KerbalX

Description

Another single-side-mounted-payload Energia, like the Brilliant Ruby, but this time with the strap-on boosters shifted towards the payload side of the rocket rather than away from it, providing much better alignment of the rocket’s thrust line with the vehicle’s center of mass. In fact, the Marquise Ruby’s thrustline alignment is good enough to allow pitch control to be maintained using solely engine gimballing and the vehicle’s built-in reaction wheels, eliminating the need for the booster-throttling-down KAL-1000 found on all my previous asymmetric Energias (the Kaminari, Aneko, and Brilliant Ruby). On the downside, the clearance between the payload and the adjacent boosters is fairly narrow, meaning that Marquise Ruby payloads are more or less limited to 2.5 meters in diameter except for the portion (if any) that extends up beyond the tips of the boosters.

The space-station payload is based on a stretched version of one of the Princess Ruby‘s payloads, with the major change being the addition of an ore refinery (precharged with ore!) to the forward portion of the station, as well as additional solar and thermal-control arrays to provide power and cooling for the refinery’s converter module. The docking multinode at the forward end of the Princess Ruby payloads has been deleted in favour of a single nose docking port, as a vehicle approaching a side-mounted port would risk colliding with the station’s thermal-control arrays. Lastly, an additional fuel tank (empty at launch; it’s the orange one) has been inserted in the aft section of the station, to provide somewhere to put the fuel and oxidiser refined from the station’s initial load of ore.

Naming is as per the Princess Ruby and Brilliant Ruby.

A stock rocket called Marquise Ruby. Built with 210 of the finest parts, its root part is probeStackLarge.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.1.

Details

- Type: VAB
- Class: lifter
- Part Count: 210
- Pure Stock
- KSP: 1.10.1