Temstar

For something a little bit different: the Stargazer Array Some shots during construction:

Awww yes the Casaba Howitzer. I bet someone from the air force was looking at how to build a battleship out of Orion and suddenly this lightblub comes on and he just thinks to himself "hang on, we're already shooting little nukes out of the back of this thing, why not load a couple of more and fire them out of the side of the ship at the bad guys?"

A single powered slingshot from Jool is more than enough to sent a ship into interstellar space: Seen here, an unpowered slingshot will already put this probe very close to Kerbol escape velocity. When we add another 5256m/s around Jool PE by firing the engines we'll be zooming out or Kerbolar system. In fact in KSP we can put spacecraft into orbit with so much delta-V that you can actually reach Kerbol escape velocity by simply escape prograde in Kerbin's solar orbit and then just accelerate with plain old rocket power to Kerbol escape velocity.

Duna in 0.17, did it with style too using a mothership and a lander, the lander turned out to be so capable I ended up doing a Duna + Ike double landing without refuelling before returning both ships to Kerbin.

On the Mun and Minmus gravity is light enough that even if the rovers land on their back then can right themselves with the torque of the probe core.

I don't think radius has anything to do with surface velocity. Can someone with a geostationary satellite confirm? If I understand correctly when you switch to surface mode on a geostationary satellite it should read somewhere close to 0m/s, hence geostationary. If that's correct then my 197,430.2m/s surface velocity can be divided into only two components: 1. My orbital velocity of 430.8m/s going straight at Kerbol 2. Kerbol's sidereal rotational velocity, let's call it Xm/s Since I'm going straight at Kerbol the equation is simply: 197432.2^2 = 430.8^2 + X^2 Since 197432.2^2 is so huge compared to 430.8^2, we can say X is pretty much 197,432.2m/s As for the ion stage, the probe is a prototype for upcoming low kerbol orbit probe, I figure I'll just use it for impactor experiment rather than designing a new probe for that job. Using the prototype will allow me to get an idea on how much electricity I can get close to Kerbol.

I'm still at roughly Kerbin orbit so the panels are not yet supercharged. But once you get very near to Kerbol they generate almost 10 times the charge they would normally generate around Kerbin.

Gentlemen I just thought of something for those of you designing weapons: for non-homing projectiles like your decoupler cannon, instead of having the separation fire straight along the axis of travel it may be better to tilt them by say 5 degrees so that when fired they impart a spinning motion to the projectile. Just as with a rifle bullet the spin will stabilise the projectile while it accelerates.

There is a reason for that "straight down" trajectory, thanks to it I've made a discovery: Here we see my probe as before, falling vertically at 431m/s straight down to the surface of Kerbol Note what happens when I switch velocity to surface mode. The "surface" of Kerbol (it's corona?) is apparently moving relative to me underneath at a fantastic 197,430.2m/s. The prograde indicator shows westward motion as prograde, since I'm falling straight down that must mean the surface of Kerbol is rotation eastward (so all planets in the Kerbolar system are in prograde orbit) at 197,430.2m/s Kerbol has an equatorial radius of 261,600,000m, this works out to be a circumference of 1,643,681,276.35m If we work this out: 1643681276.35 / 197430.2 = 8325.38s Thus, we've discovered that Kerbol rotates at 8325.36 seconds, or 2 hours, 18 minutes, 45.36 seconds per revolution. This is tremendous rate of rotation when you consider our sun has a sidereal rotation period of 25.05 days.

Before the great forum purge I had an Apollo style craft that was quite popular, I thought I'll share it again: 0.20 update Apokee MS is now upgraded to 0.20. The improved rover now use seats and total part count for the vehicle is reduced, KDS delta-V improved. Link to 0.20 update: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28133-0-19-1-Apollo-style-spacecraft-Apokee-MS?p=389094&viewfull=1#post389094 Apokee Munar Sortie - a munar orbit rendezvous spacecraft capable of Mun/Minmus landing and turning. It's features are: Launch abort system able to save the crew at all stages of ascent Efficient launch system using asparagus staged boosters using clustered engines The KDS - Kerbin Departure Stage performs final circularisation as well as trans-munar injection just like S-IVB Transposition, docking and extraction Smart KDS capable of being controlled after MEM extraction two man MEM landing using Munar Orbit Rendezvous MEM deployed two man rovers probed MEM and Apokee spacecraft Let's run through an example Mun landing mission to check out these features: Feature 1: Launch Abort System Firstly, any sensible manned mission need a way for the crew to bail out in the event that something goes wrong with their booster rocket. With the Apollo spacecraft a combination of LES tower (in the early stages of launch) and Service Module engine (after LES tower ejection) are used to move the command module away from the booster rocket in the event of a failure. With our case, our Apokee spacecraft's SM engine is so powerful that it has greater than 1 TWR on the surface of Kerbin. Add to this the fact that the booster rocket is all liquid powered and does not use any failure prone Mainsail means the Apokee MS's abort sequence can use the SM engine for all stages of the ascent, thus saving weight that would otherwise be used for the LES tower. In the event of an abort shutdown commands are sent to all engines, the decoupler separates the Apokee spacecraft from the rest of the stack and the SM engine is activated. Feature 2: Efficient launch vehicle Similar in design to the Zenith family of launch vehicle the launch vehicle for Apokee MS consists of six pairs of asparagus staged boosters each equipped with three LV-T30 and one LV-T45. The use of clustered engines avoid the usage of failure prone mainsail and improves the vehicles overall Isp. The six booster will push the centre core to near orbital velocity where final climb to orbit will be finished by the KDS. Booster rocket separation at about 75m/s short of orbital velocity. Feature 3: Kerbin Departure Stage Similar to the Saturn V's S-IVB third stage and the Earth Departure Stage of SLS, the Apokee MS is equipped with a specially designed upper stage design for multiple firings. After booster separation the KDS is first responsible for acceleration the spacecraft for the final 75m/s to insert into a 75km parking orbit. Once the spacecraft have been checked out and the phase angle is lined up, the KDS is then fired again to accelerate the spacecraft for a further 860m/s for trans-Munar injection. But that's not the only thing the KDS can do - in fact it's been over engineered to have 1352m/s of delta-V, enough also for mission to Minmus, Duna and Eve. The use of a KDS ensures that both half of the Munar stack will still be fully fuelled when entering Mun SOI. In the above picture we can see KDS after parking orbit has been established. The stage still has some 93% of the fuel after parking orbit insertion. The Apokee MS stack in Kerbin parking orbit. The components from left to right are: Kerbin Departure Stage - Munar Excursion Module with two Munar Roving Vehicles - Apokee Service Module - Apokee Command Module KDS performing the trans-Munar injection burn to send the stack to the Mun Feature 4: Transposition, docking and extraction As with the Apollo spacecraft, Apokee is position at the top of the rocket to allow launch aborts. With the MEM underneath it it must perform a manoeuvre known as "transposition, docking and extraction" just as Apollo did to pull the MEM free of the KDS after trans-Munar injection. To do this use action group 1 to separate the MEM and CSM, switch to CSM, open the shield on the docking port, move a bit away from the MEM, turn around and dock with the docking port on top of the MEM. Once you've done this stage the KDS to free the MEM from the spent stage. Note there is a trick here - when you first separate the MEM and CSM there would be that ugly engine shroud on top of the MEM's docking port. This part is not physical so you can ignore it and dock, but if you want to get rid of it like I did here for a clean look just exit to tracking station and then select the Apokee spacecraft again. When you come back the engine shroud will be gone. Feature 5: Smart KDS I hate space junk, even those far away from LKO. Thus the Kerbin Departure Stage have been designed with probe core, solar panels, batteries and RCS system to allow space loitering and manoeuvres after spacecraft separation. As with Saturn V's S-IVB I recommend deliberately crashing the stage into the Mun. This allows space junk clean up and you could also pretend it was part of a Mun seismic wave experiment to map Mun's interior if you've already left equipment on the Mun, as NASA did with the S-IVBs. Mun orbit insertion with the Apokee SM engine. Note that you might want to deactivate the MEM engines if you've accidental staged them earlier. Feature 6: Munar Orbit Rendezvous As with Apollo, the actual landing will be conducted with a dedicated spacecraft purposely designed for landing. This "Munar Orbit Rendezvous" mission profile decreases total mission weight as the fuel to get back to Kerbin no longer needed to be landed on the Mun's surface and then launched back up into orbit. The MEM (and Apokee CSM) is powered by RTG and has downward facing lights so feel free to land on the night side. Feature 7: Munar Roving Vehicles As with the late J class Apollo missions I foresaw a need for a rover on the surface to carry the crew around. Without a rover the landed kerbalnauts will be either restricted to within walking distance of the MEM, or resort to using their MMU for flying around. A rover greatly extends the range of exploration possible for a single landing site. Each rover is robotic controlled with seat for two. Powered by combined RTG and solar panels and is equipped with full suit of four scientific instruments (action group 3 to toggle). Use action group 2 to deploy the rovers. Two rovers are carried for CoM balance, the redundant rover provides insurance against loss of rover accidents as it can be driven out autonomously to bring back a stuck crew. Due to the tight tolerance in packing the rovers the deployment tend to be a bit violent. In the case of broken wheels your brave kerbalnauts can fix them by walking up to one and right click on the broken wheel and select "Repair Wheel". Fun with rovers on the Mun. Remember you can switch to docking mode for easier driving without torque forces. Once the landing is done, the crew returns to the MEM and lifts off to join back up with the CSM in orbit. You'll notice that I deliberately picked a rather high 50km x 50km Munar orbit and the MEM got back with a bit of fuel still left. Even higher orbits are possible by using up some of that 160L RCS fuel. Feature 8: Probed MEM and CSM With the crew back in the Apokee CSM the MEM is undocked from the CSM and moved away to be lift in Mun orbit. Both the Apokee and the MEM are probe core'd so with the two docked together you could in fact use them as a deep space bus to move five guys around within the Kerbin SOI. Alternatively since the MEM is SSTO from the Mun surface once there is one left in orbit the next trip to the Mun surface will only require a Apokee style spacecraft and fuel for the MEM. Once refuelled the MEM could be used as a reusable shuttle between the Mun surface and orbit as many times as you have fuel for, bringing up or down two people at a time. In this particular case I had a look at the Apokee's fuel level and decided that there was way more than enough to go home. So before undocking I fully refuelled MEM both with bipropellant and monopropellant. Thus next trip to the Mun surface won't even need refuel of the MEM - all that's needed is a ship that can reach and dock with the MEM and then go back home. With the mission complete, the crew fires up Apokee SM engine for trans-Kerbin injection to go back home. SM jettison, re-entry and splash down. Craft file: http://www./download.php?1g1wya8rfusl684

Yes, with a mile long spacecraft weighing thousands of tons carrying god know how much people/suppliers/unobtainium at 1.5G! Imagine what those engines can do when pulling a lighter ship.

I fail to see how an antimatter engine with fantastic Isp and much better TWR than current ion engine (obvious since you can use it to build huge ships that can reach 0.7C at constant 1.5G acceleration) would not be useful also for interplanetary travel. In fact if there is no minimum size limit for this kind of engine technology there would be almost no niece left for any other kind of rocket engines. In fact Avater is a pretty good example of why interstellar craft technology would make all the existing parts in KSP pointless. Do you see humans use any chemical rocket engines in that movie (little solids on the missiles aside)? Their Valkyrie SSTO is equipped with four fusion engines - two fusion rockets for orbital manourver and two fusion hybrid turbojet/scamjet for atmospheric flight and HTHL landing and hovering capability. Before discovering anti-matter rockets mankind have already mastered fusion rockets and jets to such a degree that they can cram four of them on a SSTO and still have impossibly high payload fraction on that craft. Now imagine mankind of that age trying to design an interplanetary craft, how easy would interplanetary trip be when every man and his mother could just slap a pair of fusion rockets on a tin can that can keep air in and go pretty much anywhere in the solar system? In such a world is there really any room for liquid fuelled chemical rockets?

I rather doubt it, more likely everyone will be flying expandable "big dumb boosters" full of cheap components like SRBs and mainsails. Remember aside from abusing jets SSTO is always going to result in lower payload ratio. The amount of payload a single ELS can lift might require many trips by a SSTO. Even if we discount the cost required to service a SSTO after a mission to make it airworthy again (witness the astronomical cost for a shuttle service after a mission) that fuel is going to start to add up. More simply, if SSTO is suppose to be cheaper than ELS, how come we have so many ELS in service and exactly zero SSTO?

A long long time ago in a KSP version far far away I did a huge mission to Jool consists of three separate landers carried by an interplanetary mothership. The goal was to land on all four moons (Pol didn't exist back then) and return the crew back to Kerbin and without leaving any space junk in stable orbit anywhere and no ditching of LV-N on Kerbin or Laythe. For a mission of such size and complexity planning becomes essential. First you've got to figure out the most delta-V efficient mission profile. Then you have to design and test each vehicle separately to know that they can handle their part of the mission, finally you got to design your ships in mind so that when the four are docked together the resulting combined spacecraft can actually be controlled (ie, the two smaller landers docked on the side have to be about equal in mass and geometry) to do Jool transfer burn and aerobraking. I took me something like a month to work out all the details of the mission to be confident enough to fly it for real. Even so I make a mistake in assuming delta-V to get back from Jool is equal to delta-V to reach Jool for Kerbin, Turns out due to Jool's massive gravity I actually needed 1000m/s more than I budgeted for so I had to improvise the mission and send a tanker to Jool to bail out the crew. If you wonder how I did the test, the mission profile I ended up settling on goes like this: 1. Dock the four ships in LKO, refuel via tanker rockets 2. Transfer to Jool 3. Aerocapture in Jool's atmosphere into an elliptical orbit with an AP around Tylo's orbit 4. Undock Tylo lander from mothership for encounter for Tylo, capture into Tylo orbit and then land 5. Mothership second aerobraking pass through Jool to reduce AP to Laythe orbit 6. Wait for Laythe encounter, aerobrake into Low Laythe orbit. 7. Undock Bop lander, moon-to-moon transfer from Laythe to Bop, Bop landing 8. Undock Laythe/Vall lander, land on Laythe via atmospheric re-entry 9. Lift off from Laythe, docking with mothership in LLO fo refuel 10. Laythe/Vall lander moon-to-moon transfer to Vall, Vall capture and then landing 11. Mothership trans-Jool-injection and then Jool aerobrake into Low Jool Orbit 12. Bop lander take off from Bop, trans-Jool-injection and aerobrake to LJO 13. Tylo lander take off from Tylo, trans-Jool-injection and aerobrake to LJO 14. Laythe/Vall lander take off from Vall, trans-Jool-injection and aerobrake to LJO 15. All four ships dock again 16 Jool-Kerbin transfer burn So it's clear that the bits I could test are the landers. I would design one of the lander, persistence file edit it to put it in LLO and let it carry on its part of the mission. If it can perform its mission and get to LJO then I know the landing part will work. For Tylo lander I also used LLO even though it won't actually perform a moon-to-moon transfer during the actual mission. Its actual mission profile has a lower delta-V than what the test actually asked of it so I knew it was going to work. The Laythe lander testing prototypes had two versions. A standard one fully fuelled for the Laythe leg of its mission and a partially fuelled version minus the Laythe landing specific equipments to test the Vall leg of its mission.

I don't think rovers are good idea for Bop and Pol, the gravity is too low to allow any real traction for the wheels. This is particularly true of Pol which has extremely hilly terrain on top of low gravity. For exploring the surface I think a probe lander would be better, if there is need to move the landers around then we should just fly it around. In fact I wonder if it might be possible to use ion engines for hovering to traverse the two little moons.

Ahh yes, the challenges of exploring Kerbol at close range, let's see one's design for such high delta-V probes. Here's my, with about 20,000m/s of delta-V in two stages. For the first launch of this probe I'm sending it to a direct Kerbol collision course and I managed to get into a direct dive with the nuclear stage and the ion stage still full. The next one of these will be launched at the next Eve transfer window to use Eve for a powered slingshot for a low as possible Kerbolar orbit before circularising. The sun shield at the front provides protection to the rest of the probe.

The reason I'm against it is because there is no good implementation to having multiple star systems. Basically you have two choices: 1. Having multiple stars revolving around a common mass, usually a super massive black hole. Now you can't really have billions of stars in KSP for a proper galaxy so you're going to get some bizarre looking half-assed galaxy with like 5 stars orbiting the black hole which would make no sense or 2. Have stars in binary/multiple systems orbiting a common barycenter. Since it looks like KSP doesn't support barycenters that's out of the question too.

Put your engines at the bottom, the game currently cannot handle engine gimballing correctly for "pendulum rockets" and will steer the wrong way. If you have a lot of maxRot you can get away from this if you lock gimbal for all the R24-77 engines and rely on only reaction wheel for steering. Basically any time you have vectored thrust engines above the CoM you're asking for trouble, as the game will always assume thrust comes from the bottom of the rocket and steer the engine gimbals accordingly.

I kind of doubt we will ever see interstellar travel and I have no issue with that. How exactly are you going to module other star systems in KSP? You can't exactly have three stars orbiting a super massive black hole and call that a galaxy. So if it's not a galactic black hole what SOI will you switch to once you're going far away from Kerbol? I also don't like the idea of warp drive or anti matter rockets. Having such fantastical technology will invalidate all existing engines and parts in KSP. A civilisation capable of building anti-matter rockets and interstellar ships will also be using advanced technology to move around with in their own system. To such an advanced civilisation using chemical rockets to move around will make as much sense as one of us hoping on a horse to go down to the local store to pick up a bottle of milk, even though horses are as valid form of transportation today as they were back when a hunter gatherer first jumped onto one.

Once upon a time Gilly was hard to reach, but these days with better navigation tools like orbital nodes and manoeuvring nodes it's only marginally more difficult to reach. Ike is easy to reach, but Ike is not easy land on. It's big with substantial gravity, it's got a lot of very hilly areas and worst of all it has a very fast rotation due to tidal locking with Duna. If you try to land and you forget to set your navball to surface mode before your powered descent you're pretty much guarantee to encounter a nasty surprise when it automatically switches for you as you get near the surface followed by a crash shortly after.

My new radio interferometer/deep space comsat/doomsday weapon

With stock and using a single 2.5m stack as the load bearing element the maximum payload is about 200 tons. Above 200 tons some part of the stack will simply be crushed by the weight of the payload pressing down on it while the rocket at the bottom pushes it up. But if you're willing to build payload horizontally consists of multiple stacks and have basically each of those 2.5 stack pushed up by its own rocket then there's no maximums size to payload other than part count.

I did some research on just exactly what that Orion "there goes the Soviet Union" doomsday weapon was and this is what I found out:

For those who can't be bothered to put a Stargazer array together in orbit I present: Stargazer Array Prefab - a single piece fully assembled Stargazer with a Zenith VII launch vehicle capable of putting it in LKO: Stargazer Array Prefab in the VAB, it's pretty big at 592 parts. Lift off! Gravity turn, it's pretty wobbly but rest assured I've test flight it and its pretty controllable and will stay together. Last pair of booster jettisoned Climbing to orbit on core stage Core stage jettison. The Zenith VII can comfortably put the array into a 75km x 75km orbit. Alternatively you can aim for a 100km orbit and it will insert it to near that orbit and you can just finish the orbit with the array's orbital manoeuvring engines while the core stage can deorbit itself with its RCS thrusters. Stargazer Array circularising the orbit with its orbital manoeuvring engines Orbit insertion complete. Craft file: http://www./download.php?0anmecnbao5b65w

Actually Freeman Dyson worked out the numbers - the bigger an Orion is the safer it actually becomes for the crew in terms of radiation. The thing is people are going to be at the front of the ship, shielded by that huge pusher plate, all the structure of the ship and the nukes stored onboard - turns out dense material including plutonium itself makes excellent shield for gamma radiation. The biggest Orion envisioned was 20km in diameter, weighs 40 million tons fully loaded with 30 million of those being the 30 million one megaton hydrogen bombs at a ton each, can reach Alpha Centauri and pull into orbit in 2666 years and cost $3.67 Trillion USD, or one year of US GDP at that time.