Lothsahn's Super Heavy Lifter - 250T LKO

[Lothsahn]

So I've been playing Kerbal a while and I've still got a lot to learn about orbital mechanics, changing orbits, and gravity assists. Because I've been playing around with those concepts, I've found what I need is LOTS OF FUEL in my interplanetary probes to account for noob mistakes, non-optimal orbital shifts, etc.

I've found a number of "heavy lifters" on this site that can lift between 40-80T into LKO, and that's great... but I wanted more. Because bigger is better! And everyone needs a 200T fuel depot orbiting Eeloo!

This craft launched my Eeloo lander (attached) with 250T of fuel into LKO. I then traveled to Eeloo and landed on the surface with 150T of fuel total (most still in orbit).

This craft also works for launching huge space stations or fuel depots into LKO.

Design considerations:

1) "Low" partcount--457 parts! (plus lander). This ensures as minimal lag as I could with a design this large.

2) Stable construction. While occasionally I do find a part break (<10% of launches), it appears to be pretty rare. This is due to extensive strutting.

3) No part clipping or cheating during construction of the ship

4) Easy to fly--ASAS should work without ripping the ship apart

5) Every other tweak I could find to ensure maximum payload delivery (asparagus staging)

6) My main hope is that this lifter helps some new people to the game to be able to launch ships that can travel to wherever they want, and have plenty of fuel and parts to spare. Hopefully this ship can be featured in the first post as a super heavy lifter platform.

7) Ugly. It must be ugly. Apparently...

Remaining Bugs:

1) Rarely I will have an attachment break. I'd be interested if anyone can improve the strutting to eliminate that without drastic increase in partcount.

2) The ship begins to rotate, especially in upper atmosphere. I'm not sure, but I think this might be related to the fuel transferring between stages, and I've added a number of RCS thrusters to stop the rolling. You may have to switch off ASAS and manually maneuver to stop the rolling. I'd love if someone could eliminate this problem.

Instructions for Modification:

1) If you change the probe or lander on top, be sure to strut appropriately to reduce wobble

2) If you change the fuel middle stage (above the decoupler), be sure to strut at least 2 struts per orange Rockomax tank to replace the ones there. These are vital to structrual integrity.

3) If you change the fuel middle stage, you may need to change the root module with the SelectRoot mod.

4) I strongly recommend at least 4 nuclear engines on the lander (if not more). If you have less engines, you'll find orbital maneuvers take a very very long time.

5) You may wish to put a decoupler on the bottom center mainsail engine to jettison it once you get to orbit.

Instructions for Use:

Unlike most massive ships, you can safely use ASAS with mine! This makes it a breeze to fly (mostly).

1) Enable ASAS and disable RCS

2) Throttle to 75%

3) Hit the first stage to release the docking clamps. Once the clamps release, immediately go to 100% throttle

4) Remain at 100% throttle throughout the entire ascent

5) Go to a 45 degree attitude at 25k altitude and finally nearly level at 50-55k to finish the ascent and attain orbital velocity

6) After you drop all of the outer tanks and the lower two sets of orange tanks, enable RCS to control the rolling of the ship. The ship will start to roll agressively above 25k-30k without RCS.

7) You may have to disable ASAS at 40-60k altitude and manually correct the rolling. You can then re-enable ASAS.

8) All upper-stage tanks are connected by docking clamps. Transfer fuel and jettison them as they become empty.

9) Switch to the control module on the lander and use nuclear engines from your lander or probe for orbital maneuvering for optimal fuel-efficiency. I recommend at least 4 to avoid boredom, as the entire craft is quite sluggish when the 3 orange rockomax tanks are still connected.

Craft File:

http://illatia.yhbt.com/Lothsahn%20Heavy%20Lifter.craft

(Right click and save as)

Edited January 14, 2014 by Lothsahn

[Camaron]

WOW! This is a really awesome lifter! (looks oddly familiar)

I have some monstrous lifters of my own, and was just recently noticing that same pattern you mentioned where people like to call 40-80 ton lifters, "Heavy".

As far as Super Heavyweights go, my crown achievement so far is a Fuel Carrier that is capable of dragging around 19,000 units of fuel into a roughly 150km orbit The resulting payload weight sits around 280 tons, and it took 3 days to come up with a design that could reliably accomplish this. I only finished it just yesterday. The lifter is not modular and couldn't be easily attached to any old payload, but I love it all the same. Given what I've learned from building this one, I am confident that I can soon breach the 300-tons-in-one launch mark pretty soon.

Someone tell me how to post an inline image and Ill leave some pics of my Flagship "Super-Heavies". (I've got a few giant cruisers you might like as well - the reason for a fuel carrier that holds 19k)

[Lothsahn]

WOW! This is a really awesome lifter! (looks oddly familiar)

I have some monstrous lifters of my own, and was just recently noticing that same pattern you mentioned where people like to call 40-80 ton lifters, "Heavy".

As far as Super Heavyweights go, my crown achievement so far is a Fuel Carrier that is capable of dragging around 19,000 units of fuel into a roughly 150km orbit The resulting payload weight sits around 280 tons, and it took 3 days to come up with a design that could reliably accomplish this. I only finished it just yesterday. The lifter is not modular and couldn't be easily attached to any old payload, but I love it all the same. Given what I've learned from building this one, I am confident that I can soon breach the 300-tons-in-one launch mark pretty soon.

Someone tell me how to post an inline image and Ill leave some pics of my Flagship "Super-Heavies". (I've got a few giant cruisers you might like as well - the reason for a fuel carrier that holds 19k)

I need some cruisers or something. I can reliably get tons of mass to orbit, and nothing to have fun with it.

I found that going above this much tonnage starts to scale part counts exponentially to strut everything together without catastrophic failure. How many parts were in your 300T lifter?

[Camaron]

My lifter for this ship got a fairly high part count. In the case of my 280T fuel carrier, the entire thing is experimental because I was working to lift a payload far beyond anything I had before, and had to learn some new tricks. However, and could probably be refined to weigh a lot less (in parts). Its currently 930, but I'm confident later versions could bring that way down.

The cruisers are actually launched in a strange way. When I started building real space stations and ships I found that assembling ships had a few particular disadvantages, which only got worse with more weight. Simply put, the ships are rickety and wobbly. Even when this doesn't cause fatal problems, its extremely irritating and unnerving to try to reorient the ships when they just want to wiggle all over the place. So I came up with a new approach which has proven very effective. Build the whole main ship and its fuel core as one giant thing, at the cost that these designs typically reach orbit basically fuel starved.But with a few fuel ships, you can gas them back up and all is good.

It's completely different from a typical lifter approach but my 3 main heavy ships are two cruisers and a fuel tanker (storage ship) The smallest is Red Giant, The oldest, (Original much higher parts variation) is called Supernova Seven with a max fuel capacity of 472T, and the Quasar Fuel Tanker, which has no engines or real capabilities beyond holding fuel, but carries nearly 1000T of fuel. All of these ships reach orbit with around 5% of their fuel remaining and need refueling basically as soon as they're born. Supernova Seven was actually the first - Red Giant was built as a conservative redesign and comes in at just 174 parts.

How do I post images like you did earlier?

[Lothsahn]

My lifter for this ship got a fairly high part count. In the case of my 280T fuel carrier, the entire thing is experimental because I was working to lift a payload far beyond anything I had before, and had to learn some new tricks. However, and could probably be refined to weigh a lot less (in parts). Its currently 930, but I'm confident later versions could bring that way down.

The cruisers are actually launched in a strange way. When I started building real space stations and ships I found that assembling ships had a few particular disadvantages, which only got worse with more weight. Simply put, the ships are rickety and wobbly. Even when this doesn't cause fatal problems, its extremely irritating and unnerving to try to reorient the ships when they just want to wiggle all over the place. So I came up with a new approach which has proven very effective. Build the whole main ship and its fuel core as one giant thing, at the cost that these designs typically reach orbit basically fuel starved.But with a few fuel ships, you can gas them back up and all is good.

It's completely different from a typical lifter approach but my 3 main heavy ships are two cruisers and a fuel tanker (storage ship) The smallest is Red Giant, The oldest, (Original much higher parts variation) is called Supernova Seven with a max fuel capacity of 472T, and the Quasar Fuel Tanker, which has no engines or real capabilities beyond holding fuel, but carries nearly 1000T of fuel. All of these ships reach orbit with around 5% of their fuel remaining and need refueling basically as soon as they're born. Supernova Seven was actually the first - Red Giant was built as a conservative redesign and comes in at just 174 parts.

How do I post images like you did earlier?

To post the image, I put the image on my webserver, then I clicked the "insert image" button and provided the URL. You'd need to post the image to flikr or some website first, though, if you don't have your own.

Let me know if you make your .craft files available. Definitely would love to take a look.

[Camaron]

Here are Red Giant and Supernova Seven.

And here is the Quasar Fuel Tanker.

And here is the Type IX Titan Fuel Carrier

And last but not least, Just today I finally managed to build a lander I can be proud of - Meet Terranova, The lander that can put itself into LKO without a launcher and modularized dock-based "stages" and spare fueling, as well as being Kerbal-or-okto flyable and has three full sets of science equipment. it transitions between Nuclear and Toroidal engines. Pic one shows it dock-dropping some tanks, pic 2 is just as it is reacing a circular 90k orbit.