Kerbal Space Program

[Andon]

Moar sas keeps anything straight

[Wyld Karde]

Latest news on the Minmus Refinery Platform.  I've managed to get it into stable orbit above Kerbin, but unfortunately there's a fundamental design flaw that exhibits once the ascent stages have been discarded.  The center of thrust is waaaay above the center of mass thanks to that empty kethane tank.  Which means when I fire up the engines it tumbles around like a Vegas drunk who's just been mugged.  Think I'm going to have to scrap the project and go with a more conventional three mission setup of miner/refiner, tanker rover and manned lander. 

[Wyld Karde]

Presenting another insane brilliant concept from Karde Space Industries!



The Modular Mobile Munbase uses standardised dockable rovers to put a variety of payloads exactly where you want to!  Is your Kethane deposit all mined out?  Simply undock the seperate sections, retract the landing gear and drive to a new location!  Each mobile base comes with four heavy duty wheels with RTGs to drive them, low power headlights and a set of deployable landing gear to make sure that payloads of different mass can deploy to the exact same height for docking.

I have no idea how I'm going to actually get this on the surface of the Mun.

[Wyld Karde]

Well, that turned out to be so forehead-slappingly easy I'm embarrassed to post a solution.  I used those little 2.5m tanks as a base for the chassis, so it was as straightforward as slapping a Poodle to the underside and upping the tankage so I had enough delta-v to land. 

[Wyld Karde]

Gah, getting tired of replying to myself but as this is the finale of the M3 project I can shut up for a while now.



Modular Mobile Munbase delivered, assembled and deployed in operational status.  From left to right: Fuel Tanker, Miner/Refinery and Power Generation.

The fuel tanker is particularly top heavy.  I had to actually use it's RCS system to keep it upright when accelerating and braking any harder than a brief tap on the key.  I'm thinking of working on a Mk 2 M3 base, in which case I may use more low profile components to keep the center of mass lower.

Damn thing's murder on my CPU though.  This is about as ambitious an assemblage as I dare without either a major optimisation pass by Squad or some new hardware on my end.

[Mordechaj]

I'm looking forward to getting this game sometime.

[Andon]

What's the big giant boom arm thingy from?

[Wyld Karde]

That's a Buran arm from Romfarar's robotic arms pack.  It's jointed, has a camera in the tip and can magnetically dock to another craft for resource transfer.  No point having a fuel tanker if it can't transfer fuel, after all.

Edit: If anyone's interested in giving it a whirl, here's an all-stock upload of the M3 mk2: http://pastebin.com/XL2DuBJG.  Just save the contents of that pastebin as a plaintext file in your KSP/savegame/ships/vab folder as a .craft file and you can load it in the VAB and play with it all you like.  I'd be interested in seeing what someone else can do with it.

[Andon]

Any chance of pics of the launch vehicle you used for them?

[Wyld Karde]

If you like, but it's pretty straightforward.  2 Orange tanks above a Mainsail (with strut spacing to prevent overheating), then four more of the same assembly radially attached and crossfeeding into the center stage with canards for low atmo steering.  My standard heavy lifting assembly, really.  Steering's a problem if you lock gimbals on the outer engines so you need to strut the payload to the lifter to control wobble but otherwise no probs.

[Andon]

ah, ok. Have you noticed that placing the kethane mining rigs on the structural panels works really nicely? You don't have to dick around with trying to get them to click on. Can fit two on a 1x1 plate.

EDIT: Also, fun fact: You can get the Vessel Info (In MJ1 at least) to show up in the VAB just by having a MJ part floating out in the assembly area. Doesn't need to be attached to anything. Nice way for measuring part masses and the like.

[Wyld Karde]

Here's the pic, with Mechjeb stage details for performance.  As you can see, the M3 itself has enough delta-v to get to the moon, circularise in orbit and land comfortably, so I only need the ascent stage to make it to Kermin orbit.



And no, I hadn't tried attaching the mining rigs to the panels.  The ones on my refinery stage are strapped to the RCS tank under the main body.  That's something I'll try in the future.

[Andon]

Getting any sort of rover off of the launch pad and not straight into the ground is proving difficult unless they're tiny.

[id3nt1ty]

Interesting to see your heavy lifter Wyld, I'll have to have a go at something similar myself. It looks a lot different to my design.

Nice work on getting your Mun base set up!

Here's something people are working on in the real world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... oxiK7K28PU

[trax_kaab]

Id3ntity > you can see his asparagus lifter under the lander

Awesome mobile station there, Wylde ...  :

You post inspired to me to play again KSP and I tried resurecting my old get-anywhere-land-Eve-able concept.

It's asparagus lander + with interplanetary stage - which basically will be the lander with few changes...

The lifter is 5m asparagus rocket with Nova Punch parts.

Also other non-vanilla parts I used - Soviet Buran main decoupler (cause all other such are nonsense),
B9 aerospace and KW for the cool engines, among few more minor mods, like the H.O.M.E. lateral aerspikeys - those are too cool lil engines not to have.

The Lander

The Lifter


Did made some nice ideas discoveries implementations. This was extremely stable rocket, btw
Here is a reproducible spider strut part:


Gonna test out the combo tonight.