Designs for Boats

[Rocket Farmer]

So I'm working up the final stages of a large Laythe Expedition. I've managed to design and hang all the other components on my delivery vehicle (space stations, satellites, planes, rovers, probe landers, accommodation etc) but I'm having trouble designing a decent boat and the forum search hasn't helped much.

I'm thinking jet powered but my current ones lose steering above about 10m/s while in the water. Anybody have any good ideas? Ideally it would be nice if it also had wheels to drive up onto the beach.

[M4ck]

Try Firespitter pack, it has some parts for landing airplanes on water, they could work well. There was also a good mod with "boat parts" in its name, but I cannot remember it right now... It had parts for massive ships, regular size ships and boat size ships.

[Rocket Farmer]

Sorry, I should have mentioned.

As I still haven't done everything in the stock game I haven't moved on to mods yet. I'm not saying they don't look fun and interesting but instead that I haven't got there yet and do everything totally stock.

I am finding that a plane in the water is very ungainly (ie 10m/s max speed) but a powdered raft of panels actually can manage 20 m/s + but is more difficult to steer.

[Libra00]

Without resorting to mods, the key to boats in KSP is to make sure only wing parts are in the water, and oriented correctly. Probably the best place to look for design inspiration is in the various boat race challenges, if they still exist. But basically you want to build hydrofoils rather than traditional boats. You want a reasonably long, reasonably wide stance for improved stability, and you want to build it in such a way that anything that isn't a wing is lifted out of the water. I'm not sure how the gravity on Laythe compares with Kerbin, so it may require some testing to figure out how long your foils will have to be.

The upside to this kind of design is that it can be very fast (I have designs that can exceed 200m/s in the water). The downside is they can be hard to steer (keep your control surfaces out of the water or they break off pretty consistently at speed), unstable, and if you're going long distances they seem to have a proclivity for speeding up as fuel drains until either parts fall off or you suddenly leap out of the ocean, lose lift, and crash back into it. If you want something that isn't quite so fast it's possible to build hull-like shapes out of wing parts, but every attempt I've ever made has had bad stability issues.

Also, as for mods, the pontoons from the firespitter pack are a little buggy for me. If you use the gear bays anywhere in them (to allow it to drive on land) they tend to bend and warp a lot where the gear bays connect to other parts.

Anyway, hope this helps.

[Whackjob]

I made a boat once. Then it became a u-boat. Then it became a coral reef. Bill Kerman still isn't speaking to me.

[Rocket Farmer]

I made a boat once. Then it became a u-boat. Then it became a coral reef. Bill Kerman still isn't speaking to me.

Best comment ever!

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Ohhh, whackjob, what would we do with out you?

Any way, back on topic, I recommend have a little surface area in water as possible and to have mass on the top so your craft isn't constantly trying to turn due to STUPID UNWANTED TOQUE!!!!!!

[Blackstar]

STUPID UNWANTED TOQUE!!!!!!

?

[rasheed]

I think he meant torque

[Whackjob]

Maybe he meant Torgue.

I got one, and only one question for you, Bob Kerman!

EXPLOSIONS?

Edited September 9, 2013 by Whackjob

[Flyer10254]

Ive found that a mixture of wings and air intakes as pontoons make for a nice ship.

[ApocSurvivor713]

I use the structural plates as the floats. In the end, whatever boat you make ends up looking a bit like a hydroplane. I've never actually built a boat with them, but they can withstand a water landing at 90m/sec. Just put one lying horizontally, and attach another to it at an angle. Use 3 or 4 on a body that looks like an airplane without wings and you should be good. Good luck!

[UH60guy]

I used nose cones for floats on a base (image here: http://i.imgur.com/KcvJxWc.jpg), you may want to try those or the smaller ones underneath some scaffolding beams for a boat.

Just be careful that whatever you do that the ladder or seats for Kerbals are close to the water surface (within right click range to board). The way the game is set up, it treats objects that are floating as falling, and Kerbals cannot stand on floating objects. They can climb ladders and board floating modules, just they can't stand. I'm not sure about control stations, but that's what testing is for! There is a mod for that though (sea sickness cure), but I know you're shooting for stock.

Edited September 11, 2013 by UH60guy