Modular Propulsion System. It's all about the MPS!

[Rune]

...And by MPS I mean meters per second. For all your extreme delta-v requirements, from moving asteroids around to delivering payloads to other planets, I present to you a flexible tank and drive system that you will be able to tailor for every need you can think of:

Yup, that's a tall rocket. But what the hell am I talking about? Well, the MPS is a modular system, so it obviously consists of modules. The idea is that for a given tank size (the standard is a Big Red, of course), you can strap as many as you need together and drop them as you use them. And of course it's the same with the engines: they are in individual pods you can move around, so T/W is also something you can tailor throughout the mission. The final module is to move the other pieces around (or, potentially, to tow anything, including asteroids): a cute Klaw probe that provides amazing stability and control if attached in pairs around the CoM. Plus an adaptor on the nose for additional flexibility. Here, a closeup of how things end just before you circularize orbit and start thinking what you are going to use this for (remember to undock the cubic struts suborbital for a flush exterior without bits sticking out on the next load):

But that picture in itself doesn't really shows the potential of the system, for that I have to show a couple other things, from fuel depots that are ever-expanding to massive transport motherships:

So as you can guess the possibilities are mostly limited by your imagination. I know I have been using the same fuel tank assembly for four updates now, and the last iteration of the nuclear drive pod is IMO a work of art: 11 parts, no fuel lines, and it still will draw fuel form any of the the three docking ports it has... (there are older iterations of the drive pods in the above pictures)

A note on those, BTW. You can of course move them around, but I recommend using Navyfish's docking alignment indicator for that a lot, and doing it as little as possible. The problem is that if you dock them misaligned, you can pick up unwanted torques and rotations, and since you can't use gimballing due to the tractor nature of the system, it's bugs you even with very tiny misalignments unless you have plenty of reaction wheels to counteract. You can of course put them on the back with the front docking port, that's the main reason that 1.25-2.5m adaptor is there.

And of course the Klaw pods add the ultimate docking flexibility: you can pull anything if you drag it through its center of mass, and I don't think I have to show you how you can put one of the pods at the end of the adaptor. Plus, it's a very cute little subassembly with all the round edges and stuff, downright scary-looking when you reveal the Klaw next to a EVAing kerbal (for a proper sense of scale). Oh, and if the eagle-eyed among you notice they use the old size of reaction wheels, don't worry: I switched to the proper 1.25m ones when I revised the file for 0.25 compatibility and even more black and yellow diagonal strips.

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Rune. May you have straight burns and long departure windows!

Edited October 12, 2014 by Rune