Jules Verne's Voyage a la Lune in KSP

[Halsfury]

More than 100 years ago Jules Verne predicted a future in which man flew to and rounded the moon... In a smoothbore .500000 caliber conical bullet (named the Columbiad).

The Challenge is simple, since space guns are not in KSP, build a manned ship which uses thrust from solid motors only to round the moon on a free return trajectory, this is not impossible, just unlikely, I recall that there was a seperatron to orbit challenge, this is just one step further.

Allowed Parts List (Everything a late victorian rocketeer would have):

-All Decouplers

-All Solid motors including seperatrons

-no more than 1 additional reaction wheel system (SAS) apart from the capsule

-2 Z-100 battery packs (The smallest ones with the green light on them)

-All Parachutes

-Any Fins or Wings

Disallowed parts:

-Any Bipropellant fuel tanks

-Any Jetfuel tanks

-Any RCS Tanks

-Any batteries other than the ones above

-Any electricity production mechanism (solar panels or radioisotope generator)

*This naturally eliminates Rockets fuelled by Jet, Bipropellant, or RCS

Also of note is the electricity limitations, this means that you will have to turn off your batteries and coast without power, then transfer the electricity from the batteries to the capsule to restart the reaction wheels and regain control

[DJEN]

Hey, you need to prove that it is possible first, you know.

[Crater]

As an open thread in Gameplay Questions and Tutorials at the moment shows, you can't re-enable a battery if your command pod has now power, since that is considered a control function, and you need power to have control.

[Rhomphaia]

As an open thread in Gameplay Questions and Tutorials at the moment shows, you can't re-enable a battery if your command pod has now power, since that is considered a control function, and you need power to have control.

While you cannot re-enable a battery if a probe core has no power, you can if you have a manned pod. Also even if you have a probe, you can transfer charge from a disabled battery to the probe core when it is out of power to restore control.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Rhomphaia

[Radiokopf]

Well, no need to proof if possible. I took some design notes from Jules Verne.. so i hope you dont mind the docking ports. Its just for the looks

i uploaded just every pic i took so i hope you dont mind looking at the same thing twice

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I just wanted to figur out how long it would take to build such a thing and made Orbit on first try... just added another 16 Booster to the bottom and increased the top from 3 to 6. The Plan was to use sepratrons for fine tuning orbit/trajectory but for the free return i just decupeled the boosters like a real Kerbal

i would have tried to hit slingshot and dont use the M. node or make it land in one piece but this was supposed to be a quick try to get a feeling of what is the hard part... well, none found.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Radiokopf

[The Jedi Master]

Hey, you need to prove that it is possible first, you know.

(stupid 10 chars)

[Halsfury]

Hey, you need to prove that it is possible first, you know.

Clearly it is possible

Well, no need to proof if possible. I took some design notes from Jules Verne.. so i hope you dont mind the docking ports. Its just for the looks

Neat but totally unnecessary, I can't find any pictures on the internet but woodcuts from the book show a conical bullet like you put in a gun but a lot bigger (9ft diameter)

http://renepaul.net/collection_verne1/galerie.htm?terre_lune

This is a french site, but look at image 38 it shows the bullet itself, the image I could get up on the first post looks like a steam-train-bullet-thing which is just wrong, but that is really about the lack of understanding of the illustrator, not the quality of Jules Verne's science

The Columbiad bullet had a special mechanism also which would mitigate G forces by placing the occupants on a hydraulic piston which would be depressed at a consistent rate during acceleration out of the cannon so that the astronauts would not experience more than 10 Gs the whole time, image 42 shows a cross section with the piston at the bottom.

Image 45 shows blastoff

Also check out these animations

http://jeanpierrebouvet.blogspot.ca/search/label/animations

Go to the ones labelled Terre-Lune 1 & 2:

1 shows the craft as it moves through the gun, and animation 2 shows the mission profile with a moon landing even though in the book they only did a flyby

[sparty48]

Remind me how decimals work again...

Arn't a 0.5 caliber bullet, or a 0.5000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Caliber bullet kinda... the same thing?

[jwenting]

no, because anything floating point is only accurate to within its specified precision. That that's not generally mentioned doesn't change that, just means you can make no assumptions about precision.

Could be 0.5 +/- 10 for all we know.