Mikki

...I just want to mention from RL work with high pressure (1000+ bar liquids) machinery and containments that the raptor engines chamber combustion pressure surpasses 270 bar with all the known issues of backpressure waves through the turbopump assembly. The turbopump rotors used to pump and pressurize the fuel and oxygen reach speeds of several hundred m/s (above the speed of sound at sea level) at their circumference and have a quite sturdy (and heavy) shaft attached to HD precision bearings and fittings. From my (frozen) lawnchair i would guess that flipping SH at that momentum literally shredds some of the spinning pump assemblys on the edge of their intended specifications due to inertia of their own weight and absolute unwillingness to change their orientation in space while going around with multitons of side- and topload on their bearings and pumphousings all together. (I cannot imagine that they stop the pumps and respin them again seconds later...) The sovjets reached with the RD-180 a chamber pressure of slightly above 200 260 bar without flipping any pumps mid flight... I bet that SpaceX will review their flipping maneuver, because this is physically just madness to the machinery. Or they scrap the idea of 33 single engines in favor of a few bigger ones or shared pump assemblys to save on complexity alltogether.

Ha! Excellent! Elon`s Starship is giant mess right now but i hope they make it eventually...

Thank you for the fun read and all the interesting crafts shown here... i am allways spying for laythe landers and aircrafts feasible up there... Very nice colour scheme btw Cheers for Bob!

We need fandom like yours for sure! I`ve added a link to this thread in my mission report, so more people can see it since it is posted in the KSP1 section.

Kerbal engineer 1: "Why not pretend we have everything in cheque and build a real big orbiter?" Kerbal engineer 2: "Shuttles are difficult and cumbersome, we don`t have the time and patience to..." Kerbal mechanic: "Hey guys, me and my workmate had a fun little project during last week and we like to show you this one..." Kerbal engineer 2: "Oh my Kod..." Kerbal engineer 1: "Where the ..." Kerbal mechanic: "We made it afterhours... " Tim C. Kerman and three other properly named Kerbals manned the all new Big Orbiter Shuttle and headed for "Alpha-II". In the cargohold a monoprop tug to service future assembly tasks, and despite all concerns the craft took off like a charm.... Tim C. Kerman: "This Shuttle is a beast, despite its size it handles so perfect, how come our engineers can`t come up with such a thing themself?" Kerbal mechanic 1 on radio : "... We might have had a bit too much of Hypergol from @Kimera Industries vending machine, errr... and Methalox grape, hehe..." Tim C. Kerman: "...The fact that this craft has been welded together by two drunkards after work makes me very confident to survive reentry and landing... unintelligeble mumbling... kay... more unintelligeble mumbling..." My Kerbals unloaded and docked the monoprop tug, painted yellow for... reasons... Time to detach and descend back to the KSC, the Orbiter has still a large amount of fuel in the tanks and therefore quite heavy... but the fuel is very handy to adjust the landing spot... no uncontrolled gliding and guessing like before... The aerodynamics of this interesting wing shape (cough, x-37, cough... cough) are basically perfect, it doesn`t want to flip or spin or wiggle, it just wants to fly straight and gently, crazy thing this product of booze and boredom... Flying back to the KSC was a walk in the park... still lots of methalox in the tanks... and using it for a powered approach after botching the descend trajectory... Tim C. Kerman performed a textbook touchdown on runway 1, the rather large and heavy 5m diameter Orbiter worked perfect... The mechanics who have built this thing share now a new office together with the title "Nightly Builds Department" at the door, with a vending machine from @Kimera Industries left to it...

I guess for people like me... Can haz `Rampant Rocket Nut` option in the tutorial? Just kidding..... but hey!

@Heretic391 OMG i love this stuff! I am personally deeply intruiged with launching kilotons of craft to orbit! -keep it up as long as possible! Meanwhile i launched a Super Heavy Shuttle Orbiter and had quite an adventure today... The Shuttle is a giant beast.... Docked to my "tiny" "Alpha-II" fuelstation... unloaded and docked a big monoprop tug... And landed the beast with a lot fuel left on runway 1... like a dream... and it is made of the largest parts... The X-37 experimental shuttle from NASA is a fantastic design btw... it just wants to fly perfect

....! Eggsellent! Most funny read in a while. thank you! Must have this in KSP"

@LoSBoL I must explain here that i play KSP2 on a HDMI TV set from quite a distance and the UI is scaled up to 110%, and i mostly send my Kerbals to orbit and dock to other vessels. I use the Navball all the time and i don`t care much about the space it gobbles up, when using the docking UI it could be even larger... I would appreciate if we could resize and position all the stuff by ourselfs. I`m sure the devs are aware about this issue since this thread has allready blown off the roof all the way to Minmus, and i guess Gargamel is lurking around the corner to hit the breaks on this topic soon

Kapybaras would be awesome!

It is stable, but holding SAS prograde or retrograde is more prone to oscillation than creating a maneuver marker to point at while firing an engine. Timewarp is no problem, i use to step up and down factor by factor which is smooth and causes no phantom forces at all. Turning it around takes up more time than making coffee or tea...

@cocoscacao ...Okay, we have moved location as demanded... Moving out of the way

...Some really weird Kerbal scientist and engineers drew with chalksticks a giant auxiliary nuclear tug to the wall of the VAB and after some nights the mechanics screwed it to the top of a rather bulky launchvehicle. While the only paint left was yellow, it was sprayed yellow all around. It also sports some impressive Vernor RCS gear, so that it can be moved around in space with ease... Launch was a piece of cake, and the tug made its way to "Alpha-II", sure the most overpowered tug in the history of my space program... Docking was perfect, now that we have learned to use the new UI properly, closing in and adjusting orientation looks easy as rocket science. Camera focus and panning are still clumsy and need review though. Powerfull RCS helped alot, all in all the fastest docking ever performed by a robotic pilot. "Alpha-II" is now significantly longer than before, good thing the COM shifted a bit towards the inhabited section and the dockingports along the main truss. but it still doens`t fit the screen nicely... Our main task is to lower the orbit from 160km x 130km to a nice circular 100km path around Kerbin. Rotating the station takes literally ages, turning around 180 degrees takes about five minutes despite four large reactionwheels at the center of the structure. I had to disable various small reaction wheels on the crewpods due to slight oscillations during rotation, but all is well now... Note that all the tanks are full, it is like a giant spacewhale to steer... After swinging the station around to the maneuver marker my Kerbals fired up the "Swerve" engine, with enabled RCS the station was stable enough to hold direction, but just barely. I suspect a slight displacement of the COM, or the outriggers cause additional inertia to the main truss, who knows? All went well as planned, now Kerbin surface passes by so fast it has become an awe to watch... The Chief engineer of the station went out EVA to check all of the structure for soundness and came back singing a silly song about boats and rowing... Now we have at least some form of propulsion to change our orbit if needed, phew...

Needs moar boosters, less strain on CPU maybe

...54 Clydesdale solid rocket boosters... take a look here... One went lost after liftoff.... "Alpha-II" launch" @Heretic391 Try to load the craft with "unbreakable joints" on to the pad, then disable "unbreakable joints" again and launch, it should work better. I don`t think its cheating in the current pre alpha state of KSP2. Its like KSP1 load-in easying or what it was like...

...20t? I guess you meant 20kt... I`d really like to see this rising, my record is at 16`000tons to LKO...

...errrm, well we are actually waiting for a rocketmotor to lower the orbit, our emergency lights are blinking all day long.

...my station doesn`t fit the screen anymore... i need a homecinema to see the shuttle on it...

Docked a new 0.1.5 shuttle to Alpha-II

Manufacturing in orbit or on the moonsurface would not be that far away, but since huge amounts of taxmoney is spent on things like "Defense" there is not much left to accelerate new industries. Humans could allready live on the moon for sure without all the "conflicts" around the globe mainly for fossil fuels and other ...ressources. As the romans allready knew: "Divide and rule."

The shuttle main engine bottom attachment piece (the angled one) for example prevents RCS (place anywhere monoprop) from working correctly. I worked around it by attaching them to the wing and slide them around to a proper position... May be a bug on certain parts.

On the topic of steam connection during play... my connection regurarly cuts of from steam (about every hour once) which freezes KSP2 very hard. So i resort to offline game with very rare CTDs. Does anyone else have this issue?

I have no time to reenact but i guess it was about the same or even better than "Alpha-1", my motherboard and the RTX 3060 literally crackled while hitting the launchbutton. I have watercooling and a 850 watts PSU... maybe i try later again with framerate on screen ... I am a big fan of KSP and have seen a lot of really crazy things in this forum... I can see where the devs are trying to go and i am willing to sacr send my Kerbals to wherever the journey ends...

@Periple Hi there, you have a real epic plane design going on there, i must adapt to your technology and try this for myself, it looks well functioning. I will mention you if i post a plane similar to yours clearly. And it is very shiny

Thank you, the finished product is most likely a melted 17 CPU... No seriously, i am trying to somehow benchmark KSP2 during development, and i try to workaround the known bugs and get the most out of it for my personal fun of it. There are lots of small issues but i know some tricks to get my stuff going. I was really stunned how a nearly 600 part craft got off the pad so effortlessly like "Alpha-II", KSP2 seems to achieve true progress in performance. I`ll keep this missionreport as long as possible, so people can laugh about my crazy space program. There will be utter madness around the corner.