbo).

I sent the Heavy to Eeloo for my first experiment with Kethane. Luckily, I put things together right and the Kethane mining worked!

My new Jumbo Miner is a SSTO. It is capable of taking off and landing on Kerbin on its own. Landing is difficult due to no landing gear, does anyone know of a good solution for Heavy landing gear?

Just tonight I took my Jumbo Kethane Miner to Minmus:

Not sure what my next objective is, but its fun to know I can go just about anywhere or refuel just about anything with this overpowered/oversized Kethane Miner.

[DomDiaemus]

[smallski123]

Can youj provide a filesave of this, please? That would be great. :3

[MrOnak]

It pales in comparison to some of the stuff posted in this thread but this one is mine, all mine

I present, the Sagan Kethane Refinery (and the little rover that built the whole thing)

Built with my own twist of the Modular Base Creation Kit, all parts were made from scratch (although some are 100% copies), but using the Interstellar mod, RemoteTech and others that allowed for some changes.

[Camaron]

Here's mine. I call it the Tortoise.

It is all stock-and-kethane, except for the Generators, which are perfect parallels to the weight and output of the stock generator. (in other words, 100% fair play) It effectively has 250 generators. If I put 250 stock generators on this, it would weigh exactly the same, and output exactly the same power.

It's designed to work in tandem with a monstrous orbiting station which does all the conversion and storage work. The station carries over 120,000 units of both liquid fuel and kethane.

The Tortoise can effectively fly itself to the ground, fill up, and re-orbit with plenty of room for error. It handles like a semi-truck hauling lead.

Currently operates exclusively at Minmus.

[Camaron]

As it turns out, you CAN make a Kethane driller too big.

Here's my experimental giant driller. 24 Nuclear engines and a KR-2L in the center. Eight drills, and the equivalent of 200 Generators. A capactity of almost 100,000 Fuel and 100,000 Kethane. It just finished bleeding the entire Kethane vein dry and still isn't full. So....

[Jouni]

I recently built a kethane miner to refuel my Eve lander before the landing.

Unfortunately it's too small, so I'll need five trips to Gilly to complete the job.

[Camaron]

Five trips with a driller that has an eight-tank capacity? How big is your lander?

Also, what if your lander just included a barebones drilling kit, and just refueled on the ground? Land it on a Kethane field.

[Jouni]

Almost 1600 tonnes, big enough to carry a Mk1-2 command pod and a hitchhiker back to orbit from sea level. It's also unwieldy enough that I don't want to aim it at anything smaller than a continent.

[Camaron]

What I mean though, is that it WOULDN'T be unwieldy and ultra-heavy if it was empty, and could refuel on location.

I wanna see the lander though. I love monster ships.

[Jouni]

It's here in the background, along with the deorbiting stage:

Another problem with refueling on ground is that no single kethane deposit is big enough to provide ~40 orange tanks worth of fuel.

[Camaron]

Could always do a half-N'-half

You overbuilt the heck out of that thing but it's awesome. Best of luck.

I know what you mean. That big rig at the top of the page destroyed the deposit it was sitting on. Only got about 45,000 fuel from the whole vein.

[Mulberry]

Here's my newest kethane mine/refinery - all modules have deployeable wheels and can be linked together for situations where manual EVA linkage is not available. Also shown: the refueling platform that this refinery supplies.

[VR_Dev]

So I have a new kethane project in the works which involves trying to create a permanent hoverbase on Jool's surface. I'm working on how I could condense kethane out of Jool's thick atmosphere in order to make the base hover indefinitely. I'm really busy with other projects though so if people wanna help I would really appreciate it.

I figured you are all kethane fans, so I'd post something here. Here's and alpha build of what a base could look like. I'd like to make it so that maybe several of these crafts could attach to form a bigger base. And I'd really like to see a landing deck for kethane powered VTOLS

Anyway here's my thread post

[TMS]

Here's my newest kethane mine/refinery - all modules have deployeable wheels and can be linked together for situations where manual EVA linkage is not available. Also shown: the refueling platform that this refinery supplies.http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029530895/CDE7CBAC0CB4E54EDD3986A15BB15EF0D7D8D989/http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029532968/3334AB14C6D69C1C2D20B84D087218AA01AD764B/http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029538315/1C196E9313B45C0B636FA6D1C096CF55D74A7D8D/http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029569138/70E6C0D3D259C6DA2C66C29F73C9BC7A752B8E7C/http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029571881/FE55476B7AA3FDFCAACB892250C222727CD634B4/http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029577476/37AB17B7A4718943EDAC56008F23D78BE2492DBE/http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=257116581http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321172165696041/E517A71AF1650C99B5E83CE3514CDDF7C8B31671/http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/3300321882029535472/D8C6D7991BDD98C2E063C3096236FDEACDFD99BD/

Where are those inline stack legs from?

[Mulberry]

Where are those inline stack legs from?

They come from this mod: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-1-h-o-m-e-start-kit/ - the mod isn't maintained anymore and some of the key components no longer work, but it does have 3-4 parts that I use consistently.

[Othuyeg]

I installed kethane mod for the first time.

I mapped minmus and sent a team of 3 to a kethane site to claim it and mark the landing spot. They went in an RCS powered suborbital hopper. I had only done small jumps with it before but after marking the landing spot with MJ I was able to use the RCS to execute a nearly perfect jump. I was proud.

I then designed a light drill with the ability to refuel my hopper. I launched it with a first stage consisting of SRBs (the picture does not show the final version, that one has moar boosters and a couple of liquid engines assisting the nuclear engine to achieve orbit.

I landed the drill assisted by MJ (lazy me) and docked the hopper on the drill and refueled it.

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This spot will now be used by me to found my new minmus colony. There will be habitation, multiple rovers etc. all capable of refueling with kethane.

[Othuyeg]

Sent a Kethane rover onto Mün

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[Othuyeg]

Ookay... I just understood what I have been missing. The KAS mod.

Now kethane mining is so much more realistic as I can make fuel lines between stations.

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[Rune]

Those two kind of go together, if you want serious surface operations. The alternative is to store the fuel on orbit, and base yourself there. I am working on a couple of things, and one of them is short of something like that:

There are three sections there. The middle one is a big red, nothing fancy, just my standard fuel load with plenty of ports to handle it with ease, but the idea is that they are interchangeable, and make my fuel storage and transportation highly modular, and compatible with the rest of my fleet. In the back, and you can't see it very clearly, is the Miner. It has enough Oomph to land on Duna, and enough Delta-V by itself to lift a full orange tank back to orbit from there without touching its fuel (four nukes, two drills, a X200-8 fuel tank, a small crew cabin, a heavy converter, and assorted crap to make those work in a compact package basically).

Since it already has to carry the heavy drills to the surface, I save on tanking for kethane by also putting the refinery there and doing the refining in-situ as I extract it. Saves loads of time. A KAS winch allows to refuel surface assets if need be.

And in the front, the newest addition, a Depot. Basically only for roleplaying, it's pretty much just a place where I can store orange tanks (2x Sr. docking ports, 2x Jr, 2x Normal) and dock ships, and pretend there's enough hab space to support the mining crews. It also carries another sensor to continue mapping, and the Miner launches with two tiny independent RCS probes that can go into more inclined orbits to hunt the polar deposits.

So you get a whole standard Kethane mining operation for pretty much anywhere (except Eve, Tylo, and Laythe, it can mine from anywhere at a profit, and it can still supply mission going to those places from other nearby moons) in just two launches (one for the miner with a tank, another for the station with some fuel to get started on the way, about 3,5km/s for the first deployment). But even though it's pretty universal and I'm happy with it, doesn't mean I will stop building new stuff.

Now this goes in an entirely different direction, one with a lot less docking and independent vehicles in your life: a Single Stage To Almost Anywhere*. That's right, I've finally perfected it. Makes orbit with enough rocket delta-v to land on Minmus, on full Fuel/Oxi load it can lift off from Duna and make an Ike landing, and it has about 3.5-4km/s on ion engines when empty, 2.7 full. So you could very well do a Grand Trour on this baby, and you would only miss Tylo if you ended it on Eve without returning (*Eve would be a one-way trip, Tylo a big crater ).

Plus, it looks sexy IMO

Oh, and I re-invented the turbojet-augmented RAPIER to do it, now it can be done without editor tools, but only because it somehow stopped working the way I did it before, the RAPIER had to be moved with respect to the turbojet and a cubic strut used to get proper spacing and fuel flow, because previously working engines stopped producing thrust on the RAPIER part (all of this in the same install of 0.23.5). Anyone has had that happen to him, clippy stuff that worked one day stop working when you go fly it again?

Rune. Once testing is more on its way and I find the time, probably after finals, I plan on reviving my Skunkworks with a kethane infrastructure section and a surprise, hope you guys like it.

Edited May 15, 2014 by Rune

[Othuyeg]

I sent my small drill to Duna so it can set up a base and prepare for the arrival of my large science vehicle.

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I made very few modifications to it as I adapted it from what used to be a Mun lander.

[Mesklin]

Here is my rolling stone with small Kethane help - VTOL to anywhere "Nautilus". Equipped with kethane scanner, drill and converter, can reach almost any body in Kerbol system (include Tylo with small trick/except Eve), land, refuel, return to orbit and continue moving (Mobilus in mobile). Also it is rover, stable and fast enough on low and high gravity bodies (tested on Mun, Vall, Kerbin and Tylo), if you made landing in kethane desert, you can travel on wheels to the nearest kethane deposit (you can use MechJeb's rover autopilot). Can land in the liquid, but can not move in it and mine kethane. Fully fueled craft has ~4 km/s of dV after stored kethane conversion.

See this device in action in Jool-5 Kethane mission

Craft is here, unfortunately this craft is not so sexy as Rune's plane, more standard SSTO will be late

Edited May 15, 2014 by Mesklin

[Othuyeg]

Landed a science vessel at Duna, next to my kethane miner. The kerbal operating the miner was very pleased to see the ship landing next to what has been his home for many years. He however was very displeased to find that the ship had only one seat.

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Refueling worked very nicely.

Edited May 16, 2014 by Othuyeg

[Camaron]

Hey. Rune, that's awesome work, but what's up with your Ion Engines?

[Rune]

Hey. Rune, that's awesome work, but what's up with your Ion Engines?

Hey! That's the "Hot Rockets" mod giving them awesome exhaust effects. Considering the stats are totally sci-fi at this point, it's just as well they look straight out of Star Wars when firing.

And in fact, the design is not done yet I'm afraid. I discovered upon testing reentry that I'm cutting it much too close on the wrong side of "just enough control momentum", and I might have to redesign that T-tail to make it stable enough to land reliably on rough ground (and high speeds, I want to try Duna with it!). It's been a real aerodynamic headache, that design. It should fly perfectly fine according to everything I know, but something in the configuration is coupling yaw with roll in a highly unstable manner, and the fact that it reaches neutral trim at 15-20,000m doesn't help, at low altitudes it wants to pitch up a lot.

I mean, as soon as I add canards and/or an extra SAS unit I'm going to have more control authority than I know what to do with, but I wanted to achieve it elegantly... to the SPH it is!

Rune. This is one of those designs you learn things from... and by that I mean you crash hundreds of different versions.