(Stock) Stable, beginner-friendly rockets, anyone?

[rebelcommando1807]

Since there are so many threads with ultra-fancy, ultra-complex rockets out there that use who-knows-how-many packs, here\'s something for quite a few people. Excluding SSTO designs ( They don\'t tend to have much in the way of wiggle room for training, after all ), what kinds of fun designs have you made, using only stock parts, and what kind of mission did you intend for them?

I have three to start things off, probably more in the future.

I have dubbed them the Spaceworthy series. Started before 0.12, this series was, well, spaceworthy. A good pilot could even orbit them. But as 0.13 broke all saves ( And I got a little out of hand with mod parts.. >.>; ), I have made the series anew. Presenting..

Spaceworthy X-1.

A three-engine design with plenty of RCS to mess around with, this is as close to SSTO as I care to get. Shedding only the two outer tank stacks and exclusively using gimballing engines, this design is the first one that I made, just designed to be general-purpose.. Unless you want to land on the Mun. It doesn\'t do that well. IT has as basic of a crew retrieval system as one can think of.. That is to say, a parachute and decoupler.

Spaceworthy X-2.

Designed with orbital maneuvering training in mind, it carries up a tank and a half of fuel and a gimballing engine into orbit, as well as a simple 8-block RCS with three tanks of fuel and ASAS to keep it all steady. As with the first one, it carried a basic pod decoupling system to get the crew back home.

Spaceworthy X-3.

The largest current Spaceworthy design, X-3 is designed to get a decent-sized lander to the Mun.. And possibly back, if you care to try! With a whopping 13 engines with three tanks each in the lower stage, followed by 6 engines and four tanks with a central stack of five and one, this craft is sure to get you well on your way to orbit before the remaining central stack, kept full with fuel lines, takes up the majority of getting you to the Mun and slowing you down before landing. The lander itself has three gimballing engines attached to decouplers to the structural tanks to help you slow down, as well as 21 RCS thruster blocks to stop moving sideways as the single non-gimballing engine beings you down for a soft* landing. The return vehicle is a simple two-tank, one-engine design with ASAS, more than capable of making it back with fuel to spare.

*Under 2-3 m/s, from what I know..

Well, that\'s what I\'ve got.. anyone care to share their creations?

[FiahOwl]

Since there are so many threads with ultra-fancy, ultra-complex rockets out there that use who-knows-how-many packs, here\'s something for quite a few people. Excluding SSTO designs ( They don\'t tend to have much in the way of wiggle room for training, after all ), what kinds of fun designs have you made, using only stock parts, and what kind of mission did you intend for them?

I have three to start things off, probably more in the future.

I have dubbed them the Spaceworthy series. Started before 0.12, this series was, well, spaceworthy. A good pilot could even orbit them. But as 0.13 broke all saves ( And I got a little out of hand with mod parts.. >.>; ), I have made the series anew. Presenting..

Spaceworthy X-1.

A three-engine design with plenty of RCS to mess around with, this is as close to SSTO as I care to get. Shedding only the two outer tank stacks and exclusively using gimballing engines, this design is the first one that I made, just designed to be general-purpose.. Unless you want to land on the Mun. It doesn\'t do that well. IT has as basic of a crew retrieval system as one can think of.. That is to say, a parachute and decoupler.

Spaceworthy X-2.

Designed with orbital maneuvering training in mind, it carries up a tank and a half of fuel and a gimballing engine into orbit, as well as a simple 8-block RCS with three tanks of fuel and ASAS to keep it all steady. As with the first one, it carried a basic pod decoupling system to get the crew back home.

Spaceworthy X-3.

The largest current Spaceworthy design, X-3 is designed to get a decent-sized lander to the Mun.. And possibly back, if you care to try! With a whopping 13 engines with three tanks each in the lower stage, followed by 6 engines and four tanks with a central stack of five and one, this craft is sure to get you well on your way to orbit before the remaining central stack, kept full with fuel lines, takes up the majority of getting you to the Mun and slowing you down before landing. The lander itself has three gimballing engines attached to decouplers to the structural tanks to help you slow down, as well as 21 RCS thruster blocks to stop moving sideways as the single non-gimballing engine beings you down for a soft* landing. The return vehicle is a simple two-tank, one-engine design with ASAS, more than capable of making it back with fuel to spare.

*Under 2-3 m/s, from what I know..

Well, that\'s what I\'ve got.. anyone care to share their creations?

wtf, I also dubbed mine spaceworthy...

Lol, coincidence much?

Anyways, Spaceworthy 1 is a two stage rocket I made long ago. All it does is get into space.

[rebelcommando1807]

Was so focused on seeing how it flew to activate the ASAS. ;P

Good, stable.. Though, it you want it to get even higher, I\'d say make a 2-3 tank stack under the first stage, put the non-gimballing engine under that, radially attach three more (With decouplers), and have fuel lines running to the center engine to have it burn out last.

..And apply solids as needed. My first proper spaceworthy craft was quite similar, I think.. Three tanks, engine, decoupler, three more tanks and engines on a tricoupler, then another decoupler and three solids per stack, with SAS on the outermost ones.

This was made with the older short atmosphere, but it would probably work now if the tricoupler wasn\'t so screwed up.

[FiahOwl]

Was so focused on seeing how it flew to activate the ASAS. ;P

Good, stable.. Though, it you want it to get even higher, I\'d say make a 2-3 tank stack under the first stage, put the non-gimballing engine under that, radially attach three more (With decouplers), and have fuel lines running to the center engine to have it burn out last.

..And apply solids as needed. My first proper spaceworthy craft was quite similar, I think.. Three tanks, engine, decoupler, three more tanks and engines on a tricoupler, then another decoupler and three solids per stack, with SAS on the outermost ones.

This was made with the older short atmosphere, but it would probably work now if the tricoupler wasn\'t so screwed up.

Taking your suggestions...

In theory, it\'s possible (but VERY difficult) to get into orbit, but if you burn at the wrong time for one moment...

The first stage, I activate the solid boosters full thrust (the first stage will take you out of Kerbol\'s atmosphere) and let it go.

The second stage, I active ONLY the solid boosters (by holding left ctrl down to stop the thrust of the liquid engine.)

Then when falling back I deploy parachutes.

If you have keen eyes, you\'ll notice something wrong on the third picture.

[dire]

Well, any landing you can walk away from, right?

The Munatic II is a very simple moon lander with plenty of fuel for the return trip. The big innovation here is a post-mun-landing, post-mun-takeoff stage consisting of just the pod, an RCS tank, the parachute, and some RCS boosters. Don\'t let its humble appearance fool you; on a mass that tiny, one RCS tank has a HUGE delta-v; it\'s made the difference between \'lost in space with perikerb of a couple million\' and \'safe landing, mission success\' on about 75% of the successful mun landings I\'ve brought it on (I\'m not very good at the return trip yet, hence the \'lots of fuel and huge delta-v final stage\' approach).

The center engine is gimballed, and fuel lines feed into the center bottom fuel tank, allowing you to detach the outer engines with four full tanks of fuel. Could probably add another center bottom fuel tank, giving you five full tanks of fuel and (almost) already in orbit.

On an unrelated note, anyone know offhand why my \'ships\' directory would be empty? I can\'t find the ship save to post it (I can load the ship in ksp though). Running Win and ksp is in Program Files (x86)

[rebelcommando1807]

Would be in where you have KSP.exe, under \'Ships\'.

[semininja]

Would be in where you have KSP.exe, under \'Ships\'.

Not when /KSP/ is under /Program Files/ because permissions. My advice: move /KSP/ to your documents folder. That should fix it.

[rebelcommando1807]

Not when /KSP/ is under /Program Files/ because permissions. My advice: move /KSP/ to your documents folder. That should fix it.

I just keep it on the desktop.

[semininja]

I just keep it on the desktop.

That works, just not in /Program Files/ is the important part.

[dire]

Meant to say, it\'s on win 7. And I know it -is- saving ships somewhere, because I can load ship saves, I just didn\'t know where that was.

Found it. I cleverly thought to run a drive-wide search on .craft (the drive\'s not too bloated yet).

It\'s in %AppData%\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\KSP\Ships

(%appdata% would look something like c:\users\username\appdata)

[Tim_Barrett]

Meant to say, it\'s on win 7. And I know it -is- saving ships somewhere, because I can load ship saves, I just didn\'t know where that was.

Found it. I cleverly thought to run a drive-wide search on .craft (the drive\'s not too bloated yet).

It\'s in %AppData%\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\KSP\Ships

(%appdata% would look something like c:\users\username\appdata)

Don\'t you guys save KSP and the extracted files in one folder?

[semininja]

The problem is permissions; unless you\'re running on an admin account, which is inadvisable, KSP won\'t have the permissions necessary for saving to /Program Files/KSP/*, so it puts it somewhere else. Everything gets extracted to the same place, but stuff gets saved to /AppData/ or something like that, because of permissions.

[cardgame]

I have a folder on my desktop labelled \'Awesome\'. Inside is what\'s on the tin, which includes the KSP folder. Simple enough, and it hasn\'t had any issues with permissions.

[semininja]

As long as your KSP folder is in .../users/[your username]/*, you won\'t have any problems with permissions.

[closette]

Dire, I hope your directory problem is solved.

Back to your ship Munatic II, I just made my first successful Mun-and-back trip with it (I had to do a touch-and-go on the Mun since I scraped off a winglet due to poor landing skills and the ship was about to fall over). I had a lot of fun with this ship, responsive to controls and just enough fuel (including RCS) to get the job done, as long as you\'re not picky about landing sites. Thank you!