The Ugly Duckling - Lousy Excuse of an Early Career Spaceplane. Hopefully Evolves into Swan.

[Goddess Bhavani]

"The Ugly Duckling"

X-2 Maneuverable Re-Entry Vehicle Testbed

(you could also say it's a rocket-launched spaceplane, like the Boeing X-37)

Once upon a time...

the Bacon Space Program desired a capsule that could maneuver itself into a more favorable re-entry trajectory than smacking into the side of a mountain, or worse still, crashing right smack into a busy intersection during rush hour causing a ten mile long traffic jam.

A bunch of interns from the Kerbal University were at the time scouring the beaches near/ to remove quite a number of guidance fins and winglets belonging to various renown rockets of the sub-orbital research program. Their remains were purchased for a few cents per kilogram and unceremoniously sold to some KASA enthusiasts who paid tens of thousands of dollars per pound for a piece of the Space Program. At the behest of the Science Department and with great restraint against auctioning them on KBay for excessive sums of kold hard kash, just a few were retained for further study into the effects of Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.

Eventually, the researchers went on to study more interesting things and the winglets that made up the Micro Shuttle Project were simply picked up from the side of the road. They were in remarkably good condition considering many of them were explosively ejected from failing launch vehicles before lodging into the side of Valentina's

and subsequently gnawed on and/or ingested by patrons thinking they're some new kind of snack.

I'll leave the juicy details to your certainly fertile imagination at this point and move onwards to providing a short history of the rickety deathtrap you're about to pilot possibly for all eternity.

The X-2 Maneuverable Re-Entry Vehicle (MARV) testbed is built around a then-experimental inline cockpit module. Perched atop a BACC Thumper solid rocket booster, it was used initially for supersonic research before being placed atop a range of military rocket designs adapted as satellite launchers. There, the X-2 was found to be a poor substitute for the Mark One Capsule, being nearly four tons heavier and regarded as a complete and utter waste of Delta V by the bourgeois administrators.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

However, the two-seat MARV was certainly more comfortable than the cramped confines of the tiny capsule, and so, after several very uncomfortable solo flybys of the Mun, there began the Mayday Revolution where the followers of the great Jebediah Kerman overthrew the corrupt bourgeois in favor of a new regime where the government always ruled in favour of soft comforts like pillows, cats and other nice fuzzy things.

And so the X-2's became not just a very large and heavy paperweight but a symbol of the pillow revolution as well. But by then its sheer mass was no longer relevant. With the perfection of the current moar booster strategy, we could send entire Walmarts into space if the combined will of the proletariat demanded such extravagance.

Just then, the earlier-mentioned interns from Kerbal University graduated in an academic display of epic fails and were soon put to work in the First of June Factory Complex where working day and night without pay, they prepared a small fleet of X-2s that brought Jebediah and Valentina to LKO, Mun, Minmus and beyond, soaring forth into the heavens on recycled wings and a prayer that steering for "the second plate on the right, and straight on till dinner" would prevent the launch vehicle from flipping end over end twenty seconds after liftoff.

~ The End ~

Would you, dear reader, like to face certain doom from shoddy engineering yourself?

Download the X-2 from KerbalX!

[Probe 1]

Hhhhhhmmmmmm. seems kind of like the X-20(project dyna-soar, hehe)

[Guerra]

I really like it! In fact, I've even built my own version of it, as seen here:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Goddess Bhavani]

Hey, that's pretty cute!

I need to try that design with stock parts. Much more compact and lightweight than mine.

[Guerra]

Why thank you.

I really liked this design, and a rework would be very nice!