Rocket advises and designs after playing 6 months

[gilflo]

Hello

I have been playing now for more than 6 months, building rockets from 200T to 2200T, trying to fly them, trying to land many landers and to dock landers and heavy ships.

i spend half time building, half time flying, I visit Mun, Minmus and Duna. I did not any further because I thought it was more important to find the best design with the best DV before trying further.

My favorites add on are:

-Mechjeb 2, for launching, ascent, ASAS, Pand planet transfer, also for landing prevision.

-ORDA when you want to dock big rockets, because once you have a big space station, docking on it takes a lot of time, game time being 4 or 5 time less than real time ( lag du to many pieces), and ORDA is very effective for RCS and alignment.

You can hon manually once aligned.

-TAC fuel balance, because you can balance whatever tank you want on your ship, even if tanks are not connected with fuel lines and you can balance everything you want once you are docked. Very useful also to lock certain fuel tanks or RCS tanks you don't want to be used.

-Hydrojeb, for very precise control of throttle, very useful for manual landing

-Protractor for calculation for trnasfert to other planets

-Quantum struts for struting firmly docked ship to SS or between them

Crew roster

-H.O.M.E to establish Bases on planets, but what a pity you don't see you crew inside and once inside they can never go out, and I did not find how to use the power plant and the miner.....

-KW Rocketry, because it's a very good complement of the stock and it mix very easily to it. All my rockets are a mix of stock and KW rocketry.

-Clever bob and Bobcat for carts and trucks.

Here is my best design for a 52T lander, 2456DV, easy to land, even when drifting with horizontal speed, or on slope, because it is very large. Able dock a cart or a HOME habitat under it, able to fly back to Kerbin without refuelling on SS, if you are good on economic fuel landing

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For the launcher, my best is definitely asparagus stage, with maximum struts, the more struts, the less wobble, the less RCS, the easiest to fly, and you need to absolutely center your RCS thrusters for every stage you need them.

I always put 6 RCS Thruster around a tank, because 3 axes and 2 RCS by axe for symmetry.

I always add AV-R8 winglet on tanks, very helpfull to stabilise on take off and save RCS.

Here is my space Station launcher, 1560T , 580 pieces, 5300DV. SS alone is 100T with 5500 fuel and 2200 for RCS

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Another launcher, very light, to send a full 8 habitats HOME base on Mun or elsewhere, 420T, 7700DV, the base itself 93T and more than 4400DV makes half the job. Very well struts, I never use the available RCS, and I land it manually, very carefully using precision input just with ASAS. In fact RCS on final landing create big disturbance and the base becomes uncontrollable, I don't know why....

Notice engine cluster with 3 mainsails on the center KW rocketry tank, better than a big KW rocketry engine for DV. Same clusters on my SS Launcher

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Here is my big BridgeCrane than can land with 2 engines, then you can let them fall on ground and roll your crane. Able to hold HOME Habitat or big tank.

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48 Kerbals Mun base. 48 Kerbals who will never get out, because there is bug....

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My SS orbiting Mun with 3 more tanks docked, 2 fuel, 1 RCS, but the fact is even with 2 tanks connected, docking my lander on it takes time, frame rate is dropping

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SS at the very beginning, no tank docked, still 2 engines with fuel connected, with my lander docked (no frame drop for docking)

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So, STRUT and STRUT AGAIN, Center RCS Thrusters for every stage, use asparagus when you can, and on extended structures like my Kerbal base or my Bridge crane do every thing very symmetrical.For exemple I put 3 MeckJeb units on the center column of habitat on my Kerbal base, everything is put 3 times to be symmetrical because it's the only way to get best maneuverability in every part of the flight.

Thank you for reading my long post. Hope it helps. Your advises are welcome

[SkyRender]

If you're good at docking, doing many smaller launches are better. The bigger your rocket gets, the higher your risk is of spontaneous unplanned disassembly. Relatedly, one not-on-Spaceport mod that you might want to look into is Kethane. This mod adds a very robust fuel-mining system to the game, which simultaneously reduces your Kerbin-specific overhead and ups the number of things you can accomplish per launch by several magnitudes.

[gilflo]

Well, thanks, I am going to look at that.

[sal_vager]

Hello

I have been playing now for more than 6 months, building rockets from 200T to 2200T, trying to fly them, trying to land many landers and to dock landers and heavy ships.

i spend half time building, half time flying, I visit Mun, Minmus and Duna.

Plus see his pics for proof of flight

[Kerbart]

If you're good at docking, doing many smaller launches are better. The bigger your rocket gets, the higher your risk is of spontaneous unplanned disassembly.

I like the choice of words. Not unexpected, but unplanned. A subtle difference

[IvanTehFennec]

Nice designs, but you should try flying manually. Imo, it feels a lot more rewarding.

[sal_vager]

Saw something on the Steam forums a while back...Fly your own flight.

Have fun flying the way you want to, don't worry about how others play, and let others fly their craft their own way

[gilflo]

Plus see his pics for proof of flight

Yes, sure

laucnch and climb, as you see on time table it's different flights but same Lander on top

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climbing

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joining orbit

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preparing minmus landing, same sequence for descent and landing

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Descent to Minmus

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on Minmus

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[gilflo]

Nice designs, but you should try flying manually. Imo, it feels a lot more rewarding.

Well for me the most exciting is manual landing without parachute. Docking is also a great challenge, but i am not good.

Manually climbing is for me no interest, it's like keeping a flight on a straight line or on a same curve. The autopilot do this better than me and the challenge is to get the good tools and use it as perfectly as possible to do what I want the rocket to do.

Same thing for design. And for docking, I must say i have not enough patience to try it one complete day before success.

[IvanTehFennec]

Well for me the most exciting is manual landing without parachute. Docking is also a great challenge, but i am not good.

Manually climbing is for me no interest, it's like keeping a flight on a straight line or on a same curve. The autopilot do this better than me and the challenge is to get the good tools and use it as perfectly as possible to do what I want the rocket to do.

Same thing for design. And for docking, I must say i have not enough patience to try it one complete day before success.

To practice docking, just make two small craft with plenty of RCS, and electricity/lights. Get them to orbit, and then try and follow one of the many, many tutorials out there. Once you've done it once, it only gets easier, I can assure you that.

[nhnifong]

Wow you like to build big ships.

[gilflo]

To practice docking, just make two small craft with plenty of RCS, and electricity/lights. Get them to orbit, and then try and follow one of the many, many tutorials out there. Once you've done it once, it only gets easier, I can assure you that.

Yes I believe you, but then is it so easy with big ships?

[IvanTehFennec]

Yes I believe you, but then is it so easy with big ships?

With practice, it could be. I've built a kilo-ton craft in orbit, using quad-docking ports spread out quite wide. With practice, you'll learn a lot of tricks to dock easier and more efficiently.

[SkyRender]

Yes I believe you, but then is it so easy with big ships?

The real difficulty with big ships is that their various centers (of balance, torque, and thrust in particular) have a lot more impact when they're further off-center than those values on small craft. If you're smart about how you engineer your large craft, however, they're no harder to dock than small ones.

[DMagic]

That's some pretty gratuitous overuse of winglets and clustered mainsails. Why do you have so many of both? I don't see any reason why the rocket would be uncontrollable with just a single set of winglets instead of seven.

I like the design of your lander and the way that you can hold payload in the center. That's a good way of doing it. But seeing so many unnecessary parts kind of makes me a little sad inside;.;

[gilflo]

That's some pretty gratuitous overuse of winglets and clustered mainsails. Why do you have so many of both? I don't see any reason why the rocket would be uncontrollable with just a single set of winglets instead of seven.

I like the design of your lander and the way that you can hold payload in the center. That's a good way of doing it. But seeing so many unnecessary parts kind of makes me a little sad inside;.;

Yes maybe you're right for winglets, I should try without.

About cluster it makes my gain a lot of DV, not really necessary for Mun, but welcome to go further than Mun

[gilflo]

That's some pretty gratuitous overuse of winglets and clustered mainsails. Why do you have so many of both? I don't see any reason why the rocket would be uncontrollable with just a single set of winglets instead of seven.

I like the design of your lander and the way that you can hold payload in the center. That's a good way of doing it. But seeing so many unnecessary parts kind of makes me a little sad inside;.;

The problem with the asparagus design where the outer tanks are far from the center and the whole ship is very large is that, once first pair of outer tanks is gone, it's very difficult to balance. i tried without winglet and the whole ship starts rotating after the first pair of outer tanks is gone, and it's impossible to stop even with RCS. I tried with winglets on outside tanks and no winglet on center tanks, same effect when you got the 2 last outer tanks around the center one, the whole ship start rotating, impossible to stop with RCS.

All winglets are working, so I guess it's not for nothing....

[ASnogarD]

The 0.21 update also made things a bit sturdier, my old pre- 0.21 heavy fuel tanker (delivers with no issue 3 orange tanks full of fuel and 2 nukes with a lot of fuel of their own) had 343 parts , I took off ALL the struts that connect tanks to engines and tanks to tanks but kept the struts that joined the stacks to each other... dropped to a amazing 211 parts.

Your designs may benefit from another look at how many struts you need, and less struts means less parts which lets you add more stuff rather than more struts.