[1.12.X] Tantares - Stockalike Soyuz and MIR [16.1][28.05.2024][Mars Expedition WIP]

[SpaceFace545]

18 hours ago, septemberWaves said:

Interesting. I wasn't even aware of the existence of a current US plan for Mars. I was under the impression that they still have little more than an outline for returning to the Moon yet.

I doubt the plan ever coming to fruition but there is a shaky roadmap. The whole thing is about cutting costs the entire way and oddly spending as little time on the martian surface as possible.

[AmateurAstronaut1969]

On 7/15/2024 at 8:06 PM, SpaceFace545 said:

The current US plan is to land the crew in the pressurized rover which is then used as the habitat and have a separate ascent vehicle which was previously staged. It's interesting how people design their architectures.

Eh they're not really plans remember. They're just studies, like the many many space station studies from 1984 all the way up to 1993 when the station program/ISS started to become real and less on paper. This is the same thing. Regular studies exploring different architechures help flesh out a plan and find the good options. Like the newest plans are starting to integrate commercial stuff, in the form of DST tank fuellings for the chemical systems. At the end of the day, the surface stuff is VERY notional, wheras the DST stuff is quite possibly what we may see, particularly the ChemNEP system as it's favourable and seems to be what they're focusing on

[Beale]

Gonna get real weird with it.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 17 by Beale

[septemberWaves]

I'm liking the visual style of this Mars infrastructure. It really captures what I love about Soviet spacecraft designs, they have an extremely unique aesthetic and character.

[SpaceFace545]

The best part about this is that we will need an Energia cargo carrier. Or one can hope...

[Beale]

18 hours ago, SpaceFace545 said:

The best part about this is that we will need an Energia cargo carrier. Or one can hope...

thinking about it

[Beale]

Here we gooo

[septemberWaves]

Impressive! Intriguing! In...cinerated by re-entry plasma!

 

_{Lets hope it's not the last one.}

[NateDaBeast]

I Tantares

Edited July 20 by NateDaBeast

[Beale]

2 hours ago, NateDaBeast said:

I Tantares

Tidy!

 

 

https://github.com/Tantares/Tantares

First draft of Mek parts, just the mars orbital core right now, the "MOK".
read about it here:
https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/1987-nuclear-mars-plans-part-2?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

You can kind of throw something together with NF parts right now, so at least the "proof of concept" works, will be working on the engines next.

 

Edited July 20 by Beale

[GoldForest]

Just realized... we could probably kitbash Mir-2 from ETS with these new parts.

[septemberWaves]

1 hour ago, Beale said:

I did wonder how it was intended to move. I was starting to get the suspicion it might be like this. It's extremely unique.

[SpaceFace545]

@Beale Will the extendable radiators and nuclear reactors use system heat?

[Beale]

3 hours ago, SpaceFace545 said:

@Beale Will the extendable radiators and nuclear reactors use system heat?

The very rough plan right now is yeah - not as a hard dependency, but as a very strongly recommended piece of this.

Same goes for the giant telescopic radiators / nuclear-reactor-get away-from-the-crew-ers, they will require BG robotics, but if you don't have BG they will just not show up.

The intention is also that the MPD thruster banks will follow NF fairly closely.

Moving onto the FGB section now, we have the Xenon tank.

[GoldForest]

@Beale I remember you saying either you would like to do Mir-2 or you were going to do Mir-2. The real one, not ETS one. Is that still on the table? Do you still plan to do it?

[Beale]

38 minutes ago, GoldForest said:

@Beale I remember you saying either you would like to do Mir-2 or you were going to do Mir-2. The real one, not ETS one. Is that still on the table? Do you still plan to do it?

It's not something I really have in the pipeline. Broadly speaking most of the things you'd need to make Mir-2 are already in the mod, in some form or another.  The only outliers are the electrical systems (which, admittedly are pretty big).

As I've said before, the door is always open for anybody who can model, texture, and wants to join a team, we can do great things.

[GoldForest]

2 minutes ago, Beale said:

It's not something I really have in the pipeline. Broadly speaking most of the things you'd need to make Mir-2 are already in the mod, in some form or another.  The only outliers are the electrical systems (which, admittedly are pretty big).

As I've said before, the door is always open for anybody who can model, texture, and wants to join a team, we can do great things.

And the big football field sized dish arrays. 

[ThatGust]

2 hours ago, GoldForest said:

And the big football field sized dish arrays. 

I always wondered why they dropped this concept, solar gas turbines sound like a good alternative to solar panels.

2 hours ago, Beale said:

It's not something I really have in the pipeline. Broadly speaking most of the things you'd need to make Mir-2 are already in the mod, in some form or another.

Yeah, it isn't that difficult to recreate Mir-2 from what we have, I managed to make a pretty good recreation of the 1987 study (The big one), I might share screenshots later

[GoldForest]

2 minutes ago, ThatGust said:

I always wondered why they dropped this concept, solar gas turbines sound like a good alternative to solar panels.

Yeah, it isn't that difficult to recreate Mir-2 from what we have, I managed to make a pretty good recreation of the 1987 study (The big one), I might share screenshots later

Oh right, they're the 'other' kind of solar power. 

As to why they stopped, probably hard to make it work in zero-g. On Earth, you can have the liquid fall using gravity, so you don't have to have multiple pumps running liquid both up and down the heating tower. In space you would need pumps to run the full loop. 

Another reason would probably be boil off. The gas would need to be topped off every few months via spacecraft supply, which wouldn't be hard mind you, just expensive. 

A final reason, and the most likely one, cost. The cost to ship up the materials, to teach cosmonauts how to weld and work with specialized tools to build this specialized machinery was probably too costly for their liking. I mean, sure, you could probably have launched it as one piece using Energia and some folding of the reflective dish, but again, costly. 

[Beale]

Peeber

Edited July 22 by Beale

[softweir]

4 hours ago, ThatGust said:

I always wondered why they dropped this concept

There were concerns about designing, testing and building microgravity gas turbines and make them efficient enough to deliver useful power, Unfortunately, a device like that can't be reliably tested on the ground nor at anything but close to full-scale, and nobody wanted to launch a full-size parabolic mirror and microgravity gas turbine just to see if it worked!

Additionally, the gas-turbine/collector assembly needs to be aimed very much more precisely than photo-electric solar panels, with a 5degree misalignment leading to complete loss of power; it was thought that the technology didn't exist to achieve that.

On the other hand, photo-electric solar panels are easy to scale up, and all the electric equipment can be tested in any damn gravity you like. Yes, the high-energy plasma environment encountered in orbit can degrade any kind of electrical equipment, but all the agencies had been testing and using photo-electric in orbit over may years before any serious work was done on MIR-2, so they were confident the technology could be scaled up and would have a reasonable lifespan. And they don't need to be too precisely aimed: a 5 degree misalignment leads to a trivial reduction in power output.

[ThatGust]

15 hours ago, GoldForest said:

Oh right, they're the 'other' kind of solar power. 

As to why they stopped, probably hard to make it work in zero-g. On Earth, you can have the liquid fall using gravity, so you don't have to have multiple pumps running liquid both up and down the heating tower. In space you would need pumps to run the full loop. 

Another reason would probably be boil off. The gas would need to be topped off every few months via spacecraft supply, which wouldn't be hard mind you, just expensive. 

A final reason, and the most likely one, cost. The cost to ship up the materials, to teach cosmonauts how to weld and work with specialized tools to build this specialized machinery was probably too costly for their liking. I mean, sure, you could probably have launched it as one piece using Energia and some folding of the reflective dish, but again, costly. 

Sounds logical in each one of the aspects that you referenced

By the way, here's my attempt at recreating said station,  with design liberties of course. (holy-moly.gif)

I built the main thing months ago, never got in the mood of lauching it to space until today. And since i finally launched it, i added another super-module to the design. (Using the new parts hehe)

MMTK-B, a Soyuz-ferry thingy i built using one of the documents:

Progress M2 and Mir-2 Main core

An smaller (but still big) hab module loosely based on one of the 4 designs for the super-modules.

Aaaand another shot of the station itself, there other many little things here and there i can show. Also yeah, its my first time posting pictures here, im not the best photographer haha. I launched this using sandbox, im still working to make a proper mission plan to get this thing in orbit piece by piece but other missions have taken my time and pacience in my career save.

i have made other good looking crafts based on studies, i might post them later.

[CollectingSP]

@Beale, is there a possibility that we could get a recolor/update of the Rassvet module to closer match the module's real exterior and trunnion pins, with some more tan-ish insulation like on some of the other Russian segment parts, and more vibrant trunnion pins? (The trunnion pins don't matter as much but I figured it's worth an ask.)

[Beale]

On 7/23/2024 at 3:54 AM, ThatGust said:

.

wow! Great station, among the best I've seen.

7 hours ago, CollectingSP said:

@Beale, is there a possibility that we could get a recolor/update of the Rassvet module to closer match the module's real exterior and trunnion pins, with some more tan-ish insulation like on some of the other Russian segment parts, and more vibrant trunnion pins? (The trunnion pins don't matter as much but I figured it's worth an ask.)

Ah so actually this has already been done in the latest github version, all "white" blankety parts are now a slightly yellow-white (nice contrast with the clean white paint). All Black blankety parts have a hint of brown, and all green blankety parts have a hint of grey too. The aim was to make them different from the paint colours.

Those red bits are all just protectors as far as I know, and are all removed before launch. Not against adding them for looks if they look good, but just worth pointing out.

 

 

 

"Mek FGB" section.

[GoldForest]

3 hours ago, Beale said:

wow! Great station, among the best I've seen.

Ah so actually this has already been done in the latest github version, all "white" blankety parts are now a slightly yellow-white (nice contrast with the clean white paint). All Black blankety parts have a hint of brown, and all green blankety parts have a hint of grey too. The aim was to make them different from the paint colours.

Those red bits are all just protectors as far as I know, and are all removed before launch. Not against adding them for looks if they look good, but just worth pointing out.

"Mek FGB" section.

Rassvet's trunnions are still there and are still bright red. Well, maybe a little dull, but they definitely weren't removed. The other red bits, yeah.