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KSP Challenge: Build and Fly a Space Shuttle!


Darth Badie

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Crosspost with the original STS v4 challenge.

Kinda did it for fun. Really scrapes the delta-v barrel. (It wasn't by design.)

EDIT: To SpeedingMullet - This entry was more for that thread than this one. It may be more appropriate for the acknowledgement of completion to be there.

Edited by qzgy
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I just did another 25 minutes of commenting, reviewing mission reports and awarding badges, then clicked the pop up alert to review the new posts and it's all gone :mad:

Will check in tomorrow when I'm not raging so much and repeat everything I've just done.  It was inspired though, the comments were the pinnacle of wit and humor, and it was a badge fest to rival all badge fests.

SM

 

 

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I built this fully re-usable space shuttle using FMRS, Rocket Factory, and SXT! It can carry 6 crew to LKO, with 100m/s of DeltaV for orbital maneuvering, and just enough for landing. It uses the Piggyback Shuttle concept, where the shuttle is mounted to the side of a manned rocket plane, and is launched vertically. The carrier rocket plane separates during launch and lands back on the runway, and the shuttle continues to orbit. Fully reusable!

Strange as it may seem, this entire Space Transportation System was not intended for this challenge at all - I was just messing around, trying to make a reusable spacecraft for transferring crew between stations in LKO when I stumbled upon this challenge!

The carrier aircraft is a heavily modified B-52 rocket plane, named the B-57A, and the shuttle is an X-20. As for individual names, the B-57A is named the Yaeger Jäger, and the X-20 shuttle is called Space Oddity. Major Tom and Ground Control sold separately.

Spoiler

Prepping for launch:

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3... 2... 1... Lift-off!

[No Lift-off Screenshot ;.;]

The ascent, using 5 Skywipe engines from the Rocket Factory mod, was very... hot. :wink:

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After lining up both spacecraft along the attitude for the orbital injection, the B-57A ignites its engines once more, and the X-20 ignites its single Skywipe engine. Actually, the pictures above were taken during a different launch, where the shuttle used an underpowered Terrier engine.

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And, me being me, I didn't take any pictures of either the orbital injection or the shuttle separation from the B-57A. But here's the shuttle completing the orbital injection:

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Since this was a proof-of-concept mission, legendary test pilot and brother of Wernher Von Kerman, Werhnand Kerman, simply stayed in orbit as I jumped back to the carrier aircraft separation using FMRS. Jeb himself, one of only two BadSs on Kerbin, was sitting in the pilot's seat of the B-57A, as Werhnand was expendable, and Jeb is not Gene was concerned with Jeb switching off the SAS and trying to manually fly the entire unstable, unbalanced, prototype, multi-thousand-:funds:-investment X-20 spaceplane to orbit.

Back in the B-57A, I (Flame-absently) re-entered the atmosphere, stalled forwards, regained control once I reached thicker atmosphere, switched on the Panther radially-mounted jet engines, and attempted to fly back to KSC.

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"Engines to full throttle!"

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Even at 4x timewarp, it took me seven minutes to reach the island you see in the above image.

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"Wait, what!? We've only got 8 units of fuel left!? Oh for Kraken's sake! ABORT LANDING!!!"

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Landing gear extended.

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"We're coming in close..."

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And... touchdown!

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The B-57A slows to a halt on a remote island in the Kermuda Rectangle. Conspiracy theorists are baffled as to how no aliens came to abduct Jeb, and how the plane was found by recovery crews, with Jeb in it.

And, with the carrier aircraft landed, I jump back to the main mission, and remind myself that I forgot to turn off auto-recover in FMRS! I don't like it when I land, and switch back to my other spacecraft, only to find that my carrier aircraft has disappeared, and all its resources and refunds are recovered, but I'm not greeted by the recovery screen.

I wasted 100m/s of DeltaV to simulate orbital maneuvers, and then performed the de-orbit burn.

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And, of course, pictures before and after the burn, but none during the burn! Which, I might add, left me with a mere 8 units of fuel left!

Oh, by the way, the shuttle did decouple from the B-57A, but the decoupler stayed attached!

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The magic of subassemblies. :sticktongue:

Re-entry:

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Come to think of it, I could have called the Space Oddity shuttle the Phoenix, as the Mk-2 nearly overheated and exploded during re-entry.

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As I was not bleeding off speed quickly enough, I performed my most daring maneuver yet - deploying the airbrakes of the shuttle, and nosediving towards KSC! And it happened at night, as it should.

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Now that I had slowed down enough, I leveled out and started to bank to face the right direction for my landing approach, after igniting my auxiliary Juno jet engine.

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Did a couple of banking turns, just like the real space shuttle. (Which, in all honesty, I despise - mostly because of its failure rate and ridiculous inefficiency - "...Some say that trying to achieve reusability with early 1970’s technology forced design decisions that compromised both safety and reliability. Reusable main engines were made a priority which meant a new design with new materials were required. The refurbishing of these after each flight turned out be more expensive than building new existing designed ones. Because the main engines were mounted to the shuttle and not the launcher, the payload area was significantly reduced. This design of having the shuttle strapped to giant super cooled fuel tank and having two effectively uncontrolled solid rocket motors, that once fired could not be turned off, in time lead to the failure of two of the five shuttle craft and pushed the operating costs almost as high as the flights themselves..." "... A flight failure rate of 1 in 68..." "...And killed 14 people over the course of the program...")

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On approach to runway and landing gear deployed:

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And... touchdown!

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A successful mission - and fully reusable, unlike the real STS. I am not to be held responsible if Elon Musk retires from SpaceX and starts a small-time muffin store. :wink:

 

Edited by NISSKEPCSIM
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23 minutes ago, Lo Var Lachland said:

Oh gosh. I hate flying space shuttles. And I don't even know how to fly them anyway.

To fly a space shuttle right, you have to understand how it works. You can't just light the engines and go to space, if you're doing a faithful representation.

It's especially difficult to do using KSP's SRBs, as the space shuttle's solid rocket motors were able to gimbal, and didn't output a constant thrust. They were shaped charges, basically, designed to maintain a constant TWR but not a constant thrust. The best way to combat this is to use liquid boosters for the gimbal, and just manage the throttle like you would with a rocket. It's a bodge, but it works. There's also the option of having multiple engines on your boosters and using action groups to sequentially cut the engines to simulate thrust trailoff while maintaining a constant throttle.

You'll also have to do some fiddling with fuel flow to keep your center of mass relatively constant. Your space shuttle's main engines have to point through the center of mass of the entire stack, not just the orbiter. Routing fuel flow in your external tank to keep that CoM from shifting using advanced tweakables would do the job, so that when you separate the boosters you don't just go spinning, because your center of thrust is still pointing through your center of mass once you jettison them. 

The orbiter's COM ought to be in the back of the payload bay, so that when you have payload in your shuttle it doesn't shift it. Your orbital maneuvering engines should point through this largely-constant center of mass as well, and you may want to have a probe core at the same angle that those engines are tilted to, in order to make doing maneuvers easier.

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13 minutes ago, Lupi said:

To fly a space shuttle right, you have to understand how it works. You can't just light the engines and go to space, if you're doing a faithful representation.

It's especially difficult to do using KSP's SRBs, as the space shuttle's solid rocket motors were able to gimbal, and didn't output a constant thrust. They were shaped charges, basically, designed to maintain a constant TWR but not a constant thrust. The best way to combat this is to use liquid boosters for the gimbal, and just manage the throttle like you would with a rocket. It's a bodge, but it works. There's also the option of having multiple engines on your boosters and using action groups to sequentially cut the engines to simulate thrust trailoff while maintaining a constant throttle.

You'll also have to do some fiddling with fuel flow to keep your center of mass relatively constant. Your space shuttle's main engines have to point through the center of mass of the entire stack, not just the orbiter. Routing fuel flow in your external tank to keep that CoM from shifting using advanced tweakables would do the job, so that when you separate the boosters you don't just go spinning, because your center of thrust is still pointing through your center of mass once you jettison them. 

The orbiter's COM ought to be in the back of the payload bay, so that when you have payload in your shuttle it doesn't shift it. Your orbital maneuvering engines should point through this largely-constant center of mass as well, and you may want to have a probe core at the same angle that those engines are tilted to, in order to make doing maneuvers easier.

Thank you. I think I'll just make a Dyna-soar type launch vehicle. 

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1 hour ago, Lo Var Lachland said:

Thank you. I think I'll just make a Dyna-soar type launch vehicle. 

:D Aye the Dyna-soar is a lot simpler in premise than the space shuttle :P after I made a shuttle I opted to a dyna-soar-esque design myself

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Hi, i build this "Kama" (named as river in Russia) PSTO shuttle (parallel stage to orbit = all engines ignites and used all time) for anoter challenge in this forum, but now... (...why not get also official badge here :) ? ) . Plus this is not are common shuttle disign... so why not post it here? And it fly good in RSS+realism overhaul and not common solve of overheating problem and hypersonic flight stability and maneuverability...

For stock KSP:

 

And also this disign for RSS+RO  :

also a small one

and small+mobile launch+solid main booster (and old one for KSP1.0.4 :( )

 

Edited by *MajorTom*
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On 4/27/2017 at 4:01 PM, Flamingo said:

Made this for tourist contracts:

<album snip> 
It takes up two passengers and has the ability to dock to a station. As you can see it has plenty of Dv, and if you use FMRS you can also recover the booster.

 

Reminds me of an X-37B launched on an atlas 501

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So I finally managed to fly my first succesful shuttle mission ever in RO/RSS. I have to say, designing something that behaves through the whole reentry, and is able to land in the end, was much more complicated than I expected. It's not good for much, but I'll try to design something a bit more useful next.

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Michal.don

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50 minutes ago, DarthVader said:

Reminds me of an X-37B launched on an atlas 501

That's most likely because the Mark X Space Plane parts I used to build it, are modeled to look exactly like the X-37B :wink:My version is a bit longer and has foldable wings for extra lift tho.

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First off, love all the shuttle concepts and a great idea for a challenge! Few people said I should post my shuttle here so here we go.

My space shuttle, the Kerbol Klipper, is designed with the Lockheed Martin Shuttle Concept, the Star Clipper, in mind, with some kerbal flare and a little re-engineering. The Kerbal Space Transportation System (KSTS) is capable of lifting 34 tons into LKO in non-recovery mode and 14 tons to LKO on recovery mode. My shuttle has recovery and non-recovery modes? No, the external tank does, though! The delta shaped external tank has a recovery variant that allows complete remote piloting of the stack down to a nice easy landing (on a good day) on the water as the Shuttle cruises to its apoapsis. This shuttle is completely stock and 100% reusable, external tank and all. I hope you enjoy and keep up the science!

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Here is the album for all the KSTS pictures:

 

Edited by I2ocketGuy
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Ok, I finally finished my shuttle. Only possible problem is, it uses VTOL engines for assisting landing. Is that a problem? Anyway, onto the shuttle!

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I went with a simple vertical configuration, as side mounted was proving to hard to balance. 

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Unfortunately, there was some problem with the decoupler, causing it to fail to separate the first stage. By blindly mashing spacebar with my fingers crossed cleverly thinking quickly under pressure, I ignited the shuttle's rocket engine and overheated the faulty decoupler. (The odd looking streak in the top left corner is the spent stage spinning wildly)

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I then circularised. 

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Opening the bay door, I released the payload, a micro power module for a micro space station.

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I then deorbited and started up the quad jet engines to kill speed, as the small wings don't allow it to glide as well as normal planes.

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Making my landing approach, my speed is around 60 metres a second.

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After a very short taxi due to the combination of the VTOL engines and landing on a hill, I fully stop, the mission completed.

Do I get my shiny badge now?

 

 

 

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my stock shuttle:

1 launching test

2 orbit test and landing test

and the video for the 1st mission with crew and landing:

( sorry my mic quiality; is the integrated of my laptop and is pretty old / and my englishb is too rusty/bad  )  -note:

 

Edited by jackstech
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I found some time to take another crack at, and this time I just went easy. I took a previously built BarnBurner fast Kerbin exploration airplane, and replaced the center two jets with a small payload bay with a tiny satellite. I slapped it on top of a basic Mammoth-powered booster with BigS fins that I slapped together for the job, and launched it. The mission was a complete success, with no reverts or reloads. The small sat was deployed, re-entry was cool and uneventful, and the remaining outboard engines powered it over the desert and back to KSC for a runway landing. I forgot to take a screen of the sat deploy, but have video available of the whole mission, minus some boring 850m/s powered flight back to KSC.

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Edited by StrandedonEarth
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I upgraded my Eclipse Shuttle and made a new one the Polaroid , i landed successfully and i shot the flight results and some images

used some mods

Here are the images:

 

Edited by Space_taco
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