So I want to make an interplanetary colony...

[sadron]

I was wondering if anyone had advice on building a sort of colony ship for landing on another planet. Like attaching habitat modules onto a rocket part and assembling the multipart rocket up in orbit for when we head off to another planet. I wanna do more than just land and plant a flag as I've done thus far ;p My main issue is some sort of creative block on thinking up how to build the colony ship, what parts I'd attach, if it'd be on its own rocket engine or not, etc.

[flightmaster]

I have the same problem, I get all these great ideas but have no idea how to design the ship to make them possible. I often see other peoples' work and use their ideas or just say "how on Kerbin did they come up with that crazy thing?!"

[gerryrbd]

Well you could use "H.O.M.E. 3m" mod... It has everything you need, habitat module, energy generator, hangars, etc with their own engines, legs and chutes.

You toss everything you need into orbit, assemble them and place another module with several nuclear engines at the bottom. Then you can take them all at once. So when you are at the desired planet's orbit, you detach each one at a time and land them.

Personally all my "colonies" have to do with Kethane, so apart from habitat modules ive got extractors, converters, trucks (DEMV mods), "silos" (big tanks for kethane storage) and ships to put the fuel into orbit. Its a lot of work...

[sadron]

Does anyone else have advice on how to make a good colony ship, perhaps show some examples some cool people have made?

[Brotoro]

I don't make one big ship. I send the parts separately.

[Itsdavyjones]

What I would do is send the habitats to the destination unmanned either all separate, kerbal alarm clock recomended, or a few together and send a manned ferry afterwards.

[WhiteWeasel]

My minmus lander, It's a singular launch vehicle, but it is modular in design with docking ports on the top and bottom. It can house up to eight kerbals! Yeah I said minmus, but I'm sure the design can be retro fitted with LV-Ns' instead of a poodle and 909's for places like duna and eve.

Here is the top part of it that makes it into orbit. The side mounted ditch tanks are usually used up to circularize + inclination burn. Leaving a mostly full poodle afterwards. Which is used up to get to minmus and about a 6th of the lander fuel to get there. You should still have at least at half fuel on said landing, far more than enough to get back to kerbin. So it could double as a refueler/tanker. The top part is the CM which has the initial crew held. Once a safe orbit has been established they will transfer to the LM. Afterwards the CM jettisons with a probe core and the two small fuel tanks, (little grey and round orange) which has enough to deorbit it self. Once the crew starts the inclination and transfer burn in which the ditch tanks jettison (or you could keep them if you want to use it as a tanker!) then the poodle is used up and is undocked when empty. Using about the top 4 little tanks and a little bit of the big ones to get to minmus.

If I knew how to put up a craft file I would, so you could experiment with it.

[Deaf3279]

You mean like this?

For record I didnt made it. I found them on renderosity.com who people made a 3D varies program and post their artist. This one they use Bryce program to create it. I think it's most awesome one i even seen. I wish i could build something simliar that on kerbal space program

[sadron]

You mean like this?

For record I didnt made it. I found them on renderosity.com who people made a 3D varies program and post their artist. This one they use Bryce program to create it. I think it's most awesome one i even seen. I wish i could build something simliar that on kerbal space program

Yeah, something like that. Assembling the pieces up in orbit, where weight isn't necessarily a factor, and then carting it towards my destination planet. A multi-part ship, more or less.

[MeticulousMitch]

I like to make ships that have a lot of docking ports towards the rear, and then dock clusters of engines and fuel tanks to the mothership.

[kahlzun]

The Orion Nuclear mod makes it a lot easier to loft these kind of designs.

Based off IRL tech too!

[tntristan12]

I have a disposable class of boosters that I hook to my one way designs. For example, I'll send a refueling depot to Dunar orbit and dock it with a space station starter kit to make a more official looking station, and then I will send my interplanetron back and forth between that station and the one on Kerbin, ferrying kerbals and supplies back and forth.

[triffid_hunter]

my work in progress:

Most of the RCS tugs will probably get left behind and I still have to add landers and rovers and a skycrane and things like that

[Wjolcz]

Here, have this as another idea for a colony ship

From left to right: deatachable fuel tank (to save mass after it runs out) -> interplanetary drive -> lander -> 2 habbitation modules -> rover to drive around.

This thing has about 3500 units of dV, although landing was a bit tricky. I left the drive in the orbit so I can redock it and refuel the lander, or something.

Not a big colony because I wanted it to be not laggy. Bear in mind theres also the lander but I sent it back to space to refuel it.

The best thing about this is that it's made out of modules docked together, so you can always rebuild it or change the combination in-flight.

Aaaaaand I forgot to take another flag before leaving Kerbin so every kerbal there has the same pirate flag :L

Edited June 9, 2013 by Veeltch

[Klajan]

This was a Interplanetary Mothership I designed in 0.19, but I think I will redesign it for 0.20. I had a short testrun with my colony attached to it, but I can´t find the screens right now. The front Part was designed to stay in Orbit yround Duna, while the enginedepartment had enough fuel to get back to Kerbin with the rest of the colony. Never made it that far though, since 0.20 broke most of my designes.

[Temstar]

Here is my take on colonisation:

For moving a sustainable population to another planet I would first launch this:

Fill it with 134 crew, either on the ground before launch or later on with shuttles.

Then launch this deep space rocket engine:

Dock the two together and we get this:

Fully fuelled, we get delta-V = 3026.95m/s, enough to send it to Laythe.

As for actual surface colony, I've just completed building my first one on the Mun:

Complete with a pair of crawler transporters capable of ground handling of landed spacecrafts so they could be refuelled on the ground:

The colony was put together with 11 launches including the crew shuttle. So if a interplanetary mothership was used to haul the pieces this base could probably be sent in 2-3 shiploads. Alternative if the location for the base was somewhere with low delta-V like Duna then the 11 pieces could just fly them themselves.

[Geo793]

I prefer launching two ships to another planet than one large one. The first one would either have a skeleton crew or is completely robotic, and it would establish the infrastructure, habitats, communications, and scientific facilities for the colonists upon their arrival. The second ship will carry the colonists to the planet and land them. This plan no only protects your future colonists, but also reduces the part count of the ships and the lag you might have to go through.

[sadron]

These are all great ideas. Perhaps we should turn this into a colony sharing thread?