Can you build really a city on the mun with only with stock parts ?

[ouion]

I thought about this idea. I mean you can start with a colony and as you land more parts and spacecrafts and it accumulates as it goes on. Would it be possible to build a city on the mun with only stock parts. Leave a thought about this guys. It's it really possible to build a city on the mun ?

[Vanamonde]

Yes, but part counts add up and get laggy quickly. I tried it.

[MonkeyFuzz]

With that restriction: a city, no. A village, yes!

[timsfitz]

Yeah the game becomes unplayable before town status, let alone city. A city would be at least ten thousand Kerbals.

[PaladinFoster]

Well, yes, but I expect it would be a very boring one with only stock parts. I think the most useful thing you could build is a kind of recharge and resupply station for rovers. It would have a lot of large solar panels, a massive battery bank, and a few RTGs for generating lots of electricity to transfer into rovers, which can connect via a ring of small docking ports on the bottom. On top of this is a mobile processing lab and antenna array for processing surface samples gathered by the rovers and transmitting them back to Kerbin. It would actually be a pretty sweet science farm if you had the patience to set it up and then drive rovers all over the Mun to gather the samples and reports.

Here's some screenshots of some examples I constructed on Kerbin to better visualize.

Here we have the whole setup near the shore at KSC.

Next is a close-up of the rover design. It's got a nice futuristic look if I do say so myself. It comes equipt with various scientific instruments for taking readings all over the Mun, as well as some RCS tanks and thruster blocks for jumping over those hills, craters, and canyons that are just impractical to drive through. A few RTGs extend the range, but can't quite keep up with the demands of the rover wheels forever. That's why we have a Clampotron Jr on the front.

As you can see here, the Clampotrons don't quite link up properly on Kerbin with all it's powerful gravity pulling the base down. However, in the Mun's lesser gravity it should link up and allow for fuel transfer from that large RCS tank.

Now let's take a closer look at the base. It has those large solar panel arrays to get all the juice it needs to run the mobile processing lab and communications array at the same time. A ring of RTGs along the top provide backup power during the Munar nights, and the massive battery banks provide plenty of storage for reserve power. The RCS tank should have enough monopropellant for many rover jaunts across the grey landscape, and resupply missions can be made easily with a specially designed rover to link up with the existing docking ports.

The only problem is that this thing is HUGE and HEAVY. I got it out by the shore via some side-mounted SRB's and 4 big old parachutes, though landing it safely on the Mun will be a whole other ordeal. It would take a skilled pilot and some inventive engineering to build a lander that could lug it there. Have a detail shot on those parachutes for fun.

[Tortoise]

Yes, many people has. You can even do it on other planets.

[scul]

Temstar did it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50685-Modular-Base-Creation-Kit. The first picture appears to be all stock, but the purpose of that base is for Kethane mining

[lammatt]

unless you have an insane CPU

i dont think a midhigh end home CPU manages to output at 60fps in this game when there're 500+parts within the 2.5km rendering range

(you can tweak the physic dt to gain performance marginally tho)

(mine is a 5yr old phenom2 x5 955 [email protected], and i start getting into the yellow zone at around 200parts, and is unplayable at 350+ parts)

but if your "city" has a very low part count..(aka a small village instead)

you can, i dont see why not.

Edited July 3, 2014 by lammatt

[Jean Deaux]

Just depends on how big you want to go? I'm a big (mostly) stock player and this is one of my preferred pre-fab cities I drop as a 1 piece insta-town.

Edited July 4, 2014 by Jean Deaux