DDE

Hold your horses! All their base are belong to Jeb, so you won't be hearing from them for quite a while.

If you can somehow keep your engine from burning up by contact with superheated oxygen... Basically, any addition to hydrogen - such as a second hydrogen atom - brings Isp down, hard. That's why NTRs have higher Isp at lower chamber temperatures; the record-setter is an aluminium-ozone engine at 6000 K. However, ozone has a tendency to explode for no reason, so you're better off with the lithium-fluorine-hydrogen combo at 542 sec practical Isp. The Wiki gives a theoretical maximum exhaust velocity of 4462 m/s for hydrolox, which converts to 455 sec; chemistry alone won't get you further.

I'm afraid the thrust of the ODU is quite unremarkable. What do you think it is, a capitalist-imperialist Shuttle?

@Nibb31 @Scotius @Emperor of the Titan Squid From what I understand, the Vehicle Assembly and Fuelling bunker they're in is not a part of the Russia-rented Baikonur anymore. Furthermore, it's owned by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a shell company of Roscosmos; this makes them almost impossible to recover legally. Similarly, the Kazakh government sold most of the "scrap" from the flown Buran and a flight-ready Energia to China back when the hangar collapsed.

It could be the external thermal blankets still being on fire.

This update just got even more weird.

Steam's screens are .jpg, and I have verified it doesn't work.

Chapter 18: What You Are in the Dark “Jeb! Oh, great, you’re still here!” “What happened to knocking?” Jeb growled. He was essentially sitting on packed suitcases; the next week would be spent into quarantine, and a very energetic Val barging in risked becoming the victim of pent-up ire. “Got a pet project to sell to you.” “You’ve beefed up the Darter?” “Think higher.” ---------- “We’re calling this thing the Crocoduck. We had to combine a reinforced airframe and two small jets with a conventional rocket tank for the liquid oxygen, and a thruster array.” “I see you’ve clustered everything near the tail,” Jeb noted, touching the tips of the stubby wings. “Yeah, this keeps it stable despite all the mass redistribution during the main engine burn, forward visibility be damned. It’s a bit wobbly in subsonic flight, but it can land on any reasonably flat area. And the auxiliary jets will keep it flying for almost half an hour.” “And the internals?” “Ground ingress-egress through the hatches in the aft. Two seats in the cockpit. Life support gear in the side bays. If we get greedy, we can cram some cargo into the tunnel through the nose.” “Tunnel?” “Hey, Terigh! Open up!” “Docking port? In the most aerodynamically loaded portion of the hull?” “That from the guy who’s put a hatch in the middle of a ballistic heat shield!” “OK… What are you asking for?” “Need a first-stage booster for the horizontal ascent, but Orion’s going to have that covered,” Val rattled off without skipping a bit, “We’re counting on RTGs for on-board power and heat. But most of all I need Bill’s expertise in completing the rocket motor.” “And what is the problem, exactly?” “I need to turn twelve engine nozzles into a vacuum-restartable rocket, probably with plasma ignition, and I need a better turbopump.” “What exactly have you been cooking there?” Jeb asked after a pause. “Oh, nothing, just a carbon-carbon regeneratively-cooled truncated aerospike motor that you’re absolutely going to need for Eve landers.” “The only thing I’m hoping you’re not going to defect and start yet another space program.” Valentina feigned a pause for thought before grinning. ---------- “Hermes, FAO, proceed with removal of unit 142 from rack 2B. We’re only thirty seconds ahead of schedule.” “Network, do we have a link with the ship yet?” Gene Kerman asked, slowly and with clarity. “Negative, Flight, the flight computer is being uncooperative. You should get Jenrick to flip the switch again.” “Alright, FIDO, hold onto that descent program.” “Spacecraft separation confirmed. Five meters… ten meters… second thrust pulse… twenty meters… Reorient for retroburn.” ---------- “I have to reiterate again: this is nothing more than an endurance test mission. We want to see if the life support breaks down, or if we die due to microgravity health complications – or due to boredom – and we want to test it within range of a fully outfitted medical lab and one hour away from landing.” With Walt back and Yaroslav kicking out the complete imbeciles, the press conference would have gone easier for Jeb. However, in addition to that, the crew was already in quarantine, and so the frothing mob of paper-wasters was separated from them by a hermetic glass partition, and had to share one microphone to communicate. Hence the level of pressure was kept at bay. “So, when are you going to Duna?” a reporter with slightly less dullness in his eyes than usual asked. “Transfer windows force us to stick to a schedule; the next one is in roughly a hundred days; the next one for Eve is in about a year. As our schedule stands, the nearest transfer windows will be used by pairs of Orion orbital probes; the manned fly-bys are at least two windows away. Manned landings are still in the conceptual phase, as we have next to no requisite information on our destinations.” “Could you elaborate on the Orion probes?” “Bob, you’re up,” Jeb noted, passing the mike and making a mental note to get that reporter whitelisted. “The Orion is an unmanned probe as well as a dedicated intermediate booster system, composed of the first, upper and deep-space orbital injection stages. The probe itself carries the solar power systems used on Beacon satellites, as well as a matching radio system. The scientific payload is composed of a plasma and radio analysis complex, gravimetric and solar flux sensors, a multispectral scanning complex and a radar altimetry mapping array.” “Don’t rattle off when reading your cribs,” Jeb quietly suggested. ---------- “Bill, Bob, last chance to scrub the mission,” Jeb noted as the gantry crew locked the hatch in front of him. There was no respond. “CAPCOM, confirming fairing seal. Three minutes to gantry retract, say confirm?” “Guidance computers booting. Two minutes.” The Vulkan’s design was a major departure from the use of a Launch Escape System found on the Hermes ships. The RV lacked the necessary armature interface, and the parachute system had been rebuilt. So, they had to hope the first-stage engines would be polite enough to shut down when prompted – rather than explode. The faring was ejected soon after the Tunguska stage kicked in. “CAPCOM, confirming upper stage separation. Docking radar marks closest approach to target at four-zero-zero.” “Bill?” “OMS is at nominal, we’re ready for the retroburn.” “A’ight, CAPCOM, we’re proceeding with opening the hatch.” Jeb floated upwards, and folded his seat. The hatch was at the bottom, of the quick-acting type, with eight dogs driven by the central handwheel. The whole crew had already donned the usual anti-debris masks and goggles; the fans in the RV were already active, but its LS systems were kept in reserve. The habitation module had slightly dimmed lights, and filled with stowed equipment. The smell of plastic was more overwhelming than usual. Bill floated all the way to the aft bulkhead, and began to engage the whole life support array. Jeb checked the watch; they had under thirty minutes. “Bill, brace, burning in twenty!” Jeb shouted. The OMS, with its two twin angled Spark engines, had quite the kick. Another pair of burns cut the distance to within 150 m. Jeb then engaged the RCS jets and the docking autopilot. There were grunts in the habitat compartment as Bill clutched the handhold. The mechanical grip of the soft docking ring was quite audible. The ship spun slightly, and hard dock was achieved. The pressurized crew tunnel then extended from the station, connecting with another series of clicks and growls. “CAPCOM, this is Athens station. Clocking in for one year, proceeding with internal hatch opening,” Jeb announced, watching Bill pull the bicycle out of its stowing space in the aft crew tunnel. ---------- Piraeus station was launched the following night. There were no changes to the booster compared to Athens. ---------- The first Piraeus expedition finally matched Jeb’s roster: Alpha crew, with Kath as a pilot-engineer and two scientists, Jesla the botanist and Allock the biologist. ---------- With Jeb largely out of the picture for a year – he had loaded up with astrodynamics textbooks – Gene was settling into his role as The Boss. He was looming over the administration meeting, looking particularly grim. “The Hermes experienced thrust issues on the way up,” he began, “It seems that the MAXX has somewhat underperformed and as a result the upper stage suffered significant slow-down early in the burn. We had to abort-to-orbit using the ship’s own engines, and are cutting pretty close on the dV budget as a result.” “None of that was on the TV feed,” Val complained immediately. “We’re keeping it under wraps for now, with the usual editing trickery,” Walt piped up. “Unfortunately it’s largely impossible to diagnose SRBs. I’ve ordered the three SRBs we have in the inventory to be fired on the test rig. In the meanwhile, I believe we should try to improve the rest to the vehicle to accommodate for any anomalies. My preliminary calculations show that we can replace the hydrolox stage with an equally-sized Skipper stage while only slightly enhancing the MAXX with additional solids.” “The Skipper? Isn’t that the Poodle’s high-thrust predecessor?” “Mostly, yes. It uses non-cryogenic fuel, thus greatly simplifying our logistics.” “But before that we’ll need to pull a very old motor with toxic fuel out of storage and adapt it for modern use. Maybe we should just cut the fuel load on the Hermes?” Val’s objections were interrupted by an emergency klaxon. After the depleted staff ran out, the source of the emergency was quite apparent: a massive orange-hot plume was blasting out of the top of the hydrogen storage reservoir. The thermite flares were mounted around the emergency pressure release valve to prevent a whacking massive explosive cloud from forming. “If you back me up, I’ll have your back on your spaceplane design,” Gene quietly noted, without looking in Val’s direction. “I knew it!” Gus announced, managing to make it to the cryo plant and back in under three minutes, “Somebody stole the catalyst. All of the orthohydrogen made it to the tank when we refilled it after the Hermes launch. It decayed and released heat until the emergency valve fired. Now this is definitely sabotage.” No coherent thoughts were aired after this news. ---------- “Alright, Terigh, are we good?” Val asked, glancing over her shoulder. “LOx pressure at nominal. For now. Make up your mind already.” “Do you want to back out?” “No!” “Tower, permission to blast off?” “You’re clear.” Val started the gas generators spooling the turbopumps. Then she waited as the noise from the machinery grew. Then the main engine fired. This was no airplane. The acceleration was instant, there was no spool-up. Val simply pulled the stick, and the Crocoduck obediently pulled up. She threw it into a sharp turn. The rocket allowed aerodynamic manoeuvring she would have avoided in an air-breathing plane. Finally, she settled the plane into a 45° upwards pitch, headed north. The motor cut out two minutes into flight, after tossing the plane to about 30 km altitude. Val disengaged the automatic stabilization, and gently pitched over for descent. The plane began to pick up speed. Terigh watched the capacitors on the ignition system charge up, and then engaged the jets. She watched the RPM climb, and realized that Val has gunned throttle. She was slowly levelling out, and it seemed she was intent on not going straight back to the KSC. “Val?” “Landing on any random flat area, right?” There was rumbling as the landing gear deployed. “VAL!?”

Well, dammit. @Red Iron Crown, could you please throw a report Invision's way? I doubt they meant to "fix" this.

@Red Iron Crown Has there been a recent update? Everything worked flawlessly last Sunday.

Chapter 18 suspended indefinitely due to Steam screenshots refusing to embed, for some reason. Won't start looking for now until I hear from the mods. EDIT: Yep, it's a forum update.

@Red Iron Crown Seems to be the case for Steam screenshots, too (e.g. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/277356179389964484/8766824B235DA7E995E4BB5B739EB9C779C82C81/ ). Bad news for me, I don't even know how to attach image files otherwise.

You made me! I vote for Kepler 296 B variant.

Well, aside from that, it seems that №19 was meant for Venus and not Mars.

So, every time somebody opposes the flyback booster idea, I can point it to that?

@Kryten, based on the terminology used what we're looking at is a simplified version using certain elements of Fenix. Considering the recent announcement of the hybrid Progress-Federatsiya freighter, there may be a new tendency to use fraknensteined systems.

Hm... Russianspaceweb is under the impression that the Fenix is to be based around a new methane-oxygen motor.

But that's a magnetic sail and not a ramjet... although in theory it could be used as a retromotor.

Bussard ramjets have been found to create more drag than thrust in their original role of relativistic interstellar flight. I doubt they'd do better in... thicker waters. And the more advanced versions (such as the hydrogen-boron fusion scramjet) need relativistic velocities to work.

Not before the Soviets used them in WWII, though.

Absolutely anything is better than the Hyperloop. You're really not setting a high bar there. If I could pick, I'd rather opt for the L-drive. Orbit-capable and requires lasers powerful enough to write on the Moon.

@Laie, but, err, since when the NERVs in KSP need radiators? Seriously, do people use huge clusters of them? Am I the only one who doesn't have and never had overheating issues?

Nationalist arguing INITIATE! The Red Planet really hated the Reds. Even when they named an operation after it back in WWII, they ended up with well over a hundred thousand people sent into the meat grinder.

M'kay. Prep the gas masks, RealPlume gives the Skipper an unhealthy exhaust colour similar to the Dachshund.

Dear readers, today I have a question to address to you. The Mk2 Hermes variant, supposed to act as the workhorse ship for my space stations for the foreseeable future, has rather inexplicably stopped working. I'm currently unable to identify the source of the issue, but basically the whacking big SRB is no longer delivering the hydrolox stage to a necessary altitude; as the whole thing was built with very tight dV tolerances, the result is ugly. There are two ways out of this. I can clip a few more SRBs into it to have it working again. As an alternative, I've already slapped together a working "modernized" version with extra boosters. Which one would you like to see?