Clamp-o-Tron

Yep, the ullage problem is the biggest one you’d encounter. SSME needs 1g to draw propellant through a a certain major valve (forget exactly which one), so it’s not possible to restart it without truly giant ullage motors, even with its all-electric ignitor.

Hear me out- replace the ET on a normal shuttle stack with SII and the SSMEs with J2S or T

Pioneer's great, but it could be better. (Inspired- kind of- by the Mariner Mk. II proposal in which a common probe bus would be used for all planetary missions) PIONEER 12- a Jool orbiter with many moon flybys PIONEER 13/14- Tandem Mars orbilanders PIONEER 15- Asteroid rendezvous More of these coming soon- the biggest challenge holding me up is getting a compact aeroshell kitbashed up.

Who'd like a bit of alternate-alternate history? Following Apollo 18 and Skylab, there are no Saturn V boosters left in existence- ruling out possibilities for a Skylab II. So Space Station Odyssey is conceived, using small modules serviced by evolved Apollo ferries and the DoD-funded Saturn 1C.

Quick Little Joe II Plumes are a little overzealous so the action can't be captured well, I would encourage you to load a CM with a tower on it and press backspace to see it for yourself. Avionics cost money, astronauts do not.

The RL10-A-5 has its time to shine.

Oh- please do. Uni hit me hard. PM me for any questions.

RAC-2? https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/sls4.html

Wetlab Lunar base.

Apollo I+ Class Lunar Surveying (Fictional as far as I know) https://imgur.com/a/XWCAUEf A few highlights:

@Gordon Fecyk I think you may have been the first to find it in the wild- I was only able to give that foreshadowing because anomalies show up in the Kerbal Konstructs build menu

HG3 was J-2 derived- generally comparable with the J-2S, although there’s really no technical information on it and it’s believed to be little more than an Rocketdyne projection or baseline for future J-2 upgrades. @Pappystein can tell you in more detail.

The Geiger counter must stand. Never change it.

Probably? The only functional parts around there are the turbopumps (very small actually for the volume of LH2 that may need to flow through there), and the propellant lines. Those bends are important so that thermal expansion/contraction doesn’t rupture the pipe. I’d also like to point out the cycle of the engine- it looks like both turbopumps feed LH2 into the reactor, but I don’t see a second pipe to input into the nozzle for the LOX input. (There is a set that leads from the top of the reactor into the boattail, but I believe it’s for a coolant being sent to the radiators). Also- that joint where the 2 pumps join outputs looks a little questionable.

I voted for T/Space- because hopefully it can lead to this:

Yo @CobaltWolf- while you’re working on the subject of the S-IB engine mount- would you consider an alternate history configuration (never proposed as far as I can tell) for removing the outer 4 engine mounts? I was messing around with a Saturn 1B with 4x UA-1205 boosters for launching USAF Lunar Gemini, and found that it was optimal to use only the inboard engines (longer burn time with still good TWR). I used the engines with gimbals btw, but in real life it would probably use LR-101s to avoid larger changes to accommodate the gimbals. This was a real thing I believe, if anyone has any primary sources (or secondary! Not just Astronautix/Wikipedia), I’d love to see! http://www.astronautix.com/s/saturnib-d.html

I’m interested in contributing a few airports to this- I had done a similar project in the past just for myself, which has sadly been lost to the sands of ssd cleanups. Here’s where I put them, roughly. I’ll be recreating these slowly and posting the zips here as I finish.

Right. I can get it to you in an hour if you can solve the problem with patching multiple instances of ModuleRCSFx using the same ModuleB9PartSwitch. (joking of course, I have to sleep- like I have been doing for the past 12 months) (self-depreciating jokes do not save me)

More than happy to do it, not a problem. I want this for myself too, and some of the future plans might not make sense for someone not living in my twisted mind.

Oh definitely! To be completely honest with you and the rest of the people in the thread I was kind of intending to let it die a slow, agonizing death. But now that I know that there’s demand I would be happy to crank up dev again… if not at 100% because of university (not like it ever was lol)- it should be smooth sailing after I get past a single technical problem.

That’s quite odd. My Falcon Heavy can easily send the included Crew Dragon or Dragon XL translunar, and the normal F9 can put ~15 tons into LKO, or an entire Cygnus (by Beale with some life support canisters clipped in) to TMI. You’re right that RTLS F9 doesn’t have a lot of capacity- about 5 to 6 tons in my experience. But if you expend the booster or even do ASDS landing, you can double or triple that. Important for FH- don’t attempt to RTLS the center booster, it will go badly. This doesn’t seem like flight profile issues by a large margin though, something is probably broken with the dry masses.

KSPTOT would be the best thing for this kind of mission in general, pinging @Arrowstar preemptively so that they can provide advice. But this ^ was the planned trajectory for the actual flight (from False Steps), which may or may not scale to Kerbin-Eve in JNSQ, stock, or even KSRSS. The general idea should hold though, a regular transfer with an Eve/Venus gravity assist that flings you out into an orbit that intercepts Kerbin/Earth on the way down from Apohelion.

You shouldn’t have to even do that- there’s a button labeled “force run” in the experiment panel (can be accessed from the main Kerbalism menu) that will allow you to gather it again. I would also pay attention to that craft, because it’s possible that it’ll keep running after it collects all the data it needs- which will show up in the data menu- creating a lot of excess sample mass. My solution for that has always been to re-root to my X-plane’s fuel tank, note the configurations of the X-1 cockpit I have attached, detach it, replace it with a new cockpit from the part selector window, and configure it as it was.

Maybe so that we can fully enjoy it, make those radiator panels fold up with an animation?

This sounds like something I'd like- is there a link somewhere? Google shows nothing and I can't find it on CKAN (if I even used CKAN)