AHTech Industries' showroom

[AHHans]

I finally decided to show off the best craft that the engineers at AHTech Industries came up with. All the craft can be found on KerbalX.

And today I get the ball rolling with a case of space engineering that was sorely missing from the Kerbal universe: the Very Kerbal Array.

For many years Kerbals have looked to the sky, now they are also travelling to the bodies in their own solar system. But there is much more far away: new star systems, star clusters, quasars, new galaxies, giant molecular clouds, supermassive black holes, even bigger bangs, and sooo much more. Since the invention of the radio the astronomers have been listening to the stars on radio frequencies with increasingly bigger and complex telescopes. But now they got to the limit of what can be done on the surface or Kerbin: the atmosphere and Kerbal made interference make detecting weak signals harder and harder. So the solution is to go to space, and the engineers at AHTech Industries came up with the solution: the very Kerbal Array:

This is a space based radio interferometer, with 19 of the finest radio dishes that are currently available. We at AHTech Industries developed a sophisticated unfolding mechanism, that allows this to be packed into an affordable fairing and launched with a medium sized launcher. We combined it with a powerful onboard computer for signal correlation, data analysis, and navigation. The antenna spacing gives it a good UV-coverage with low sidelobe levels in the synthesized beam, even for a snapshot observation. For a regular observation it gives essentially filled UV-coverage with even a small fractional bandwidth. And being a spacecraft it can not only point straight at a target - making the quality of the observation independent of the target's declination - but it can also rotate during the observation to either generate more sensitivity on fewer baselines or to fill the UV-plane even during a short observation. Launch this and your astronomers will sell their firstborn assistants into slavery(*) for the opportunity to do observations with it.

With a combined antenna power of 910G - or more than 3.6 times that of a fully upgraded tracking station - it can also be used to facilitate communication with weak transmitters in the outer solar system. But who would want to use this fine piece of space exploration hardware for such pedestrian tasks?

(*) Which might be to the benefit of the assistants depending on the professor in question.

P.S. Inspired by "KSC ‘Chessboard’ ground relay" from TheFlyingKerman, and real life radio telescopes like the VLA and others that I worked on.

Edited January 8, 2020 by AHHans
Added P.S.

[AHHans]

Today in the showroom we have another piece of fascinating space hardware from the AHTech Industries labs, the:

GeeMaster 2000

This fascinating space station includes a precision centrifuge optimized to separate money from thrill-seeking tourists' wallets. It is the modern solution to the problem of fulfilling high-gee adventure contracts from tourists that want to pass out while in orbit (or on suborbital trajectories). Generating high accelerations with engine thrust means not only that you have to bring massive amounts of engine power into orbit together with the fuel to run the engines, but also that you only have a few seconds before you have reached escape velocity and are no longer "in orbit".

The centrifuge section of the GeeMaster 2000 includes two one-person passenger cabins. While not in use these cabins are securely docked to the main body of the station, which allows for secure storage and enables safe transfer of tourist passengers to the cabins. For centrifuge operation the cabins can be decoupled from the main body, which allows the occupant to experience the full force of the centrifugal  acceleration. Using only easily-replenished electricity to generate the acceleration for the tourists, this craft can stay in space and be reused over and over again to extract money from a large number of tourists.(*)

If the main body of the craft is aligned along the prograde/retrograde axis, then passenger cabins will typically  remain on an orbital trajectory for the full circle of the centrifuge motion. If the main body is aligned along the normal or radial axis of the orbit, then for part of the circle the passenger cabins will move retrograde relative to the main body. If this is done in LKO then the cabins will be in a suborbital trajectory during that time, allowing the extraction of money from tourists that prefer suborbital trajectories.

(*) Suitable passenger shuttles are sold separately. The risk of pilot complaints about doing "boring shuttle missions over and over" are outside the responsibility of AHTech Industries.

 

Edited February 5, 2020 by AHHans