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Recycling "Kickback" Solid Booster


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No not really. Not in conventional sense anyway. First stages need alot of hang time to circumvent KSP's loading range of 20km. So maybe on really small undersized craft where the srbs you mention exit the atmosphere and can be switched back to after completing the burn to orbit.

You need parachutes, rcs,mono, probe control, electric, an over powered rocket and a steep inefficient flight path. That's the only way to do it in stock ksp more or less.

I hope with Unity5 we can have the means to replicate SpaceX with multi craft play between hundreds of kilometers. And the little things like recovering down range boosters.

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Also, bear in mind that they'd be worth very little -- around 1000 funds at most. Given how much you get from a successful contract completion, it's not really worth the extra effort and time-- you'd get more bang for your buck (literally!) by just ditching them, and using the time saved to fly more missions. :)

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Also, the funds spent recovering them may outweigh the gains. Kickbacks should be a few hundred klicks downrange from KSC. We're talking 80% recovery. The break even point is 4000 credits for recovery equipment; any more, and you lose money from recovery! You also need to further reduce that number as adding recovery features will reduce lifter mass efficiency meaning you need more fuel.

Just let the SRBs go. Focus on recovering the core of your lifter. My rocket fleet has no SSTOs, but plenty of 2STOs SRBs for launch TWR then the core does the rest and returns to KSC.

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Stagerecovery is an excellent mod if you want to recover stages that are ending up in kerbin atmosphere. It calculates if it could be recovered from a combination of parachutes and powered landing methods.

Parachutes don't need to be deployed or even set for the right altitude for that stage to be recovered but do have to be able to safety land it. Powered landing needs to have either a kerbol or a probe core with electricity and enough dv and twr to be able to safety touch down.

This mod is great since you don't need to worry about actually doing anything once it comes of of your main stage. There is one mod that jumps back in time and allows you to fly it back for landing but I cannot recall the name (Scott manly featured it in a video so that would be the first place I'd look for it)

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I don't know about Kickbacks, it should be possible... This one recovers its BACC.

screenshot118.png

1600m/s left in the tanks when in orbit; instead of leftover fuel it could carry cargo instead. And for SSTO, it reaches the orbit in a record time too.

But in all seriousness, the way to go is fully recoverable SSTO rockets.like these.

Edited by Sharpy
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You should really develop a few low-tech alternatives :) Tip the side boosters with Stayputniks or something. The guy is running low on funds and still using SRBs; he's unlikely to have the large probe cores, large batteries or maybe even the Orange Tanks.

I wonder if Skipper is good enough or are Mainsails mandatory.

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Yes, I could go to the lower tech, but those rocket are quite easy to build. Once you get a working prototype (stable and steady) would can go anywhere by duplicating the engines and set a similar TWR. You can switch engines as you want to get different payloads. It's rally easy.

I built a 600T and a 400T just by ALT+click on the 200 and 300T rocket (and adding a bit of fuel). I didn't do the 500T because I need a x4 symmetry on an existing x5 symmetry.

Those rockets are much easier to design that any asparagus or even regular 2/3 stages to orbit. When I played science game mode in beta 0.9, I remembered fine tune the launch stage with multiple stages/asparagus. It was a lot of test to check if boosters were detaching without destroying everything.

Then in carreer, I built SSTO stage and I don't need to test launches anymore, even with new aero. I plug the nearest launch stage to the payload and run for it...

(Further more, I'm working on a modular space station)

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