Shuttle Refurbish And Reuse - Program Development In Progress

[Geonovast]

Instead of cluttering up the WDYDIKSPT thread, I'll keep development here.

Triggered by the push for more immersion of my shuttles, and @CatastrophicFailure's suggestion to do something I was already thinking about doing, I've decided to put together a program to recover, re-attach, refuel, re-load, and re-launch a complete shuttle.  @kraden and @JadeOfMaar this may also interest you two.

Step one is recovering the and re-orienting the shuttle, since I'm sure I'll need to make some small adjustments to it.  Afterward will be making the main fuel tank recoverable, then I'll work on the boosters, and the boat to grab them and haul them back to shore.

Two early failures:  The firs one did ok, just couldn't get nearly high enough.  The second one was spectacularly horrible.  I don't understand IR hinges.

The cylinders are a little easier to figure out, and I finally, finally broke down and used Tweakscale... because I pretty much had to.

This worked!  I'll need to make adjustments, like adding wheels so they can actually go up and grab the shuttle, but I think this is good to get it spun vertically, then I'll have another crane come in and grab it with the nose docking port.

 

Edited February 22, 2018 by Geonovast

[CatastrophicFailure]

Awesome. 

Throwing this out there in case its helpful, been mulling it over the last couple days. It might be a slightly more, er, elegant solution if IR is giving you conniptions, all do-able with stock bits.

Start with a rig like this that you can drive over your shuttle. This one's from SSTU massing around 40 tonnes, not sure how your much-better-looking one compares.

Not pictured: the 6 large landing gear on the rig. Which are unpowered here, but you get the idea. Park the shuttle, drive this over it, then retract the gear so it settles onto the shuttle's docking port.

Then retract the shuttle gear, extend the FRONT most rig gear, and start transferring ore from the front tanks to the ones up high.

 

This will transfer the center of mass rearward...

That didn't work.

 

Made some tweaks, tried again.

MOAR boosters ore! Mordor?

 

Flipped the middle gear out, still not quite enough, so I popped the rear gear...

This gave it an uncontrolled jolt, but... it's working! It's working!

 

TIIIIIMBEEEEEEEEEEER!

 

uM... well I guess the landing gear on the counterweight ore tanks weren't quite enough to catch things.

 

Kinda blew up the runway...

 

But, as a proof-of-concept, it worked pretty well, thrown together in about an hour, and without any IR shenanigans. But WITH KJR and copious autostrutting.

YMMV. 

 

[Geonovast]

That type of device might be useful for the boosters.  Might even put some small engines on it for braking thrusters so it doesn't explode.

Also I think if you'd mirrored the retractable landing gear on the landing side, to step it down the same way you stepped it up, it would be much better than trying to catch it with some landing legs.

I may have to make everything indestructible for this.  Already having trouble with the boosters exploding when landing in the water, I can't imagine dragging them up onto shore will be any better.  A lot easier than patching the impact tolerance of every single piece I'm using.

 

[Geonovast]

Tonight I'm playing with some booster recovery ideas.

First test successful!

Edited February 17, 2018 by Geonovast

[qzgy]

11 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Tonight I'm playing with some booster recovery ideas.

Neat. Have you maybe thought about lowering a platform underneath the water level then floating to the booster before raising the platform again to avoid towing something draggy through the water? Sorta like this ship?

[Geonovast]

1 minute ago, qzgy said:

Neat. Have you maybe thought about lowering a platform underneath the water level then floating to the booster before raising the platform again to avoid towing something draggy through the water? Sorta like this ship?

I have!  The problem is that I'm really bad with buoyancy.  Never seem to have any control over it.  Plus either one or more of my mods is affecting buoyancy.

Also considering a sea plane option.  Wouldn't be terrible since I am going to have to put docking ports on the sides anyway.

[qzgy]

1 minute ago, Geonovast said:

I have!  The problem is that I'm really bad with buoyancy.  Never seem to have any control over it.  Plus either one or more of my mods is affecting buoyancy.

Also considering a sea plane option.  Wouldn't be terrible since I am going to have to put docking ports on the sides anyway.

Pretty sure that theres a chart out there somewhere that has all the buoyancy values plus what makes good ballast and doesn't and that sort of thing. Not sure where it is though... There's also some ballast tanks from some form of mod that could help.

A sea plane could be also a good option. I wonder if making it a vtol would be an option, cause you've already got IR anyways. Might also help with pinpoint landings.

[Geonovast]

12 hours ago, qzgy said:

Pretty sure that theres a chart out there somewhere that has all the buoyancy values plus what makes good ballast and doesn't and that sort of thing. Not sure where it is though... There's also some ballast tanks from some form of mod that could help.

A sea plane could be also a good option. I wonder if making it a vtol would be an option, cause you've already got IR anyways. Might also help with pinpoint landings.

VTOL would probably be ideal, especially if it was built as a jet powered quad copter, that picked up the booster directly in the middle.  CoM would never change.

Two problems:

• I'm terrible at flying VTOLS
• I'd need to keep the booster floating vertically.  Too bad the game isn't mimicking the real things and letting them fill up with water when they're empty.   The STS ones stayed vertical until they pumped the water out.

Playing with the main tank this morning.  Survives re-entry just fine, I just suck at aiming.  Getting the tank down on KSC property might actually be one of the trickier points of this.

Nose docking port is for recovery crane.  I don't plan on tipping it over just to tip it back up.  If I can nail a VTOL for the boosters, I could probably use the same craft for this guy too.

I also slapped the current versions of each piece together.  No decouplers, all docking ports.

Going to need a bit of fine tuning on the action groups, since staging the launch isn't practical due to the fact that it needs to do it again.  @JadeOfMaar was awesome enough to write me a MM patch that allows me to re-fill and re-ignite the SRBs.

Re-launch pad... which is just a giant trench plate with some heatshields attached.  The entire vehicle is supported on one docking port on the tank with 4 struts.  Hopefully the KAS EVA struts will hold up to the challenge on re-launch.

The problem?  The whole plate is just sliding around on the launch pad.  Hopefully it won't do it on the grass.

[Geonovast]

Initial launch was going well, until separation of the SRBs.  Not having decouplers in there really changes things, and they took out half the wings.

Hardened as they are, Jeb and Val seem unconcerned.

[qzgy]

45 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Two problems:

• I'm terrible at flying VTOLS
• I'd need to keep the booster floating vertically.  Too bad the game isn't mimicking the real things and letting them fill up with water when they're empty.   The STS ones stayed vertical until they pumped the water out.

Hmm. The first one would be hard to fix. Practice I guess? One option is always to have a docking port pointed straightout and controlled from with the SAS set to radial out.

Second problem - You could add some ore ballast to the bottom. That might not actually do anything though.

 

16 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Not having decouplers in there really changes things, and they took out half the wings.

I wonder if having a bit of lift pulling the SRBs away from the craft would help. Like just a wing panel angled to make it go away.

[Geonovast]

1 minute ago, qzgy said:

You could add some ore ballast to the bottom. That might not actually do anything though.

I could... but that'd be a lot of weight to haul up just to drop back down again.  I'm thinking maybe some deployable arms with airbags? 

 

2 minutes ago, qzgy said:

I wonder if having a bit of lift pulling the SRBs away from the craft would help. Like just a wing panel angled to make it go away.

I grossly increased the number of sepratrons, added some airbrakes to the bottom to help angle it away, and am using a SmartParts controller to detach them when they hit 1% fuel left.  Now they actually shoot out in front of the shuttle and veer away.

There are definitely some benefits to doing all this with action groups instead of staging.

Of course no staging and using docking ports is confusing the heck out of KER.  NaNs everywhere important.