The Farside Mission II: Operation Muntropolis

[gabyalufix]

Everyone seemed to enjoy seeing my Farside project, so I figured I’d show you guys what I’ve been fiddling with lately. As always, buckle up and bring a snack. I do tend to write a lot. I admit it: I’m an imaginer. I take shit, and I imagine the everlovin\' heck out of it. It\'s a thing.

Presenting:

The Farside II Mission: Operation Muntropolis.

aka: Operation put a huge freaking colony on the mun!

This mission had much simpler intent than Farside I. No orbital space station, no commsats. Captain Jeb would have none of that frofrourah. No. For this mission, the goal was to launch a full-fledged COLONY into orbit, and land it on the mun. I figured 800 civilians plus a few hundred crew would just about do nicely.

It needed some serious power to get this up into space. A dozen 90-ton KW Globe X-L solid boosters provided most of the initial thrust, helped along by four KW-LLR Hercules XIII’s, which all fired simultaneously on liftoff. The LFE’s provided the gimbaled thrust to let the ASAS keep it upright, as the game puttered along at 1 frame per 2 seconds. Full throttle, we empty a 40-ton, 10000-fuel-unit 3-meter droptank in about 25 seconds. I slapped 3 of those on the bottom of the ship, and dropped them as they go empty.

Popping the SRB\'s without damaging the ship requires me to throttle down.

By the time I break atmo, I’ve shed 1200 tons, not counting the launch tower. I leave quite a mess down below. And I still have the main engines and 30,000+ units of fuel left for them. My altimeter is long-since bugged out, so I have to either eyeball it or go to the map.

We\'ve lost another 256 tons by the time our final-stage engines fire. They’re initially assisted by 6 CMM-96 solid boosters.

Once those boosters drop, It’s a long, slow, tense burn to finish off my orbit. The last set of engines are weak but efficient. They’re also not strong enough to directly fight kerbin’s gravity. I have to make it into orbit or everyone falls to their deaths. Unfortunately, that means I have to have patience. Sometimes if I angle the previous stage’s burn too shallow or too high, I’ll fall back into atmo before I make it to orbital velocity.

Made it!

My final stage has 13 LVB20 liquid engines, along with 37,000 units of fuel. 6 of the engines cut out partway through, which is annoying. Is there any way to get tanks to fully share fuel?

Now more long slow burns, burning at perigee to build up a transfer orbit.

I’ve gotten pretty good at aiming for intercepts. If I intercept into a hyperbolic with too high a perigee, I end up running out of fuel. I aim for a slow intercept, with a nice low perigee.

Managing the landing was made a LOT harder by the fact that my engines were incredibly weak (though efficient!), and my altimeter was bugged out. I actually had to use the altitude from the map screen to manage my approach. Once I was close enough to really judge distance by eye, I did that.

Zero-zero-blank-blank-blank-blank . . . Why do my kerbins all look so happy?

This was, by far, my best landing ever. It had to be: If I impacted at more than 1-2 m/s, the whole thing would come apart. So I took it nice and easy. Nice and slow. I (thought I) had plenty of fuel. I actually touched down with only a few pixels of fuel left. I touched down moving almost-perfectly downwards, at 0.5 m/s. Woot!

It shuddered a bit as it settled in place, but eventually stopped. Thank god. I\'ve had a few explode minutes after the landing, as they slowly shift around on a slope.

Now, let’s take a tour:

The Muntropolis has thirty 2-meter habitation modules, arranged in 6 towers: 5 for civilians, 1 for crew.

It also has 7 empty fuel tanks, which can be repurposed as living space. Or cut apart for scrap (29.5 tons of metal, dry), if anyone can figure out a way to do so without bringing the towers down.

Each of the 25 civilian modules holds living quarters and common areas for 32 kerbin civilians. Some of them have to double bunk, but every Kerbin gets his very own window (though a few of them just get a view of a tower wall, a few feet away).

The crew tower is where the enlisted crew and junior officers live. The 200 enlisted crewmen have it a bit more cramped than the civilians—every three have to share two windows. The 30 junior officers, on the other hand, each get one, and live in the top module of the tower, just below the FWtSHtF II.

The 3-meter central column is restricted to crew only, which is probably for the best, since the heart of the central tower is a 3m by 3m nuclear reactor (built out of 12x decomissioned NERVA engines and 3x habitation modules.). Above that is the engineering deck, built out of seven 1-meter lab modules, chockablock with life support equipment, transformers, Heat exchangers, recyclers, and all that handy-dandy stuff. There are also 12 large solar collectors anchored here, attached to struts.

Above the engineering deck are the big tanks of air and water. (Note, in-game it’s still full of fuel, so it’s quite heavy). Six senior officers live beneath the captain’s command module (the design specifications dictated that they be “within shouting distanceâ€), in a re-commissioned lunar lander from previous mun missions.

Captain Jebediah lives at the top of the central tower. He also has access to a nice scenic porch area. Sufficiently brown-nosey officers may occasionally be invited out there as well for brandy and cigars. A special device of Jeb’s own design was constructed just so that this was possible while on EVA.

The Muntropolis X.O. is officially captain of his own vessel, the FWtSHTF II, which is docked to the top of the crew tower. The FWtSHTF II is (probably) capable of getting back to kerbin, if the whole “city on the mun†thing doesn’t work out so hot. He lives on board the FWtSHTF habitation module, with his adjunct bunking above, in the command pod.

The 5 civilian towers are each capped with a science or engineering module. Let us take them one at a time:

First, the Uber-Sensor, Mega-bandwidth, ultra-spectrum, HK-42W Really Tall Tower With Sensors On Top (or RTTWSOT, for short). Using (patent pending) 'having-four-times-as-many-dishes' technology, the RTTWSOT is able to scan in almost four times as many directions at a time, totally quadrupling their ability to detect enemy UFO\'s and/or azure-skinned alien nymphomaniac pleasure barges! It also has other sensors, too. Cameras, antennae, little probodobodyne square thingies. Four each, naturally.

Next up, the Space telescope. Pretty straightforward. Much bigger than the one that was mounted on Lowball Station in Farside I.

Opposite the space telescope, it\'s opposite. captain Jeb reasoned that while telescopes were excellent for seeing large, faraway objects, they were almost useless for examining small, nearby ones. Thus, the Jedediah Kerman Space Microscope was born! Though it might look like a smaller space telescope mounted upside-down, nothing could be further from the truth, insist the engineers who constructed it.

The science laboratory mounts a standard solar array, which provides auxiliary power during nuclear meltdowns and other maintenance work. The main lab module provides a place for SCIENCE(!) to take place. It includes a sunroom with acoustics optimized (at great expense) for maniacal laughter.

Finally, the Engineering module has space for a small machine shop and 3d printers, for producing replacement parts as well as new tools, as necessary.

Few more shots:

From far away:

Nightfall.

I\'ll post the .craft in a bit. I\'ll strip out the custom parts (just the renamed command modules), and list the mods.

[SteevyT]

Looks like you managed to keep the sun out of the sunroom this time.

[Goddess Bhavani]

Sparta? nah.

THIS IS KERBAL.

[marko dash]

well, it looks like the boosters with \'get a building into orbit\' in the description weren\'t kidding

edit: also brings back memories of the simcity 2000 Arcologies

[Goddess Bhavani]

It\'s like the Empire State Building going to the Moon.

[MC3craze]

I love how you stick crazy shit to fuel tanks and make art.

[Goddess Bhavani]

I correct myself, this is not the Empire State, it\'s the entire friggin Kremlin flying out to space.

The similarities are obvious

[Panichio]

??? So much weight! How did you fly that thing? I\'m still trying to complete your challenge to get out of the solar system with those habitation modules...and I only have nine of em\'.

[Lord Strange]

Sweet Zombie Jeb!

That\'s incredible!

Do you have a list of all the mods required, and possibly a craft file?

[gabyalufix]

Right. So I\'m waaaay too tired to do this properly.

Here is a screenshot of the list of mods I use:

And the 'miscmod' mod contains:

I\'m not sure which ones I used in Farside II. I found all that stuff here on the forum, all over the place.

I removed all the custom-modified parts (just the command pods, which I had renamed and changed to struts), because I don\'t think I\'m allowed to release those as modified. Unfortunately, that means it\'s stripped of most of the awesome top-level stuff, but that shouldn\'t be hard to fix up.

Fair warning: the muntropolis is not for the faint of heart. I crashed it. A LOT. I ran out of fuel at 10m or less, like, 4 times before I successfully landed. I think my efforts with the muntropolis could technically count as genocide.

Anyhoo: here\'s the muntropolis lite edition:

[Guest Flixxbeatz]

you win

[technoguy33]

I WORSHIP YOU! Oh all mighty mun base builder person... I LICK YOUR FEET!

[manofwar447]

EPIC 8)

[Guest TonyZ]

Holy F***ing Christ!

I don\'t know what you won, but YOU WIN!

Seriously... Highly impressed.

[Jesus KerBeard]

Do you know which of those mods are the giant lander legs and those solar panels?

[gabyalufix]

giant lander legs are lander leg 3 by 'maryG'. No idea where they came from.

Little Solar panels are probodobodyne by novasilisko, and the big ones are from Astrobug enterprizes.

[Jesus KerBeard]

Found em both, thanks.

[Heyheyzx]

Can you like up load all the parts ziped?

[gabyalufix]

I looked into this a while ago. Does anyone have a way to get a part list given a craft file? Specifically, I need to know which parts from which mods / which folders are in this thing.

If I were to zip my whole mods directory, we\'d be looking at hundreds of mb, perhaps thousands.

[Neomex]

Wow, you have won an internet, sir.

Was it actually lagging?

[MC3craze]

Wow, you have won an internet, sir.

Was it actually lagging?

I built a replica, but I didn\'t get much lag. I got a little when I decided to do a low Mun orbit, but that was because I went 2km sec.

[Katalliaan]

I looked into this a while ago. Does anyone have a way to get a part list given a craft file? Specifically, I need to know which parts from which mods / which folders are in this thing.

If I were to zip my whole mods directory, we\'d be looking at hundreds of mb, perhaps thousands.

You could open it up in your text editor of choice and do a search for 'part = ', and copy the name of each unique part. As long as the modder put a prefix that denotes what pack it\'s from (like how C7 puts 'C7A' in front of his experimental parts), it shouldn\'t be too hard to figure it out.

[gabyalufix]

If I have time I might try that. But the part name isn\'t as helpful as you\'d think, a lot of the packs don\'t put a prefix on their parts.

I also tried using the control key to find the parts. Do you know how unhelpful 'author: novasilisko' is? Yeah, thanks a lot, KSP. that narrows it down to only, what, six different packs, each with a zillion parts?

[bradx954]

holy shit nice ship

[Zoku Gojira]

'I chose the impossible. I chose... Mun Rapture!'[/Andrew Ryan voice]

Very cool idea and well executed, kudos.