This is the standard tanker I send out now, although I have an idea for an upgrade. When I put these in orbit, the central core of the lifter stage usually has about 75%+ of fuel left. Couldn't I use that fuel, but not fire up the mainsail, but rather use my nuclear engines? That would be more efficient. But then I'd be dragging a heavy mainsail around, so I might need a design that will allow me to detach it.
You can right click on an engine and disable it, then right click on others and activate them. This should work for you. Alternatively, you can group them to activate/deactivate them with a single button press in the action groups menu in the VAB. The mass of your mainsail is going to be pretty small compared to your whole lifter, so dumping it probably won't make a huge difference. Oh and one other thing, if you disable the mainsail and turn on the NERVAs, they are probably going to be in front of your center of mass for your stack. So your controls will be reversed, I think. You'll have to try it and see.
I've never thought about deactivating the mainsail of a core stage and using NERVAs to drain the core tanks. That would be a lot more efficient and I'll have to keep it in mind. Anytime I'm doing an interplanetary journey, if I have any fuel left in my core stage I always use that up completely before I ditch it. I only ever ditch a core with fuel if I'm doing an LKO mission where I don't need it and even then I always hate wasting it.
And see what I mean about the left-hand fuel indicators are off? Compare those progress bars to how much fuel I actually have left. I have no idea how to make sense of how they calculate the left hand one. It can't be that it's fuel in the tanks directly attached to the engines, because in this image they are full - the fuel is coming from the larger central tanks at first due to the fuel lines.
I am pretty sure that the indicator....nevermind, I have no idea! I know how it works when you are asparagus staging and emptying tanks that you drop off, but when you are draining from a tank that you are keeping with you, I'm not sure. I think it just shows you total fuel in all the tanks connected to the engines and doesn't specify which tank exactly it's draining from so you have to manually check.
Right now I'm trying to land on Laythe.. or rather was trying to last night. I didn't realize there were not so many islands on it
.. and I don't want to use up much fuel to casually land, so I sort of have to fly in full speed and use fuel sparingly. so far it's always ended in disaster, although about 70% of the time I do crash on land. So I'm almost there. I don't know if the lander will be able to take off afterwards, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.
Yeah, trying to make a landing on one of the tiny islands on Laythe is a big challenge in and of itself, especially since the maneuver nodes don't estimate the effects of air drag at all; it's a guessing game.
No! That thing is PACKED with fuel too, my landing did not use much at all. It's sort of why I settled on landing on the northern ice cap - it's as low as you can get and flat.. and big, so all that helped me minimize the use of my engines. I figured I would need a lot of it to get back into orbit. I'm gonna give that a try, thanks! The engines are the.. lv-909 kind. They might just not be up for the job, but I'm giving it a try anyway, might as well. There's 4 of them.
If the LV-909's are the engines that I think they are, then they have a thrust of 50 vs the NERVA's 60, weigh about 25% as much as a NERVA and have much less Isp. On balance, I think they should be able to lift you off the ground, but you'll have to burn them for a while and burn off some fuel. Whether or not that will leave you with enough fuel to get to orbit and dock is anyone's guess. Good luck!
My method of attaching them to an 8(9) core asparagus launcher is actually fairly straightforward. It doesn't take long and it never leads to them hitting anything when I get rid of them. For me it's probably the least problematic part of putting together a giant rocket, in terms of headaches and things going wrong.
It's never that simple for me! I do know that a ton of my problem is that I can't just add a few extra SRB's, I *always* end up trying to add 50 or something ridiculous. I just can't help myself for some odd reason and I over-complicate things and it doesn't work. I could just add 4-8 SRB's pretty easily but I never do. I guess that for the kinds of designs I typically build (50+ tons), adding just a few SRB's don't help very much so I overcompensate by adding 500000000 SRB's everywhere. Which is totally a stupid thing to do and counterproductive.
Basically when I design my launcher, I do the 6 or 8 core asparagus thing, and then test it. If it can get into orbit, great.. If not, I move on to my "attach solid fuel boosters" stage.
When I have that kind of problem, I usually add more fuel tanks to my boosters (which can help but has diminishing returns, particularly if you are only using mainsails - using the 9-engine cluster would get a lot more utility out of the 'add more fuel tanks' approach as they can handle the extra weight that a single mainsail per stack can't)
I start with attaching either 1 or 2 tt70 radial decouplers to a core with 6 or 8 symmetry on. Then I attach the boosters to that. So that gives you 6, 8, 12, or 16 boosters. Strut it up - each booster attached to the ones beside it with a cross cross pattern, then one going across at the top, and one at the bottom.. and then 2 struts attached to the asparagus stage one at the top and one at bottom.. and then a longer diagonal one from each one running from the very top of each booster to somewhere higher up on the rocket. That seems to be all the stability you need - or at least all the stability I've ever needed for my designs.
Yeah that's
exactly how I strut up my rockets. And it would be simple to just add 2 SRB's per booster, but mentally I just can't do that. It's silly but I can't limit myself and just go nuts when I try and use SRB's and break everything.
That never leads to problems for me. You have to make sure that your first asparagus stage doesn't run out of fuel first though, so you can't run it at max. I usually stick to anywhere between 30 and 70%. And decoupling all of the boosters never leads to problems due to the tt70 decouplers - they give you a lot of wiggle room.. and since you're still heading straight up, that helps too.
With my huge rockets, it's much more efficient (and usually necessary) to start your gravity turn very early and to adjust it gradually by a few degrees. I watch my apoapsis during launch and when I see that the time to apoapsis is increasing, I tilt over until the time to apoapsis stays steady. I burn at that angle for a while until my time to apoapsis begins increasing again, then I turn some more and so on. Usually by around 30-40km I'm burning almost sideways.
Anywhoo, what this means is that I'm always in danger of bumping into my asparagus boosters because I'm nearly always at some angle relative to the horizon. I compensate by adding sepatrons, but it takes a good 30 minutes or so to get it all right when I have 8 boosters to put sepatrons on and to make sure they're staged correctly. One huge problem I have in the VAB is mis-clicks. It's super easy to misclick when trying to attach struts and sepatrons and for some stupid reason the Control+Z (undo command) only works 5% of the time I press it. So I have to save after literally every single part or I could ruin everything and all of that takes a lot of time; especially when I have to reload to a previous save of a huge rocket that takes a half a minute to load fully.
But back to the SRB's, if I use them, I don't do my gravity turn until they're dropped because I don't want to collide with them and I also don't want to deal with the hassle of putting sepatrons on them. What that means is that I lose some (and sometimes a lot, depending on how many SRB's I use and how high up they get me) of efficiency as I can't start my gravity turn. So it becomes a trade-off for me and I don't have a good rule of thumb to go by although using just 2 SRB's per asparagus booster really isn't too big a deal.
Oh random advice: one of the bugs on the orange tanks is that they overheat when used with mainsails so you can't burn at full thrust (which you usually need to burn at to lift a huge stack). A way to get around this is to attach a short tank that's as wide as the orange tanks to the bottom and attach the mainsail to that. This will keep it from overheating and since I found that out a couple of days ago I now use it for all my rockets.
It's why I love the tt70 decouplers. I use them for everything - even my asparagus stage. If I have to decouple something in the middle of a gravity turn, it really helps and actually makes it possible.. most of the time. I don't do it if I have to, in the middle of a turn, but if it happens, I just go for it. Most of the time it works.
Are those the ones that stick out really far? If so, those are the one's I use as well, though I usually have to stick 2-4 of them on top of each other to give the orange tanks enough space on an 8 booster asparagus design.
250 boosters sounds crazy though! I've had a rocket with 128 I think, and at that stage I basically had to admit that my rocket design was not efficient enough and had to be redesigned.
Yeah it was nuts and that's what I mean about I can't just add a couple, I have to go full-blown rocket ********. That 250 SRB design launched a massive, 8 booster asparagus stage up to 10,000m by the way. It happened in about 15 frames as the fps slowed to a crawl. It worked but I never used it for anything because of the lag. I am also 150% sure I could never build anything like that again. It took a long time and a lot of patience and when it was done and I had no use for it, I was like lolwtf?
That's how I do it anyway. I used to have huge issues assembling a simple launcher.. but now I can sit down and put one together from scratch fairly quick. The most annoying part is figuring out staging, really, and where to put all of the decouplers - figuring out which is which.
Yup yup yup. It's pretty routine once you know how to do it but like I said earlier, the fact that Control+Z doesn't work for me means everything takes a loooooong time.
edit: I also now play fully vanilla.. Not because I'm a hipster, but at first because I couldn't be bothered to re-install all the mods. It's easy, but I can be lazy. Then I got used to it and I think it's helping me learn faster, especially docking, without any docking helpers.. no mechjeb has also made me better at moving around I think. I've gotten a lot better at docking, it's almost routine now..
Hey, now I play fully vanilla for the exact same reason! I don't even know how to add mods to the steam version of KSP but it's probably pretty simple. I just can't be assed to do it and I found that a lot of the mods I downloaded made the game break, didn't add anything useful, were super-mega OP and whatnot. There were a couple of cool ones I wanted to use like quantum struts, docking cam, mechjeb and Kethane but I never got around to it. I will probably just wait until they add those functionalities into the main game.
but mind you at times it still feels like this
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lol inorite?
It's weird how docking is just like riding a bike. It's really tough to learn and frustrating at first and then....you just get it and it's nbd.
I'm really glad I asked my roommate to give me a mission for the game, even though he doesn't really know much about it. It made me fly to Jool with the intent of docking two craft there. Then when that mission failed, I'm glad I asked him again. He made me put together a space station.
And now I can dock and it's not so bad! Makes me feel like I was an idiot all along. I also wish I had more time to play the game - this opens up a lot of doors for a lot of cool missions.
I've only ever docked the regular clampotron docking ports, never a sr. Those sr. ones look like they'd be perfect for putting together a larger interplanetary ship - in the sense that everything would be a lot more stable. Is this primarily what it's used for - putting together larger structures like space stations and larger interplanetary craft? It also for some reason seems like they'd be harder to dock.. but I'm not really sure why.
Yeah I wish I had more time as well. Every time I play I end up wasting an entire day and I just don't have many days I can devote to a game like that.
I haven't used the clampotron sr yet either but I'm pretty sure they are for bigger ships and sturdier construction like you said. For my upcoming Laythe mission I'm going to use them for sure. I'm also thinking about building an enormous orbital wheel space station (like the one in 2001: a space odyssey) and if I do I will have to use those big clampotrons for structural strength. It's going to be enormous...but Laythe first, I still have time to beat you!
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So I'm on my laptop so I don't have any more pictures to show you but I did a couple of big missions yesterday and this morning (at 3:30am b/c the damn puppy woke me up).
So the first big mission was right after I launched the monolithic refueling depot. I realized it didn't have much RCS fuel and had no Xenon fuel, so I needed to add that capability. I started off by designing a craft with lots of RCS and Xenon and it was just supposed to dock with the depot and supplement it. But in typical fashion, once I started building it I couldn't stop. I kept adding capabilities until it turned into this general-purpose orbital utility vehicle (first picture in my last post). It has room for 5 Kerbals so I can use it to shuttle Kerbals around on orbit. It also has enough fuel and that I can go out to rescue stranded Kerbals in orbit and enough thrust that I can use it like a space tug. It also has 4 RTG's so that it can provide power to dead ships even on the dark side. It has no dedicated purpose really, other than to provide extra RCS/Xenon fuel for the depot. It just seems kind of handy. I docked it and the only issue I had is that the action groups I set up to toggle the forward/reverse engines don't work for some reason so I have manually activate/deactivate them. It's nbd and I docked without incident. Oh and it has these weird batwing-like things on it that house the launch escape system; I jettisoned them before I took those pictures of it)
The second big mission was to build a dedicated low-orbit shuttle (on the right in the second picture) to move a lot of Kerbals (11 IIRC) to-and fro- on orbit between different ships and stations. It has no reentry capabilities but it does have a lot of fuel and super efficient NERVA's so it can go and dock a bunch of times before I need to top off. It was designed to launch unmanned (and thus has no escape system) and it flew without issue to the depot. At the back is a copula so that passengers can enjoy the view as they travel around on orbit.
So all that led up to my last mission. I have a rule that says you can't have more Kerbals aboard a space station than you have capsules to bring them home in an emergency. Because I forgot to take the a Kerbal out of the space station during launch (it was only supposed to have one pilot but it had two on accident) I now had 5 kerbals at the station but only enough room to take home 4 (3 on the Orbital Utility Vehicle's front capsule and 1 on the little emergency ship that launched with the station). So I had to go up and bring one of them home.
I realized that my OUV and the Orbital Shuttle don't have the capability to return a lot of kerbals and they are also much too big and complicated to do a simply ferry service. So I decided to build yet another ship that's sole job is to launch unmanned, go pick up a lot of kerbals on orbit and bring them home.
I started by using 2 of the hitchhiker containers so I can hold 8 Kerbals and designed everything around that. It has a docking port at the front that detaches on reentry and engines side mounted on a rear fuel tank that also detaches before reentry. It has 4 parachutes on one side that flip it over sideways so that it can land on the 4 legs on the side. It launches unmanned.
When I first built the module, I wanted to do some high-altitude tests so I could verify the landing system. I designed a 3 stage stack of SRB's to boost it up high in the atmosphere, unfortunately, the design was top heavy so I couldn't steer it away from the launch pad for safety without it tumbling. So I started adding more SRB's and tinkering with it before I finally had to ditch the test launcher and started on the main launcher. It's a 4 booster design that's not asparagus-staged though the boosters do all drain into the core stage and are jettisoned at the same time (onion staging). The core booster can get it up to 100km and a small injection stage I attached puts it in a final orbit, then turns around deorbits itself.
I had a TON of problems with the lander legs, they just don't want to be attached to the side. I also had a problem in that an unmanned probe core that's sticking off of the side of the rocket will try and act like the whole rocket is oriented sideways. I just turned the core on it's side so it's facing up and that solved the problem. After testing, I launched it unmanned, docked this morning and brought the extra kerbal home. It was a lot of fun but it really wasn't a huge deal and I don't know why I felt so accomplished about this little retrieval lander.
Oh one last thing - I placed the solar panels in front of the reverse engines and though they don't break off when the engine fires, they somehow magically cancel the thrust so I had to retract them to use the reverse engines. I'll fix that before I launch again.
Next up: to build a massive Science/Research station, then I can begin my Laythe Mission in earnest.
ARG I wrote too much, sorry. :[
Unfortunately, this launcher just never worked. It was 1000+ parts and like 700t and 81 engines or something ridiculous and it always broke even though, as you can see, I strutted it to the hilt. I finally tried to fly it with the debugger mode on so that nothing would break and even then it wouldn't fly straight. The game just hates mega-massive rockets. 
