K.S.S Hornet [Apollo 11 50th anniversary]

[kapteenipirk]

Taught it would be a little rude not to make some craft related to the Apollo 11 project.

 

K.S.S Hornet

 

I was in the process of building some new ships for the KNS post when i realized that there was a pretty vital element of the Apollo 11 mission that i could replicate, the U.S.S Hornet CV-12, the modernized WWII Essex class aircraft-carrier that recovered the Apollo 11 crew and their capsule.

The crew was picked up from the capsule by a Sea King helicopter and then brought to the carrier where they would be greeted by president Nixon and brought into a special quarantine habitation module to avoid contamination. The capsule was then later lifted onto one of the carriers aircraft-elevators by the carriers own crane.

From there the crew was brought into the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston.

The Hornet also recovered the crew of Apollo 12, as-well an unmanned test capsule.

 

PSA for shipbuilders

As you may be able to see from the pick, i decided to go with a non tweackscaled hull this time...why you may ask, after the Grand Carrier ive built two huge carriers using tweackscaled hulls, one based on the Lexington CV-2, and one being a custom design, they both detonated either underway, or when i entered their physics range in another craft.

Picks of those ill-fated carriers

Spoiler

This one liked to explode at random when i was trying to get into a good position for a landing test, and then again when i entered it's physics range in a carrier aircraft.

 

On this one i was saved from detonations underway, but not from the "enter physics range and see a huge cloud of exploding parts that used to be a carrier"

 

So, i think you can see why i went with a stock hull this time. Remember kids, if you don't want unplanned rapid disassembly of you aircraft-carriers, don't use tweackscale on the hull of the ship.

 

Now that we have that PSA out of the way, let's get back to today's build.

While the hull may be non tweackscaled, pretty much everything above it uses it quite heavily, cause as per usual, i wanted to make it more usable by lowering the part count and also making it more durable.

With the power of the new DLC servos and rotors and stuff, i was able to remove Infernal Robotics from the calculation all together. Unfortunately the BG DLC doesn't have gantry rails in it, so i had to ditch working aircraft-elevators.

In this case BG is simply used to animate the dummy radars. I could have mady made some servo powered rudders, but those would have probably stuck out a little too much and would have hit something on the ground, and since they don't self center, keeping the ship steady would have been nigh impossible as they would never really be truly straight. Another thing i kinda wanted to try but dropped, was propeller-pods. Basically engines mounted on servos, witch would eliminate the need for rudders and bow-thrusters. I feel they would have had the same problem as rudders, but even worse this time.

Then there's also the limited axis-groups, witch i would rather like to save for stuff like: fore and aft main battery guns, torpedo-armaments, recovery crane...etc.

 

The overall design/build is pretty standard stuff you've gotten to see before, so there's not much to say.

Other than the fact that to make this compatible with the KNS stuff, i didn't go all out on the details. I did put some extra details as i saw that the part-count was looking nice and low, but nothing crazy.

 

More picks of the carrier

Spoiler

 

 

 

Decided to throw together a replica of the Grumman S-2 Tracker witch was a common sight on the deck of Hornet.

 

And to make a complete set, a quick and dirty replica of a Sea-King.

 

The Hornet was the main focus here, and there's a lot of other projects i want to get done, so that's why the replicas of the Tracker and Sea King are a little thrown together. It didn't feel worth it to create proper replicas of them, but it also felt wrong leaving them out.

I feel like overall the tracker is pretty fine, but the Sea King could use some more work, mainly in the cockpit area, as the more Huey style cockpit just feels way out of place, but, there wasn't really a good alternative, minus going completely custom, so that's what where going with.

 

Technical specs:

Armaments: 4x Goalkeeper MK3

Top speed: 28 m/s

Length: 167.2m

Width: 30.4m

Height: 33.3m

Mass: 1,535.263 tons

Parts: 580

 

The radars are operated by just accessing the rotors menu and sliding the output higher.

 

Mods used: BD-armory and tweackscale for the carrier, and Airplane+ for the aircraft. Also both DLC's.

 

Download link (all 3 crafts): https://www.dropbox.com/s/04a6w77vg8ydqjv/Apollo 11 recovery pack.zip?dl=0

 

And there it is for you, my contribution to the Apollo 11 50th celebration. I hope you enjoy it

 

[Alpha_Gametauri_2]

My laptop is already lagging looking at this.

 

[HafCoJoe]

Magnificent

[kapteenipirk]

3 hours ago, Avera9eJoe said:

Magnificent

Thanks