I would really like to see your launch stacks for these. Are the orange tanks lifted as one piece or docked in orbit?
The 13 orange tanks make up my standard interplanetary tug design. It is usually made up of 14 orange tanks and all lifted up in one go. (The fuel refinery/asteroid catcher version has 13 orange tanks to make room for all that refinery stuff)
I looked around and don't see any lifter screenshots for any of those launches. That's too bad because from what I remember it's a bit of a fun (if bit slow) launch. I will put one on the launchpad and take some screenshots later
For now I am VERY VERY happy because I ran into another bug.. or rather because I figured out how to fix it.. Some asteroids will change shapes as you reload your game. This sucks because if you are attached to that asteroid, it will eat you. I was heading back to Jool with my 3rd asteroid when this is what happened to me.
Took me days to figure out that it was a bug with the way the asteroid ID or seed is determined for the asteroid. I came across it a couple times during research earlier but didn't really take it in properly I guess. Turns out if the asteroid ID is too large, it will convert it to scientific notation, which somehow forces the game to create a new asteroid ID, which implies a new seed, which changes the shape.. or something like that. Anyway, I had to keep reloading my game until I could undock both of my ships. It took a LONG time. Once they were undocked I edited my quicksave.sfs file, found the asteroid, and changed it's ID to a much smaller number. Then I reloaded and docked up my ships, and then reloaded a couple times to make sure the shape is stable, and.. so far it appears to be. But geez that was annoying. Latest thread on it I found was from Jan 20, people were saying it's going to get fixed in the next big update.. Def. watch out for that when you're about to dock to asteroids and back up your save file
Also, why are your NERVAs at such a high cant angle? You're eating pretty large cosine losses with them arranged like that.
It's so that I can grab the biggest possible asteroids and pull on them without some or all of the exhaust hitting the asteroid.
How do you find your energy generation situation while you are mining/refining fuel? I find that the miners are absolute energy hogs and even as far out as Duna I have trouble staying power positive.
My fuel refinery ships have a lot of batteries, and enough solar panels, but if I designed them again I would probably use more. I only end up sometimes getting negative electricity flow, and that's when I'm both mining and refining and the sun is angled weird. But it's so slight it usually allows me to operate for a long period of time anyway. The new attachment that I attach to every single asteroid now has more batteries and solar panels, and I attach it to the other side of the asteroid, so now electricity supply is never a problem when I'm mining or producing fuel
edit: well this is just so damn frustrating... i had such a nice intercept with Jool for my asteroid, and since my fix relied on using an older save file, I now i have to mine it, get fuel, and redo all the maneuvers. I can't even figure them out for anything near an acceptable orbit. I remember spending a lot of time perfecting that, and now it's all for nothing and it seems like I can't even replicate it. This game really gives you the best feelings but also the worst
This is a screenshot of what I'd use to get an asteroid catcher/fuel refinery into orbit
The whole thing is almost exactly 2,000 tons. I should have taken a screenshot of my 2,500 ton launch setup for the HERA mission, it's slightly more elaborate. Both designs are stable, but you have to be careful to perform each action properly during launch. If you don't make any mistakes it's easy to get into orbit
