A novel way of assembling ships. My manual construction project. [pic heavy]

[vetrox]

Manual Construction project.

NOTE:I have had to type this up on the work computer. I will alter it when i get home (the pictures arent displaying correctly for me atm i may have linked them wrong) as well as add sections 5 and 6.

[insert header image here]

Table of contents

1. Introduction

2. Welcome to my project

3. Designing the crane

4. Designing the ship

5. Construction commences!

6. The flight

Hey all. I thought I would share with you my “manual construction projectâ€Â. Basically I wanted to assemble a ship outside of the vab, on the launch pad itself.

1) Introduction

The Kerbal population has finally voted in a crazy rocket scientist as the new president of the world. Couple this with the fact that the majority of Kongress consists of whacky scientists and astronomers, there is no surprise that the go ahead was given to form a space programme.

After the launch site had been chosen and construction facilities built, construction could now begin on the first space fairing vessel…or could it. Private companies as well has scrap metal merchants had delivered hundreds of parts to help the space programme get off the ground. However, this created a problem.

“Ok Professor…show me our space rocket contraption-majig!†asked the president. Professor Kerman hesitated for a moment. What was he to do? The president would see how much he had failed. Kerman’s dream was to build a rocket to get to space, it was all he had ever wanted. “Yes Mr President. I must warn you, we are still in the early stages of construction†Kerman replied with a quiver to his voice. The president didn’t care, eager to see this grand marvel that would put a kerbal into space. “yes yes yes†replied the president “just open the doors and show meâ€Â

The VAB doors squealed open. The president had already angled his head upwards in anticipation. His eyes widened at the marvel that stood before him “This is truly amazing. An invisible space ship! The military will be pleased. Good job professor†and before the professor could muster up a response the president had already turned around and skipped away in delight. Proffessor Kerman gave out a hefty sigh of relief. The president hadn’t noticed the mound of parts sitting on the floor.

Kerbal scientists had been unable to find away to attach the various parts together. Even the highest grade duct tape was insufficient for the job. A new way of constructing ships was needed!

2) Welcome to my project.

So with no way of assembling ships in the vab it was time to find a way to make them on the launch pad. I’ve always wanted to try this but have never quite got round to it but a couple of nights ago I thought I would have a go.

Basically I wanted to have a modular ship that I could bring out in separate pieces and then assemble them on the pad using a crane. The reason I never bothered before was the fact that there is no way to weld parts together once you are “in gameâ€Â. But I decided to bite the bullet and have a go just using docking ports! It probably seems stupid and pointless to most of you but I just fancied challenging myself. (which is kind of what this game is about in a way)

I thought the real joy of this would be in the designing of it all but it turns out that playing with a crane is good fun. I thought a crane would be quite simple but as it turns out ksp makes it kind of hard. The mods I used were “Kerbal attachment system†and “infernal roboticsâ€Â. KAS would allow me to actually have a crane be able to pick up and drop parts and IR has a rotatable washer and a usable gantry.

3) Designing the Crane

First and foremost I needed a crane and I thought it would be quite simple but it wasn’t and this was a fun learning experience. First of all I have never used KAS or IR so finding usefull parts was difficult. My first crane used a rail and piston setup which wasn’t of any use at all but did prove I was able to pick up and move stuff around. It was small but I was just playing around to make sure this project would actually be possible.

Then I started making some whacky but taller designs

After some playing around I had something almost useable. Obviously with something so tall but light causes some…fun, but a counterweight overcomes this somewhat. I added a fuel tank which I think is 2ton? So theoretically it should be able to lift and move 2 tons around. And to a certain extent it worked but it wasn’t very reliable (it would bend every which way it could) and when a test ship was put together the physics load just constantly caused it to topple over. But it was able to assemble a ship after hours of trial and error

But it just wasn’t reliable enough and at this point I almost gave up. A crane that could barely lift 2 tons wasn’t going to serve any purpose for this so I had a rest for a couple days. Then I had a brain wave at work. Why not anchor the crane to the floor with one of the KAS anchors? That idea also didn’t work as the crane would just topple over and drag the anchor along with it with any payload over 2 tons (even 2 tons was a bit hit or miss) However I then had another brainwave. Using the electromagnets (the one I use to lift things with) I could anchor the crane to an orange fuel tank to stop it bending and falling over. I was so adamant that this would work I doubled up the gantries at the top of the crane and anchored it to an orange tank and attempted what had been impossible so far…a 3 ton payload!!!!!

It was sort of successful too! The only problem now was the washer was the weak point.

But I solved this by having an anchor point above the washer. This would be adjusted whilst rotating the crane to stop the anchor just pulling the top of the crane off as it tries to rotate. This proved very successful.

The great thing about kas is the GUI that allows you to see how much tension each winch has. So you can constantly fine tune the winches to get the perfect tension. This becomes a lot of fun when you are lifting and dropping several different payloads. But even so, actually rotating the payload around causes some lean but everything holds true.

The next step was to see how big a payload I could lift was but anything above 3 tons still caused the crane to tip over. Even with the anchor. I later discovered this was because of the double gantry setup I was using. I wanted 2 as this gave the crane a lot of range to lift and move but it just proved to unuseable for large payloads. So i reduced it to 1

Then i went for the biggest payload one of my crane designes has ever lifted…10 tons!

It did successfully lift it (sorry I don’t have a screenshot) but rotating with a 10 ton payload was too much. I haven’t since lifted 10 tons again but I did increase the amount of anchor points to 3 so in the future I think 10 tons will be do able. You will be able to see the 3 point anchor setup in the final construction part of this project.

So in the end I had a crane that could rotate safely with a payload (if the speed is set to 0.1-0.3 depending on weight) and could also lift and drop things a reasonable distance. Heavy loads were lifted at 0.25 speed.

4) Designing the ship

Designing the actual ship wasn’t really much of a challenge. However it was about 2am when I finally got round to this stage so all I wanted was a small ship that could get into orbit. The only real difficulty (if u can call it that) was working out how to stage it. You cant really stage using docking ports and action groups (well u can but I wanted to do it the traditional way) So basically wherever I wanted to stage I would just put a separator in between the docking port and the stage. Not weight efficient but it works. Also a special thanks goes to squad for the tweakables system. This means I can now remove all fuel to save weight for construction and as an added bonus I get to drive a fuel truck to the launch pad and fuel my ship before launch. Oh the roleplay!!!!

The ship consisted of 4 parts. As I saved a lot of these parts as sub assemblies there are a few random docking ports that aren’t used. They are there as a root part to attach the sub assemblies. They were all build in the VAB as I found it a lot easier to design in the VAB than the SPH. This meant that I had to drive out all the ship parts first and then setup the crane but this really is a minor inconvenience and as I wanted to drive the parts to the launch pad anyway, I guess it worked out

From left to right it is.

-The lower Stage-

This consisted of a base for the whole craft to sit on during construction and a skipper engine. With a separator between the base and the engine itself and a docking port

-The Lower fuel Section-

This is the fuel for the skipper engine with a senior docking port to attach to the engine stage and an adapter plus docking port to attach to the upper stage. The two radial mounts are only there to make attaching my parts transporter sub assembly easier.

-The upper stage-

Just a fuel tank, lv909 and a docking port at each end with a separator between the engine and the bottom docking port for staging purposes

-The command stage-

Just a parachute, mk1 pod, separator then a docking port.

On the far right is the fuel tanker that i hastily cobbled together

This has about 3700m/s of delta v if memory serves

Edited January 28, 2014 by vetrox

[Cupcake...]

Reserved for section 5 and 6

Will write them up when i get home from work in a bit

As luck would have it...

Cupcake...

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/66293-Today-I-build-a-Rocket