Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"

[Canopus]

Radially mounted Orion engines! I see no need for that but its still awesome:D

[czokletmuss]

DONE!

A lot of pics but this is a test so I guess it's okay:

Leaving the atmosphere.

3min into the flight.

200 nukes used and on course (50km periapsis).

After some braking (minus 10.000 m/s) I am approaching periapsis.

How do you return from Mun? Just point the Orion to Kerbin and press Z - I stopped and accelerated to 3600 m/s in 1 minute (this is more than 5000 delta-v in 60seconds!)

Accelerating (!)

25.000 m/s is enough I guess.

Setting course to aerobraking.

EXTREME AEROBRAKING. 23000 m/s in 9 seconds!

I tried to use one bomb to stop but even with c.120m/s this one bomb gave me c.200m/s more than I needed and sent me up.

Finally stopping on the ground! Pod broke off the ship, forgot parachutes -> collision

My record.

36m28s to Mun and back - and still 16% nukes left!

It could be much faster than that but I wanted to set the periapsis low and have some time to take pics and set the nodes.

Conclusion: once you go Orion, you never go back. What's the point of any other engines when you have THIS?

Edited May 26, 2013 by czokletmuss

[Mekan1k]

So.. Any progress on figuring out how to slave the animation and firing to the throttle?

[nyrath]

Also, for those of you who wondering: Yes, it's possible to have radially-mounted stages. You just need to finagle things a bit in the VAB...and probably use the Editor Tools mod to get it all to fit. Works fine, though!

Great Galloping Galaxies!! That's terrifying!

If you ever had a burning need to put an intact city block into orbit, Hremsfield has you covered.

Sweet with magazine stacks i can now attach RCS or 3m SAS modules. Im assuming that with the addition of magazines the "ammo" count goes up?

Yes, ammo count goes up. Currently that does not work, but it will soon.

Each magazine has 60 nukes. I'm also going to have magazines for 1 kiloton/2,000 kiloNewton, 1kt/3,500kN, and 5kt/80,000kN bombs. Naturally the individual bomb mass goes up with the size, as does the total mass of the magazine. I will also add a 15kt/400,000kN magazine if I can ever find accurate figures on the bomb mass.

The idea is to allow the user to customize the magazine array to fit the mission, instead of being stuck with the monolithic package you have now.

Right now I wrestling with how to handle it if some person adds magazines of different sizes, and if somebody pushing the limit adds multiple Orion engines. Probably needs an entire pop up GUI window.

So.. Any progress on figuring out how to slave the animation and firing to the throttle?

It's on my big list of things to do in Bugzilla.

[nyrath]

DONE!

36m28s to Mun and back - and still 16% nukes left!

It could be much faster than that but I wanted to set the periapsis low and have some time to take pics and set the nodes.

Conclusion: once you go Orion, you never go back. What's the point of any other engines when you have THIS?

Yes, in other words it breaks the game. Blasted thing is a Torchship.

I will have to set the cost of these items pretty high, even though currently that has no effect.

Your mission and screencaps are awesome, though.

The thing is, we could have this in real life, if we could find a way to deal with the radiation and that pesky nuclear test-ban treaty. Yes the radiation is a problem, but this thing could send a manned mission to Saturn.

Edited May 26, 2013 by nyrath

[czokletmuss]

Thanks!

I think radiation is a smaller problem. As you wrote on your site, every powerful engine is in fact a weapon. If it will be possible to put nukes on orbit - well, we all know what EMP is. Of course Orion pellets aren't big enough to do a lot of damage this way (are they?) but let's say India or China or USA want a really big Orion. Having this monstrosity up in the sky will pose a serious threat (even if we are past the cold war MAD we have to consider accident or human stupidity). Probably we should keep all the Orions on the lunar orbit, just in case

Besides, your Orion can be easily accelerated to more than 40.000 m/s. I think the weight of the engine, bombs and bomb storage should be increased, it will have a bigger impact than price (until we have a career mode at least). I have a very small payload (5t?) but still...

Edited May 26, 2013 by czokletmuss

[Leonov]

5t is barely a challenge for the monster of a craft.

Try taking a 125t Payload to Dres and back.

Give the modder some time, He/she is making this mod out of the kindness of his/her heart.

I am sure that he is doing all he/she can too clear up his probably massive list of things to do/finish/complete.

Edited May 26, 2013 by Leonov

[Mekan1k]

This engine designs perfectly into John's Law.

"Any really cool engine or vehicle counts as a WMD"

[czokletmuss]

5t is barely a challenge for the monster of a craft.

Try taking a 125t Payload to Dres and back.

Give the modder some time, He/she is making this mod out of the kindness of his/her heart.

I am sure that he is doing all he/she can too clear up his probably massive list of things to do/finish/complete.

It was a speed challenge, though you don't need more than 10-15t lander to land and take off from most of the celestial bodies.

I know, I'm trying to be helpful by giving some feedback. One who creates webpage as great as Atomic Rockets deserves all the appreciation there is, not to mention this very succesful Orion implementation into the KSP. So chillout

[nyrath]

Besides, your Orion can be easily accelerated to more than 40.000 m/s. I think the weight of the engine, bombs and bomb storage should be increased, it will have a bigger impact than price (until we have a career mode at least). I have a very small payload (5t?) but still...

Oh, that's easy. The weight of the bombs and bomb storage is as per the original USAF Orion study. But the engine should be 91 tons. You can try changing that yourself, in the USAFOrionEngine folder, make a copy of the part.cfg file. Then edit the part.cfg file, changing the line mass = 2 into mass = 91 or whatever value works best.

[Fyrem]

btw: when pushing a ship that tops over 1000 tons (due to a Full Orbital Construction Warehouse) each bomb results in a Dv change of just about 50Dv...

not bad at all.

[nyrath]

Well, here are the magazines. Maybe the writing on them is a bit too garish and large...

Listed on the side is the bomb yield and megaNewtons of thrust of each of the nuclear pulse units contained therein.

[Leonov]

I took a couple of snapshots of my Dres Rescue Craft, You can see them here.

Looks like good progress. Making them color coded on an "order of intensity" could be better than writing on them.

[nyrath]

I took a couple of snapshots of my Dres Rescue Craft, You can see them here.

Looks like good progress. Making them color coded on an "order of intensity" could be better than writing on them.

Wow! That a real rescue craft! Look at that monster.

I tried writing on the magazines with color coded text, but it wound up looking a little too psychedelic 1960's Yellow Submarine, and less military. I've already gotten a lot of flak because the textures on the rest of the Orion are not enough like the textures on the stock Kerbal parts. Of course I include information in the extra file of the mod to allow one to change the textures.

[Fyrem]

I think he meant just use the color on the Radiation symbol, like you already have, and DROP the text completely. put the Kiloton information in the Description of the part in the VAB.

[nyrath]

I think he meant just use the color on the Radiation symbol, like you already have, and DROP the text completely. put the Kiloton information in the Description of the part in the VAB.

Yes, I can do that. Have to be careful to make the blue different enough from the green so they are not confused. The kiloton description is already in the VAB catalog.

Phooey. I tried using the 400,000 kN bombs. Since each magazine had a mass of 180 tons, first it was just too heavy for the support struts to hold it, fell down go boom.

Added more struts. Blasted thing shook itself apart, with the magazines dancing like titanic poker chips. I initiated a launch and it just blew into smithereens.

So I tried the 80,000 kN bombs, with a cockpit - large advanced SAS - engine stack. I guess the coupling with the SAS is a little weak. One bomb and the cockpit shot off the end of the rocket like a champagne cork. But one bomb had tossed everything halfway to orbit. Deprived of the cockpit, the engine will no longer accept Z key commands. So both cockpit and engine just plummeted to earth.

Next I tried just a cockpit-engine with no SAS. Cockpit stayed on, but of course the rocket quickly started to tumble. By only firing when the plate was aimed at Kerbal, I managed to get almost to orbital altitude before the bombs ran out (currently my code is only smart enough to suck bombs from one magazine, only 60 bombs).

I'll have to try using an SAS tied down with lots of struts...

[Leonov]

I think he meant just use the color on the Radiation symbol, like you already have, and DROP the text completely. put the Kiloton information in the Description of the part in the VAB.

Yes, what he/she said.

The rescue craft.

Its got enough fuel to go anywhere.

I even made the Rescue craft re-attachable with the aid of the New docking-port sr. Just realised that if i un-dock the rescue craft, trying to use the orion drive could get messy. Oh well, plenty of fuel for a return trip form the ship itself, dont need to send a rescue ship for the rescue ship.

Could you make two attachment nodes. one node attaches to the central column of the feed tube and the secoond node that stacks. That could fix one problem, might crate some more along the way.

Edited May 27, 2013 by Leonov

[Hremsfeld]

Made a craft with just a cockpit, ASAS, and the four science instruments and a Telemachus link on a structural fuselage. The g-force over time graph is particularly amusing. Pictured: Initial ascent, gravity turn and briefly coasting while I re-orient, and raising apoaposis. Not pictured is the circularization, because the graph got too horizontally scrunched together.

The Velocity-over-time one's pretty interesting, too. Pictured: Vertical ascent, coasting to apoapsis, "circularization," and drifting around for a little while.

Edited May 27, 2013 by Hremsfeld
Explanations, the velocity graph, and the link to Telemachus itself.

[czokletmuss]

Wow. The Kerbals are a pulp after such treatment with 15-20G.

[nyrath]

The rescue craft.

Its got enough fuel to go anywhere.

I even made the Rescue craft re-attachable with the aid of the New docking-port sr. Just realised that if i un-dock the rescue craft, trying to use the orion drive could get messy. Oh well, plenty of fuel for a return trip form the ship itself, dont need to send a rescue ship for the rescue ship.

Could you make two attachment nodes. one node attaches to the central column of the feed tube and the secoond node that stacks. That could fix one problem, might crate some more along the way.

Yes, that rescue craft can probably reach anybody in the entire Kerbal system.

Ummmm, I'm confused about the nodes you want. Where do you want them?

The engine that everybody has now is equipped with one node stack-top, at the top of the center spine.

The new engine (that I have not released yet until I get it working) has seven node stack-top points: one on top of the center spine, and six on the top of the engine for the magazine stacks.

The trouble with the magazine nodes is that they are inside the engine's collider (as seen here). I had to edit the magazine's part.cfg file to make them allow collision in order to let them use those stack nodes.

If those are the extra nodes you want, I'll have to figure out how to edit the engine's collider so it does not overlap the stacking area. Not much of a problem, but it will have to take its place in the bug list and wait its turn.

If you want to experiment, you can of course edit the USAFOrionEngine part.cfg yourself and add extra stack nodes yourself.

Made a craft with just a cockpit, ASAS, and the four science instruments and a Telemachus link on a structural fuselage. The g-force over time graph is particularly amusing. Pictured: Initial ascent, gravity turn and briefly coasting while I re-orient, and raising apoaposis. Not pictured is the circularization, because the graph got too horizontally scrunched together.

The Velocity-over-time one's pretty interesting, too. Pictured: Vertical ascent, coasting to apoapsis, "circularization," and drifting around for a little while.

Yow! Look at that g-force over time graph! Looks like a seismometer's chart of an earthquake. Great graphs!

Edited May 27, 2013 by nyrath

[Leonov]

Rough sketch Done. Fear my gimp skills. more of a lack thereof.

Maybe using these kind of nodes can stabilize the stack?

Just for reference.

Edited May 27, 2013 by Leonov

[Canopus]

Maybe using these kind of nodes can stabilize the stack?

I don't think multiple nodes can be connected at once.

[Leonov]

That boat part mod uses more than one node for attachement, it should be no different here. Then agian, i am no modder.

[nyrath]

Maybe using these kind of nodes can stabilize the stack?

No need to apologize for your GIMP skills, you made the diagram quite clear. Thanks!

I will look into it, but I fear that Canopus is correct.

What I will also do is take a peek at the Quantum Struts mod and see how they do it.

[Canopus]

Let me present to you the next mission with my updated Orion Ship. Target: Jool and its moons.

The new updated version of my Ship including 2 capsules and 2 landers with spare fuel:

Ludicrous Speed achieved:

Who needs Hohmann transfer orbits when you can go on Brachistochrone trajectories:

I'll keep you guys updated!

P.S. @nyrath could you give me your atomic rockets flag for some screenshots?