Project Phoenix

[Diashi]

First things first, this is my first post here on the forums. Hi all!

I just wanted to share my first attempt at a Solar System traveler. Here's the final pre-launch form of Project Phoenix:

Main Power is provided by 16 Nuclear engines.

The main fuel tanks are docked at the rear of he craft and are designed to be discarded in interplanetary flight as fuel is used.

There are two science landers (docked at 1 and 3) are to be used in multiple planets in one trip.

The Mule Space Tug (Docked at 2) is a purpose built tug intended to brute force the fuel tanks into place or transfer the tanks from my LKO Space Station.

The Recovery vehicle (Docked at 4) is for crew recovery and replenishment.

The final craft was almost 100 Meters long and weighed in at just under 500 tonnes.

[Vanamonde]

Has it gone anywhere yet? Part count looks crazy.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

Very Kerbal. I'm interested to hear how she handles once you fire the engines, seems like there's a lot of wobble potential here

edit: why are there landing legs on your fuel tanks? also very KERBAL!! XD

Edited January 14, 2014 by I_Killed_Jeb

[Captain Sierra]

Very Kerbal. I'm interested to hear how she handles once you fire the engines, seems like there's a lot of wobble potential here

Not to mention the landers section looks slightly off balance. please post pics when you make the ejection burn, I wanna see the catastrophic failure epic nature of this beast when you fire the engines.

[Diashi]

oh, there was a spectacular amount of wobble. It DID get out of LKO (200Km) and to geosynch safely after disengaging all the fuel and parasite craft. After redock and refuel I went for Duna trajectory and all the parasites and the fuel modules did what you'd expect their inertia to do.

I over-engineered it to let Kerbals move from the lower dock all the way to the command module. Whenever a module came within 2 Km my PC lagged as it loaded everything. the Docking rings were made before i had Max-Mono units and max-batteries so i've reengineered those sections to use far less parts.

I'll post more as i redesign.

[Rune]

Speakong as someone that built a grand tour monstrosity of a thousand parts and 10 independent sections docked together: tractor configuration! It's the only way to do an ejection burn without huge losses due to wobbliness and some semblance of precision. Plus, you can pull with you pretty much anything as a chain withou worrying about balance.

Rune. You also don't need more than 0,01G or so once on orbit if you are patient, cut on nukes to increase delta-v.

[Levelord]

I question the wisdom of needing to bring 12 massive FL-R1 RCS fuel tanks. D:

[Camaron]

I won't lie, this looks like a very difficult craft to fly, extremely unstable, extremely heavy, extremely high parts counts. But don't be discouraged! Even if you find yourself having to totally scrap it, I personally went through THREE whole full scale stations like this before I came up with the formula which worked for me. You're bound not to get everything right on the first go around, because a lot of the important lessons you learn about space stations and cruisers come from building them.

Meet The Red Giant (My final revision for now at 174 parts) and Supernova Seven (I keep it around because its awesome-looking). They are both self-launching "one piece" cruisers, meaning that the main core of the ship is complete without expansion. This means they are absolutely stable and have none of the wobble problems.

And in this next picture, you see Supernova Seven Docked to one of my earlier experimental stations to absorb anything useful. Th station on the left is a wobbly, uncontrollable monstrosity, and took me a day and a half to put it all together. I learned a lot from it though, and ate all of its resources later, so it wasn't even a total loss. Supernova Seven then acquired a second experimental station before I made some revisions and launched a new one entirely. And then Supernova Seven ate Supernova Seven. Then I decided I needed to reign in the parts count after Supernova seven (the second) was completed, and I built Red Giant, which is essentially my fifth large scale ship of its kind, but the first to ever be put into actual service. The entire learning process took about two or three weeks.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Camaron