The Impossible Station

[ShakeNBake]

Do you ever get stuck in the VAB for way too long working on an epic mission? Designing, and re-designing, and re-re-designing, and adding this, and tweaking that, ad infinitum. And eventually, even though the TWRs and delta Vs and all the other details are properly engineered (mostly), the craft is completely unflyable in game due to it's excessive complexity. Well, I fell for that hard and ended up with IMHO an awesome design that unfortunately will never leave the VAB; the Zues Program's Jovian Science Station.

The mission is to have a permanent space station in orbit around Jupiter (RSS) that would allow access to the surface of all 4 Galilean moons. However, from the midpoint (deltaV-wise) between Io and Callisto, the full there-and-back-again was too much for a single stage. The chosen orbit is 585Mm above Jupiter, just inside of Europa. From here, the round-trip delta V to either Io or Ganymede is just over 5km/s, workable for a single stage. Round trip to Callisto would be 9.2km/s, possible if I have a fuel tanker already in Callisto orbit (yet another ship to design, number waytoomany at this point). There will be 2 different crafts for the moons; an Orbiter fully equipped with science gear, and a stripped down Lander/Space Tug for surface access. The ships are fully reusable so these trips can be repeated by shipping more fuel, with the limitation that the Callisto tanker only contains enough fuel for 1 mission of each craft, and will have to be refilled or replaced for subsequent Callisto missions. Transfer to Jupiter will use a E-V-E-J path that will require a 5.7km/s departure burn (Flyby Finder is awesome).

The Base:

Spoiler

The station is powered by a small nuclear reactor at the bottom and life support is provided by a large Soylent system at the top and 2 greenhouses on the trunk. The Science Cruisers are docked to the upper truss while the landers are docked to the trunk.

The 3 brown tanks around the bottom are the components of the Callisto tanker and get dropped during the Jupiter arrival burn. As soon as I achieve capture, they will be staged off. In order to fire the maneuver engines or the main capture engines, the reactor must be shut off and the radiators retracted. There are 6 maneuver engines (red nozzle) with 467kN each, and 9 main engines (white radial pods, 6 on the drop tanks and 3 on the main trunk) with 1750kN each. The side tanks are expended after 2.4km/s, after this the remaining 3 engines have 2km/s in the main trunk. This isn't enough to go directly to my final orbit so the first burn will be to get to an elliptical, moon-crossing orbit and use gravity assists from the moons to gradually circularize until I can insert into the final orbit with what's left in the tanks.

Once in its final orbit, it can provide for 8 crew nearly indefinitely and initially holds enough fuel to allow each craft to visit each moon.

The Ships:

Spoiler

The Science Cruiser is mostly a thing because I love the Mk2 form-factor. Fully solar powered, it holds a full suite of scientific equipment and 60 days of life support for 4 crew. It has 8 AJ10 engines with 44kN each, a wet mass of 87t, and 5.4km/s delta V.

The Jovian Lander is a tribute to my tendency to completely ignore part count in pursuit of something that looks cool. Thankfully, UbioWeld allowed me to make that whole blob into a single tank.

The orbital tug and the lander are solar powered, the lander uses the Apollo lander engine, the tug uses another 8 AJ10s, the lander carries 4 days life support with another 16 days on the tug.

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The tanker is pretty simple. The 3 tanks get dropped from the base during the arrival burn, each one has avionics and RCS, and they just dock together. The main engine is the same RD-275M as the main base at 1750kN. It will use the same technique of multiple gravity assists with the destination being a low orbit around Callisto.

The Launchers:

Spoiler

I did design launchers for all of these parts as well as a ginormous transfer stage for the Earth departure, but I don't have screenshots of them and it's late tonight...

Even after an aggressive campaign of part welding and cleaning things up, it still runs at <10% speed. A 5 minute burn will take over an hour. As awesome as it is, this design is headed to the recycle bin...

What next? I've been thinking of updating to the newest RSS and trying this mission again, but WAY stripped down, or perhaps trying out Principia in the Kerbal world.

[Zeiss Ikon]

I love Principia, and it's not a terrible load on your computer (or at least on my FX 8350 with 16 GB).

What clinched it for me was when I launched into a sun-synchronous orbit and I could see (in heliocentric view) the predicted orbit lying right on top of itself for hundreds of orbits, where ordinary orbits spread out into a "ribbon" as perturbation moves them around.  Six months later, the orbit was still right over twilight.

Sadly, I'm not running Principia at on my 1.6.1 RO career, because it requires upgrading my Linux version; too big a job to do before I get a long weekend again...