The Kerbal-ladder engine. The lightest Eve ascent vehicle

[fulgur]

One of the things I discovered when testing my own ladder drive was that if you make it the right size, the Kerbal will constantly hit his head without [W] being held and so you can switch to the probe and make a controlled ascent with a gravity turn and everything.

[Tw1]

Here are those craft files: 

Ladder Powered spacecraft

Here for anyone to take for a ride, and/or verify everything here. 

 

17 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

It’s amazing that this exploit hasn’t been patched out yet!

Now you’ve got me wondering if the Breaking Ground robotic parts have any extensions into the kraken’s realm that could be used to build a reactionless drive...

Have you seen  @dnbattley's   Battery-less movement thread? They've got the latest in Kraken-Drives, and some cool experiments mixing the robotic parts with the small scanners.

I love this sort of glitch, it's the sort that brings out inventiveness and creativity,  and kinds of engineering specific to video games. It's not that useful if you aren't really patient,  I hear people still use it for gliders though.  I hope the devs continue to overlook it. 

15 hours ago, fulgur said:

One of the things I discovered when testing my own ladder drive was that if you make it the right size, the Kerbal will constantly hit his head without [W] being held and so you can switch to the probe and make a controlled ascent with a gravity turn and everything.

That's interesting. This gives evidence to the theory this works more like a kraken drive (part clip)  drive than just force from moving along a ladder. How much acceleration where you getting for about how much mass? 

I am pretty certain the force from a kerbal plays a role, and I've used that to move things in water - a kerbal walking was used to push my Apollo capsule close to my boat in my Apollo reenactment. But the exact nature of this, and its relationship to kraken drives and the FTL egg remains uncertain. 

 

Edited August 4, 2019 by Tw1

[SlinkyMcman]

12 hours ago, Tw1 said:

Aerocapture at Eve, the engines tucked in behind the shield. 

This is such a great idea I had to comment on what a great idea this is.

[Tw1]

  I decided to science it up. Let's get us some data on how much thrust one kerbal makes, and what the interaction between kerbal and part is like. 
I teleported the Eve ascension vehicle to a high orbit, and measured the acceleration using graphotron. At first, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the results.

You can clearly see the wiggles as the kerbal's heat pushes against the frame. Here's that zoomed in.  Note it lessens, but does not fall to zero.

Vessel mass 139kg + kerbal mass 94 kg = total mass 233kg

According the data, it was around 20m/s/s on average, so

F = ma

About 4660  Newtons of force per kerbal? 

Science theory needs experiment to back it up, so 

That's really close, especially considering that I had an extra kilo on this test rig.
This was the last after a series of slightly frustrating experiments, which got me to double check my numbers a few times. 


There we go. A kerbal on the ladder makes aprox 4.66 kN of thrust. 

The raw data is here.  I used a time interval of 0.05 seconds per data point. 

That's far to much force to just move a kerbal along a ladder. I'm still not convinced it's K-drive like clipping, but it could be. I'm curious about what the strength of a kerbals grip on a ladder is. My current hypothesis is that this is the force a kerbal can withstand on a ladder before slipping.

Edited August 5, 2019 by Tw1

[greenTurtle1134]

I know what we're going to call these things: Leiterschiffe

German for either "Ladder ships" or "Head ships" both of which work.