Evolution of Rockets

[SiriusRocketry]

I started this thread to both share rockets from your early days of playing and the evolution of your career/science/roleplaying rockets. I will post my own later.

[purpleivan]

In my early days (summer 2014) my designs tended to follow OTAT rules (Orange Tanks All the Time), with Jumbo 64's on pretty much anything I built.

Those truncated hot dogs took me everywhere.

 

With plenty of fuel stashed in Kerbin orbit to supply those journeys, in the same orange tanks.

 

This culminated in the ultimate orangey beast, the Eve Party boat. This not only was one huge block of Jumbo 64's, but was also supplied and pushed to its destination by vehicles using them.

 

In addition to OTAT there were also the the NBEF "(Never Bring Enough Fuel) rules to comply with in those early days. Again this meant some trust orange tanks being put to use, in this case to send much needed combustables to some hapless Kerbals, stranded somewhere in the system.

 

After the orange tanks period came that of ITE (Ions To Everywhere) rules that saw them used to venture around the system, land on various moons (including Mun) as well as break some speed records of the time.

This of course was in the heyday of SPE (Solar Power Everywhere) and IAF (Ion's Ain't Feeble).

 

 

[KerikBalm]

Well, this would be rockets with wings... and the evolution followed the game's evolution and my evolution playing it with mods...

Very pic heavy, so all done with the spoiler tags:

  Reveal hidden contents

My first attempt at a heavy cargo SSTO that had some success, with a payload that wa sa duna flag and footprints mission:

A larger design with a higher capacity:

And another design, this one seems to be from .23.5 due to incorporating LFBs:

 

Then... .24 or so, when I heard they were going to incorporate Porkjets' space plane plus mod, I think I also installed NEAR (which was similar in many ways to the aero overhaul of 1.0)

payload at duna just fyi:

Some of my First SSTOs after 1.0 dropped:

A later SSTO design:

And after some aero changes, and the big airliner wings wouldn't survive reentry anymore

Cleaned up the design a bit more:

And... then I went to a 3x system, and while that served as the starting point for my 3x SSTOs (with dramatically reduced payload fraction), they underwent their own evolution... I'll just show the more or less current state:

 

  On 5/20/2018 at 6:33 AM, purpleivan said:

This of course was in the heyday of SPE (Solar Power Everywhere) and IAF (Ion's Ain't Feeble).

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Well, yea In the early days solar power didn't drop of very rapidly at all (definitely not following an r^2 law), but do you remember when their thrust was only 0.5 kN. It wa s quite a big buff when they were increased to 2 kN.

You really needed patience when they had just 0.5 kN of thrust.

[Zeiss Ikon]

Unfortunately, all my really early rocket images were on my Photobucket -- that account was deleted when Photobucket started asking $400/yr to share images with the world.  The oldest I have in my Imgur are from Jeb's first orbital mission in my current career -- Explorer III.

Common 1.25m rocket, solid boosters and core, Swivel upper stage, dependent on batteries and the Swivel's alternator for electric power (hence, no successful science transmission, as the internal batteries in a Mk.1 Command Pod are insufficient to transmit even temperature and pressure logs (makes no sense to me, but that's the way it is).

Later, there was the spaceplane era (vertically boosted spaceplanes, like graceful and fragile versions of Dyna-Soar or Space Shuttle):

With a little stretching of the orbiter, and adjustment of the aerodynamics, combined with multi-pass aerobraking, derivatives of this vehicle went on Munar flyby and orbit missions -- even one attempt at landing, which would likely have been successful if drop tanks had been added to increase terminal fuel capacity.

Eventually, tourist contracts took this spaceplane family to its end point: two at once.

That ridiculous outgrowth, coupled with the failure of the Munar landing attempt with one of these orbiters, and the one death so far (a pilot whose cockpit exploded attempting reentry in an overstretched version) was the end of the spaceplane era; after that, the program returned to conventional vertical launch, expendable vehicles -- like the Space Shuttle, too little of the Taxicab spaceplane family was reusable to gain much on the funds side, and by then the space program was profitable enough that reliability was more important than purported reusability.

Not really much to see after this -- direct launch Mun and Minmus landers, everyone has seen those.

Edited May 20, 2018 by Zeiss Ikon

[KerikBalm]

  On 5/20/2018 at 3:59 PM, Zeiss Ikon said:

a pilot whose cockpit exploded attempting reentry in an overstretched version

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Shortly after reentry heating became a thing, I basically retired the mk-1 cockpit from orbital designs. In one step in the evolution of my spaceplanes, you can see the old mk1 cockpit, but I got rid of it.

I do sometimes add a mk1 inline cockpit to my heavy cargo designs, like if I'm playing with plasma blackout on, and want to be able to control it during reentry. The mk-1 inline cockpit can handle reentry fairly well (higher heat tolerance, it will have something in front of it taking theb runt of the heating)... but I really consider the mk-1 cockpit to be only for suborbital use on Kerbin.

[Vanamonde]

Craft sharing thread moved to the craft sharing subforum. 

[SiriusRocketry]

  On 5/20/2018 at 11:34 PM, Vanamonde said:

Craft sharing thread moved to the craft sharing subforum. 

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It wasn't really a craft sharing, more a picture and discussion section

[Vanamonde]

  On 5/21/2018 at 2:52 AM, SiriusRocketry said:

It wasn't really a craft sharing, more a picture and discussion section

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"Sharing" whether as craft files or concepts.

[SiriusRocketry]

Oh- I thought it was strictly craft/links, sorry!

 

[The Minmus Derp]

So dope. (the good kind)

[Zeiss Ikon]

  On 5/20/2018 at 6:05 PM, KerikBalm said:

I do sometimes add a mk1 inline cockpit to my heavy cargo designs, like if I'm playing with plasma blackout on, and want to be able to control it during reentry. The mk-1 inline cockpit can handle reentry fairly well (higher heat tolerance, it will have something in front of it taking theb runt of the heating)... but I really consider the mk-1 cockpit to be only for suborbital use on Kerbin.

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At the time I designed and built the Taxicab family of spaceplanes, my career didn't yet have the Mk. 1 Inline Cockpit; in fact, the only command modules I had were the Mk. 1 Command Pod (the original Mercury capsule analog) and the Mk. 1 Cockpit (the one made from cardboard and tinfoil, that would burn up if you looked at it cross eyed).  Heck, I built the Taxicab spaceplanes with parachute recovery because I didn't have retractable landing gear until the last couple missions -- and I'd just barely gotten landing legs above the toothpick size when I attempted a Mun landing in one of them.

I had gotten into the habit of using 60 km periapsis multipass aerobraking on Munar return after the first few tests brought home just how fragile the Mk. 1 Cockpit is -- get the Ap down under 200 km, and I could prevent anything important from melting on the actual landing reentry.  With the canard "deployed" and some RCS to assist the reaction wheel, it was possible to keep the craft in a deep stall that slowed down most efficiently and spread the heat to more tolerant components, until it was slow enough to enter a normal glide.

Nowadays (still in same career -- don't have tens of hours a week to play), I'm flying stuff like this Module Lifter III:

There's 6400 units of Lf/O (and a Mk. 1-3) inside that fairing, bound for Minmus Station Alpha.  Usually winds up having to borrow about 800 units to make rendezvous, but Minmus capture is assured without touching the cargo.  Now that the station's been accepted (contract completed) I'm thinking about setting up a mining/fuel conversion operation to use Minmus as a stepping stone for Duna/Ike/Gilly landings and a visit to Dres.  Which, I suspect, is what the "build a station around Minmus" contract is about...

Edited May 21, 2018 by Zeiss Ikon

[The Minmus Derp]

Is this thread dead?