Kerbal Katapult V

[rdfox]

New from Vulpine Kerbospace and Jeb's Auto Salvage and Spacecraft, a booster for all your heavy-lift or Kerbin escape launch needs, the Kerbal Katapult V!

On its very first test launch, the Kerbal Katapult V successfully conducted an equivalent of the human Apollo 4 unmanned test mission, placing a standard Mark 1 Command Pod directly into a 198km by 42km elliptical orbit, with approximately 50% of its third stage fuel remaining. At apokee, the third stage conducted a successful 25m/sec retrofire burn to deorbit the spacecraft, then, as programmed, turned vertically downward and burned its remaining fuel to exhaustion, followed by the command pod and service module separating before the service module's onboard engine also conducted a downward vertical burn to exhaustion; these unconventional maneuvers were made to boost the spacecraft speed at entry interface, achieving a peak speed of approximately 3.2 km/sec at interface, adequate to verify the integrity of the spacecraft heatshield for a direct re-entry from just about any plausible transfer, including orbits of the Mun and Kerbsol. Despite gravitational loading peaking at over 14 gees during re-entry, cockpit temperatures remained comfortable, and all three members of the crew were recovered safely, although Bill and Bob did soil their pressure suits.

Additional test flights have been mostly successful, all with safe recovery of the crew, though two flights did see failure to make a fully stable orbit due to failure of first-stage engines following SRB jettison. The booster's heavy-lift capabilities have not yet been fully explored, but Jeb is confident that it can put almost anything you want to try into orbit in a single throw.

(Hi, guys, it's essentially a Kerbal-scaled Saturn V-class booster, though somewhat different in execution from the Saturn. It's almost all add-ons. Required add-ons are Wobbly Rockets 1.8 or later, NovaSilisko's SIDR&SD pack 0.9 or later, CaptainSlug's radial booster pack 1.3 or later, Trust Thrust's radial stack decouplers, Vaccer's Big Effin' Engines, the MTS Tuned SAS set, Xemit's MicroEngine and tank, Killerhurtz's thermal control pack 1.2 or later, and Dartstriker's Mk16-3 triple parachute (in the Mk 17 parachute thread). Note that the ullage engines on the third stage and the service module do tend to cause wild gyrations when fired, though it seems to be less of an issue with the SAS off and the throttle closed. All ullage engines fire with the decoupler, *not* the stage they're mounted on, so you have time to settle the vehicle down again before firing the next stage. Don't launch at full throttle, or you're in for a short flight, but you can bump it up to full thrust once the engines are running. In four flights, I've had a 50% full-success rate; the other two flights, the SRBs literally knocked off the main engines they were aligned with as they separated...)