The Farside III: Operation One Launch To Rule Them All

[gabyalufix]

Buckle up, ladies and gents. To commemorate the advent of persistence, I have launched the Farside III: Operation Do Everything In One Launch! As usual, this is gonna be a long post.

So, building on the experiences of the original Farside, the Farside III mission had the following objectives (not in this order):

(1) Farside Base: Launch a large mun base capable of supporting a long-term complement of 6-8 kerbalnaughts.

(2) Highball Station: Launch a munar space station, capable of supporting 3-6 kerbalnaughts, long term. It\'s primary mission is to coordinate the satellites, provide a refueling station for future missions, and transmit messages to and from farside base.

(3) The Very Diffuse Array (VDA): This is a set of 14 satellites and 2 small planet-orbiting skylab-style space stations, intended to provide a constant, uninterrupted communications linkup between farside base, lowball station, and KSP command.

(4) Use fewer mod packs, so others can witness my greatness firsthand.

With me so far? Ok, let\'s go!

The launch vehicle is nothing special. Just a bunch of standard fuel tanks and KW engines. The original design had SRB\'s as well, but I found them to be unnecessary. The farside III isn\'t as heavy as some of my past payloads have been, but it is very complex. It thus lags like a beast. If you so much as glance at the SAS switch, it will tear itself to vapor.

Here you can see the two skylab stations, as well as highball station and farside base. This time I put the munar station (highball) above the lander, so that I could use all the slots below the lander for engines without impeding pre-seperation egress between highball and farside.

Once planetary orbit is achieved, we release VDA-skylab I. We then continue our burn and release VDA-skylab II into a higher elliptical orbit.

After we drop the SSTO launcher, we continue our burn towards munar transfer orbit, dropping satellites as we go.

Here you can see that we\'ve already released 3 of the 14 VDA satellites mounted on top of highball station. This is why I made an upside-down 7-coupler, by the way. 12 of the satellites are based on the same design used by the comms sat of farside I, with nothing more than 3 solar panels, some electronics, and a comms antennae. 2 of them are larger (one is already released, the other is currentlyhidden beneath the 1st 7-coupler). The VDA is released into numerous different orbits, so that hopefully there will always be a linkup between all mission units.

I released 3 of the VDA sats into a hyperbolic munar excape tragectory, angled tight up against the mun so that it will slingshot around into a hopefully big orbit. Just for kicks. Forgot to take a pic of it, but here\'s a similar one from a previous attempt.

Highball, farside, and the remaining parts of the VDA.

Here you can see the refueling arm, for refueling future missions.

I released the rest of the VDA into various munar orbit, into various ellipses and orbital planes.

And the VDA is complete!

One of the larger VDA sats. Set in an unusually high orbit, to provide a high-power relay back to the kerbin-orbiting VDA sats.

Various shots of the station/base combination. It\'s an unusual design, with engines on one side and main fuel tank completely opposite, and the habitation sections sandwiched in between. This was so that kerbonaughts could freely transfer between highball (which needed to have lots of fuel), and farside base (which needed engines for landing, and a much smaller amount of fuel).

Now it\'s time to say goodbye to highball, and make our descent to the surface. I found that low orbits were unstable when you use high time dilation factors, so I put highball in a 20km orbit so it wouldn\'t wobble too much when I warped time up in future missions.

Now for the landing. I actually forgot to re-hook-up some of the fuel lines after I did some fiddling, so only 3 of the 5 engines actually work. The landing was therefore a bit . . . tricky.

Touchdown!

I actually used RCS translation to shift around a bit after landing. The new landing legs are much better than the old ones, which would get all twisted up and explode at the drop of a hat. These ones seem to have a sort of built-in suspension.

Ok now! Let\'s take a tour of the new and improved Farside Base:

The upper core node connects all sections of the base together, and used to connect farside to highball.

Beneath the central node is a set of habitation modules, where the crew lives, eats, breathes, and does all those annoying little things that crews always whine and/or die when they can\'t.

There\'s a lower central node beneath the habitation modules, providing a second route of egress into the science tower, and the only route of egress to the section of the service tower that is beneath the escape vehicle engine. Technical note, this is the only one that is actually structurally connected, the upper connection is just for show.

The science tower contains a radar dish, auxilery solar panels, and laboratory space. It also contains the new and improved sun room, which has special filtered glass that should probably prevent instant death upon contact with radioactive solar rays, in theory. It also mounts a communications station, a small Probodobodyne telescope, and a radio antennae / camera tower.

The starboard engineering tower contains a fuel tank (for landing), a set of supply tanks for oxygen and water, as well as a BACE habitation pod, which has been retrofitted to stow non-vacuum-proof cargo. It also mounts a large solar array, for providing power, and a parabolic radio antennae.

The port engineering tower (to the left) is identical to the starboard one, except instead of a cargo container, it has a compact BACE nuclear reactor, to provide additional power, particularly at night, and to provide a source of ionizing radiation for the nefarious purposes of the resident Mad-Scientist-in-Chief.

The service/escape tower contains various life support subsystems, and also mounts the return vehicle. The return vehicle is really only intended for emergency use, and would be pretty cramped with the full crew complement inside. KSP officials have assured the crew that in the event of an actual emergency, it is considered highly improbable that the entire crew will survive long enough to make it to the escape vehicle. It is capable of full return to kerbin, without even needing to refuel at highball (which is good, since I\'ve never succeeded at a rendezvous).

Ok, good tour. Now let\'s go back and look at highball station:

Pretty simple and straightforward. A 2-meter habitation module provides living space. The rest is mostly for engineering and science laboratories. It has a substantial excess of power generation from it\'s many solar panels, and will likely see significant expansion once docking is implemented.

The refueling arm has a standard docking port. Unfortunetely, the fuel line was cut when it was released from farside base.

The port side has a 6-way node, for docking later missions.

The starboard side has an airlock, along with equipment racks, for EVAs.

three parabolic comms antennae, for communicating with the VDA and with farside.

The port side also has a small telescope.

Some of the VDA sats that I slingshotted around the mun actually made it into kerbin escape, after release:

I can\'t find them now though. Maybe they got recaptured? or maybe they\'re just too far away to see?

I\'ve attached the craft and the sfs file, so you folks can see for yourselves. I\'ve tested the dependencies and pared it down as far as I could. You will need: (by the way, this is my idea of cutting back. I usually use twice this many)

-AES station parts

-AVK landers 0.2b

-BACE construction kit 0.1

-Down Under aerospace & party supplies

-Gaby\'s quick and dirty miscelannia.

-White Monkey Pack v0.4

-Rocketco Soyuz MIT kerbabl v1.00

-Rocketco orbital parts set

-Probodobodyne Construction Kit v0.5

-Black sun lab\'s?? Kebylon Launch tower (modify the maxtemperature to '200')

-Black sun lab\'s project Firelark???

-Noyuz Pack 1.2

-Novapunch 1.0a

-(EDIT:) Silisko Edition 1.2

-KW challenger v0.5

-Kosmos pack 2-25-12

-the Kunlab The Kublab (edit: also added to the misc mods pile, see below)

-C7 flight pack v2.16 (for the RCS)

-nova\'s landerparts 1.1

-Kerpollo 1.0

-IFE\'s pack

AND

-This compilation of miscellaneous mod parts. These are not my parts. They\'re other people\'s parts from scattered single part releases, all put in once place. There are also a few parts from standard packs which were removed from those packs in subsequent version updates for some reason, which I have added in (the novapunch radial stack coupler, and the old probodobodyne strut, which I liked the look of better). I also included the required pile of command pods which I renamed as struts.

Previous Farside missions:

Farside I

Farside II

edit: fixed the misc mod pile to be a zip instead of a rar. Also added the kunlab to the pile.

[Drakomis]

Well, there went my jaw.

Also, where is the link to the page with Kunlab?

[Caesar15]

This is...amazing

[gabyalufix]

Added the kunlab to the misc mod pile.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

Well, there went my jaw.

Also, where is the link to the page with Kunlab?

Added the kunlab to the misc mod pile.

Its name is kublab, not kunlab. Simple mistake.

Also here is the link:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=4129.msg46259#msg46259

[Caesar15]

Its name is kublab, not kunlab. Simple mistake.

Also here is the link:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=4129.msg46259#msg46259

we already got it groundhog

[Nurb]

Awesome! While I sift through the mods, could you tell me which one allows you to use multiple BACE modules? I only ever see them as command modules in the standard kit... unless I did something wrong, which is possible ???

[SmiteZero]

...

[gabyalufix]

I just changed their config type to 'Strut'. It\'s in the pile of misc parts that I stuck up there.

[Nurb]

I just changed their config type to 'Strut'. It\'s in the pile of misc parts that I stuck up there.

Thanks for the tip

[mincespy]

Are you a wizard?

[gabyalufix]

A while after landing, the denizens of farside base realized that they were critically low on twinkies and radiation pills (they had plenty of radioactive pills, but according to the staff physician these were probably not quite the same thing). Thus, the Farside Resupply mission was launched. Due to a typographical error on an internal budgetary report, the project manager was actually allocated more funds than the original mission! Rather than mention this oversight to anyone, he decided to just roll with it.

The FRM munbase had:

-Two BACE cargo pallets, stacked with crates.

-One BACE pressurized cargo hold, for vacuum sensitive cargo.

-One Baker command pod, for 'chilling out' in.

-Four 1-meter habitation modules, to provide extra living space for the farsiders. A half-dozen new crewmen were also brought along, mostly because nobody on board the original farside mission knew how to program the base VCR.

-Four FULL external 400-unit fuel tanks, refitted to carry oxygen and water, for breathing and drinking, respectively.

-Four more of those smaller external fuel tanks (I forget the capacity), also full, to replenish the base\'s dwindling beer supply.

-A gemini command vehicle, for bringing some crewmembers back home, when they get bored of looking at stars.

Bunch of shots of the base:

It was quite a bit bigger than the base itself. I actually didn\'t notice this fact until they were landed right next to each other. It took a lot of tries to manage to land this close, and I actually took off and landed several times. I also used the heavy RCS to scoot my way closer, which actually worked surprisingly well. the new legs are much more flexible than the old ones were, and they don\'t snap off so easily.

In some of the pics you can see the remains of a previous attempt, which tragically ended in catastrophic failure when someone forgot to unfold the landing gear.

It base was easy to spot: just look for the huge pile of rubble and charred kerbins, and go uphill a bit.

edit: added a few more pics

[Volt]

Good god.

All the Farside projects so far have blown me away. I wish I had your design and piloting skill and perseverance.

[Tim_Barrett]

What computer do you have....

[madmat]

Now my missions all feel soo insignificant,,I\'m going home.'shrugs shoulders and walks away dejected'

[Luigibro606]

What computer do you have....

This.

Loading a small (by your comparisons) space station in Kerbin orbit almost lags me to death. If I booted up the Farside III on the launchpad KSP\'d freeze and crash. ,_,

[mincespy]

This.

Loading a small (by your comparisons) space station in Kerbin orbit almost lags me to death. If I booted up the Farside III on the launchpad KSP\'d freeze and crash. ,_,

I think he has this:

Anything less would blow up of it tried to load that thing.

[Guest Flixxbeatz]

It\'s the computer specs that separates us mere mortals from a god like you prevents most of us to do such things.

If someone has an equally (or more powerful) rig, he/she can do something like (or bigger than) this.

Anyway, nice station there! Keep blowing our minds up and owning us up the good work!

[gabyalufix]

Computer is no slouch, I\'ll admit, though it\'s now almost a year old.

-ASUS P8P67 motherboard

-Intel Core i7-2600 3.4 Ghz quad core w/ hyperthreading

-16 Gb DDR3 1600

-EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti, 1GB, 256-bit GDDR5

Built it myself.

When I load all my mods and build something big, KSP takes up, like 4 gigs, all by itself.

[SmiteZero]

I still think I must be using the oldest computer here. Single core Athlon 64 (2.21Ghz) with 2gB RAM and 256MB video.

[LagTT]

Wow, your Farside series has inspired me not to quit this game (even tho I\'m still having problems even establishing an orbit around kerbal)