The Peacemaker - A Practical Lifter Design - 1000 ton payload

[Redshift OTF]

OK, here is a general purpose lifter that can get a 1000 ton payload into LKO using the new SLS parts.

The top part is just a generic 1000 ton payload to illustrate its capabilities. The lifter is below this.

Using my latest clustered engine design enables all the engines to be placed near the centre top of the lifter. This allows extended fuel tanks to hang down from the side eliminating the possibility of radial detachments hitting the engines, allows extendibility and also allows multiple SAS modules to be placed on the end of the lifter where they are most effective. This should eliminate the need to use more SAS modules or RCS tanks on the payload which would be wasted after separation from the lifter.

This design has a relatively low part count considering the payload it is lifting, (667 - mostly struts), minimal staging and fuel lines and has very high TWR ratio compared to other lifters so you don't have to wait forever to get your objects into orbit. Starting TWR = 2.27 and rises to over 10 at the end of the orbital burn. Total mass with max payload is aprox 6532 tons.

First stage dropping. The second stage doesn't drop until the insertion burn at an apoapsis of 100km which means the SAS units are there all the way up to turn the lifter.

A shot of the engines between the secondary tanks. You will probably need to strut your payload to the lifter to prevent wobble but there is plenty of space on the engine nacelles for this.

The standard gravity turn. The high TWR ratio really starts to kick in here.

Second stage fuel tanks dropped.

Final stage burning.

Made it!

If you want to use it for your own payloads I would recommend detaching the lifter just below the stack decoupler that connects to the payload I provided, deleting my payload, selecting a new large decoupler as the root part, attach the lifter the bottom of that and saving it as a subassembly.

Please note! I tend to use MechJeb to launch these and due to the high TWR it engages Limit to Terminal Velocity until around 16km. If you don't use MechJeb you may want to go easy on the throttle to ensure you don't run out of DeltaV. If this is a problem it should be a trivial matter to add another set of fuel tanks to the ends of the lifter to give yourself a safety margin, (it will easily take more weight).

I hope this is of use to anyone. I have no idea why anyone would want to lift 1000 tons but hey ho. I would be interested in knowing what people think of the design concept as I don't think this was possible in 0.23 due to the fact that mainsail weren't really easy to cluster together like the newer engines.

Download craft file.

[quasarrgames]

Wow...

You REALLY clipped them engines up in there!

[Jeb Cubed]

Looooots of engines, but still good lifting power. To be honest a thousand ton lifter isn't practical, over 6000 tons of fuel would be a pain to pump in... But this is ksp and that is awesome.

[The Destroyer]

Ummm...

Wow.

[Supersaian117]

I think I almost peed myself.

Seeing as i'm a noob, I can't imagine me needing a rocket like this, but this is a pretty nice rocket, so I might just give it a try.

[Redshift OTF]

Looooots of engines, but still good lifting power. To be honest a thousand ton lifter isn't practical, over 6000 tons of fuel would be a pain to pump in... But this is ksp and that is awesome.

The engine stage gets released when orbit is reached leaving whatever payload you lift.

[Keymaster89]

Mother of clipping! O.O

[Iguas]

Have you got this craft for 1.4.2 ? i really need this ! thank you !

[Snark]

5 hours ago, iguas said:

Have you got this craft for 1.4.2 ? i really need this ! thank you !

Hi, and welcome to the forums! 

It's worth noting that this thread is ancient-- over 4 years old.  The craft in question would likely have issues in current KSP, since this craft is so old that it pre-dates the radically changed aerodynamic model that arrived with KSP 1.0.

For example, all those flat front ends of tanks would cause huge amounts of drag, in the new model.  Depending on design, it's also entirely possible that it might not be aerodynamically stable, i.e. if you tried to launch it in current KSP, it might just start flipping over.

If you need a super-heavy lifter, my suggestion would be to find something recent, i.e. not from four years ago like this one.  Anything that predates the April 2015 release of KSP 1.0 is highly likely to have problems.  Reviving an ancient thread like this is unlikely to be productive. 

 

[Iguas]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Hi, and welcome to the forums! 

It's worth noting that this thread is ancient-- over 4 years old.  The craft in question would likely have issues in current KSP, since this craft is so old that it pre-dates the radically changed aerodynamic model that arrived with KSP 1.0.

For example, all those flat front ends of tanks would cause huge amounts of drag, in the new model.  Depending on design, it's also entirely possible that it might not be aerodynamically stable, i.e. if you tried to launch it in current KSP, it might just start flipping over.

If you need a super-heavy lifter, my suggestion would be to find something recent, i.e. not from four years ago like this one.  Anything that predates the April 2015 release of KSP 1.0 is highly likely to have problems.  Reviving an ancient thread like this is unlikely to be productive. 

 

I found the lifter of my dream, you must be right  i forgot about that major change ^^, sorry for reviving that old thing, byebye <3