Nuclear Waste Disposal

[Entroper]

Alright, so you've gotten into orbit, into an escape trajectory, and far beyond.

The government of Kerbin has seen fit to commission your engineers for an important mission: disposing of the highly radioactive waste generated from experiments in nuclear-powered propulsion.

Some things to know:

• 
  [li]This waste is made up of mostly trans-uranic elements, so it is extremely heavy.[/li]
  [li]In accordance with keeping the weight down, the storage tank is made of a thin, strong alloy. This makes it highly sensitive to collisions and temperature. Exercise caution when handling![/li]
  [li]The waste has a very long half-life. This is both good and bad; on the plus side, it means that the radiation is weak, and short-term exposure should not cause any ill health effects. On the minus side, it means it really needs to go, or it will be a hazard on Kerbin for hundreds of thousands of years.[/li]
  

Because of the extremely long half-life, the government cannot run the risk of simply putting the container into a stable orbit, lest the orbit decay and many tons of radioactive waste be 'redistributed' throughout the atmosphere. So your mission is to put the storage tank on an escape trajectory, and to return the crew safely to Kerbin.

All the parts you need are attached below. Good luck!

[Entroper]

So, I've been attempting this challenge with stock parts only, and I've managed to get it to about 1 000 m/s, with a max altitude of 150 000 m. I haven't spent a ton of time on my rocket, but enough to know that reaching escape velocity will definitely be tough with stock parts! I'll be interested to see what everyone comes up with.

BTW, to give credit where credit is due, and since I'm no modeling artist, I've used the mesh from SynthOrange's Fatboy Large Fuel Tank, and recolored the texture. Also, don't mind the SRB icon in the screenshot; I was messing with the .cfg file and trying to get it to show an overheating notification, which it never did. If anyone knows how to get this to show up, let me know and I'll update the part.

[Entroper]

Gah, I always get design ideas for these challenges while at work! Can't figure out if they're even possible until I get home.

My first design uses a first stage of 27 liquid engines and 63 fuel tanks, plus 8 SRBs. This makes for a nice, smooth liftoff, but doesn't have nearly enough impulse for escape. I want to see if I can fit 42, maybe 43 engines under there.

[andydouble07]

I'm not sure if it's possible with stock parts, i couldn't get it much faster than 2km/s.

Got it (barely) with Sunday Punch/SIDR parts. i think im about 8 m/s above escape velocity, and the tiny booster on my capsule barely managed to turn me around.

[foamyesque]

You're on, pal.

EDIT: Mass 50? Oh, this will be fun.

[Entroper]

I'm getting closer. 1 500 m/s on my last run, and I can add more fuel and SRBs to the design. The idea I had at work didn't pan out, but a variation on it did.

EDIT: More fuel, 2 000 m/s. Added SRBs, but I went too fast in the lower atmosphere and flipped over. Can't add any more fuel at this point without making the rocket even more prone to flipping.

EDIT: Final attempt for tonight. More SAS, more fuel, no flipping this time. 2 125 m/s @ 203 km. 72% of escape velocity. I think I can add fuel, SAS, and SRBs to go faster. The game runs at about 1 frame per second for most of my flight.

[foamyesque]

I'm getting closer. 1 500 m/s on my last run, and I can add more fuel and SRBs to the design. The idea I had at work didn't pan out, but a variation on it did.

EDIT: More fuel, 2 000 m/s. Added SRBs, but I went too fast in the lower atmosphere and flipped over. Can't add any more fuel at this point without making the rocket even more prone to flipping.

Try not flying vertically. If you're getting 2km/s straight up, you should at least be able to get to orbit, and if you can get to orbit it becomes much, much easier to boost into an escape trajectory.

[Entroper]

Try not flying vertically. If you're getting 2km/s straight up, you should at least be able to get to orbit, and if you can get to orbit it becomes much, much easier to boost into an escape trajectory.

Yeah... easier said than done with the way my craft flies. I mean, it's stable, but if I turn off the SAS to pitch over, I'm fairly sure I'll lose control. The extreme lag also makes piloting difficult. I'm up to 39 LFEs and over 130 fuel tanks.

[andydouble07]

i was getting absolute slideshows with stock parts and then ending up barely over 2,000 m/s, it might be possible but i doubt my computer can survive it

[MaxSchram]

It's done, the radioactive waste is on an escape trajectory to outer space.

The spacecraft at liftoff. Only vanilla parts are used.

Getting speed tangential to the planets surface.

Jettison the waste at ~240km altitude and 3100m/s speed (Escape velocity is 2927m/s)

Unfortunately i slowed down to much, so the poor guys land on the dark side.

[shdwcaster]

The Waste in Haste Mk. VI is showing promise as a launch platform for this stuff. Unfortunately, given the amount of nuclear waste spilled over the launch area by unsuccessful launches of WiH Mk I through V, I'm not sure this was the optimal method of waste removal, even given the hazardous nature of the cargo.

[Aiyel]

whee! successful.

Using parts from Sunday Punch, Silisko, and the Saturn pack.

Stages (from top to bottom)

Core stages

Parachute

Capsule

vanilla decoupler

Vanilla fuel tank

micro engine

gentle decoupler

2x SAS

RCS

payload

extended 1.75m fuel tank

small bertha

Secondary stages (quad symmetry, attached to the payload directly)

1.75m SAS

1.75m lateral decoupler

1.75-3m adapter cone

3m fuel tank

strut linking each of the four tanks to its neighbors

3m engine

3m shroud decoupler

2x 3m fuel tank

strut linking upper tanks to their neighbors

1x strake

Saturn-V S1 engine cluster.

Tertiary stages (8, 2 to each tank. Careful of placement, or you'll hit the launch gantry with them)

1.75m lateral decoupler

2x 1.75m extended fuel tanks

heavy bertha

You want your saturn V engines and your berthas to ignite simultaneously. Hit space abr the INSTANT you're on the pad, keep the throttle at about 90-95%, adjusting for heat as necessary. Begin your gradual pitch maneuver about the time the tertiaries are empty, you might also want a bit of a roll as you jettison them to prevent impact with the Saturn engine clusters. This would be spectacularly bad. By the time you've burned the secondaries out, you should be very, very close (~2-300m/s) to orbital velocty at an altitude of around 80-100km. Fromt here, you light up the primary stage, aim for your TVV, and keep it burning until you hit escape velocity. End result should leave you with about a third of that extended tank left once you hit EV. I could probably get away with a smaller fuel tank, but with a payload that monstrously massive, it's nice to have some breathing room when it comes to fuel capacity.

Detatch from payload, gently maneuver away, then turn opposite your TVV and nail the pedal to the floor. If done correctly, you should land on or just off of the continent directly east of the KSC, so no insta-'splodey night landing.

It's brute-force, it's painfully inefficient, it handles like a drunken cow, it lags my computer (being the first rocket I've ever made to do so) and it needs to launch *immediately* or it'll fall apart on the pad. In other words, Jeb wholeheartedly approves.

[ZMX]

It's done, the radioactive waste is on an escape trajectory to outer space.

The spacecraft at liftoff. Only vanilla parts are used.

Getting speed tangential to the planets surface.

Jettison the waste at ~240km altitude and 3100m/s speed (Escape velocity is 2927m/s)

Unfortunately i slowed down to much, so the poor guys land on the dark side.

When I saw this challenge, I immediately thought to build a ship like this one. Whenever I try to make one, the game just goes insane and flips out.

I've heard that supposedly if one's CPU isn't powerful enough when pushed to the limit, the game wigs out and behaves unnaturally.

I've got a Core 2 Duo (e4600) OCed to 3GHz. What might you have?

[NovaSilisko]

Take a tip from humanity, Kerbalkind, dump it in the oceans! Worked for us. 'course, we're probably all dead by the time this message reaches your star in 3900 years, but hey - at least it wasn't from dumping radioactive waste into the ocean.

[Fhajad]

I see no way to do this but brute force. And even then, it basically kills my PC at 3.8GHz overclocked. So it takes 6 minutes to even see if stage 1 works, and if it fails, I can't even tell what caused a failure.

[Entroper]

Yeah, the workload rises pretty steeply with the number of parts interacting with each other. If we just had bigger engines and fuel tanks, even at the same thrust-to-weight ratio and ISP, it wouldn't be so processor-destroying.

[foamyesque]

Someone beat me to the vanilla launch, so I thought I would try two.

Unfortunately, there's a structural failure just after 4km that I have yet to isolate.

[foamyesque]

Progress!

And an inspirational message, too!

[Entroper]

That's a biggun.

[what-the]

I think the easiest way to return is to detach in low orbit and fire the boosters once clear. Now I just need to get enough boosters up to high altitude don't need many though.

[Sabactus]

Used some third party parts.

Lift Off

Going

Gone

Retro fire

Glide-slope

Chute deployed

Home!

I dont thing my run counts cause the the third party parts.

[foamyesque]

Blast it.

Liquid boosters on:

Core ignition:

Clear of the gantry:

Detaching liquid boosters:

Solids on:

Solids detached:

Clearing the atmosphere:

Seperating core stack:

I should've throttled back more...

Lessons learned:

1. A second Command Pod would be really bloody handy for making the orbit turn. I was expecting to have to fight to keep the rocket nose up; instead I had the devil of a time tipping it at all.

2. Bigger rocket.

3. The mission summary has a character limit.

[CarolRawley]

hey foamyesque, any chance you could share that box-rocket?

[foamyesque]

hey foamyesque, any chance you could share that box-rocket?

Once I have it working, certainly.

[CarolRawley]

yay!

I wanna drop it on the VAB!