KerbalX

Description

With seating for five, and an asteroid grapple, you know what that means?

ASTEROID TOURISM!

Seriously, don’t ask. Just don’t. Some people really like space rocks, and who am I to judge?

Just do me a favour. Don’t try to get this thing all the way to an asteroid in one hop. Toggle your engines with 3. Don’t worry about saving engines for later, you need them all, so use them all. Get to orbit, about 80-100km, that’s easy. Then, send up a refuelling tanker with a bit of everything, including monoprop. Make sure another tanker is available for the Primus’ return from the asteroid, cuz it’ll probably need it. See that big hunk of drop tank on the bottom? You should right click it on take off and monitor its fuel during ascent. Then, when it hits zero, just push 0, and it will jettison. Or you can stage it. You can even autostage it with MechJeb if you want, that works well. Once you get to space, activate your solar panels and radiators (4). To allow a refuellign ship to dock, push 8.

It took me HOURS to balance this thing, and it ain’t bad, but when it’s low on gas, it gets a bit tail heavy, so go easy on the landings. If anyone can rebalance it better, lemme know. Use your airbrakes (5) and when you touch down, deploy the ‘chutes (6). If you have a 'chute accident, or you just want to cut them early, just push 7.

Playing with the asteroids is easy. Pushing 1 will activate asteroid clamping mode, which opens the cargo bay and deploys the grapple. It’ll also automatically make the grapple your control point. To disengage from the asteroid, push 2. This will close everything up and return your control point to the cockpit.

Of course, feel free to fiddle with all of these and let me know if you can do it better. Because if it can be done better, I definitely want to know. This was a HUGE pain in the backside to design.

A mod aircraft called ST-686 Primus. Built with 90 of the finest parts, its root part is j.cockpit.qs.no.intake.

Built in the SPH in KSP version 1.7.2.

Details

• Type: SPH
• Class: spaceplane
• Part Count: 90
• Mods: 12

Mods

• Aviation Lights
• Breaking Ground DLC
• Interstellar Fuel Switch
• KSP Interstellar Extended
• KW Rocketry
• Making History DLC
• Near Future Solar
• Orbit Portal Technology [OPT] Spaceplane Parts (Legacy)
• Squad (stock)
• TweakScale - Rescale Everything!
• USI Exploration Pack
• opt