The Super Tall Rocket V2

[Dvd]

Want an incredibly inefficient but awesomely TALL and LARGE rocket? Look no further!

1st stage:

2 SRB's + 1 heavy LFE under three 2 meter fuel tanks form a custom booster. There are 8 of these boosters. All 16 SRB's and 8 LFE's ignite.

2nd stage:

The SRB's are discarded.

3rd stage:

The huge booster stacks are discarded. 8 nuclear engines ignite. The nuclear engines are fueled by 4 super tall 3 meter fuel tanks and a set of small tanks.

4th stage:

The main fuel stack is discarded. A smaller stack of two tall 2 meter fuel stacks sits on top of a heavy LFE. The heavy LFE ignites.

5th stage:

The secondary fuel stack is discarded. What remains of the (tallest?) KSP rocket is a flight pod, 3 tall fuel containers, and a low thrust NERVA engine. By this time, the rocket is traveling faster than escape velocity.

6th stage:

NERVA engine ignites. Rocket goes to the stars.

[Baldr]

How does the puppy fly, and what packs where used?

[rdfox]

I would assume it's not too bad straight up, if you're gentle with the throttle in the early stages--lord knows how many designs I've got where you have to stay below 50% throttle on the first stage to avoid a collapse--but god help you when it comes time for pitchover.

Either that, or struts (which I haven't played with much yet) can be used to add additional longitudinal stiffness between, say, decouplers and the stage that they're jettisoning. Which would help a *lot*...

[Dvd]

How does the puppy fly, and what packs where used?

Sunday Punch and Silisko Industries.

It flies...interestingly. From stage one to stage three (a good 3/4 of the rocket), the rocket is traveling at only a few hundred m/s. Despite that, the burn lasts for so long that the rocket ends up something like 100,000 m away from the planet. By the end of stage 3, the lack of fuel means that the engines are finally pushing a bit more and the rocket is maybe at 2k m/s. Stage four is when the rocket picks up speed rather dramatically; it'll end up at ~7k m/s. Stage six... Well, I haven't actually let stage six burn to completion, but I suspect that it'll go pretty fast. Consider; starting speed is 7k m/s, the rocket is already outside of the planet's gravity well, and you've got three large fuel tanks with 1000 fuel each. On top of that, the engine is a NERVA thruster which means it has a thrust of 100 with a fuel burn of 2. So we've got about 25 minutes of burn time at max thrust.

I would assume it's not too bad straight up, if you're gentle with the throttle in the early stages--lord knows how many designs I've got where you have to stay below 50% throttle on the first stage to avoid a collapse--but god help you when it comes time for pitchover.

Either that, or struts (which I haven't played with much yet) can be used to add additional longitudinal stiffness between, say, decouplers and the stage that they're jettisoning. Which would help a *lot*...

The way the rocket flies, I'd venture that this is actually *easier* to put in orbit than most rockets. The very slow ascent means you end up well outside the atmosphere but only traveling a few hundred m/s. If you wanted orbit, you could toss away whatever remains of stage 3 before you start to gain any more speed. That means once you've discarded the stages 1-3, you're left with a normal sized rocket with a powerful engine, already outside of the atmosphere, and with only slight vertical velocity. It's easy to tip it over intentionally and put it into orbit from there.

As for the struts, you are correct.

[sirmonkey]

any chance you could post the crafts file? i want to screw around and try to actually put this beast into orbit

[Tim_Barrett]

Its cool, it flies, but yes it does look inefficient. Sometimes rockets that are too big dont make any significant 'profit' of upscaling the ship.