Attempting Titanus (New Horizons, 1.12.5)

[FTLparachute]

Ah, New Horizons.

An old mod for KSP, NH rearranged the stock system, moving bodies around and adding new ones to explore. However, the lack of any major updates past 1.3 left it in the dust against the more well known mods of today.

However, thanks to the work of several users (link here), a version of NH compatible with modern KSP is available. So today, I thought I'd use this opportunity to land on one of the mod's hardest bodies - Titanus.

What is New Horizons?

As mentioned, NH is a revamp of the stock solar system. Notable changes include:

• Interplanetary distances are now much greater
• Kerbin is now a moon of a gas giant, Sonnah
• Entire system in inclined to Kerbin's orbit, making transfer more complicated
• Several other new bodies, including:
• Ernus - vacuum planet with Eve's gravity, orbiting at an unhealthily close distance to the Sun
• Vanor - Furthest planet from The Sun. Moons include mini-Eve (Tidus) and high gravity dogtoy (Etal)
• Titanus - Subject of this mission. Super-Kerbin with 9 atm surface pressure, 2+ g surface gravity and 160km atmosphere.

Titanus orbits just past Jool in this mod, and has three moons, one of which happens to be Tylo. Despite a quirk of New Horizon planets having unrealisticly low entry heating, Titanus is the exact opposite - its atmosphere hits you like a brick wall the instant you drop below 160km.

Designing the lander

Although Titanus is a tough nut to crack, my solution was simple - recycle an old design of mine. Specifically, this abomination  v

About a year ago I had the bright idea to send a rocket to the 0-mark of Jool's atmosphere, using helicopter rotors to push the rocket. This mission was made more complicated by doing it on Console. I will not elaborate, you probably get the idea from just that.

Turns out, the basic design works very well for Titanus, and with a few modifications (more thrust, landing legs, fuel cells for rotors instead of 100+ RTGs) the Titanus mission was ready for launch.

As well as this, I gave myself the arbitrary restriction of only using stock parts. Technically my use of ReStock does invalidate this, but I am willing to do this for the sake of prettier rockets.

Launch 1 - Lander

The first rocket launch was the Titanus lander. The rocket's main feature is the oversized fairing to protect the blades. It was successfully taken to orbit by an SSTO. Yes, it is an SSTO. It certainly cannot fly well, but it is a single stage to orbit.

Launch 2 - Transfer

Yet another holdover from the Jool Mission of Abomination, this transfer stage is powered by 24 NERVs. It lacks RCS, however, which resulted in about 20 minutes of pushing the two modules together in orbit until the Sr. docking ports connected.

Launch 3 - Crew + Minor lander

The final launch used the only rocket I think was vaguely aesthetically pleasing. It carried up the lander for Titanus' new moons and the crew module, housing Jeb, Bob and Val. This docking was thankfully more succinct, as the reaction wheels aligned it better.

The rocket was now assembled.

Using the Astrogator mod (link here) I plotted my course to Titanus. Thankfully, a combination of the Oberth effect of Sonnah and little inclination made the transfer very cheap. However, what I did not expect was for my laptop to crash KSP several times until I relented on using any gravity assists to capture.

The capture around Titanus was uneventful, minus a small Kraken attack. Turns out, this craft isn't very stable (go figure) and nearly shook itself to bits. This was fixed with Autostrut.

The Descent

The descent to Titanus was terrible. Due to the setup of rotors and heat shields, the craft took 2 hours to fully reach Titanus' surface, leading to an entire session wasted when it fell over on a cliff. The wings did not contribute to this, as despite being behind the heat shields they burnt off after less than a minute. This unfortunate glitch meant that I had to regrettably uninstall ReStock for the remainder of the mission. Finally, a functional lander rested on the ground.

My penance for this was several attempts, each taking several hours, consisting of the rotors pushing the craft to about 60km before losing stability and falling back down to the surface. This was caused by me using SAS lock on Radial Out, and the resulting flip when the Navball switched from Surface to Orbit. Once this was finally diagnosed, the craft successfully reached the target altitude of 80km.

The Ascent

After I had squeezed as much altitude as possible from the rotors, the blades, fins and fuel cells were jettisoned and the Vector engines ignited. This phase of the launch gets the rocket on a trajectory out of Titanus' atmosphere as soon as possible - the 2nd stage needs as much clearance from the planet as it can.

This is because it is nuclear and has a TWR of only 0.38, and therefore cannot combat Titanus' surface gravity under about 3km/s of orbital velocity. However, it was doable. I had finally escaped Titanus.

The docking was rather boring - the lander still had 2km/s of fuel left and easily docked to the mothership. Jeb returned to Bob and Val and a course was set to Ete, Titanus' closest moon

The 'Victory'  Lap

Now I had been backstabbed by ReStock, another,  more annoying problem had emerged - my own incompetence. The lander was initially meant to so a surface return from Tylo, but I forgot to add the external tanks to make this possible. On top of that, I did not have enough patience to haul it to LTO and then attempt a landing, unaware of how doomed it may be. So, after using the remaining fuel of the Titanus lander, the Tylo lander pushed on to Ete.

Now Ete has it's own challenge - due to the proximity of Titanus, the SOI minus the radius of the moonlet is only 15km. This was overcome, and the lander safely touched down on the deep blue surface.

The lander then rendezvoused with the mothership, with it then being ditched in Ete orbit.

The 3rd moon is called Oree, and orbits retrograde around Titanus. The surface gravity was, however, only 0.02 g, so after a ballistic insertion the mothership made contact and the whole crew took a look at Titanus.

The Return

The return had its own share of problems, which became apparent after leaving Ete for Oree. Having been unimpressed with a recycled Jool mission conquering Titanus, New Horizons itself decided enough was enough and made several attempts to completely ruin the mission. This was displayed in phantom forces which pushed trajectories out of sync, the manuever nodes failing to cooperate and the planets themselves offsetting off their rails during timewarp. Thankfully, I had packed a slight excess (2500m/s) of fuel and after 10 years, the crew was home.

The Aftermath

Unfortunately, the surface sample was thrown out by RnD because it was a sandbox save. In summary, I enjoyed the mission, excluding the attempted sabotage by the game itself at the end. If anyone reading this has any mission ideas pls reply - I'm fairly new to KSP planet mods and would like to have a go at some other challenges. 

Thanks for reading.

 

Mods used - Better Time Warp, Texture Replacer (for kerbals), Astronomer's Visual Pack, Astrogator, Re-Entry Particle Effects Renewed, Restock, New Horizons (duh), Planetside (solar panels have funky texture and this is my best guess why).

Edited September 24 by FTLparachute
updated post

[FTLparachute]

oh dear i sent it unfinished.

[Vanamonde]

1 hour ago, FTLparachute said:

oh dear i sent it unfinished.

These things happen. Welcome to the forum. 

[MythicalHeFF]

I like this! The New Horizons pack has always been one of my favorites, even if it’s a little dated compared to a lot of other planet packs out today.

I also agree with the use of a rotor-powered craft… leaving Titanus on rocket propulsion alone sounds next to impossible. If I recall correctly, there is oxygen in its atmosphere, which allows for the use of jet engines. I remember trying to make some sort of stratolaunch contraption years ago with it, but never managed to successfully get it to the surface without burning up. Best of luck!

[FTLparachute]

On 9/18/2024 at 3:16 AM, MythicalHeFF said:

I like this! The New Horizons pack has always been one of my favorites, even if it’s a little dated compared to a lot of other planet packs out today.

Thx man. That Ernus video of yours a big inspiration for this mission. It is quite a nice planet pack, and playing around with it is good fun. The inclined orbits are quite tricky to deal with though.