My first interplanetary ship

[xpiation]

Hey everyone! I have had a mission to Duna before this, but it was a one way ride with a lander, so I don't count it

This ship took me a few hours of designing and testing before its maiden voyage.

I first designed the ship until I was happy with the look (because at the end of the day, that is what really matters), then worked on the functionality.

I built the lifter around the ship, so it is more than a little ugly, but I have made far worse, just to have them explode in my face haha.

The current model reaches Eve with spot on 50% fuel left, after a few corrections and mistakes were made (I heard of this thing called aero-braking, tried it at 50,000 altitude on Eve, because I am a scrub... I used a lot of fuel not sending my kerbal to a fiery death).

The ship currently only has two docking clamps, which I may move or add more of in the future, along with a HSC.

Anyway! enough boring crap, here are some screens from the adventure!!!

1. Breathtaking view of Eve from orbit.

2. The hideous lifter at KSP

3. Dropping the last of the lift in Kerbin orbit, LATER SUCKER!

4. I just thought that this shot looked extremely awesome =D

5. The death defying 50 000km aero-braking stunt >_<

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the pictures, my design is, of course, pretty ordinary... So feel free to tell me how many things I have done wrong

I am working on an orbital command satellite, which currently have seven modules attached, I took a break from it for now, because the frame rate is quite terrible and frustrating. But I hope to finish it in the coming week or so, so pictures of that will also be coming

Edited May 31, 2013 by xpiation

[Blipser]

Love how it looks with the winglets, maybes you could attach some Gilly or Duna landers to those docking ports?

[xpiation]

Yeah I liked the look of the wings on there too, purely aesthetically though, there is no way it could fly in an atmosphere =(

The plan was to utilize the docking ports for landing pods or probes to leave in orbit, this was the maiden voyage =)

[Immashift]

The problem I always have is that when I want to go interplanetary, I never just wanna orbit. A ship like that is great, but you don't actually get to walk on the planets/moons you visit.

For this reason, my interplanetary stuff is more or less always a space-train of a lander and an efficient transfer vehicle bolted on to it. Or, in the case of my grand tour idea, the entire craft is capable of landing and making orbit again:

The problem with this craft is that it requires approximately 999999999 quicksave loads to land successfully. I usually go for a smaller lander attached to a mothership of sorts, but then that has the problem of the momentous task of refueling the mothership.... Of course the more you make your ship do, the lower the framerate gets, and the more tedious it becomes to dock things to it.

[Malakai030]

The problem I always have is that when I want to go interplanetary, I never just wanna orbit.

For this problem I have made a carrier ship that can pull smaller vessels like landers to Duna (and maybe Eve too). I just have to find a way to get a ship to Duna surface, refuel it and back into orbit, where the carrier waits. So you need only the fuel for landing and orbiting, the transfer is done by the big ship.

[Immashift]

I solve the refueling problem with the Kethane mod. It puts deposits on the surface to mine, and adds converters to turn it into whatever fuel you need. So I have a lander with a large fuel supply that can land on any planet aside from Eve, and take a decent portion of fuel back up to the transfer vehicle. A few landings and I'm refueled and ready to go to the next moon/planet.

[xpiation]

Well, there is four docking ports, I am just worried that they will off-set the centre of mass if I use them, I may work on the spacing of my engines so that I can tug a module, similar to your second image, so long as I design the module to be centered nicely, and dock in the middle like you have. I don't think I will mod the game however, I will wait for squad to give me those features =P I like the challenge of fuel usage.

Also, do you have to land your first rocket with thrusters? Sounds highly tedious =P

[Immashift]

Well the mods can add a lot of fun. Most of them I have just to give me more / nicer looking part options. The Kethane mod is there because I sort of like the logistics of moving fuel around all over the place.

One of the added benefits of mod parts is that most of them are balanced for weight and capacity to the normal tanks, but are just bigger, so I can have a fewer part count for the same thing, leading to less frustration over frame rates.

That interplanetary tug is designed to be nice and stable. The fact that it pulls the lander rather than pushes it means it handles 4x physics warp perfectly fine, and the port doesn't compress like it does when you push something along. Having the engines behind the center of mass like that also makes it nice and stable during my burns.

Both of those images, the two ships both land on rocket / parachute power. The huge ship I posted has two nuclear engines for interplanetary burns and 4x 1700Kn engines for high gravity takeoffs and landings, though I usually only turn on two of them. On things like Minmus I can land on nuclear engine power alone.

The most recent image I posted has a lander with 2x LV-T30 Engines (well, they're mod engines that are slightly better on fuel in the atmosphere) and parachutes to bring it down. That one can take off of anything other than Eve.

In the end I like the smaller ship as it's not as ugly and doesn't turn like a brick. But I think the puller design is a lot more suited to toting stuff around the solar system than pusher designs. If only for the long physics warp burns.

Also - you mention docking things. I've found that as long as ports are fairly close to the center of mass, and as long as what you dock isn't too heavy, you can have it a little uneven, and SAS will compensate for you. Especially if you're using low thrust engines like the nuclear ones. That second image of mine - I had small probes docked to each of the three external tanks at one point, and I put them in orbits around various things. The whole vehicle flew fine with one or two probes missing. Then again they only weighed like 2 tons each. YMMV.

I also didn't mention - I have a rover at the bottom of the lander that can re-dock and be taken to every world the lander goes to

The rover's docking port sits just slightly higher than the port on the lander. The rover has the ability to retract and deploy its wheels. If I retract the wheels as I'm rolling under the lander, I come under the docking port. Then I redeploy the wheels and the ports meet and I'm good to take off again.

I used to use a mod called Damned Robotics that had hinges and things to dock the rover a bit more easily, but it's still bugged in .20, so I just went with the rover squatting technique to get it to dock.

Edited June 1, 2013 by Immashift