TOMBS - Trans Orbital Modular Base System

[InfernalVortex]

I dont have mayn friends who play this game and I built this behomoth and wanted to know what you guys thought of it. I rarely do anything in this game that I consider all that innovative or impressive, this is probably the first time I've really been proud of something I've made.

It's scalable, it's versatile and it's a little cumbersome to "Steer" but for exploring the kerbin system, it's pretty easy to just toggle one set of rockets off, turn on the other and switch which guidance module (to other side of core tank) to control from and you're immediately lined up for your next burn if you stick with your apoapsis and periapsis points. I was actually very surprised that it worked as well as it did. Didnt try to come apart, and I'm pretty sure I've got enough fuel to go back to Kerbin orbit and back to Mun again.

I was trying to figure out an elegant way to get a full orange jumbo tank to Low Kerbin orbit, and I ended up using this. Just 6 radial jumbos with mainsails in a 3 stage asparagus setup. It's pretty easy to fly and use until it gets into orbit and it's just too heavy with the 3 final tanks. I try to get as much as I can out of my last stage of mainsails, then go into a spin and ditch them in stable orbit. It's not overly strutted either.

I just pack whatever I want onto the center tank, I've got fuel to burn. I started adding a pancake tank on the bottom and a skipper to fine tune my orbits and help my rendezvous without digging into my main supply of fuel. They've got a ton of RCS ports, 4 little tiny orange rockets radial mounted on the orange tanks on the top and bottom to give me forward and reverse thrust, mostly to help with the rendezvous process. Takes a good bit of thrust to slow those down. If I need to use those I can usually refill my jumbo tank with my pancake tanks.

I made some slight modifications to that setup, but the key was that I was able to get that jumbo tank into stable orbit. From there anything is possible and that's always what I wished we would do in space. I guess I read 2001 A Space Oddysey too many times in middle school.

So Im thinking I got to Mun with it, but it took a 6 minute burn. I had to do it in two separate orbits... Im thinking I might want to switch to mainsails, but Im not sure on that. Might be a little too harsh. But Im thinking I could make this thing pretty wide. I have double docking ports on the side of each orange tank so each one can get at least one extra tank+rocket engine attached to it, although Im not sure how well it would hold. But I figure I can attach landers/rovers/habitation modules to either of the docking ports on the sides of the main core unit which is essentially nothing more than a reserve tank. It doesnt seem like the skippers upset the craft enough to knock aynthing loose.

This may be how I can get to the far off planets, as I've never put kerbals anywhere except Mun. And if nothing else this fulfills my vanity wish to have an orbiting refueling station in orbit around Mun in case I use too much fuel trying to land there.

It may seem hokey, at first glance, but I always felt like massive heavy lift setups with 50 mainsails are a lot less realistic than actually assembling something in space... since I can get orange jumbos up I may be able to come up with something a lot better than this, but Im havign a hard time mocking up docked together tanks in weird arrangements. The assembly building crew doesn't seem to want to cooperate with the way I want them to assemble the parts.

[reschke]

I like the way that setup looks I may have to try it and see what I can accomplish as well.