Tellumo - Galileo planet pack

[Brandon Kerbin]

How the deuce do I get a craft off of a planet with gravity almost twice as strong as Gael and an atmosphere ten times thicker? What kind of delta-v will I ultimately need? Any suggestions on stock or mod engines that would be particularly effective?

Help me Kerbal-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope...

[Tyko]

Yes, it's possible. Yes it's hard. You may want to read up on the GPP forum page. Some people have done it already and there's been a number of discussions about it in the past 2 weeks.

[Vanamonde]

This question about how to play the game has been moved to Gameplay Questions. 

[AeroGav]

That's going to have spoilers for me since i installed it !

I take it the atmosphere has oxygen?

My thought is a space plane, but with jettisonable fuel tanks and jettisonable engine pods, would get you to orbit most easily.  Make the atmosphere work for you, but the huge delta V requirement means 100% ssto would be very hard.

[AeroGav]

Woah.  3 hours later, i have this as a first attempt.

Yes, I used the f12 menu cheats to put it there.     Flight testing is too much of a bear otherwise.

Two nukes, two panthers with drop tanks, and a rapier.  The panther and the rapiers separate once they outlive their usefulness.

The main problem for a spaceplane approach, is that the orbital velocity is 4200 m/s.   By 1350 m/s Rapier's are only producing 80% of their max thrust, and this falls to zero by 1800.      So you need about 2800dV closed cycle delta V  assuming no losses to drag or gravity,  compared with 800 or so on Kerbin.       Chemical engines won't cut it (unless you just want to stage like crazy, and arrive in orbit with an ant, oscar b and command chair).   So you need nukes.

But, gravity is twice as strong.  Assuming the same lift:drag ratio, this means you need double the thrust weight ratio as on Kerbin.  On Kerbin,  I can launch 20 tons with 1 nuke quite comfortably.    Also, at the point where your Rapier gives up, you are still nowhere near orbital velocity.   On kerbin, you've got 60% of it, so free fall effect is supporting most of the weight of your craft.   Here, this will not be the case, so this doubles the required TWR again.

Flying the above ship, this becomes obvious as it stagnates at around 16km and mach 6.  It barely accelerates.  Eventually, it starts to get going again, but i don't know if that's because we're starting to benefit from orbital freefall or simply that some of our fuel has burned off and we're light enough to climb again.

Heat - also a problem.   When landing it on Tellumo to make this flight, temps went over max and would have destroyed it had i not been using cheats.    Part of that is down to not having enough reaction wheel authority to pitch up much - i couldn't get the nose more than 5 degrees off prograde.  And part of that is due to being heavy with fuel.  You'd have to make the descent empty, and get refuelled on the surface by some kind of IRSU rover with a claw.

On the way up,  things were ok up to about 25km.   I started trying to pitch up to climb faster and avoid overtemping, but that was wasting fuel and i was in danger of not making orbit.   So I just pitched for optimum lift:drag again and let the cockpit heat up to 115%.

Changes I'd like to make -

• Double the size - this would allow me to have 4 nukes, 2 rapiers, and 2 whiplash or panther.    Because they are in pairs, they can all hang underneath the wing around the plane's CG.   Makes balancing a heck of a lot easier.
• Put the landing gear on the engine drop pods  - this will reduce the mass carried to orbit and could make all the difference. For recovery, ditch  in the water next to the space centre.
• Forget cockpits - can't cope with the heat, and too much mass.  Sorry Jeb, it's command chairs in service bays for you
• More wings, less fuselage tanks - the other parts of the ship went over temp as well.   Replacing some of the mk1 tanks with big S wings will cause the upper atmosphere flight profile to be more lofted - ie. it will be higher for any given airspeed, which will reduce heating all over.   And it will improve our lift:drag ratio further, at the expense of dry mass.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ly6thbnad8ffakl/ready to go.sfs?dl=0    

Here's the save file of it ready to take off if you fancy a go yourself.    I strongly recommend it,   I landed in the highlands and ended up taking off through a canyon as i flew due east.   The views are just 

Just do yourself a favour and use the "ignore max temp" cheat.   

Action groups - Abort toggles afterburner.   Just set SAS to Prograde hold for flight, that keeps drag to a minimum.  The wings are angled and will still make lift.

Craft file - 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ykfs0empy4inwj4/tellumo flyer complete.craft?dl=0

 

[AeroGav]

@Brandon Kerbin what is your goal btw?    If flags and footprints is your goal, a stock single use rocket can probably get you back to orbit.     The place is beautiful though and it makes me want to colonise it.     But with such a horrendous gravity well,  the idea of kerbals simply commuting to and from orbit in a "fuel and go" reusable shuttle seems impossible.  Not without some severely game changing high tech mod parts.     My space plane is "partly reusable" , but has to fly back to Gael to be refitted with the parts it dumped.  Perhaps any Kerbals leaving Tellumo are headed for home anyway,  but if they're just going to a space station or somewhere else in the system, it's a major drag having to fly the thing all the way home again.

 

[Brandon Kerbin]

@AeroGav for the moment, I'm just going for a flag on every body in the system. I haven't begun to figure out colonization. OPT has a few atmospheric-optimized rocket engines. I can't remember the mod, but I've got access to these Mallet air-boosted hybrid SRBs that should help, too. I'll post results when I can.

I just want to send out a quick thank you to @Galileo. If you are ever in St. Cloud, Minnesota, I'll buy you a beer. It's the least I can do for the person who revolutionized and reinvigorated my love for KSP.

Every planet but the Gas Giants, obviously. 

[AeroGav]

Tellumo space plane mk2 taking shape.    Wonder if it needs more wings?   How about some more nukes?  This thing is so ugly, it flies by repelling the ground.

Edited January 27, 2017 by AeroGav

[Snark]

Just started a GPP career game myself.  I'm planning on going to Tellumo to explore, but haven't gotten there yet (so far, have just explored Iota and Ceti, haven't sent kerbals interplanetary yet, still filling out the tech tree.)  Looking forward to engineering my way off the planet. 

I'm running Extraplanetary Launchpads in this career, so I can build stuff locally.  My exploration plan is to set up shop on Lilly, use that as an exploration base, and send craft down to the surface of Tellumo.  Since I can build locally, I don't need SSTO at all, I just need to be able to get to space from the surface.

Since I haven't actually done it yet, I don't know yet what will actually work.  However, this is what I was thinking to try out:

• Build a craft that's basically just a high-TWR, multi-stage rocket with a decent chunk of dV.
• Top stage would probably be the ol' standby, Mk1 pod plus 2-ton LFO tank plus Terrier.  That's like 2500 m/s of dV right there.
• Below that would be one or two LFO stages with high-TWR engines.  Bottom stage perhaps something like a Mainsail with a Big Orange Tank.  Give it enough oomph to have ~2000 m/s of dV or more.
• Mount air-breathing engines, intakes, landing gear, wings, etc. to the sides with radial decouplers.

The idea being, use the airbreathers to get it up to an altitude where the air is thin and the rocket doesn't have to worry about air drag and can just slam it at max TWR.  Don't need to go super fast in airbreathing mode; will be happy if I can get it above 1000 m/s.

So, climb with airbreathers until they run out of steam, then stage them away.  At this point the ship is a high-TWR vehicle already above most of the atmosphere going 1000+ m/s, so I would think it would make orbit with a fair amount of dV to spare.

Sounds straightforward enough... but then, I haven't actually done it yet , so for all I know there could be some critical problem with the design that I haven't thought of yet.  But that's my initial plan.

[AeroGav]

BTW, is Tellumo's atmosphere really that thick?     If it starts out that way, then it certainly attenuates more quickly than Kerbin's on the way up.

My first Tellumo flyer went supersonic around 7km - on Kerbin i'd expect that type of vessel to mach over at about 12km given the number of wings it has.   Rapier flamed out at something like 16/17km.     The atmosphere ends completely at 50km.

btw SNARK , you might want to try having wings on separate decouplers from the jet engines.    Since you're already flying like an airplane, and because it avoids having to pitch up to 90 deg aoa while there is still some atmo around you.  Also, it will let you fly with TWR less than 1, so you can pack more fuel on the stage.

[Snark]

10 hours ago, AeroGav said:

BTW, is Tellumo's atmosphere really that thick?

My understanding is that it's 10 atm at the surface, but only 45 km high.

That makes sense that it would attenuate really rapidly with height:  it has double Kerbin's gravity, so you'd expect the atmosphere to be half as high, assuming similar molecular composition.

10 hours ago, AeroGav said:

btw SNARK , you might want to try having wings on separate decouplers from the jet engines.    Since you're already flying like an airplane, and because it avoids having to pitch up to 90 deg aoa while there is still some atmo around you.  Also, it will let you fly with TWR less than 1, so you can pack more fuel on the stage.

Yeah, I was kinda thinking to just mount the wings (without decouplers) directly on the big high-TWR LFO booster stage.  Wings are fairly light, they have minimal drag, and as you say, they may come in handy.  Then I can just have, for example, a foursome of Whiplash or Rapier mounted above/below the wings, and those can be decoupled away when the airbreathers poop out.

[AeroGav]

14 minutes ago, Snark said:

My understanding is that it's 10 atm at the surface, but only 45 km high.

I have a savegame linked in my second post in this topic - the flight test of my mk1 tellumo flyer.  it landed in the highlands - they are much bigger than kerbin's highlands, the tops of the valleys are about 6km.   I was landing at 3 or 4km if I remember correctly, and did not notice the atmosphere being particularly thick - no more than twice as thick as kerbin's by this point, certainly not enough to overcome the double gravity, because my spaceplane takes off at similar speeds to what you'd expect on kerbin.   You do notice the gravity if you decouple the engines when parked on the ground - they fall off with quite a clang (like they're made of lead) and even though the nacelles only fell 2 or 3 feet onto the ground, they explode.

[AeroGav]

Alright, I had a chance to fly the "Tellumo Flyer Mk2"
 

Mk1 - 2 nerv, 1 rapier, 2 panther

Mk2 -  4 nerv,  2 rapier, 2 whiplash

The following main changes were made to create mk2 

-Kerbal in cargo bay to avoid the melty mk1 cockpit and draggy mk2 cockpit
-engines installed in pairs over CoM, for ease of construction
-much more wing area
-panthers swapped for whiplash
-two ft400 tanks were brought along - this one has some oxidizer (2ft 400 tanks).  

Why oxidizer?

The previous Tellumo flyer design performed well at low speeds and went through the sound barrier easily.   After mach 2.5, the Panthers fall out of the picture but performance remained adequate up to mach 4.3, when the nervs had to be activated to prevent us stagnating.
However, after Rapier flameout it stagnated for a long time, appearing not to gain height or speed until fuel had burned off.  I wanted to swap one of the LF tanks for some LFO to try boost through to mach 7 or 8, where orbital freefall starts to support our weight and enables us to reach higher altitudes, where drag is less.     However, Tellumo flyer mk2 has very different mass ratios/wing loadings and implementing this may have been a mistake.

 

Let's break down the key differences with my observations as to how this affected performance -

 

Wing Loading 

Mk 1 has 1.5 tons per lift rating

Mk 2 has about 1 ton per lift rating

*this excludes mass of engine parts that get staged off, since we only really care about what happens between mach 6 and mach 14.

When launching the mk1, many parts exceeded their max temperature - the elevons, with a 2400 rating, would have been destroyed, leaving the ship uncontrollable, as well as the cockpit, and the mk1 liquid fuel tanks. 

The mk2's extra wing area meant it flew about 3km higher for any given mach number, and it almost made it without damage.  The small nose cone, right at the very front of the ship, would have been destroyed as we passed mach 13.  The rest of the ship would have been ok.

Neither vessel can re-enter fuelled, however when i re-entered the mk2 flyer defuelled, the core made it down safely.  Unfortunately, the mk1 fuel tanks that form the basis of the rapier and whiplash nacelles overheated so the airbreathing engines were lost.   Their exposed location on the wingtips is likely to blame, something i can change in the next iteration.

 

Nuclear Thrust-Weight Ratio

Mk1 - 19.4 tons carried per NERV engine

Mk2 - 20.25 tons carried per NERV

both seemed to stagnate a bit around mach 6.   The mk2 started to accelerate better on nuclear power alone after completion of the closed cycle burn than it did just before i switched  rapier mode, however, that's hardly surprising given the ship just cast off 4 tons of rapier engine and was also lighter by 4.5 tons of L/FO.    What did burning 4.5 tons of LFO gain us?  1.2 mach and 800m in altitude.

 

Fuel Mass Fraction

The mk2 makes gains by using a command chair instead of a cockpit, but loses out by having all the extra wings, which bump up the dry mass.

Mk1 -  is 65% LF by mass

mk 2 - is 61% LF by mass,  with another 6% in LFO, but which is burned in an engine less than half as efficient.

The mk2 just failed to make orbit.  Val baled out, and was able to get into a stable orbit by using 150m/s of the delta V in her jet pack.

Why did the mk2 not get there?  I suspect the biggest reason was the LFO.  If I could have swapped that 4.5 tons of LFO for another 4.5 tons of LF i think we'd have made it easy.

Also,  i may have hung on to air breathing mode too long.   It was flying in a gently oscillating series of climbs and dives, three times it went above flameout height and i waited for the jets to relight when it came back down.    The last time wasn't worth it,  we were climbing at mach 5.3, when we came back down to an altitude where the engines could relight, the dive had increased our speed to mach 5.6, which is well past their best speed and the engines didn't give us much thrust.  All this time i was running the nukes, so they were burning fuel to drag these useless engines through the air longer than they needed to.

The last reason is that this time, I de-orbited and landed at sea level, rather than in the highlands.  Took a surprising amount of time and fuel to get up to 5km.

 

Hope these data points are of use for someone looking to design a successful vehicle.

 

 

Edited January 29, 2017 by AeroGav

[Brandon Kerbin]

Thanks for the advice and the data. I've never been terribly good with spaceplanes, though, so I'll probably have to go with my patented "giving Kerbal physics the finger" design language. 

[AeroGav]

I got around to testing a liquid fuel only version of Tellumo flyer II.    As well as the removal of oxidizer, it has a fly by wire hub in place of the small nose cone, to see if it survived any better. Note that this time, instead of landing at sea level, we came down in the highlands again, so we started from a much higher altitude.   However, mach 6 is a great equalizer.   It turns out, how ever much or little fuel you used to get to mach 5 at 15km,  there is only a certain amount 4 nukes can lift beyond that to mach 7.  If you didn't use much in air breathing mode, you'll just stagnate for a long time till fuel burns off and you get light enough.

Mach 4.5 .   Acceleration had more or less died at this point, the air breathers alone were running out of steam.  I start up the nukes..

One minute and 40 seconds later, the turbo ramjets flame out at mach 5

It takes us another eight damn minutes to get from mach 5 at 16km to mach 5.7 at 18km.   Again , i probably held on to these engines too long.  They flamed out in a climb, i waited for them to relight on the next swoop down, which they did eventually, but hardly got above 10kn, then quit again very soon after.    First flameout, say goodbye!

After 5 minutes, we reach mach 7.

2 minutes and 10 seconds to get to mach 8.  The pace is definitely quickening.

Mach 9 after another 90 seconds.

70 seconds for mach 10

Another 60 seconds to mach 11.  Nose cone at 95% of max temperature..

One minute and twenty seconds to put another mach on this time, because i'd been throttling back to try and save the nose cone.  Should have just kept her wide open, might have saved a bit of delta v..

After being given the order to "punch it",  we accelerate from 12 to 13 in just 35 seconds.   The NCS adapter temperature has actually gone down from 99% to 97%, we must be through the peak heating.      I didn't grab a screenie of mach 14 because our AP was over 45km at this point , so this was us coasting.     

Was there enough left for circularisation ?

...Just !

 

[Guest]

Maccollo used a predominantly solid rocket in their RSS Venus video. SRBs' high TWRs lend them well to punching through thick lower atmospheres as quickly as possible, and the higher density of solid fuel makes transport easier (smaller size for a given mass).

SpaceY and KW Rocketry both have large SRBs (particularly the SpaceY Fenrir), and you can make procedural ones of practically any size and thrust you need.

[astroheiko]

Maybe I can help, I've done it already.
This is how the airplane looks at the start.

 

After reaching the orbit of Gael, it looks like this. Here you have to refuel for the Transferburn to Tellumo. In the low orbit of Tellumo, less than 400km, the rear tanks have to be refueled. The plane itself has to land empty.

 

The PE must be lowered to 45km. At the PE then ignite the rhinos. You have to come within a short time to less than 100m / s or the plane is broken.

This will reach the surface...Refueling by ISRU.

 

Now you can explore all biomes. The aircraft is able to circumnavigate half the planet without having to refuel.

Interesting is then the ascent into the orbit. Since I have had to try a long time. All rocket steps must be full and only the middle wing. The rest is empty, so we can get really fast. Shortly after the start, ISRU, material bay, rear capsule, rear wing and all wheels are released.

 

The engines will be switched off at a height of 17-18000m or a bit more. Then press the Space button and the rest is left. Now it's funny. Normally you stay prograde, but not here. You have to raise your nose to 30-40 degrees, leaving the Prograde marker above the horizon. Otherwise you lose height and will not get out of the thick atmosphere.

 

Gradually you can then go back to prograde. If this stage burns out, you should have the apoasis out of the atmosphere. Then comes the last stage.

 

Since you only need to circle the orbit. In my best attempts I had an orbit of 50km and still 1200 m/s dV left. You can not see it, but there is the science container in the 2 man capsule clipped in, so you can collect all the Science.

I write about it a story. But this is not yet finished. Here is a link

A Journey to Tellumo

Edited February 6, 2017 by astroheiko

[Snark]

Just thought I'd toss my own hat into the ring, now that I've managed to actually do it. 

It turned out to be harder than I anticipated, though I think that's more a reflection of the fact that I suck at spaceplanes, rather than Tellumo being impossible.

My plane is 44 tons on the ground, fully fueled.  It can take off from a fairly low elevation and loft an orbiter into a low 50 km circular orbit.  The mass of the orbiter, upon reaching orbit, is 6 tons.  That includes crew space for 3 kerbals; a few tons of payload (in my case, life support supplies); and about half a ton of fuel remaining, enough for a little over 300 m/s of maneuvering reserve.

Context:  I'm running Extraplanetary Launchpads, so I'm building and fueling the craft on the surface of Tellumo; it doesn't have to handle re-entry or landing, just taking off and reaching orbit. I'm running TAC Life Support, so life support supplies (food, water, oxygen) are a thing.

Back-story (i.e. why I needed to build this plane the way I did) in spoiler section.

Spoiler

I have a big "grand tour" style mission.  Went from Gael to Tellumo first; the idea is that once I'm done with Tellumo, I'll proceed to Otho or Gauss.

I sent most of my kerbals down to the surface, along with most of their life support supplies.  The idea was to locally explore with air-breathing jets, then return them to orbit when done.

In hindsight, I did two stupid things that I had to recover from, which resulted in this plane:

• The first stupid thing was sending all their life support supplies down there-- enough for years.  That was stupid because they only spent a few weeks on the surface; they shouldn't have lugged that stuff down to the surface and back.  It made for a payload hassle bringing it back up to orbit again.  I should have just sent down a few weeks of supplies, and left most of my supplies in orbit.
• The second stupid thing was setting up my base at low elevation where the air is much thicker than Kerbin's.  Tellumo has some nice, big, wide, flat plateaus at nearly 9000 m elevation, where the air pressure is only 40% of Kerbin sea level.  If I had set my base up there, it would have been a lot easier getting back to orbit, since I could have just built a conventional vertical-ascent multi-stage rocket and wouldn't have to futz around with finicky spaceplanes that I suck at designing and flying.    (A vertical-ascent LFO rocket wasn't an option at my low-elevation base, since rockets get horrible Isp there; even Mainsails run at less than 50% their vacuum thrust.)

 

Anyway, here's the plane:

 

Flight procedure, from initial launch to orbit, in spoiler section below.

Spoiler

1. Fire up jet engines and start taxiing.
   • The engines are two Rapiers plus one afterburning Panther.
   • The Panther is there to give a boost to low-speed thrust (where the Rapiers are weak), to help it get off the ground and start the initial lumbering slow climb to an altitude where it can really get up to speed.
   • The fuel flow is set up so that all three engines are draining an underslung LF drop-tank (A) where the Panther is mounted.
   • In case you're wondering, that A tank is a modded part I use, it's basically just a 4-ton LF-only tank that's the moral equivalent of the FL-T800 LFO tank.
   • The Panther is mounted with a bit of rotation so that its exhaust points slightly downward, to help move its thrust line closer to the CoM and prevent it from making the aircraft pitch upwards too badly.
2. While taxiing at low speed, the first thing to do is to jettison the "fueling boom" that you see up near the front of the craft.  That boom is where the connector ports (from KAS) are mounted; that's how I connect up the (empty) plane after construction, for fueling it from my base before takeoff.
3. You can't see it in these pictures, but all the landing gear is mounted on radial decouplers.  As soon as the plane gets off the ground (which happens around 45 m/s), jettison the landing gear.  We're not coming back down. 
4. Agonizingly slow, lumbering climb, clawing its way up to ~7000-8000 m of elevation, most of which is only around 100-150 m/s speed.  This uses up about 70% of the fuel in the A tank.  By the time it gets there, it's going ~300 m/s.
5. Mostly level out, then start accelerating.  By the time the A tank runs dry, the plane is going ~700 m/s in level flight at ~8000-9000 m elevation.
6. Jettison the A tank with the Panther.  Continue accelerating in level flight on the Rapiers, which are still in airbreathing mode, now draining the B LF droptanks.
   • The B tanks are only ~50% full on launch, since they don't need a full fuel load.
   • Note that they have shock cone intakes on the front.  They don't actually need 'em, since the intakes on the front of the E tanks are plenty, but I put the intakes on there, in the theory that they're lower drag than nosecones would be.
7. Accelerate in airbreathing mode to ~1300 m/s in level flight at 9000 m elevation.
8. Now pitch up as hard as I can without sacrificing too much speed to high-AoA drag.  The idea is to climb as fast and steeply as possible.
9. Watch the thrust on the Rapiers.  When they start to poop out (get down to ~60 kN thrust), which happens at around 20 km, do all of the following in one single action:
   • Jettison the B droptanks.
   • Switch the Rapiers to closed-cycle mode, so they're now draining the C LFO tanks.
   • Jettison the backwards-facing nosecone on the central stack, which was there to reduce drag.
   • Activate the D engine.  This engine is a "Viktor", which is a Vector that I have modded via ModuleManager into an engine with 45% of the weight and thrust of a Vector, while keeping the same Isp and TWR.  (It's what I always do, since I hate the stock Vector and find it OP.)  It has a thrust of 450 kN.
10. At this point, it's climbing, but shallowly.  Pitch up to a 30-40 degree AoA to gain ascent angle.  During this time, the Rapiers are draining the C tanks, and the Viktor is draining the E tanks.
11. When the C tanks run dry, jettison them along with the Rapiers.
12. When the E tanks run dry, jettison them, along with their attached wings.  Pitch down to a lower AoA, only 10-20 degrees above prograde, and continue burning while the Viktor drains the F tank.
13. When the F tank runs dry, jettison it, along with the Viktor.  The Terrier and four Twitch engines activate on the final stage, draining the G tank.  The rest of the burn is prograde (no AoA).
14. Switch to map view and watch the time-until-Ap.  At the time that the Viktor is staged away, the Ap is only a few seconds ahead.  Keep burning until it gets 60 seconds or so ahead of the craft, then toggle the Twitches off, so the rest of the burn can be completed more efficiently using the Terrier, which has a significantly higher Isp than the Twitches.
15. Keep burning until Ap gets up to 50 km, then cut engines.  Set a maneuver node at Ap to circularize, then do that burn with the Terrier.

Ta dah!

 

Here it is in orbit:

[astroheiko]

3 hours ago, Snark said:

Finally.

Finally, I get to see another aircraft, which can beat Tellumo. Since I wait so long for it. So not only I did find it difficult to get something back into the orbit. Although I am not the questioner, I thank you very much for your reply.

Very nice plane - and almost the same flight profile.

Greetings

[AeroGav]

Mine did it too, though it needs a lot of refinement.   I need to change the part attach order because it rolls constantly left at lower altitudes.  Getting to the surface (don't have any mods that can put me there) to make each test flight, and the fact that it takes 40 minutes to get to orbit, mean i have not bothered.

[astroheiko]

@AeroGav

I did not miss your plane, of course.

It's ... how can I say it? It feels a bit like cheating when you squeeze a poor Kerbal into a cargo bay. This is now not to depreciate your performance, anyone who manages to bring a plane from Tellumo to the orbit has my respect. I really do not want to annoy you.

at all

What would interest me too:
What were your solutions for bringing the vehicle to the planet's surface? How I did it is in my mission report. This was the first time I really needed the Rhino.

And how did you bring the plane to the orbit of Gael?

What do you think? Did the questioner have expected such complicated answers?

And ... Are we really so few that have managed so far? I mean ... there are hundreds of thousands of players worldwide ... that can not be?

I'm honest. Since I was at Tellumo, these questions deal with me all the time.

Greetings

[AeroGav]

@astroheiko

My Career mode has stalled while i work on the Shuttle challenges, my plane was developed in Sandbox.

 

2 hours ago, astroheiko said:

I did not miss your plane, of course.

It's ... how can I say it? It feels a bit like cheating when you squeeze a poor Kerbal into a cargo bay. This is now not to depreciate your performance, anyone who manages to bring a plane from Tellumo to the orbit has my respect. I really do not want to annoy you

Well,   my plane might not provide much comfort,  but bear in mind it is the lightest of the three things to reach Tellumo orbit, 100% stock, and also the "most re-usable".    The other two space planes throw away more than half the vehicle on the way up.   Mine "only" drops two Rapiers and two Whiplashes.      I was trying to minimise the amount of dropped parts, rather than maximise size of crew accommodations.

2 hours ago, astroheiko said:

What were your solutions for bringing the vehicle to the planet's surface?

I used Alt F12 menu , Cheats, Set Orbit to put it in orbit of Tellumo for the test flights.    Then I re-enter with "ignore max temperature" cheat.

 

If I empty the fuel tanks, it can re-enter Tellumo safely, however the Rapier and Whiplash engines are destroyed by heat.  This is because they are very exposed out on the wing tips.   I could redesign to put them around the main fuselage , so they will be inside the "bow wave"  created by the vehicle's nose on re-entry.

 

3 hours ago, astroheiko said:

And how did you bring the plane to the orbit of Gael?

As I said before, for the test flights i used cheat menu to get the plane in position.  Even then, it was still a very time-consuming process.

 

However, it  can take off to orbit from Kerbin or Gael without dropping any engines.   If refuelled in orbit, the delta V is huge (lots of liquid fuel storage,  nerv engines).      For role play reasons , i'd want  to use a Claw to attach a crew cabin or something to the side of the plane while it does it's Hohmann transfer -  i don't expect a Kerbal to sit in a chair for 3 years !

 

On the surface of Tellumo, you'd need a Claw-equipped, ISRU rover to refuel the plane, since it cannot re-enter fully loaded (too much heat generated at the higher mass).

So ,  that's a few extra components, but it's the best  Kerbin - Tellumo shuttle system i can come up with.     You only loose 2 rapiers and 2 whiplash per round trip.     You also loose the IRSU rover, which can never be transported back to Kerbin, but that cost can be spread out over a large number of filghts in a colonisation scenario.