Kerbal Space Program

[warpus]

Thanks dude, hope it helps.

Just finished going through it all and taking it all in. Helps for sure. I realize that my station has way too many solar panels and batteries and all that, but I like the way those panels look.. I actually had/have more panels on the other station parts, but some of them got destroyed and the others i retracted.

Refueling in LKO for an interplanetary mission is usually unnecessary and kind of a waste. I can explain why if you want, it would be a short explanation (hopefully).

It makes sense to me that you can try to use your launcher stage to start your insertion burn.. but if I have a larger payload to send to Val, or wherever, oftentimes I end up using the interplanetary stage to help me finish getting into orbit. So if that ever happens now I can just dock with the station and top up.

The plan was really to have a station up there with fuel, dudes, and eventually other vessels that I will attach to interplanetary stages to send to places... stuff like landers, planes, station parts, etc. A lot of that would be done partially just to make the game more.. engaging. You know, making things a bit more complex than necessary, maybe doing a mission to top up the station with dudes, then have some of them hop onto outgoing missions.. just for fun.

So far the station handles fine, I seem to have placed the RCS thrusters at exactly the right positions. I put them at the centre of mass, then at equidistant ends, like you said (of each craft that formed the station). I only put 4 in the centre though, 4 at each end too. I'll look to add more in the centre for my larger vessels. I'll also stop using those circular rcs tanks for larger ships, like you suggested. I started using them I guess when I ran out of fuel out of a big one once.. "need just a bit more" I thought, and the design choice kind of stuck after that.

It's not really that wobbly yet either, and I was going to attach more fuel, but that's not necessary. I should work on that interplanetary stage.

Sorry I assumed the station you showed was for going to Vall, I didn't realize it was just an LKO refueling station. Hopefully the advice still provides some insight.

Yep, lots of good tips there for sure, thanks. It sort of turned into a refuelling station... I mean, I put so much effort into it, I might as well use it for other missions. And I tend to have fuel problems more often than not, so it should come in handy. Plus I can use it to make my missions more engaging like I said before.

Always count on new versions of KSP breaking your saves. If you update via steam, they're gone forever. If you manually update, the old version of KSP will still be on your harddrive so you can load it up and play your old saves. *i think*

I will have to hunt down my save and back it up then..

Also, that's a really beautiful station.

Thanks! It's named after a Chelsea player a lot of people hate. I'm sort of in love with it.

I have some questions about your thesis btw:

For a rescue, you don't want to send more kerbals than you need to or else you risk stranding yet more kerbals.

I'm planning on sending no dudes in my rescue efforts.

There is actually a craft around Val that has outdoor seating for 6. It's the first ship I sent that was meant to be a fuel tanker or emergency return vehicle or something like that. I sort of forgot it had those seats.. I can probably fill it up with fuel via a refuelling mission, rendezvous with the 3 dudes stuck in orbit, have them transfer over, and then return home. I think that's what I'm going to do! I just need to check I'm not hallucinating about those 6 seats. Also need to make sure that craft has a docking port

Finally, the problem with your current station setup that you've pictured is that you aren't going to be able to move it.

It was surprisingly easy to move actually! It moved incredibly easily on one axis - a bit more difficult in the other, but not so bad. I haven't tried to move around the new symmetrical beast yet. We'll see how that goes.

When I dock what I basically do is fly up to the thing I'm trying to dock to, come to a complete stop, and then align both craft to point at eachother. Then I fly closer together, and dock.

I know this can be done more efficiently by pointing them towards the horizon or whatever and then only maneuvering one craft as opposed to both of them.. but I'm not that great at moving around laterally. Like, side to side. I should be using the IJKL keys for that, right? I've mastered H and N... and I do use IJKL, but for now the way I dock has been working so I'm sticking to it. I'll play around with lateral movement a bit more during my next docking maneuver.

Lastly, avoid inclination changes if possible.

When I go to Duna I never have inclination problems. My missions to Eve were the same. But for some reason whenever I go to Jool, my inclination seems random. My approach might be very close to the planet.. finetuned even.. but I'll always come in at a strange angle. Should I be fixing my inclination when I do my first correction burn after I've left Kerbin's SOI so that I don't have to adjust it later, when I'm already in the system? - I think this is why I never end up with much fuel by the way.. or at least one of the contributing factors.

You're probably going to want to put on some SAS modules on your ship to provide turning capability without having to use RCS. A couple of the large modules (do they have large SAS modules?) at either end should be fine. Also, stick on an ASAS module someplace to be able to use the thrust vectoring of your NERVAS and to control the control surfaces of your launch vehicle.

Both SAS and ASAS? I usually just have ASAS and that's it. Actually, make that always. I was under the impression that ASAS did the work of SAS, as well as the other stuff it does.

edit: Oh.. I was going to ask about something else but forgot. You said something about using a 6 way docking port (like the one I'm using in the centre of space station cole) on both ends of my interplanetary tanker? That would basically give you 4 extra docking options, right? Is that just so that when you're facing 90 degrees in the "wrong" direction, you can dock easier without rotating around and crap?

My docking method is to fly craft A very close to craft B, then stop, switch to craft B, select craft A as target, right-click on the dock I want, click 'control from', rotate it to face the incoming ship (usually very slowly still moving towards its target, not really stationary), then flip back, select craft B as target, press M to switch view to craft, readjust position towards the now facing towards me docking port, and move forwards at a reasonable pace, finger over the N key, as well as the WASD keys to reposition where I'm pointing, ready to dock. Usually I will be moving slightly laterally to craft B, so I have to switch between a couple times and do minor rotations so that things align. I think I can probably get this down to 2 and at times maybe 1 switchback, so while selecting the target every time you switch is annoying, it's not really *that* annoying.

Anyway, I realize that this means that I will have to make all my ships active partners, as you've been calling them.. but that's what I've been doing anyway it seems. I don't think I'd ever end up using one of the 4 side docking ports, if I added that 6 part dock piece at both the front and end of my tanker, because the way I do it I need to be pointing towards the docking port in order to dock. Or at least that's the maneuver I'm trying to get used to, in order to make docking more routine than it still feels now.

I agree that it would be a problem if I couldn't easily rotate one of the craft I was trying to dock together. I haven't tried rotating the newly expanded space station cole yet, but before the expension it was already showing some signs of making it harder to rotate along a particular axis. It wobbled a bit when I maneuvred along this axis, but in the end you just needed to give it a bit of momentum, and it was rotating relatively easily. Bit of an annoying exercise to put the space station through, but after the first rotation you don't really rotate it much unless you mess up big time. Usually just minute rotations. And maybe now that it's more symmetric, it will be easier to rotate?

So hmm.. what am I missing? Or am I missing anything? Do I really need those 6 directional docking port pieces at both ends?

Also, what do you think about this improvement to your tanker design:

Instead of connecting the nuclear engines to the 4 narrow tanks connected to the 1 central orange tank, why not connect them to the orange tank? (or a small grey tank as a buffer to avoid overheating or whatever) Then on the return thrip you can leave behind the 4 narrow tanks, which at that point will be empty.

And how do you connect 4 nuclear engines to an orange tank anyway? I've seen people do it, but I never took a closer look at the exact parts they used or how one might replicate that.

edit^2: mission redesign idea

Since I have a perfectly good lander and perfectly good return vehicle already in orbit around Vall (I checked, it's got seating for 6 and a docking port), what I'm going to do is send tankers that way, fill up those 2 ships already there, then try to land on another moon or two. Those 3 guys who are already there might as well explore a bit more before heading back home - they are getting big pensions when they get back, I might as well make them work for it a bit more.

 

[warpus]

I just realized that if the tankers are one-way missions, you don't need to worry about detching any fuel tanks once you're at your destination. So the redesign I proposed would only be useful for return missions. I was going to edit that in, but I didn't want to make it seem like I'm trying to outthesis you so here's a new post

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Just finished going through it all and taking it all in. Helps for sure. I realize that my station has way too many solar panels and batteries and all that, but I like the way those panels look.. I actually had/have more panels on the other station parts, but some of them got destroyed and the others i retracted.

If you are just doing missions in LKO, it's not really a big deal either way. But if you are going out to Jool, then that extra mass becomes a huge liability.

It makes sense to me that you can try to use your launcher stage to start your insertion burn.. but if I have a larger payload to send to Val, or wherever, oftentimes I end up using the interplanetary stage to help me finish getting into orbit. So if that ever happens now I can just dock with the station and top up.

If you are having to use your interplanetary stage to get to orbit and need to top it off, you should really look into bigger/better launchers. It's a huge waste to have to stop off in LKO and then dock, top off and leave from there.

The *ideal* mission profile out to Jool is that you leave from the surface of Kerbin and burn straight to Jool without stopping in LKO at all. Stopping in LKO means you are wasting fuel setting up that orbit. However, in real life and KSP, it's often a necessary step. In real life it's usually done to check out systems and because the inclination of launch sites means you wouldn't have an easy way to make a direct burn because the launch sites aren't usually on the equator. So they stop in LEO, check out the systems and line up for the interplanetary injection burn. In KSP, you have neither of these problems as the launch site is on the equator and you don't have to do system checks.

So you can easily burn straight from the ground to Jool, if your launcher is big enough. Stopping to refuel means your going to have to top off both fuel and RCS after achieving LKO - which means eventually you're going to have to refuel your fueling station, a tedious chore. Also, since you are going to have to dock at Jool at some point, possibly multiple times, do you want to have to also dock at LKO for each and every launch? It becomes a time suck and annoying.

But it's certainly feasible to do it that way and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it. But trust me, at some point your going to want to build massive rockets; they just make things a lot easier. I can give you tips if you want.

The plan was really to have a station up there with fuel, dudes, and eventually other vessels that I will attach to interplanetary stages to send to places... stuff like landers, planes, station parts, etc. A lot of that would be done partially just to make the game more.. engaging. You know, making things a bit more complex than necessary, maybe doing a mission to top up the station with dudes, then have some of them hop onto outgoing missions.. just for fun.

Hahaha if you don't think KSP is complex enough already, you're doing it wrong!

I like having space stations myself and even built a 4 orange tank refueling depot myself when docking first came out. The thing was though, that building a rocket capable of lofting fully fueled orange tanks to the station taught me how to build enormous rockets. Once I had perfected that, the need for the refueling station went away. The rocket I developed for that project was able to take a lander all the way to a Duna injection and then do some of the orbital insertion there without ever using the landers fuel until I was setting up my Duna orbit. It's pretty phenomenal and extremely reliable. Well, it got reliable once I ironed out the kinks. Before that it was a mess. But now I use that same basic design for all of my serious (and large) launches. It's extraordinarily flexible.

The one undeniable benefit of an orbital refueling station is if you are going to cycle landers or transfer stages back and forth from Kerbin to the other planets. With a station, you can go to Duna, come back, stop at that the station to refuel and then head on back to Duna or wherever. This saves you from having to launch multiple rockets for the same type of mission; you just cycle back and forth.

However, getting to the moons of Jool and back is a much trickier proposition and will usually require refueling at Jool or one of the moons. I was able to take my Duna lander on a one-way trip to Laythe, but it didn't have enough fuel to lift back off and head back. So the lander itself would have needed to be bigger just to get back into orbit of Laythe. So you make a bigger lander, but then you need more fuel to haul the bigger lander, which needs more fuel to haul more fuel and so on. If I were smart, I would have stuck with the basic design but sent out tankers to Laythe first and topped-off before I landed, then topped off after I lifted off.

So far the station handles fine, I seem to have placed the RCS thrusters at exactly the right positions. I put them at the centre of mass, then at equidistant ends, like you said (of each craft that formed the station). I only put 4 in the centre though, 4 at each end too. I'll look to add more in the centre for my larger vessels. I'll also stop using those circular rcs tanks for larger ships, like you suggested. I started using them I guess when I ran out of fuel out of a big one once.. "need just a bit more" I thought, and the design choice kind of stuck after that.

It's not really that wobbly yet either, and I was going to attach more fuel, but that's not necessary. I should work on that interplanetary stage.

You don't need 8 RCS thrusters around the core, it just makes translating up/down/left/right easier and faster. But four can handle the job; I just find that if I'm trying to dock a massive piece like a full orange fuel tank much easier with 8+ thrusters. Is your orange fuel tank full?

Yep, lots of good tips there for sure, thanks. It sort of turned into a refuelling station... I mean, I put so much effort into it, I might as well use it for other missions. And I tend to have fuel problems more often than not, so it should come in handy. Plus I can use it to make my missions more engaging like I said before.

Oh yeah it will certainly come in handy! Plus, it's just an awesome achievement to put together a big station. Congrats! You seem to have gotten the hang of docking.

I will have to hunt down my save and back it up then..

Not necessarily. Are you using steam for KSP? Because if you aren't, then when you update it just creates a whole new copy of KSP, the old one is still there and you can use it and copy over saves from it.

I have some questions about your thesis btw:

I'm planning on sending no dudes in my rescue efforts.

There is actually a craft around Val that has outdoor seating for 6. It's the first ship I sent that was meant to be a fuel tanker or emergency return vehicle or something like that. I sort of forgot it had those seats.. I can probably fill it up with fuel via a refuelling mission, rendezvous with the 3 dudes stuck in orbit, have them transfer over, and then return home. I think that's what I'm going to do! I just need to check I'm not hallucinating about those 6 seats. Also need to make sure that craft has a docking port

That's a solid plan.

It was surprisingly easy to move actually! It moved incredibly easily on one axis - a bit more difficult in the other, but not so bad. I haven't tried to move around the new symmetrical beast yet. We'll see how that goes.

Sorry, when I was talking about 'moving' the station, I meant putting it on a trajectory to Jool. I thought that's what you're doing with it. Even big, wobbly stations can be rotated in a pinch without much fuss but actually sending them off into space is another bag of worms. That's when the instability really becomes a headache as even small wobbliness turns into huge, ship-breaking wobbles under thrust.

When I dock what I basically do is fly up to the thing I'm trying to dock to, come to a complete stop, and then align both craft to point at eachother. Then I fly closer together, and dock.

I know this can be done more efficiently by pointing them towards the horizon or whatever and then only maneuvering one craft as opposed to both of them.. but I'm not that great at moving around laterally. Like, side to side. I should be using the IJKL keys for that, right? I've mastered H and N... and I do use IJKL, but for now the way I dock has been working so I'm sticking to it. I'll play around with lateral movement a bit more during my next docking maneuver.

If you use the 'docking mode' button, it changes your ASDW keys (which rotate the craft) into the IJKL keys, which translate it up and down, back and forth. This way, you can easily swap between rotational motion and translation motion without changing the keys you use to do it. But yeah, you will find that once you learn how to use the up/down/left/right translations that your life will be so much easier. That's because once you do the initial alignment, you don't have to turn so much as you approach, you just move up/down/left/right to keep it in line without ever turning off that axis. Also, use the chase camera and line it up so your looking forward from directly behind it, this helps a lot as well.

When I go to Duna I never have inclination problems. My missions to Eve were the same. But for some reason whenever I go to Jool, my inclination seems random. My approach might be very close to the planet.. finetuned even.. but I'll always come in at a strange angle. Should I be fixing my inclination when I do my first correction burn after I've left Kerbin's SOI so that I don't have to adjust it later, when I'm already in the system? - I think this is why I never end up with much fuel by the way.. or at least one of the contributing factors.

Same here, it's always Jool that throws off my inclination and that I think is largly due to all the large moons.

Yeah, you should be trying to fix your inclination right after you leave Kerbin's SoI, but you can only do this to a certain extent. For me, I have the patch conics set at their default. What this means is it will only show me two encounters at once. So I can leave Kerbin's SoI and set up a trajectory that encounters Jool and it will show me the trajectory after that up until my trajectory encounters a moon, at which point it shows me that encounter but not the resulting trajectory. So I can't plan that far ahead.

I may be wrong but I remember you saying that you reset your patched conics to show more of your flight path so you won't have this problem. Either way, space gremlins strike and destroy your best laid plans and trajectories. But even still, you want to do as much of your trajectory changes as far away from Jool as possible to come in at a good inclination without making a huge correction burn at Jool. Then, when at Jool but before you encounter a moon, make a correction burn to make the new post-moon-encounter inclination decent while still as far away from that moon as possible. It's once you're in orbit that inclination changes become even more of a fuel drain. I mean, they always are, but if you can come in at a good inclination to begin with, then you won't waste as much fuel.

Both SAS and ASAS? I usually just have ASAS and that's it. Actually, make that always. I was under the impression that ASAS did the work of SAS, as well as the other stuff it does.

They do different, but related functions. SAS creates a torque that allows you to rotate your ship without burning fuel. You command pods have built-in SAS (the satellite cores have less torquing ability though), and so it's easy to neglect that capability. The problem is that with huge ships, the torque created by the pod isn't enough to rotate your ship very well. So they have extra SAS modules you can throw on that add more torquing power. I'm not sure if they make a large-diameter SAS unit though, which may or may not complicate things.

Basically, if you have a huge rocket and you put on some SAS modules, you will be able to rotate it without ever using RCS thrusters. You will still need RCS to make translational movement, however.

ASAS simply yokes all of your control surfaces (movable fins, thrust-vectoring rockets and RCS thrusters) to your movement commands. So if you launch a rocket with thrust vectoring engines but don't have an ASAS module, then even if you try and turn the ship, the thrust vectoring won't work. Same goes with fins. The RCS units will accept your direct commands and will fire when you tell it to turn, however, if you want to set a heading/orientation and turn on RCS and hit the SAS button to keep that course, RCS units won't fire because there's no ASAS unit to tell them what to do; they will only respond to direct commands without an ASAS unit present.

So you use ASAS to control the various control surfaces and to enable your SAS button to use those control surfaces itself to keep a steady orientation.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

THESIS WAR!!!!!

edit: Oh.. I was going to ask about something else but forgot. You said something about using a 6 way docking port (like the one I'm using in the centre of space station cole) on both ends of my interplanetary tanker? That would basically give you 4 extra docking options, right? Is that just so that when you're facing 90 degrees in the "wrong" direction, you can dock easier without rotating around and crap?

Yes, exactly! Let's say you're planning to dock head-on with your tanker, but you haven't locked it to the horizon. So as your approaching, the damn thing is squirreling around so now you have to chase that docking port as it moves. It's a damn chore, even with a small, nimble craft.

However, if you've got 6-way ports on either end, then it doesn't matter so much. You can keep approaching and dock with whichever port happens to line up with you, instead of trying to line up with a particular port. So you may end up docking with it sideways, which is ugly, but since it's just a tanker and not a core station module, who cares? Grab your fuel and go!

Even when you've mastered docking, this will still save you the effort of lining up docking with a particular port. Even though it may be easy to do for a master (which I'm not, mind you), it's still much easier to not have to deal with it at all. It also provides a lot of flexibility for situations you don't plan on, like a rocket engine that breaks on landing and makes controlling difficult, or whatever.

My docking method is to fly craft A very close to craft B, then stop, switch to craft B, select craft A as target, right-click on the dock I want, click 'control from', rotate it to face the incoming ship (usually very slowly still moving towards its target, not really stationary), then flip back, select craft B as target, press M to switch view to craft, readjust position towards the now facing towards me docking port, and move forwards at a reasonable pace, finger over the N key, as well as the WASD keys to reposition where I'm pointing, ready to dock. Usually I will be moving slightly laterally to craft B, so I have to switch between a couple times and do minor rotations so that things align. I think I can probably get this down to 2 and at times maybe 1 switchback, so while selecting the target every time you switch is annoying, it's not really *that* annoying.

Yeah, that's basically how I've always done it. You get good at it with practice so it's not a huge deal, as you said. I am interested in using the horizon-fixing method myself as even though I've gotten better at docking, it's still presumably easier if I have a fixed target with fixed orientation.

It's also extremely helpful if you care about precision alignment. If you want all your station modules to line up perfectly along the same axes, then you absolutely have to use the horizon-fixing method. From all of my docking experiences, I can tell you it's impossible to line up a perfect docking with the method we've been using. Luckily, I don't really care about alignment.

Anyway, I realize that this means that I will have to make all my ships active partners, as you've been calling them.. but that's what I've been doing anyway it seems. I don't think I'd ever end up using one of the 4 side docking ports, if I added that 6 part dock piece at both the front and end of my tanker, because the way I do it I need to be pointing towards the docking port in order to dock. Or at least that's the maneuver I'm trying to get used to, in order to make docking more routine than it still feels now.

Yeah, we both have used all-active docking partners. You're not alone on that, I was just trying to show you easier ways to do things. Even with fixed-horizon method, I'd still probably make them both capable of active docking just out of habit and for the added flexibility.

But yeah the extra port was just an idea, not a necessity. I only recommend it because if you are going to start doing routine refueling flights, that extra flexibility is going to save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

I agree that it would be a problem if I couldn't easily rotate one of the craft I was trying to dock together. I haven't tried rotating the newly expanded space station cole yet, but before the expension it was already showing some signs of making it harder to rotate along a particular axis. It wobbled a bit when I maneuvred along this axis, but in the end you just needed to give it a bit of momentum, and it was rotating relatively easily. Bit of an annoying exercise to put the space station through, but after the first rotation you don't really rotate it much unless you mess up big time. Usually just minute rotations. And maybe now that it's more symmetric, it will be easier to rotate?

Well being more symmetric is always helpful, but your real enemy is going to be mass. That extra mass is very hard to counteract and you end up using more and more RCS fuel. If you tack on some SAS units, presumably you could avoid this.

From my own experience with fully fueled tankers, even they can be a real pain to rotate by themselves. But practice and proper RCS alignment make all the difference.

So hmm.. what am I missing? Or am I missing anything? Do I really need those 6 directional docking port pieces at both ends?

You really have to develop an ultra-heavy lift rocket in my opinion. You seem to have everything else figured out. Particularly now that I know you aren't planning to send that massive space station on a rescue mission and will do that instead with smaller ships and tankers, you've got an excellent handle on things. The UHL rocket will just make things considerably easier and open up new possibilities, though you can do without it, especially with an on-orbit refueling station.

You don't need 6-sided ports at both ends. It'll simply make your life easier, especially if you are doing a lot of refueling missions and you aren't a pro at docking. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to come in to dock, only to find you aren't properly aligned which then takes 10 minutes to re-align. With all the options that 2 6-sided ports provided, you can just say screw it and go for another, more conveniently located port for your current alignment.

Also, what do you think about this improvement to your tanker design:

Instead of connecting the nuclear engines to the 4 narrow tanks connected to the 1 central orange tank, why not connect them to the orange tank? (or a small grey tank as a buffer to avoid overheating or whatever) Then on the return thrip you can leave behind the 4 narrow tanks, which at that point will be empty.

Yeah, that works, no problem. Your next post on only needing it for return trips makes sense as well. I would worry that attaching engines directly to your orange tank means it will drain your orange tank first. Naturally, you can move fuel around, but it's always handy to be able to look at the side tanks as they empty and know directly how much fuel you have to play with before you start dipping into your fuel payload (for a refueling tanker). Having to move propellant around obfuscates this a bit.

And how do you connect 4 nuclear engines to an orange tank anyway? I've seen people do it, but I never took a closer look at the exact parts they used or how one might replicate that.

You use the small cubic struts (they're just little steel-webbing cubes) to connect (using the symmetry function) the bottom of your orange tank. Place them as close to the outside of the tank as you can in a large square pattern, each cube will be a corner of a larger imaginary square. Then place the engines on those cubes. The cubes will feed fuel to the engines, so no need for separate plumbing.

edit^2: mission redesign idea

Since I have a perfectly good lander and perfectly good return vehicle already in orbit around Vall (I checked, it's got seating for 6 and a docking port), what I'm going to do is send tankers that way, fill up those 2 ships already there, then try to land on another moon or two. Those 3 guys who are already there might as well explore a bit more before heading back home - they are getting big pensions when they get back, I might as well make them work for it a bit more.

Hahaha, I hope they are getting hazardous-duty pay as well as their pensions!

Best of luck, post some pics for me!

 

[warpus]

If you are having to use your interplanetary stage to get to orbit and need to top it off, you should really look into bigger/better launchers. It's a huge waste to have to stop off in LKO and then dock, top off and leave from there.

The *ideal* mission profile out to Jool is that you leave from the surface of Kerbin and burn straight to Jool without stopping in LKO at all. Stopping in LKO means you are wasting fuel setting up that orbit. However, in real life and KSP, it's often a necessary step. In real life it's usually done to check out systems and because the inclination of launch sites means you wouldn't have an easy way to make a direct burn because the launch sites aren't usually on the equator. So they stop in LEO, check out the systems and line up for the interplanetary injection burn. In KSP, you have neither of these problems as the launch site is on the equator and you don't have to do system checks.

So you can easily burn straight from the ground to Jool, if your launcher is big enough. Stopping to refuel means your going to have to top off both fuel and RCS after achieving LKO - which means eventually you're going to have to refuel your fueling station, a tedious chore. Also, since you are going to have to dock at Jool at some point, possibly multiple times, do you want to have to also dock at LKO for each and every launch? It becomes a time suck and annoying.

But it's certainly feasible to do it that way and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it. But trust me, at some point your going to want to build massive rockets; they just make things a lot easier. I can give you tips if you want.

I've been sort of trying to get away from giant and/or crazy launcher designs. I have a design that's fairly solid.. it takes a lot longer to get in orbit cause of all the struts and all the parts.. plus there's more stages, a crapload of solid fuel boosters, etc. with so much stuff going on usually 4 out of 5 of my launches were failing and in some cases 9 out of 10. There always seems to be something wrong with the design, be it a lack of strut here, a tank hitting something while falling down for some reason when it never happens otherwise, problems with doing the gravity turn, etc.

This space station is supposed to be a step towards simplifying the launches. Smaller payloads and smaller launchers is the new motto, at least for now. And I haven't had a crash in the last 5 launches I think! if we're not counting test launches. I've been able to go straight from design to launch into orbit and use with one of the simple designs, without any testing. It's still smart to test, but the point is that there is far less room for error.

Anyway, that's why I started going down that road. I might very well get back to crazy rockets, because crazy is always fun in KSP.

The one undeniable benefit of an orbital refueling station is if you are going to cycle landers or transfer stages back and forth from Kerbin to the other planets. With a station, you can go to Duna, come back, stop at that the station to refuel and then head on back to Duna or wherever. This saves you from having to launch multiple rockets for the same type of mission; you just cycle back and forth.

I really like how all that makes you feel like you're establishing a footbhold, in orbit around this or that. That adds a lot to the game for me!

Not necessarily. Are you using steam for KSP? Because if you aren't, then when you update it just creates a whole new copy of KSP, the old one is still there and you can use it and copy over saves from it.

Yeah, I switched over to simplify things. I stopped played as much and I got lazy manually downloading updates.

It's also extremely helpful if you care about precision alignment.

Why does that matter?

Particularly now that I know you aren't planning to send that massive space station on a rescue mission and will do that instead with smaller ships and tankers, you've got an excellent handle on things.

I can see you facepalming when you saw that first photo of it if that's what you thought I was going to be doing with it

Nah, the space station was my roommate's idea. "Your mission is.. save those dudes using a space station somehow". "I can use it to refuel a ship to go there and get them". "Okay, do that"

It was also an excuse to finally get good at docking I guess.

You really have to develop an ultra-heavy lift rocket in my opinion.

One design that worked that I still might have around had over 80 solid fuel boosters. It was kind of crazy. I think I've even had 100+ of them at one point. That seems rather extreme.

Yeah, that works, no problem. Your next post on only needing it for return trips makes sense as well. I would worry that attaching engines directly to your orange tank means it will drain your orange tank first. Naturally, you can move fuel around, but it's always handy to be able to look at the side tanks as they empty and know directly how much fuel you have to play with before you start dipping into your fuel payload (for a refueling tanker). Having to move propellant around obfuscates this a bit.

I would have the narrow tanks connected to the orange tank so that it in the end it's essentially as if you're using fuel from the narrow tanks and not the orange tank.. but not really.. but you don't care because the narrow tanks drain first.

I'll post an update on this mission whenever I have more time to play.. for now I have to go look after a couple dogs and work on a workflow management system :/

 

[Antilogic]

Is there an easy way to ensure symmetry on asparagus staged rockets? I'm using the dual symmetry button and dropping several separators, and then building up off that. However, they are just slightly askew sometimes because there is no grid, and the larger I build my launch stages with more solid boosters on the outside of the core, the greater the symmetry problem.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Use eight way or six way symetry or whatever. You can place them all at once on all of the stages as a group, then manually place them into groups to go off when the stages are jetisoned.

SPELLING ERRORS CORRESPOND TO ALCOHOL INTAKE AT THE INLETS. MAXIMUM PARTIAL VAPOR PRESSURE OF ETHANOL EXCEEDED. ALL WORKERS MAKE WAY TO SAFETY SHELTERS POST HASTE.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

 

[warpus]

My method to attach a whole crapload of solid fuel boosters to my launch stage is to start with the (usual?) 7 or 9 cores, then attach the appropriate 12 or 16 TT-70 Radial Decouplers to the outher 6 or 8 cores, with symmetry on.. so basically 2 on each one, pointing about 75 degrees away from eachother (or so, IIRC). The way my 6 or 8 cores are attached to the central one (also using tt70 radial decouplers), gives me enough room to attach the 12 or 16 solid fuel rockets... I strut everything up using a criss-cross type pattern, then attach another layer of tt-70 radial decouplers right on top of the existing solid state boosters. You can do 4 layers like that to get 64 solid state boosters total.. And at that point spaces start opening up for you to put in even more at each subsequent layer.

This sort of setup has been for the most part very stable for me. And if I don't need that many solid fuel boosters, I put the tt70 radial decouplers right in the centre of each outer core. That makes it super accurate in terms of placement because you're putting it right in the middle.

I'm confused what you mean by dual symmetry, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I set my symmetry to 6 or 8 and follow the above process for every launch vehicle I build now.. Sometimes solid fuel boosters aren't required, but that makes it even easier. That's just my way of doing it though, hobbs seems to have more efficient designs. I like mine because each empty fuel core has a lot of room to fall, so I don't have to care about which way I'm facing during gravity turns. Dropping fuel tanks is really easy, even if you're turning.

 

[Antilogic]

So, Hobbs is saying you should use the 6- or 8- symmetry to place all your equipment that will be asparagus-staged, and then break them up afterwards (didn't know you could do that, but as it turns out, you can!). I was placing 3 or 4 sets of 2-symmetry and building the same boosters over and over again.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So, Hobbs is saying you should use the 6- or 8- symmetry to place all your equipment that will be asparagus-staged, and then break them up afterwards (didn't know you could do that, but as it turns out, you can!). I was placing 3 or 4 sets of 2-symmetry and building the same boosters over and over again.

Yes exactly. Place them all at once with symmetry, then group them individually with the staging list in the right to set them to go off when the appropriate stages jettison. It can be tedious, but it works very well.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, you build everything up using 6 or 8 symmetry. then if you want to move the whole shebang around, click on the first thing you placed, likely the decoupler, and you'll be able to place it somewhere else on the main core. The editor will pick up everything attached to that decoupler and allow you to move it around. make sure that your symmetry remains on - you'll be able to change it to 6 or 8 or to whatever before you place it again. Very handy! Although it does mess up your struts from time to time, so you might have to readd some.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

'readd some'

It comforts me to know I am not the only one on a one-way trip to margarittaville

 

[warpus]

re-add

My Thailand trip is in a month and a half. Life's hectic. I'm not sure if I'll be able to rescue these guys before I go. And by the time I'm back a new version is bound to be out.. Ah well, at least we'll save that pension money.

 

[warpus]

This guy gets to the mun using only his feet


Link to video.

 

[trader/warrior]

I kind of miss the days when reaching the Mun was really hard, before the map mode and maneuvers. KSP felt a bit wilder when the best strategy to reach the moon was to wait for it to appear on the horizon, give it full throttle and hope for the best with no way of knowing your orbital path.

Still my proudest KSP moment:

Spoiler :

Not that I would ever go back. Trying to do an old style Mun mission now though, missed it three times now...

 

[warpus]

Whoa, no map view? I'm guessing this was before planets?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I still exclusively use the 'moon over the horizon' method to get to the Mun.

 

[Antilogic]

The horizon trick is pretty solid, especially because my calculated burns don't yield the appropriate trajectory due to excessive fast-forwarding.

 

[cardgame]

Whoa, no map view? I'm guessing this was before planets?

We had map view, but no patched conics, so it was total guesswork.

Unless trader/warrior played even before 0.12 or something

 

[hobbsyoyo]

This guy gets to the mun using only his feet


Link to video.

Whoa there was vehicles driving around outside the VAB and I saw a canyon on Kerbin!