Escape Towers

[capi3101]

I usually ditch mine with the lighting of the second stage. At least that's the way I set it up with the Storax Anacostia 7 rocket (the treehugger Apollo-style Duna mission I've got in progress); with the Castle Romeo 7 (Munar Apollo-style), I forgot to ditch the thing entirely until I was in orbit...

All stock; just a decoupler, a modular girder adapter and twelve Sepratrons tied in with the Abort action group (the decoupler in the action group is the one holding the CM to the rocket; there's a second decoupler that will jettison the assembly from the stack). A second action group jettisons the tower post-abort and a third activates the descent chutes.

I have pictures of the system in action, come to think of it:

Damn good thing I put it on the Storax Anacostia - the second and third launch attempts suffered RUVD during the first stage and I'd have lost my three musketeers for sure without it.

[Tiron]

All stock; just a decoupler, a modular girder adapter and twelve Sepratrons tied in with the Abort action group (the decoupler in the action group is the one holding the CM to the rocket; there's a second decoupler that will jettison the assembly from the stack). A second action group jettisons the tower post-abort and a third activates the descent chutes.

I did one like that, with 16 sepatrons (was having a lot of problems with rogue SRBs on that design) right after we got action groups.

I'm not sure if I'm reading that right but it sounds like you've got a decoupler mounted between the clamp-o-tron and the modular girder adapter... which isn't strictly necessary. You can save a part and a tiny bit of weight in there, because clamp-o-trons, when attached directly to a non-clamp-o-tron part in the VAB, gain a 'decouple' option. So you can mount the modular girder directly to the nose COT and use some or all of the sepatrons to pull it clear.

If you've already fired them, well, I find it's generally not such an issue at that point, since you're no longer under power.

Edit: And when I said the occasional disconnected liquid stage made things 'hairier', which I mean is that it was the center stage that was broken, and it remained attached to the bottom of the attempted abort through sheer thrust and friction. It's not a catastrophic problem in a situation like that because there's no actual impact: The connection is broken, but the parts stay in contact continuously.

In that situation, you can still steer with torque, if in a bit of a wobbly way. As long as you're not in a high speed dive with the engine driving you down, the parachutes will pluck the pod right off the top when you hit 500m. The best way I've found to do that is to swing it back and forth, using the out-of-control engine to slow your descent while still having the pod facing upward . And If you're still going up instead of down you can always just wait for the fuel to run out.

Broken off outer-stack liquid stages tend to go straight up, and frequently relatively slowly(In contrast to the inward-curving, very very fast SRBs). If you've got a powered upper stage at this point the chances of an impact are low, and the chances of a FAST impact are very low.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Tiron