Mothership Designs?

[Axelord FTW]

That looks pretty cool. Are you using sepertrons to get them away from the ship?

Separatron are not even needed unless you absolutely want to be able to ditch those empty tanks during a burn. Otherwise, just giving the ship a bit of a spin along its main axis would be enough to get the empty tanks clear and away from the ship's trajectory.

Here is something I wrote a few hours ago. It was in a thread about space stations (whose purpose often overlap with mothership). Working with FAR, this has become my go-to method for long range missions (to jool mostly in this case). My PC isn't bad but the game can still easily become a slideshow if I'm not careful.

At one point, I was really trying to get huge ships going.

Although more cost efficient, I've found out that launching long range missions in parts is more fun and interesting (not to mention easier on the FPS).

A three ship mission to Jool is real fun.

A) A main long-range probe relay and maybe two dozen omni-antenna probe relays tacked on.

A main crew vehicle with a science lab.

C) Utility ship, which include a low gravity lander, an atmo probe or two for Laythe and Jool each, a high gravity lander for Tylo and some extra resources like fuel and monoprop.

Sometime I might even split C into two.

Edited January 23, 2015 by Axelord FTW

[Laie]

Maybe using it to get right to the edge of Kerbin's SOI, and aerobraking it when it comes back around so its home again with very little extra dV? According to the wiki that could save about 940m/s if done right.

That figure is correct, but if you can do it you're tougher than I am. I find that if I have a high TWR, I want to use it for the whole burn. When going to Jool, 940m/s isn't even half of it. Besides, from an efficiency point of view, the first 900+m/s can be pieced together in small increments at low TWR. But as soon as you raise your apoapsis out of Kerbins SOI, you want the rest of the burn to happen quickly.

But, just to toss in another idea: the extra tug (and the fuel it carries) may also be used to raise your entire orbit to 1000km or more, before you even start the burn. That would take a lot of urgency out of the actual transfer burn.