Open Source Construction Techniques for Craft Aesthetics

[soulreaver1981]

how to make a cool looking shock cone intake.

place the shockcone intake.

move it back using the offset tool and place the cirrular intake (clipping needs to be on or use a octagonal strut)

[H2O.]

Hello people.!

The Kassandra is now pretty much done, and I wanted to talk a bit about compact design, and some of the solutions I used.

The Ion Ring:

The idea is to use a decoupler as a basic structural part, and attach engines and fuel tanks to it.

Now, in my first design, the decoupler was a big one and engines were inside. But it is just too much weight, so I did the opposite.: a tiny red decoupler, and fuel tanks and engines outside. It works better, both from an esthetic and a weight point of view.

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The Lander:

The command pod + fuel tank is ultra-classic. What matters here is the landing gear-science-rover-satellite part.

Obviously, you don't have a lot of options for the material bay location, but on the plus side it lower the center of mass.

Now the rover is attached on his side but with a slight angle so it can fall on his wheels.

On the other side, in the center, the satellite. Note how the engines and solar panels are positionned for optimal space use. A goo container on one side and a little assembly composed of the atmospheric sensor, a probe and an electricity generator on the other side, so space is well used. All of that has the advantage of balancing the weight of the rover on the other side.

On this side of the lander you can also notice a landing light and a landing leg that cover the view when retracted. Observe the picture from IVA when the landing gear is deployed, you can see the foot of the landing leg in a the nice disk of light produce by the landing light: it help so much for IVA landing!

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All that equipment lower the lander's center of mass, so you can go with three legs. Now you may notice that there is nothing under the two engines of the lander and rightly so because they are used for landing. But all that space is not waisted during flight.

The Nuclear Stage:

First of all, nuclear engines are tall, with the unfortunate consequence of making ships bigger than they could be. And that is how the remaining space under the lander's engines comes handy! All that is needed now is to fill the gaps with fuel thank and there you go.

One of the unintended side effect of a ship with a landing approach that use two stages is the staging moment itself. If your stage is not empty, engines will continue to burn, making the situation quite desperate.

• First option: you are an octopus, and you manage to cut engines, stage, throttle up to a reasonnable level while maintening roll, yaw and pitch. All of this at 50-100 m above ground.
  
• Second option: use an action group to stage and cut the engines of the jetissoned stage.
  
• Third option: wait for empty tank and then stage.
  
• Fourth option: regular staging shut down engines on the jetissoned stage.
  

I think the last one is the best, and to do that, I attached the engines to a blue stack separator. As blue stack separators detach everything that is attached to it, it works very well.

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And

, I hope you've enjoyed it.! Edited December 29, 2014 by H2O.

[Yukon0009]

Apparenty the midsize antennae make great pico cargo bays.

EDIT: GusTurbo it seems your sig is broken..or at least the OSCTCA badge image is broken.

Edited December 24, 2014 by Yukon0009

[problemecium]

O_O

Sheer Brilliance, that. I must say. I never would have thought of using an antenna like that.

[Yukon0009]

O_O

Sheer Brilliance, that. I must say. I never would have thought of using an antenna like that.

They are very, very useful.

[Majorjim!]

Apparenty the midsize antennae make great pico cargo bays.

http://i.imgur.com/xMd0ZAM.png

http://i.imgur.com/ONmAWr2.png

EDIT: GusTurbo it seems your sig is broken..or at least the OSCTCA badge image is broken.

I tried the antenna as a cargo cover on my X-37b but it never quite fits right. Bugged me too much to use it. Plus it has to clip though the cargo when it opens which looks a bit crappy.

Looks cute though, and they make great kerbal doors too.

http://i.imgur.com/VqdAko1.png

They are very, very useful.

LOL that poor kerbal is being eaten!

[Yukon0009]

IKR, it was a nightmare to fit them on my X-37 as well.

[Brownhair2]

http://i.imgur.com/VqdAko1.png

They are very, very useful.

That is hilarious

Also, it's a bit late, but 9t3ndo, your Rockomax Turbine isn't working for me. The fuel tank is getting in the way of both engines, so neither are generating any thrust.

[Majorjim!]

IKR, it was a nightmare to fit them on my X-37 as well.

Well I have used these antenna for my new SSTO, my first proper SSTO release if I can get it to work.

Keep up the good work Yukon.

MJ

[Gue__1]

Well with the new offset tool I think every craft needs a revisit. Meanwhile I tried to make our kerbal engines more like real ones.

So here is my attempt:

I used the radial antennas and attached them to the small fuel tank. With the offset tool I moved them down.

The engine works fine and it doesn't affect the direction of the trust.

Gue

[GusTurbo]

Cool idea! Here's the technique applied to a Poodle engine:

[HafCoJoe]

Hm... I've been looking at Blue's hidden adapter stages and with the add of offset, they could be simplified even more. Time to experiment!

[astropapi1]

So here's a little something I've been doing since the dawn of time, never thought of suggesting it.

Grab a radial intake and switch it so it sits into the other part like so. You'll end up with a teardrop-like shape, cool for streamlined designs if you don't care about it being "cheaty".

[Yukon0009]

Not exactly a technique, but RCS ports can be clipped so that they look like really small engines and still have the benefits of RCS:

[PTNLemay]

I'm trying to build a Minmus base and I could use some hints for the aesthetic aspect of it... Any help would be quite appreciated.

I can't find anything to serve as a good railing. The reinforcement struts work okay, but they're non-corporeal. The Kerbals can walk right through them which really defeats the purpose of a rail. I also like the structural pylons (click the pics to get larger versions of them) but they're one miss-click away from getting blown off the structure. There's no way to remove the explosive bolts in them, so to speak.

Also, for these sort of large bases, does anyone know which is worse for lag, excessive weight, or too many parts? I sometimes find myself coming up with nicer solutions that weigh less, but that use a lot more parts, and I worry about the final product. The base is probably going to use many of these platforms interconnected to one another, and this initial platform is already 170 parts large.

This is a ramp I built for the base that uses the old style legs. They're heavier and taller, but use less parts.

[Yukon0009]

@PTLemay moar parts is worse for lag.

[Wanderfound]

Parts are the lag makers, not mass.

If you like the pylons, have you tried hardpoints instead? Similar effect, but no risk of decoupling. They worked well on this sailing ship design: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92653-K-S-S-Kraken-three-masted-sailing-ship

Those radial engines on the central tank are intended to be purely decorative? They won't give you any thrust where they're placed.

[PTNLemay]

Those radial engines on the central tank are intended to be purely decorative? They won't give you any thrust where they're placed.

The big platform is meant to be a landing pad, I added the top tank for balance and as a place to hold the nicknacks necessary for landing (side thrusters, control probe). Once it's landed at a satisfactory location I decouple the central bits and push them away. Hence the radial engines, they won't move the platform, they'll move the tanks away from the platform.

And yeah, the hard-points would probably work best. A bit short to work as walls, but it's better than nothing.

[Azimech]

How to build gigantic, sci-fi worthy spacecraft using stock parts and without tweakscale, in a few minutes!

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Btw, until patched, don't use MK3 parts. They'll make your life miserable.

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The 77I-78. Stock parts only. And useful too.

Specs:

Mass: 594t.

Delta-V: 7605m/s

Length: 45m.

TWR: 0.33/0.88

Seats: 70

Docking ports: 8x 1.25m, 9x 2.5m

Parts: 408

Edited January 31, 2015 by Azimech

[GusTurbo]

Very cool. But what's wrong with the Mk3 parts?

[Kurotenshi]

2 quick techniques that require part clipping:

1) Flush "heat shield"

I've never liked the bottom of the Mk1-2 pod, so I usually stuck an flat adapter under it, as a "heat shield" placeholder. The pic illustrates how to make said heat shield look flush with the rest of the orbiter, by either attaching a large decoupler to the upper node of the adapter, or by attaching an SAS ring to the tank/part under a small decoupler, connected to the adapter. Decouples without any problems.

2) Engine clusters

Don't know if anybody else has figured this out, but when you drag an engine to the side, and attach another one on the same node, they function perfectly, both drawing fuel from the tank as they should. You do have to drag them away from the node, attaching directly still doesn't work. You can do this with as many engines as you like, only watch out that they don't block the nozzle if you clip them trough each other (like an "LV-T75"), and beware of overheating issues if you really go berserk with the number of engines.

The SAS ring is attached to the same node as the engines, mostly there for aesthetics, with the benefit of adding more control authority (as these are non-gimbaling engines)

[problemecium]

It's not a terribly groundbreaking technique, but I did notice that four of the quarter-size fuel tanks, capped with nose cones, fit snugly underneath a 2.5-meter tank to make a half-donut shape with just enough room for an engine nozzle to poke out:

It's a bit clippy, but to that I say A: why else was the Offset tool invented? and B: I like to think of the extra volume of the nose cones being where the fuel is stored and making up for the "clipped out" volume of the tanks.

[Azimech]

Very cool. But what's wrong with the Mk3 parts?

If you compare the MK3 and B9 cargo bays, they have the exact same mesh. But the B9 breakingforce and breakingtorque values are balanced on their function, while the MK3 parts have such low values it's absurd.

Edited January 31, 2015 by Azimech

[problemecium]

I've had very little trouble with them. Granted they sometimes need a few struts here and there, but why shouldn't massive chunks of spaceship be heavy and prone to overstressing the poor little bolts between them?

Also props to Azimech. Why didn't I think of using cargo bays as hulls?!?

[sgt_flyer]

First, a little trick i use to avoid complications when dealing with clipped parts (such as attaching to the wrong part, or needing to attach a fuel tank to a node inside an array of tanks without wanting to deal with the radial attachment)

(i use this trick in my next post, but it's so handy i think it deserves a separate post )

i simply attach the part i want to use on a non clipped node, and then i radially attach an I-beam to it (or several, depending on the size of the clipping - can be used vertically to - useful to 'block' one of the two nodes of a decoupler for example)

then, you detach the part with the I-beam attached - and click on the extremity of the i-beam so the mouse moves the group of objects from the I-beam instead of from the part :

now, i can easily place my decoupler between these engines without worrying with part selection bugs