Stock Space Shuttle

Yukon0009 · March 28, 2021

Thought this build deserved a thread of its own. This project started out as a side project when I was making my Saturn V, with a simple question: could I build an MK3-sized shuttle without using MK3 parts? This resulted in the following shuttle build.

Spoiler

But right after I finished building that shuttle, the flags got released in the KSP update, so I tried replacing some of the parts in that shuttle with flags that could better emulate the texture of the real shuttle. But then I realized it would look very jarring if some of it was flags and some of it just regular KSP flags, so I decided, why not make the entire thing out of flags?

Contrary to what you might think, building the shape of the shuttle was the easy part. Getting it to fly, was most definitely not.

I thought the flags were physicsless. They were not. Every single time I tried to do a drop test from orbit, the shuttle would spin out of control. Every. Single. Time. I could not for the love of me figure out which part in particular was causing the problems, which pretty much stalled out the process of building. I ended up rebuilding it from scratch in an effort to figure out just what the %$#! was wrong with it, as well as to try and lower the part count (orbiter went from 1100 parts to 900). Eventually, after on and off months of testing, I finally managed to figure out how to fly it without losing control.

After many hours of losing my sanity at sub 10 fps, I present to you the best stock shuttle replica I can build.

Flight instructions, custom flag downloads and such are on the KerbalX page.

KERBALX DOWNLOAD

Fancy pics:

Spoiler