Any unusual, twisted, weird, exotic design that actually functionned and fulfilled their purpose ?

1) I've had my bi-rocket phase. It started as a way to fulfill the ground-based "retrieve pod" contracts (I wanted to be able to roll over the target, grab it, and lift it back to home - it took a few tries as the claw's required height was hard to evaluate in advance, I finally went for detachable wheels in order to fall on the target).

2) Then I used this structure for other rovers (more like rolling skyscrapers) in mine-and-refuel missions. Same principle, except that the claw would be horizontal in order to connect with a full vertical rocket.

3) I later went the tri-rocket way, to move whole stations around (which components were imposed by another contract). Went surprisingly well. A quadri-rocket palindromic craft (with claws and thrusters on both ends) later met with it to refine the ore it had gathered, to temporary merge with it for a supplementary "space station contract", and to give it a passenger module for a supplementary "rescue contract", before leaving to fulfill a supplementary "satellite contract", and, long story short, it became a one-run-pluri-modular-multi-mission-from-hell which has been the most epic planifaction juggle so far. Involving unconventional design, shape-shifting ships, and claws. I love claws.

I'm back to traditional one-rocket structures, nowadays, though, but, there, this was the phase where my rockets were looking more like phantom menace pod racers. So :

Any rocket design that surprised you by not exploding, or by managing to fit a specific situation ? Any rocket that didn't look like a rocket ? Any space monster transformer robot mech tank thingy that saved the day ?

How lego do you go ?

Nice designs. Didn't think of going the "multirocket" way for cumbersome stuff that stick around the sides of a traditional launch. Like rovers, my personal bane :P

Though some of them look like "I don't want to bother with 2 hours of docking today, so I'll just launch my whole space station in one piece" rockets... ^^

I might have some really weird (and very, very ugly) contraptions, from the time of my first planes and space stations. Just need to find a way to put the snapshots online.

OK, facepalm-time : I'm so used to forums where you have to link to images stored elsewhere, that I didn't even notice the big obvious "attach image" button under the post screen. ^^

I'll post some of my monsters this evening :)

I only learned docking a few weeks ago, because I found the idea (and the frantic posts about it) intimidating. And it's true it is both somewhat hard to learn (although not THAT hard when compared to all the other stuff like munlanding or orbital rendez-vous. Just a little more complicated) and time consuming (even when you know what you do, docking is a tricky, slow manoeuver).

So I was really reluctant to try it.

But when you manage to do it... You remember how mastering orbit just opened a whole new world of possibilities? That.

Docking allow you to build big, cumbersome, asymetric (and awesome) stuff in orbit, like big stations or interplanetary crafts. It allow you to rotate the crew of your crafts and stations. And more importantly, it allows you to refuel.

In my present campaign, I have a big station orbiting the Mun, with several crafts (a probe, a lightweight semi-automated mun lander, and a heavier 3-man "lifepod/tug") all attached to it. It's the headquarter to all my Munar science and rescue missions. If I need to take samples from the western crater, I simply send the one-man craft, do the landing, lift off and dock to the station again for a tiny fraction of the fuel and time it would have taken if I tried to do it from Kerbin. Once docked, I transfer some fuel from the big station tanks to the lander, and it's ready for another mission. Once every 4-5 missions, I launch a tanker from Kerbin to resupply the station, or a ship to bring back home the samples, experiments and rescued personnel.

For big, manned flight to the other planets (for the moment, I only sent one-way probe and rovers), I think orbital assembly and refueling, and the possibility to send and retrieve a lander from the "mothership" will be a lifesaver. :)


My advice :

- Use RCS for the manoeuver, and the RCS keys (i, k, etc) for thrust. Docking with your main thruster is probably possible if you're some sort of prodigy, but not for me.

- Select "pilot from" the docking port, and set the other ship's docking port as target. That way, when your prograde sight is aligned with the target circle, you know you go in the right direction (and it becomes quite easy to correct with RCS so that the sight are realigned

- Switch between the 2 ships to align the docking ports. It's far easier to rotate your whole space station so that the docking port is facing the ship, than trying to circle the station with your ship. Don't forget to chose "pilot from" the docking port for the target ship/station and target the docking ship, so that the station/ship will rotate "around" the port and allow you to align on the target reticule.

- Docking on a cluttered surface (for example between 2 solar panels) is classy, but difficult, as the ship will tend to "bounce" from the panels. The easier dockings are with axial docking ports.

- One of the munar tutorials starts with 2 docked ships. It might be a good training ground (though trying with your own contraption is more satisfying, of course).

I have several (big, manned) interplanetary missions enroute, in addition to a ship on Duna (stranded - it only has enough fuel to get back to orbit, so it passes time producing science on the surface, waiting for the resupply ship to arrive). But I use my time (pseudo-)realistically, doing short missions in the meantime instead of just far-forwarding through the yearlong journey. So my rockets are still a hundred days away from their destinations.

But yeah, they left Kerbin in one piece. However, I very often refuel my ships in space, that's why I said that I am using the Claw a lot. It's easy, it only demands contact, doesn't require alignment, and it allows resource transfer. So, the thing is, I haven't needed orbital docking yet. Even when I thought I would, for instance when a contract asks for a whole space station supporting ten kerbs, I end up building a piece that fulfills all the demands and doesn't need further docking.

So, I'm kind of waiting for circumstances to actually justify docking procedures. So far I've had no (orbital) issue that a docking port would have solved better than the claw.

We'll see if my Eve project will change this. But, as leaving Eve will require even more power than leaving Kerbin, I doubt it's the best place to drop fractions of a ship... Anyway I have still a lot of ship testing to do on Kerbin's soil, before throwing that thing up there.

Eve intimidates me.