Fulton Skyhook.

[123nick]

would it be possible to impliment a fulton skyhook into ksp? like this:

. i think it would take some coding, but not too difficult. you could have a specialized part, and you could recover probes and other planetary installations that originally were not supposed to lift off again, using this method, and it seems to be pretty cool. imagine picking up a rover on duna with this system, you could skip landing, and save delta-V. its supposed to use a winch to pull the item in, and can be used with people (IRL) to pick them up from the ground, and bring them into the actual airplane. maybe this can be implemented with kerbals, allowing you to pick up stranded kerbals, easily?

[hab136]

You could probably cobble together a skyhook using KAS's winch and a balloon mod (Procedural Airships, Professor Phineas Kerbenstein's wonderous vertical propulsion emporium, Hooligan Labs). Use girders for the actual catching mechanism since they have a high impact tolerance.

You could even attach the winch to a lone Kerbal.

Flying on Duna is quite hard since the air is so thin, and jet engines don't work there (or anywhere except Kerbin and Laythe).

After reading the wiki, the Skyhook plane was going about 55 m/s, so you're not actually going to save a lot of delta-V versus landing - just 55 m/s at best. At worst, you'll spend more than that staying aloft while trying to hit the hook exactly. You don't save any delta-V on the ascent since you still have to accelerate all the mass of the plane and the pickup package up to orbital velocity.

It would be interesting to see it work, but totally impractical. In real life it was apparently abandoned in favor of long-range helicopters.

[123nick]

You could probably cobble together a skyhook using KAS's winch and a balloon mod (Procedural Airships, Professor Phineas Kerbenstein's wonderous vertical propulsion emporium, Hooligan Labs). Use girders for the actual catching mechanism since they have a high impact tolerance.

You could even attach the winch to a lone Kerbal.

Flying on Duna is quite hard since the air is so thin, and jet engines don't work there (or anywhere except Kerbin and Laythe).

After reading the wiki, the Skyhook plane was going about 55 m/s, so you're not actually going to save a lot of delta-V versus landing - just 55 m/s at best. At worst, you'll spend more than that staying aloft while trying to hit the hook exactly. You don't save any delta-V on the ascent since you still have to accelerate all the mass of the plane and the pickup package up to orbital velocity.

It would be interesting to see it work, but totally impractical. In real life it was apparently abandoned in favor of long-range helicopters.

alright. i guess your right, it does seem a bit impractical. although, really, most project (by me atleast) dont have a really good reason why to even bother with it in the first place. maybe there would be some obscure use, but nothing a helicopter with KAS winch cant do.