The Icarus Project

[Bluegobln]

The goal is to make something that is highly compact and scales upward to the 100m to maybe even 200m scale. Is it possible with solid shield pieces? Can it be made relatively compact? There has to be a way.

[Tommygun]

Something more like this, but higher up on the rocket?

You then use a second section like your 16 meter shield for the middle area.

This one is about 100 meters wide. It's the Eyeglass Telescope.

Edited May 28, 2013 by Tommygun

[Bluegobln]

Oh god. That hurts my brain thinking about modeling it. Setting up the constraints scares me. I'd have to use IK to make it work for sure, I have no idea how I would animate that without it.

I'll think about it.

[Mekan1k]

That expanding shield/telescope... Looks complicated, but it has a series of simple parts, repeated in a pattern.

It should be possible.

[Sapphire]

The real Icarus I and II were built in orbit, right? Would it be possible to make one giant shield in pieces, then dock them? Give them special edges that lock specifically with other plates and are much stronger than normal linkages. Would that be possible?

They are from the newest version of RemoteTech:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/remotetech-3/

Much appreciated! Maybe I can yoink the models and configure them to work with Chatterer or something... Anyhoo, how goes your voyage to the sun? Any unexpected explosions or crazy sunburnt Kerbals yet?

[Bluegobln]

It's been a fun ride so far. I've hit some speed bumps along the way but seems to have worked out well.

Enjoy the teaser. I'll have it textured and released soon. I'll be using PNG's again so you can make your own textures if desired.

Notez:

- Yes, it's huge folded... 15 meters across and 7.5m tall, however... it is 45m unfolded, which is immense. I will probably release a miniature version that is much smaller. This was meant to work with my 16m shield to form an effective barrier.

- Yes, I cheated in the folding, but only because the minute details about how the panels are shaped to be able to fit together more easily aren't really that important.

- The pieces look simple, but I found out that precision is absolutely required. You cannot fudge it. I tried several sizes before realizing there was a sort of equilibrium of measurements required by the design.

- The completed PARTS will be released as: 1.) a solar shield with reflective surface, 2.) a lens piece with transparency which is what it was designed for. You can build your own "eyepiece" and fly it a kilometer away and pretend you're literally imaging a planet around another star.

[Tommygun]

Wow that was fast.

I'll need to upgrade Icky Russ 2 now.

[Sapphire]

That thing is awesome! And just in time for my own Icarus III that I'm currently building in orbit. Now, if only there was some kind of onboard computer that would keep ships aimed at the sun... when sun heat is added, imagine leaving your ship in orbit around the sun. Then you go do other things, and at this time, your ship is frozen on rails. Then you take control of it about half a solar orbit later, and it immediately explodes because its shield isn't facing the sun anymore. Might be a problem...

[mrrpamplemousse]

Mechjeb is what you looking for

[Sapphire]

Tommygun, I have a challenge mode for you! Don't return Icky Russ 2. Leave it in orbit around Kerbol, and rename it to Icky Russ 1. Then send a refitted Icky Russ 2 up to rescue them! Good luck with that.

Mechjeb is what you looking for

True enough, but I don't think Mechjeb can keep ships oriented when you're flying other ships, though. I was under the impression that they'd be put on rails upon changing craft.

[Bluegobln]

That's correct, you can't do much about craft you're not following. Fortunately I imagine even in a very low orbit it takes days, not hours, to orbit the sun. If we get to the point where we have realistic heat and cooling systems involved and you don't want to load your ship only to cause it to be destroyed because the shield is facing the wrong way, then you'll have to use orbital "windows" when the ship is facing correctly to make adjustments or do Kerbal Science*

*shooting things at the sun to see what happens.

[Tommygun]

Tommygun, I have a challenge mode for you! Don't return Icky Russ 2. Leave it in orbit around Kerbol, and rename it to Icky Russ 1. Then send a refitted Icky Russ 2 up to rescue them! Good luck with that.

True enough, but I don't think Mechjeb can keep ships oriented when you're flying other ships, though. I was under the impression that they'd be put on rails upon changing craft.

I may have to put it in orbit around Moho to follow the movie.

Actually my goal is to slowly reduce it's orbit to see how close you can orbit the Sun before you get sucked in.

It takes really massive amounts of delta V to maneuver in orbit too. I have to use the cheat codes to do this.

I was thinking the other day of the problems of maneuvering a real ship like this. You can't change the ship's facing to do a prograde or retrograde burn or the ship will burn up.

You need a large set of engines at the ship's side near it's center of gravity and not at the end where it is shown in the movie ship.

Although you could do the trip as an elliptical orbit and release the bomb at your closest approach, but you are locked in that orbit until you get far enough away to maneuver again.

As for leaving the ship for a while, I think in game terms, you can deal with this heat by needing the ship to be exposed to the Sun for few minutes before burning up.

This will give you time to turn the ship. Ether this or the game will need to remember your facing upon returning and I don't think the Devs would bother with that function.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to the ship and continue the mission.

....and Bill has gone missing again....

[Bluegobln]

I like the added logistical issues that arise with that. My solution will be to use a series of engines along the sides of the craft, like oversized RCS. Just enable/disable with control groups and its pretty easy. Though, if you mess up the CoM, which is very possible to do if constructed in orbit, well... yeah. I'd probably want to test things thoroughly before going near the sun.

[Bluegobln]

Ah, here we go.

GE-Solar Shields

Includes:

- GE-4500: 45m shield with a 2.5m base.

- GE-2250: Resized shield to 1.25m base, the unfolded diameter is about 23m

And of course included it in the main zip file as well.

For re-texturing you can use either the UV PNG file or the PSD file downloaded here.

On another note: I made the thing QUITE heavy lol... too much? What should it be? The same goes for my other parts.

[Sapphire]

Yes! Yes! It's out! Thank you!

I may have to put it in orbit around Moho to follow the movie.

You need a large set of engines at the ship's side near it's center of gravity and not at the end where it is shown in the movie ship.

Those were pretty much the things that popped into my head while watching the movie. Wouldn't the Icarus get ripped to pieces by having the engines at the rear of the spindly crew section? And why did they need to slingshot around Mercury? Surely that would send you at a high velocity into the sun, but all you need to do is get out of Earth's orbit then just burn retrograde until it pulls you straight in. But I'm not too good at this, so I might be thinking about it the wrong way. But then again, just a movie, right? Lots of great sci-fi movies had little problems like that.

I might have to rethink my design... even trying to dock the first two modules is a major lagstorm. And good luck with your stuff!

[Bluegobln]

I've come up with an idea for how to make a 200m shield (or hell, MUCH bigger if desired), have it be decently thick and high mass not just a flimsy cloth, and be able to fit it in a very small space.

- First a scaffolding is extended. This will form a "net" like shape similar to the final shield shape.

- Empty bags are unfolded and pulled out to "fill" the scaffolding net.

- A specialized mixture of material in grain form (sand basically) is pushed out into the bags through sleeves, filling them relatively tightly. The final shape is a relatively thin shield, probably 5-10cm thick.

- As heat builds the material in the shield melts together, and as it does thermal conductivity is increased and special cooling systems are turned on, dropping temperature in the shield again.

- As heat dissipates again the shield hardens. Bam, solid shield, 200m diameter, extremely compact form at launch.

What do you think?

Biggest problems:

- It's going to be HEAVY. But then, so would any solid shield material. This one might be theoretically made from lunar soil or something though, or harvested from an asteroid which would make it quite a bit simpler to launch this shield. This also would make for much more interesting and fun missions!

- Do the bags just get fried when the shield first heats up? They have to be able to keep it's shape through incredible amounts of heat. If we're using flexible bag material that can withstand that kind of heat... why fill it with sand at all? *ponders*

---

Edit: On another note, since we're basically doing it this way anyway, maybe some kind of concrete... lmao *duh* There are other ways to harden a grainy material. It could also use magnetic fields from planets to generate electricity to melt the material with more control, and be able to turn it off when the process is complete.

Edited May 29, 2013 by Bluegobln

[Sapphire]

I have no idea if it's possible to mod this, but maybe the shield could use resources to fill up completely? Say, the shield itself is really light, but it needs x units of sand to fully deploy it, and the sand tanks are very heavy so it takes several trips (or one very large rocket) to fill it, so those who don't want to build massive rockets can send it up in bits. Who knows, said sand might have to be mined in the first place to get it into the tanks.

[Bluegobln]

Precisely. But then that's getting into the realm of plugins and such so it's a bit out of my skill range. I'd love if someone decided to tackle it though!

[Sapphire]

Yep, this is awesome.

Redesigned the command/payload control module; removed some parts, added a few minor things, and obviously glued a big heat shield on the front. And I guess I don't really need the two large fuel tanks, so that narrows it down to habitation/science module and engineering/propulsion module. And I already have a spaceplane in orbit with Capa Kerman and the rest ready to hop on board at their leisure. I also modified the .part for the shields a little bit; I gave them both integrated thermometers.

[Bluegobln]

Thank you for testing. I didn't actually launch one lol *cackles maniacally*

I'm working on the telescope lens but I'm not sure how to do transparency. Apparently the game doesn't allow it, but I've seen parts that have it, so I'm like.. HUH!? Maybe they're using some trick with cutoff shaders? If nothing else I can "simulate" the lens with textures decently well. The lens is actually intended to use a kind of Fresnel design, which I can give the general effect of by using a few little texture tricks.

Eh, it will happen eventually. Even if I got it done, there's no way to use it. The telescope would be so powerful you'd be able to see an ant on a hill on Duna from Kerbin orbit (well not really but, it has incredible imaging ability apparently, like 100x the power of the Hubble).

[Mekan1k]

Ask Hooligan Labs ( http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/23774-0-20-Hooligan-Labs-Airships-Party-Starters-Shields-SQUIDs ) how to make transparency, or possibly Ravski (The creator of these: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/28273-0-19-M-M-M-%28Modular-Magnetic-Module%29-0-20 )

[Tommygun]

I thought with Gimp you can add a color or bucket fill, but just reduce its Opacity from 100% to something like 20%?

You basically get tinted glass.

[Tommygun]

Final Approach of the Icky Russ 2:

129 Million Meters

88 Million Meters

6 Million Meters

1327 Meters with a velocity of 63,513.4 m/s; final image received.

Last transmission:

From Bill Kerman; Are you an angel? Has the time come? I've been waiting so long......

Edited May 30, 2013 by Tommygun

[Sapphire]

Bleh... I've got the spaceplane up, the control module up, and the propulsion module up, but I can't send up the habitation module up until I can get my hands on a working DR rotatron... So until then, I've decided to at least try and simulate what humanity would have likely done in the events leading up to the first Icarus being launched. As in, send various probes to the inner planets, then build a miniature probe-sized Icarus and send it into the sun, which is what I'm doing now, I guess.

The hard part with using ions on these things is that (obviously) the heat shield is in the way, so you can't rely on solar panels. Which means RTG spam!

Edited May 30, 2013 by Sapphire

[Bluegobln]

Once you're closer to the sun the solar panels become incredibly powerful. Similarly, I imagine it shouldn't be difficult to extract power from the heat shield (though which method for doing so is a good question to ask). Because power is available once CLOSE to Kerbol, but not so much when further out, I think I will use nuclear rockets for the orbital phase and ions for the final adjustments when in close. This is also good because I can mount ions along the length of the ship at the CoM of each module, which should keep thrust well balanced once all the modules are connected.

Then there is the problem of alignment. Indeed, I've already been working on such a project, but it has just become relevant: Here.

It seems I should solve that problem before launching my primary Kerbol station lest having misaligned parts' engines screwing up my orbit.

Great pics.

Edit: So wait, that's a "probe" with a 16m shield? *cackle* Ah, just wait till I release the 100m and 200m shields. I've decided they're too big to be built anywhere except on the Mun, and launched from there. Besides, we can use the lunar soil for the main substance of the shield. Just have to send up water, or extract it from the Mun somehow.

Edited May 30, 2013 by Bluegobln