Looking for some suggestions to my designs

[The Wrong Stuff]

So, I've been playing KSP a while now (since .18 or something, honestly don't remember anymore). But I have always had trouble reaching beyond Kerbin. Now I'm not exactly a rocket scientist (actually I work on steam locomotives for a living) but I know enough to get by, know how to make orbits, can easily reach the Mun and back. Even had one mostly successful trip to Minmus (until my Kerbal got EVA happy and bounced along the ground for almost 6km before bouncing off a cliff and being killed, the lander is still there though...), I've made one trip to Duna, but did not have enough fuel to make a decent orbit.

I've decided to go back to a stock game, rather then trying to keep up with mods, and also now using KMP (hence stock). But my biggest problem seems to come down to the size and possibly the style of my rockets. I'd like to make a trip to Eve or Duna, but most of my rockets are too heavy at liftoff to get a good enough start to make it to any other planets beyond the Mun. The Mun has become routine for me, so its no longer a huge challenge as it once was....although one 215 M/S decent to the surface can change that. Anyway, I was sort of curious what people were using the stock game, and how they achieved orbit of other planets, and what their rockets look like. I'm not looking to copy by any stretch, but I've always sort of stuck myself to a very typical Apollo style rocket, and I was wondering if perhaps I need to rethink my designs a little.

Thanks for any help

-The Wrong Stuff

[fancycat]

I have had a few good ones. One landing on two or three on lathe and atmosphere probes on jool and eve.

the experts use a tad of planning for when to transfer to another body. choosing when you launch can make the difference between a two min burn and a 30 second burn when transferring to another body. my first attempt to land on eve took me a three min continuous burn with a high powered engine and my second attempt actually only took 24 seconds. I have also used the moons gravity to gain kerbin escape with much less fuel.

so each planet has a time (usually once or twice a year) where it is the easiest to get there and that is called the transfer window. the best way to measure it is by using the angle. by drawing a line from kerbin to the sun and then from the sun to your target planet, then measuring the angle between the two. the transfer window is usually given in degrees. I hope this helps.

[Clockwork_werewolf]

First thing I would suggest is to build rockets looking more like Christmas tree rather than pencils (pictures of your rockets is always a good way to get suggestions). KSP doesn't have any difference in drag between two tanks on top of each other or next to each other so although it always LOOKS like a better design it in fact at the moment just makes it harder to stop it wobbling.

Second is more struts. There does come a point where the stress on one strut becomes too much in the split second for it to be transferred over all the struts but you can get quite a big rocket before this happens.

Third is dock in space. It is VERY hard to get over 100 tons of payload into orbit in one go so split your rocket up into two or three launches and dock them in orbit. With 150-300 tons of fuel you should be able to get anywhere and back (apart from EVE landings). If your rockets get too wobbly with docking ports holding it together you can now try just refueling it in space. Send up a payload with many empty tanks (which you can now tweak) and then send up a large tank or three of fuel to refuel it. This means the rocket could weight 400 tons fueled but only 80 empty. This would mean sending up 320 tons of fuel but the whole ship could be strutted to your hearts desire.

Forth is nuclear engines in space. They may be heavy and not much use in atmosphere but in space they are your best friend. At double the fuel efficiency, they can get you to other planets for half the fuel of any other engine (except the ion but we don't talk about him).

Fifth is payload reduction. The last space stage of your rocket should be as light as possible. Don't need 5 Kerbals for a 3 Kerbal mission? Then don't send them, hell you might be fine with one. Adding 8 engines where 4 would do? Got 4 solar panels where 3 would do? Make sure you payload is as light as possible, 1 tons on the payload is probably 20 tons of extra fuel and engines on the lower stages.

By the way I play with stock parts and without Machjeb or any other mods. I say this so you know it is possible with needing to see Delta-v numbers.

[Kasuha]

If you can get to Mun and back, you should be able to get to Minmus and back even more routinely - all it needs is to burn a bit longer at the periapsis to raise your apoapsis to the Minmus level. You need to burn longer there, but you need way less fuel to land on Minmus. Any ship that can go to Mun and back can go to Minmus and back as well.

Now, getting to other planets is just matter of burning even slightly longer at the Periapsis - your Apoapsis will exceed the Kerbin SOI limits and you can then zoom out in map view and see what your interplanetary trajectory does.

Of course to do it right, you need to burn prograde or retrograde in interplanetary sense, so you want to start the eject burn at the right spot of your initial orbit. And you need your interplanetary orbit to cross orbit of another planet, Duna or Eve for starters.

A ship capable going to Mun and back can go to Duna or Eve. Probably not return, but it should be able to land there. Or visit their moons (Ike/Gilly) and in that case it even could have enough fuel to return.

Just for your inspiration: the ship below (less the sepatrons and chutes, they were already used at that point) was all I needed to get my Kerbal from KSC to Eve. It was part of my Reddit challenge entry.

Edited January 29, 2014 by Kasuha

[Jouni]

There have been some good suggestions already, so I'll just add something specific to my playstyle.

- A simple interplanetary mission consists of three vehicles: lifter, transfer stage, and mission stage. Unless you want to optimize the mission for maximal efficiency, you can use general-purpose designs for the first two.

- Apollo-style vertical staging is a bad idea for the lifter vehicle. Engines are heavy, and decouplers and docking ports make it harder to stabilize the rocket. A better idea is to build a single-stage lifter, and add enough boosters so that it can get the payload into orbit. Asparagus staging can be used with the boosters, but it's not really that necessary. Here is an example of my standard heavy lifter about to launch a fuel tanker into orbit:

The lifter stage has three big orange fuel tanks, a Mainsail engine, and eight Mark 55 radial engines. The bottom radial engines are ignited at launch, while the top ones are used only after the corresponding boosters have been dropped. (Premature ignition can have rather unfortunate results.) There are four boosters in asparagus configuration, with two orange fuel tanks and a Mainsail each. The lifter is (usually) nice and stable due to the exoskeleton (see here for a better view).

- The transfer stage should have enough fuel to get the mission stage from LKO to the destination (and back, if necessary). Remove the jet fuel tanks from the tanker in my example, and you get my standardized interplanetary transfer stage (essentially an orange fuel tank and two nuclear engines). For large modular spaceships, I use several of them.

- Even for smaller missions, it may be easier to launch the transfer stage and the mission stage separately, and dock them in the orbit. Designing good lifters for large payloads is quite hard.

[SRV Ron]

A standard design either with mods or stock for going most anywhere.

Heavy loft fueler;

Career Mode interplanetary lander

Big mod Jool Mission. Payload redesign from another user.

Small two stage that went one way to Laythe landing

Try different things for different missions. The smaller the payload, the easier the mission.

[WhiteKnuckle]

Learn to dock, get good at it, and put a docking port on everything you send up.

That way you can salvage any mission. Made it to Duna but ran out of fuel? No problem, just send out an unmanned fuel tanker at the next launch window.

Docking will also let you build big ships in orbit rather than trying to launch them all in one shot.

[The Wrong Stuff]

Thank you for the suggestions! Also thank you to everyone who contributed pictures. I have noticed the lack of nosecones on the rockets, by adding them am I just adding excess weight?

This is the launch system I'm currently using for just about everything. Its done me well so far, with 5 trips to the Mun, and 1 trip to Minmus (never did find out if it would return from that or not). I'm currently fairly early on in career mode, and I don't really have a large selection of tanks and engines, or solar power for that matter. I've been keeping stage 1 basically the same for each launch, and either removing stage 2 for a Kerbin orbit, or leaving it for Mun and Minmus trips, and adding and subtracting tanks on the lander to get to and from Mun and Minmus

[AmpsterMan]

This thread would be better served in the gameplay questions forum. Moving it there.

[Anton P. Nym]

An alternative to making one massive launch is the "Kerbin Orbit Rendezvous" plan; put the transfer stage and lander up in separate launches, then have one dock with the other. To save further, you could even launch one or both with partially-empty tanks now (thanks to Tweekables) and then launch refuelling missions. It takes longer, but it makes for much simpler designs overall and could even save mass on the mission vehicles.

-- Steve

[Dave Kerbin]

If you want to return I would really suggest Duna as your first destination. It combines low fuel requirements and a relatively simple mission sequence. A return from Eve is the biggest possible challenge in the stock game, though getting there is pretty easy. After you've managed Duna I would suggest Dres as your next target or an unmanned mission to Eeloo or one of Jool's moons (not Tylo though).

For your ship more is always less, if you can remove any weight near the top it greatly reduces the weight you'll need at the bottom. To do that start thinking about missions backwards - build a small ship to complete the last part of the mission and then build the rest onto that. I have two careers, one of which did a fairly big and complicated Duna mission and another for the latest version of the game (0.23) that has a less complicated one. Pay particular attention to the little ship I came back in, that's the kind of thing you should be aiming for to keep your rocket from getting too big and unstable on the launchpad.

I'm not sure how much help you want vs. how much you want to figure it out on your own - do you want any specific designs or modules you can use? If you want some specific designs then a screenshot of your current tech tree progress would be useful.

[Claw]

Someone also recently asked about a single mission that landed on both the Mun and Minmus. This thread sparked a bit of discussion.

Since you are somewhat familiar with both, you can give that a go. It will challenge you a bit more with adjusting inclinations and doing a couple transfers between bodies before venturing way out of Kerbin.

[Jouni]

Thank you for the suggestions! Also thank you to everyone who contributed pictures. I have noticed the lack of nosecones on the rockets, by adding them am I just adding excess weight?

Most of the time, nosecones are only useful for aesthetics. I find it amusing to launch the nosecones spinning away with separatrons when you reach space.

This is the launch system I'm currently using for just about everything. Its done me well so far, with 5 trips to the Mun, and 1 trip to Minmus (never did find out if it would return from that or not). I'm currently fairly early on in career mode, and I don't really have a large selection of tanks and engines, or solar power for that matter. I've been keeping stage 1 basically the same for each launch, and either removing stage 2 for a Kerbin orbit, or leaving it for Mun and Minmus trips, and adding and subtracting tanks on the lander to get to and from Mun and Minmus

If you can get to Mun and back, you can use the same configuration to land on Minmus, visit a few different biomes to gather surface samples, and return to Kerbin for ridiculous amounts of science points. Do that and research at least the basic solar panels to get rid of one annoying point of failure in interplanetary travel.

A return mission to Duna also requires surprisingly little fuel, if you can find a good transfer window. With aerobraking and enough parachutes, you can land on Duna with the same amount of fuel that would only get you to low Munar orbit. Taking off and returning to Kerbin requires a bit more fuel than the remaining stages of a mission to Mun, so the minimal delta-v budget would be something like 8000 m/s for Duna (vs. 7500 m/s for Mun).

I guess that if you take the Mun lander from this example, replace the FL-T400 reserve fuel tank with an FL-T800, and attach the whole thing to your stage 1, you would be pretty close to completing a mission to Duna. Parachutes require some thought, as it's not very efficient to bring enough of them for a safe landing. A short burn to kill excess speed just before landing can save a lot of mass. And don't forget to repack the parachutes before taking off, as that's another common point of failure.

[bsalis]

This is the launch system I'm currently using for just about everything.

-snip-

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y241/will107/2014-01-29_00002_zps35280354.jpg

Perhaps try using the bigger 2.5M parts. That and MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer (in the VAB only if you want) to get realtime feedback on delta-V. With that and a delta-V map, you should be able to get anywhere and back.

[DrMonte]

I might a bit disagree with "building rockets in space" tactics. As this is efficient in real life because safes a lot of fuel it is quite fun and a bit of a challenge to bring 500t to orbit.

For really it is a good challenge to learn more about rocket building. If you'll get to 100km orbit 10 full orange tanks, then there is no payload which will stop you.

For example no one is building EVE landers in space and they weight from 70 to 200t.

[Taki117]

Here's a pic of my current monstrosity (Planning to go out at the next Jool Window) If you will notice it is a completely modular design, with Sr. Docking ports at most of the major intersections. Specifically the two engine nacelles, The reactor Section, the Main Truss, and the Crew Quarters. This allows the craft to be assembled in orbit, unless somebody has a lifter than can lift 630 parts weighing in at 514t

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[robopilot99]

Check out this website helped me a lot!

http://flyonbudget.onegiantleap.info/index.html