[WIP][STOCK][TUTORIAL] How to rocket! (and helpful tips)

[frash23]

-= How to space! =-

- A tutorial by Jacob

Unoriginal name aside, this is a tutorial assembled by all my experience so far. This tutorial might be a bit heavy on images, so DEAL WITH IT

This tutorial will (hopefully) take you to the moon and back using stock parts. (I am using linux v.0.20.2.0 in this tutorial. I might update it, i dunno.)

As you probably can see, this tutorial is put up in chapters, so grab a snack, sit back, and get ready to be educated about rockets and stuff.

REMEMBER: EVERYTHING I AM DOING IS WITH STOCK PARTS. I HAVE A LOT OF MODS, BUT ALL OF THIS IS STOCK!

Chapter 1: Building the rocket

To me, this is usually the hard part :I

Building a good launch stage, orbiter stage, docking stage or whatever it is is usually hard for me. I don't suck at building rockets, but it's still hard.

Optimizing Delta V

If you are having problems with your ship whilst flying it, whether it is spinning, uncontrollable, out of power or something else, it is most likely something that could be fixed in the VAB.

A very important thing to pay attention to whilst building your ship, is the DeltaV (here as referred to as ÃŽâ€v). I'm not all fancy with this, but as far as i understand, ÃŽâ€v is the amount of velocity your spaceship can change from its current position (usually in m/s). I'm not going to go into detail about the equation, but it is about your total mass, dry mass and your engine(s) ISP. The higher your engines ISP is, the better. The easiest way to increase ÃŽâ€v, is usually by lowering your dry mass as much as possible. This means lots of decouplers, and cleaning of unneccesary stuff and even changing part sizes. Here is an example of a standard rocket and a ÃŽâ€v optimized:

The unoptimized rocket got me 48k meters up. The second got me 400k meters up - quite something, as i didn't change much! (thrusting directly up all the time with both.)

(according to

this

post, nosecones are pointless. Correct me if it is changed.)

Now that you've learned about optmizing your rocket, lets move on to the next part!

Making a rocket capable of (x)

Alright, we got our ÃŽâ€v sorted out, what now?

Building a rocket capable of doing something of course!

In this tutorial, we will be going to the mun and back - because minmus is too easy, and getting out of the kerbin system would be too hard and boring for a beginner.

I have had some problems with my lifts lately, so if you know you can make yours better, you are very welcome (submit yours if you want).

We have a couple of things to do. Let me put them in a list:

• Making a capsule capable of landing safely back on kerbin.
  
  
• Making a mun lift stage.
  
  
• A mun landing stage.
  
  
• Mun orbiting stage.
  
  
• Kerbin orbiter stage.
  
  
• Kerbin lift.
  
  

It may seem backwards, but we don't want to start with the initial lift, do we?

First things first, we need to make our kerbals land safely on the ground. Here's my favourite way of building

capsule

s:

The low-drag parachute on top is to slow us down if we come flying against kerbin with a too high speed, so the other parachutes don't cut off.

Thereafter we can deploy the radial parachutes at a reasonable speed.

Next, here is how i build my

mun lift

and

mun landing

stages:

Actually, the nuclear engines are used in some of the

mun orbiting

stage as well.

For my

kerbin orbiting

stage, i use the tri-coupler to put three nuclear engines on one big tank:

This stage is more powerful than it looks as long as you use it correctly!

Here is what i made for a

kerbin lift

. It isn't as good as i wanted it to be, but it successfully gets us into kerbin orbit (by the help of the kerbin orbiter stage):

Green lines mean "stage <=> decoupler"

Let me quickly explain how i used asparagus here:

There are four decouplers with fual tanks and engines on them. Every second fuel tank has a fuel pipe going into the one right to them. The stage fires all 4 rockets. This means that all four rockets will first be draining the two fuel tanks with the fuel pipes first. When they are empty, you are supposed to launch the next stage, and throw them off. Then you have two sets of fuel tanks and engines left, all full.

It's not completely asparagus staging, as there should be going fuel pipes from the last two into the middle, and the middle should be firing too, but it is close enough in my opinion.

That's all for chapter 1! I will first be writing chapter 2 tomorrow, as it is 2 AM right now. See ya tomorrow!

For anybody interested, here is the .craft:

Tutorial vehicle.craft

Images of landing on mun and kerbin (for proof (kinda)).

Album

Have fun making successful missions!

Edited June 15, 2013 by frash23

[Henri von Braun]

Nice Tutorials. I Like the idea of dubbing communotrons as junk.

[frash23]

Nice Tutorials. I Like the idea of dubbing communotrons as junk.

I use them myself sometimes, but i've seen a lot of people use more than 4, and i just don't understand why.

One big and one small is what i usually use on my explorer probes. It's also more just to make the reader understand that putting unneccesary thins on your rocket is going to affect its performance.

[Naten]

Communotrons are defined "PhysicsSignificance = 1" in their part.cfg file. They will not affect anything on the ship, they just send science back home. Same thing with ladders, landing gear (NOT LANDING LEGS) and cubic octo struts. They don't provide any mass, even if their Mass is shown to be a number greater than zero, they still are weightless. (If you divide by zero on a computer's API, it gets the whole NaN (not a number) problem, so SQUAD made the "massless" parts appear to have "mass".) in summary, the Communotron dish(es), like many other parts, is essentially "mass-free." Not junk.

The small ASAS is more massive than the large ASAS. Large ASAS mass is 0.2, while small ASAS mass is 0.5. 0.2 < 0.5. About 0.3 metric tons of weight are added to the ship when you switch out the large ASAS for a small one.

Asparagus staging is more efficient, but in real life, it would be very very drag-inducing, like putting a flat plate that's 10 sq. meters big on top of the rocket bad. In KSP, the sucky drag model allows you to do this, but to me it's exremely cheaty. You can lift 90 tons into orbit with one of those darn things.

Other than that, nice tutorial.

[Pecan]

...Asparagus staging is more efficient, but in real life, it would be very very drag-inducing, like putting a flat plate that's 10 sq. meters big on top of the rocket bad. In KSP, the sucky drag model allows you to do this, but to me it's exremely cheaty. You can lift 90 tons into orbit with one of those darn things....

Many people lift hundreds of tonnes to orbit without using asparagus staging but there is nothing more drag-inducing about that strategy than anything else that uses side-boosters - ie; radial, parallel or onion staging. Unless you are committed to a single-stack, serial-staging strategy you may as well use asparagus - it's only the fuel-lines that are different, after all.

By the way - did you post this to update the thread or just say 'happy birthday' to it?

[Justin Kerbice]

Very good job ! Thanks.

Have you considered creating scenario for the game ?

Doh ! didn't check the date ! Old and dead it seems... too bad.

Edited June 15, 2014 by Justin Kerbice

[sal_vager]

Yeah this is really old guys, but it's a tutorial and they are nearly always still useful

[SRV Ron]

For the lander, you can ditch an excess 8 tons by using LV-909 in place of the heavy nukes. Their lower efficiency will be more then offset by the elimination of all of that weight. Likewise, the lander legs can then be placed on the decent rocket tanks for better stability to be later ejected upon ascent. The smaller SAS is not needed as the three Kerbal pod has more then enough control.

Don't forget solar panels.

The design as posted will probably make orbit much easier minus the 8 tons of nukes on the lander.

You might want to test an orange tank and Skipper in place of the three nukes on the orbiter stage.

Nukes are good for long interplanetary burns due to their almost double efficiency. Otherwise, they are excess dead weight for general use such as in landers and for placing ships into orbit.

The real test of any design is to fly them and compare their performance. Then' tweak the design to see what can be improved.

Edited June 15, 2014 by SRV Ron