Longinus - Kraken Drive Prototype

[TheUnamusedFox]

This isn't really a craft showcase, more of a concept awareness post, I'd like to see more kraken powered craft floating around.

 

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/6qKxa

 

https://kerbalx.com/TheUnamusedFox/Longinus-K-Drive-Prototype

 

Kraken drives have been around for a while. Earlier versions, before the various krakenbanes and bugfixes and physics changes, were based on landing legs. My current iteration is based on pushing an undocked landing gear shaft down onto the ship, creating acceleration... Spooky kraken wibbly wobbly physics.

This ship is capable of landing on Duna and returning, with no engines, only using RCS for the encounter. There are some challenges in this, due to the way the K-drive works, and the arcane rules it works within.

The K-Drive accelerates faster and more stably the faster you are moving relative to your current planetary body. Taking off in the atmosphere from the launchpad will not give you constant acceleration, it will lock you to somewhere between 8-20 m/s, until the ship spasms and starts accelerating at ~10g. This may also cause the landing gear to be scattered across the spacetime continuum, and is also not guaranteed to happen at any altitude. You can wait for 30 seconds or 10 minutes, it's magic. As you start to pick up speed and break past ~300m/s, your acceleration will start to dramatically increase, until you hit about 1000m/s, then stabilize. This has been the same across 4 different drive designs, modded and stock. This drive does NOT function at all in solar orbit, or even past certain altitudes for planets. Duna's limit is about 600km (in my game! it may be different for others, who knows, this is more magic than science), activating it past that altitude is likely to break the landing gear and will not provide any thrust. The drive also becomes less stable and more jittery again when below about 1km/s, which is somewhat noticeable in Duna orbit.

Note that this drive is big mostly for visibility, so you can see what is going on very easily. Tiny drives can be made, and even smaller ones can be made without throttle control. There are a few different methods out there, this is just a big clunky one I made once I had the thought to try and get some more people into making k-drives.

 

Timewarp will kill the drive. Sometimes just the thrust, sometimes literally killing the drive. Don't do it.

 

CONTROLS -

1 undocks/decouples node

There are two sets of airbrakes. The top airbrake set pushes the shaft back into the docking port, allowing you to timewarp. The bottom set of airbrakes is your throttle. Kraken is invoked for thrust at about 51 on the bottom airbrakes, keep the bottom set pinned on your screen.

 

-I don't know how often kraken craft are posted, or if all that many people know about this kind of thing, as I don't browse the forum regularly.  I mostly end up here in long bursts once every now and then...

Spoiler

--Yes, the landing gear are on backwards. Trollolol.

 

Edited March 4, 2018 by TheUnamusedFox

[MacLeod-Industries]

Oh my. These are still a thing...

I agree though, I haven't seen too many lately. Might be dying off. Only the creative designs survive.

Natural selection.