What's YOUR crazy KSP invention!?

[Thorbane]

Stock? Probably this thing, the incredible flying pancake

14 orange tanks to 100km orbit. (the 7 small tanks on the bottom have 3.7% fuel left)

[SirJodelstein]

My craziest invention is probably the "Down Goer Five" from my xkcd inspired challenge. Its a 40t payload rocket that starts with the engines pointing upwards and performs a 180° flip just in time to prevent a ground impact. That challenge has seen a pretty awesome collection of unique rockets anyway, go check it out.

yep, this goes to space today

[Psycix]

Does not go to space today

[Felsmak]

-snip-

You never disappoint, Whackjob.

[snepel]

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but it works quite neatly.

For lack of sepatrons, I spin my lander just before decoupling my interplanetary stage, like a sort of 'pirouette decoupling'. This allows the boosters to drift quite a distance away and prevents them from slamming into the craft when entering the atmosphere:

[How2FoldSoup]

Well I've got two in this one: The craziest landing method ever for an SSTO (which I've used on two planes, but it's much crazier on this one, which is much larger and heavier than the other), and the craziest rover storage/deployment mechanism ever:

The landing method aside I just had that same idea for cargo bay! I was thinking about putting one upside down and then just dropping the rovers out of it...I'm totally stealing your idea because I have MSI installed as well and I love it even better. Thank you for making my interplanetary SSTO rover delivery system come true!

[Tiron]

That rotating mid section on Tiron's SSTO is very cool. I like that! Do you use Qstruts during flight to keep it from flexing?

There's a couple regular struts connecting the front and back sections through the cargobay (at the top where they're hard to see in this vid) to keep it from just flopping downwards, the IR docking washer connections are EXTREMELY floppy for some reason. I originally used docking struts to attach the pieces in front of and behind the cargobay to the cargobay when in flight (and also the cargobay to the rover for stability), but switched to KAS 4 struts when it came out. That's the boring part I skipped: Sending Bill into the cargo bay to disconnect all the struts so the bay can rotate without tearing the ship in twain.

The landing method aside I just had that same idea for cargo bay! I was thinking about putting one upside down and then just dropping the rovers out of it...I'm totally stealing your idea because I have MSI installed as well and I love it even better. Thank you for making my interplanetary SSTO rover delivery system come true!

Heh. I had a monster of a time getting this to work, but I'll share my key secret because I'm nice: For IR at least, you need to make the CargoBay the root part. Elsewise the docking washers MAY change rotation orientations when the craft gets rebuilt after docking the rover.

I also did some, shall we say, manual .craft editing (in notepad) to keep there from being a gap where the docking washers are.

[Merinsan]

Something I've posted on the forums before but I'm pretty proud of it (and it took me bleeding ages). It was a real pain to fly and I doubt I'll be doing anything quite so ambitious for a while...

That is brilliant!

Here is my contribution, when I tried to make a viable ion drive ship. It wasn't very viable.

[PotatoJoe]

I made a top. Well I also used infernal robotic's free moving docking washer too. Infinite fuel. Ill share the Craft file if anyone is interested...

[Ultimate Steve]

10 minutes ago, PotatoJoe said:

I made a top. Well I also used infernal robotic's free moving docking washer too. Infinite fuel. Ill share the Craft file if anyone is interested...

This thread is nearly two years old, but it is still relevant to a certain extent. I made a giant Ion Plane that flew Jeb to 18 KM.

EDIT: Hey, I made it to 400 rep!

Edited August 27, 2016 by Ultimate Steve

[cantab]

Asteroid 4 Wernher is set to slam into Kerbin in only a little more than a fortnight, with the potential to flatten a whole car. The people of all Kerbin must rally to stop this celestial catastrophe before it happens.

There can be no pussyfooting around, no nice careful engine burns to gently push the asteroid where we want it. We need to hit it hard and hit it fast. Our rocket designers worked all night and slept all day to develop the radical Nobel 1 spaceship, the only thing capable of the task and ensuring the survival of my Ferrari.

Now, crewed by a crack team of the two bravest, cleverest, and next-in-the-queue-est Kerbonauts the space program has, the Nobel 1 is headed for rendezvous with the killer rock. Failure is NOT an F9-ing option!

Basically I built a "bomb" using stack separators and used solely the blast force from those separators to deflect the asteroid.

More pics: https://flic.kr/s/aHsjXr9quA

I've done bigger stuff, but I think this still tops it for bonkers ideas. At least for bonkers ideas that worked.

[Sharpy]

 

[fourfa]

5 hours ago, Sharpy said:

 

so kerbal!

[klesh]

Its not terribly crazy, but I did make a sucessful Mohole lander.  Hard to design something to land in a giant 5km deep cone that you haven't really been to before.  

[Corona688]

Ooh, I've got a few, though none of them are spectacularly successful.  Perhaps the strangest was a mining vehicle which used a Juno as a generator in lieu of fuel cells:

...it was a very poor miner, but a spectacular special effects machine, with jet flameouts several times per second.

I also made a stock rover which fits inside, and can re-dock with, a 2.5 meter can once its mothership refuels itself.

How about the Planespace, a jet aircraft that launches vertically, leaves the atmosphere for a suborbital hop, and survives re-entry via retrorockets?  You can airdrop an aircraft anywhere on Kerbin in less than an hour for those across-the-world temperature logging missions.

Two docked spacecraft may not be much of an "invention", but my re-entry vehicle was fatally flawed and docking the piece of space junk on the left allowed it to re-enter heatshield first.

 

 

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by Corona688

[fourfa]

Laythe SSTO with removable wing modules, in order to fit in a Mk3 cargo bay

[cubinator]

Stock Rubik's cube, it's very clunky but it works!

[Tiron]

Just a note to the people of the present viewing this old, old thread:  The Pancakes don't work anymore.  The stock aerodynamic model was VERY different at the time.

I'll also mention something I didn't at the time:  I had the entire fuselage of the Valkyrie behind the cargo bay welded together to reduce flopping and lag, which is why only the nose flexes when the nosegear hits.  I'm pretty sure it would've taken the hit anyway but there would've been a lot more bending.  We didn't have KJR at the time, and the stock joints were even floppier than they are now, so welding was the only way.

Edited September 2, 2016 by Tiron

[Nuclearsheep]

A flying rotor. It spins incredibly fast and can take off like a helicopter. I am currently trying to combat the issue of spinning out of control.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/photo/107029110591918995788/6326213376081052914?icm=false&sqid=109488336238758153845&ssid=3e35f011-b7cb-4b88-ae1b-217b3803b3ee

[Xyphos]

oh well, my crazy invention so far is "Ore Force One"

 

[n.b.z.]

On 2.9.2016 at 7:56 AM, Tiron said:

Just a note to the people of the present viewing this old, old thread:  The Pancakes don't work anymore.

True.

However, we can now build a new type of pancakes that could not be made with the old aero model.

A fact that I can conveniently illustrate by showing my own craziest KSP invention: the Circular Crackpot Contraption.



This stock part, five-Rapiers-and-two-nukes, ISRU capable monster is actually a spaceplane, deriving lift from atmospheric flight - but the only lift surface is that huge, insane, saucer-shaped fairing. Just to make things even crazier, I did not bother with any aerodynamic control surfaces at all, and instead used some shameless amounts of reaction wheels.

This design is a nightmare with regards to Center-of-Mass and Center-of-Lift, and only became possible once I decided to balance 5 Rapiers at the back against 2 Nukes pointing forward. This in turn dictates an ascent profile involving a 180° yaw maneuver while still in the atmosphere... which by itself only works because there are no rudders on the ship.



The thing can reach Minmus, and go further from there. It carries some Duna-specific hardware, and otherwise has features such as rear landing legs, VTOL rockets etc. that enable it to land almost anywhere.

It is also a part count monster with absolutely no practical value (one Kerbal, no other payload) that I abandoned in an old 1.0.5 save, before we got the 1.1 performance increase. Which in turn broke the landing legs, which are mounted in a crazy orientation even by pre-1.1 standarts.



Album of abandoned mission (first image shows vessel internals in hangar): http://imgur.com/a/Z8Cmj
 

[Artheus]

I had various ideas for missions, one being a duna outpost landing by radially attached fuel-tanks+engines that had wings for stability on their sides. I never finished the Idea.

Another one was actually realised, it was a big rover landing on Dres, and when its time has come, the plane-like part of the rover detaches from the rest, flying back to Kerbin to land on the runway.