[WIP] [1.1.2] DIRECT - Super-Heavy Launchers - REVAMP RELEASE

[benjee10]

Deep-Space & Interplanetary Research & Exploration Craft Technologies

DIRECT is a parts pack designed to emulate primarily the Jupiter launch vehicles proposed by the DIRECT team. With the Jupiter rocket being a Shuttle-derived vehicle, this also allows for construction of properly scaled STS stacks as well as SLS and the Ares rocket family. In future the mod will also include Orion and Altair parts for use with the giant rockets this mod allows. DIRECT is integrated with Nertea's Cryogenic engines pack and most fuel tanks and engines provided run on LqdHydrogen with Oxidiser. 

DOWNLOAD EXPERIMENTAL v1.0.0 FOR KSP 1.1.2 FROM SPACEDOCK

You will almost certainly need Kerbal Joint Reinforcement for this mod to be playable. 

Current roadmap:

• PHASE ONE - Launch Vehicles
  • 5m fuel tanks for Jupiter and STS launchers
  • 1.875m Shuttle SRBs in 4 segment and 5 segment variants
  • Various structural adapters, decouplers, and fairings (5m-7m adapters & decouplers still to do)
  • 7.5m fuel tanks and parts for the colossal Jupiter III launcher
• PHASE TWO - Spacecraft
  • Orion spacecraft analogue (early WIP command module is included. Still needed are service module and LES parts)
  • Altair lander (crew and cargo variants)
  • Shuttle-C parts
• PHASE THREE - Exploration
  • Duna lander
  • Heavy interplanetary habitats (3.75m-5m)
  • Heavy Surface base parts (inflatable base parts are planned for HabTech)
  • Centrifuges

The roadmap is subject to change and is tentative. 

Current screenshots/parts:

Shuttle stack. 

Jupiter rocket. 

Updated SRB.

Jupiter III. 

Edited May 19, 2016 by benjee10

[Tellion]

If you are interested going down the path of realistic ISRU, you might be interested in this project by regex. Apart from that, best of luck!

[_Augustus_]

I would do this as an expansion for the ShadowWorks SLS mod, that way you only have to make fuel tanks, engine mounts, DAV, and fairings. Good luck regardless!

[tygoo7]

Very cool so far! Looking forward to see how this develops.

[xxhansonmaxx]

Pretty cool, isn't the left pic basically the SLS? If theres any help i would be glad to help!

[Astrofox]

No, it seems to be a Jupiter class rocket, derived from shuttle technology...

I've known about it for a while, even before stumbling upon this thread.

[SmallFatFetus]

Hey, this is cool! I would be more than happy to contribute to this mod, so PM me if you could use some help. I can do models or stockalike textures.

[benjee10]

Awesome, thanks guys! Not sure what degree of realism I'm going for at the moment, I'll figure that out as I go. Certainly I know I want integration with the Community Resources Pack, not sure if I'd do that through a MM config though, meaning in pure stock the tanks would just be filled with LF&O. To clarify this is sort of a mix of Mars Direct and the DIRECT shuttle-derived launch vehicle proposals, with a dash of The Martian thrown in for good measure.

Compiled a notional parts list for the Jupiter launchers:

1.875m Parts:

-1.875m SRB (4 segments)

-1.875m SRB (5 segments)

-1.875m->3.75mm adapter

-Radial decoupler (styled after SRB decouplers on STS)

-RS-25 Engine (possibly this could be 1.25m)

3.75m Parts:

-Crew Capsule (3.75m->1.25m)

-3.75m stack separator

-Service module (LFO&MP) styled after Orion, possibly after the earlier Orion designs where the entire service module is the same width)

-Service module engine

-Full length hydrogen tank (orange)

-Half length hydrogen tank (orange)

-Quarter length hydrogen tank (orange)

-3.75m heat shield

5m Parts:

-Full length hydrogen tank (orange)

-Half length hydrogen tank (orange)

-Quarter length hydrogen tank (orange)

-5m Hydrogen nosecone (styled after top of Space Shuttle ET)

-5m Hydrogen endcap (styled after bottom of Space Shuttle ET)

-Half length LFO tank (black & white)

-Quarter length LFO tank (black & white)

-Stack Separator

-5m->3.75m hydrogen adapter

-5m->3.75m LFO adapter

-5m procedural fairing base (I play using the Procedural Fairings mod but will provide stock procedural fairing implementation)

-Engine 4x adapter

-Engine 3x adapter

-5m Upper Stage Engine (dual nozzle)

-Radial decoupler (large, styled after the connectors between the ET and the Space Shuttle)

7m Parts:

-Full length hydrogen tank (black & white)

-Half length hydrogen tank (black & white)

-Quarter length hydrogen tank (black & white)

-7m->5m hydrogen adapter

-7m procedural fairing base

-Engine 7x adapter

-Engine 5x adapter

Example of an Ares-I made using the parts:

[SmallFatFetus]

A few opinions to convey...

I vote the crew capsule go from 3.75m to 1.875m with a custom 1.875m docking port. The Taurus HCV already fills the niche for a 3.75-1.25m capsule.

For the service module, I would think the smaller modern Orion-style CSM would work better for shielding RCS control blocks, solar panels, etc. from the aerodynamic forces of launch. However, you could always make both parts.

Unless this is for RSS/RO, I think 7m is too big. You just don't need that size. 5m is already huge. The main SLS tank and space shuttle ET is 8.4 meters across, (Saturn 5 is 10m) so this seems unnecessarily huge for stock Kerbin, considering that most KSP rockets are about half the size of their real-life counterparts. Also, this cuts down on the amount of parts you have to make.

You can see here that all of the Jupiter core stages are ET sized.

This will complement Tantares and the AB launchers pack quite well!

Edited July 30, 2015 by SmallFatFetus

[benjee10]

A few opinions to convey...

I vote the crew capsule go from 3.75m to 1.875m with a custom 1.875m docking port. The Taurus HCV already fills the niche for a 3.75-1.25m capsule.

For the service module, I would think the smaller modern Orion-style CSM would work better for shielding RCS control blocks, solar panels, etc. from the aerodynamic forces of launch. However, you could always make both parts.

Unless this is for RSS/RO, I think 7m is too big. You just don't need that size. 5m is already huge. The main SLS tank and space shuttle ET is 8.4 meters across, (Saturn 5 is 10m) so this seems unnecessarily huge for stock Kerbin, considering that most KSP rockets are about half the size of their real-life counterparts. Also, this cuts down on the amount of parts you have to make.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Jupiter_Family.jpg

You can see here that all of the Jupiter core stages are ET sized.

This will complement Tantares and the AB launchers pack quite well!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/DIRECT_Jupiter-232_Exploded.jpghttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/DIRECT_Jupiter-120_Exploded.jpg

The 7m tanks are for the Jupiter-III:

Which is a ridiculously big launcher even by Earth standards. The reason the launchers are bigger are because I have some pretty high-mass things planned for the Duna/interplanetary stuff. The main thing is a centrifuge, which I'll go into a bit more detail about here.

The problem with most centrifuge designs is the engineering difficulty of maintaining an airtight seal which is also in constant motion. While that may be possible on Earth, in a hard vacuum, eventually something's going to fail from the constant friction. They seem pretty unrealistic unless you have a seal kept airtight by some sort of ionic liquid which would boil away in deep space anyway. So the most realistic solutions are either a) having a fixed centrifuge and rotate the entire ship, as in the Endurance from Interstellar, or have an internal centrifuge instead, as in the Discovery One from 2001. I'm intending this pack to allow for voyages out to Jool and even the Outer Planets Mod planets, at least if used in combination with Near Future Propulsion or something like it, so from a realism standpoint you do need a centrifuge of some sort. The trouble is that everything in KSP is so small that the form factors we have give centrifuges which are basically useless IRL. I intend to create internal centrifuge parts, either 7m or 10m in size as these are at least slightly practical in creating simulated Moon-Mars level gravity without having ridiculously high rotation speeds or creating too much nausea through the Coriolis effect (especially for Kerbals, who are much shorter than humans so the difference in rotational velocity from head to toe would be lower)

The centrifuge would make up pretty much the entire habitable part of the craft but would be extremely heavy given that it includes all the rotation tech and the life support systems, as well as all the consumables for the trip. A deep space ship is also likely gonna need a nuclear reactor, and those things aren't exactly light.

The static habs for Duna are also gonna be pretty big. Think a hitchhiker, but maybe 7m in diameter, split up into various different rooms, supporting maybe 12 or more kerbals at a time for a year or more. I'm thinking about a multi-floor design, perhaps done in a similar way to Universal storage where you have a core & framework and then slot 'wedges' in to make up the configuration you want. E.g with a hab wedge, a science instrument wedge, ISRU wedges, lab wedge, a cargo bay door to facilitate rovers, stuff like that.

In short, the 7m tanks stay, partly for the reasons above, partly because I just love ridiculously gigantic rockets

I like the engine configuration on the second Jupiter pic, with two on one side and one on the other (presumably to provide the asymetric thrust the STS stack is designed to endure) Will have to see if that's practical in KSP or not with high enough gimbal ranges.

[VenomousRequiem]

Aweh! Those models look adorable! Good luck to you, man!

[SmallFatFetus]

Hmm. While I see your reasoning, I still think 7m is too big.

But that's fine. We both have our opinions, and you, as the dev, have right of way. If there's no way to launch the centrifuge with a 5m rocket, I'll just have to boot up blender and get to work.

Although I do want to point out that you pretty much used the only 2 images of the Jupiter III on google. I don't mean that as an insult, just to recognize how the rocket never really got past the "Hey, let's make a huge rocket!" stage.

Correction- there's a few images of it in orbiter as well. but that's it.

[benjee10]

Hmm. While I see your reasoning, I still think 7m is too big.

But that's fine. We both have our opinions, and you, as the dev, have right of way. If there's no way to launch the centrifuge with a 5m rocket, I'll just have to boot up blender and get to work.

Although I do want to point out that you pretty much used the only 2 images of the Jupiter III on google. I don't mean that as an insult, just to recognize how the rocket never really got past the "Hey, let's make a huge rocket!" stage.

Correction- there's a few images of it in orbiter as well. but that's it.

Yeah I know, it's pretty much just some pretty concept art and notional figures from one technical study, I just saw it and was like, "I HAVE to make that in KSP." It looks like something someone made in KSP anyway (and is probably about as practical IRL as one; in my research I've seen lots of people pointing out that the crawler and launch pad were only ever designed to handle 2 SRBs at most, so having four as well as that almighty core stage would be well over the limit as well as shattering every window for hundreds of miles around at launch)

Looking further into it, it looks like the SSMEs on the bottom of it are purely fed by the two ETs, with another set of engines above them (hidden by an interstage fairing) which fire up after the ETs detach. There's also an upper stage, so that'd need an engine and a stack separator if I went in that direction. But first comes the standard Jupiter designs.

Interestingly the document that talks about the Jupiter-III also refers to a Jupiter-V - I wonder how big that thing would be?! (Jupiter-I seems to be an Ares-I and Jupiter-II an Ares-V in this study - it's not the same one which the other Jupiters are from but I believe the teams behind it collaborated on DIRECT 2.0)

[Tellion]

Hmm. While I see your reasoning, I still think 7m is too big.

But that's fine. We both have our opinions, and you, as the dev, have right of way. If there's no way to launch the centrifuge with a 5m rocket, I'll just have to boot up blender and get to work.

Although I do want to point out that you pretty much used the only 2 images of the Jupiter III on google. I don't mean that as an insult, just to recognize how the rocket never really got past the "Hey, let's make a huge rocket!" stage.

Correction- there's a few images of it in orbiter as well. but that's it.

Depends on the environment the vessel is used in I think. For Stock KSP, 7 meters is not really necessary - you will have to push dry masses through the roof (as stock does) to keep it balanced. If we are talking 10x or RSS on the other hand, 7m is your average moderately-ambitious moon mission.

[SmallFatFetus]

Depends on the environment the vessel is used in I think. For Stock KSP, 7 meters is not really necessary - you will have to push dry masses through the roof (as stock does) to keep it balanced. If we are talking 10x or RSS on the other hand, 7m is your average moderately-ambitious moon mission.

And that would be 7 meters with no boosters. In stock KSP this rocket with no payload could probably get you to eeloo and back.

[hoojiwana]

And that would be 7 meters with no boosters. In stock KSP this rocket with no payload could probably get you to eeloo and back.

With no payload, lots of rockets can do that. The total size doesn't matter, the dry/wet mass ratio and efficiency of your engines does.

[cxg2827]

If there's no way to launch the centrifuge with a 5m rocket, I'll just have to boot up blender and get to work.

Ive been thinking of a way to get a centrifuge to space without an obscenely large rocket, and I think I might have a solution via KIS that would still have functioning IVAs which would not be obstructed by the exterior mesh faces at the attachment points. Dont want to derail the thread so I'll leave it at that and will just make a new thread whenever I get around to testing it out.

benjee10, so are you thinking of making habs similar to the Mars Direct ones?

[benjee10]

Ive been thinking of a way to get a centrifuge to space without an obscenely large rocket, and I think I might have a solution via KIS that would still have functioning IVAs which would not be obstructed by the exterior mesh faces at the attachment points. Dont want to derail the thread so I'll leave it at that and will just make a new thread whenever I get around to testing it out.

benjee10, so are you thinking of making habs similar to the Mars Direct ones?

http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/mars-direct-photo-credit-Orange-Dot-Productions.jpg

I'm intrigued!

Yup, those are the sorts of habs I'm planning. Maybe some KIS-deployable pop-tents for if some kerbals go off on a rover expedition further from the hab, or if you just want to travel light.

And that would be 7 meters with no boosters. In stock KSP this rocket with no payload could probably get you to eeloo and back.

Don't forget that these are hydrogen tanks, so much less dense than stock Liquid Fuel. My Shuttle replica (using a 5m KW ET) has the stock liquid fuel tweaked down to less than 40% of max capacity, whereas with these parts the tank would need to be full.

[SmallFatFetus]

Could you put up a poll as to whether 7m is in line with stock or not?

[benjee10]

Could you put up a poll as to whether 7m is in line with stock or not?

It's 7m with maybe 60% of the fuel capacity a 7m stock tank would have (not sure exactly how the density of hydrogen & lox relates to stock LFO)

I'll be going ahead with it. If people don't want the 7m parts (which are really only a small part of what is planned, the main focus is on the 5m launcher family and the deep space infrastructure side of things) then they can remove them from their game. I can put them in a separate folder to the 5m parts and the rest of them to make things easier.

[hoojiwana]

Could you put up a poll as to whether 7m is in line with stock or not?

If its going to be using a non-stock resource, why does it matter if it's in line with stock? Why does it matter if its in line with stock at all, its a mod, the idea is to do things stock hasn't already done, or to do them differently.

[_Augustus_]

It's 7m with maybe 60% of the fuel capacity a 7m stock tank would have (not sure exactly how the density of hydrogen & lox relates to stock LFO)

I'll be going ahead with it. If people don't want the 7m parts (which are really only a small part of what is planned, the main focus is on the 5m launcher family and the deep space infrastructure side of things) then they can remove them from their game. I can put them in a separate folder to the 5m parts and the rest of them to make things easier.

It would be 7.5m parts, but still,

I WANT THEM! NAO!

[SmallFatFetus]

If you want to make 7m parts, go ahead. I'm less keen on the Duna mission equipment relying on the 7m rocket for launch.

Great models by the way. Looks like this is going to turn into a standard for me.

[hieywiey]

This is just an opinion, but I personally think that the IVAs for Endurance really don't need to be done, since the IVAs for most of the stuff is done; I think that this should get more priority since it isn't working yet, while Endurance is.

[Astrofox]

I have a suggestion on the realism issue. Maybe make an RSS and RO config (yes, for those who play stock mechanics with RSS) and keep the released version a stock-a-like kind of feel.

In other words, make the main core booster 3.75m and then make various adapters. then the booters need to be both 2.5m and 1.25m, or, for a better fit, 1.875m SRBs.

But really, do what you want, it's your mod and I'm just throwin' out a suggestion.