If things are not working on your rocket, what should you do? a) Fix the issue at hand b) Inspect the rocket for any intersecting parts c) m o r e b o o s t e r s
Why is nobody talking about the fact that the Launch Escape Tower part has 5 thrusters: 4 pointing up and one pointing to the side. the one on the very top (so it has a lot of torque) it is intended design for the escape tower to pull the pod up and away from the rocket but also off to one side so as to minimize the chances of the rocket colliding with the pod that's why you got the rotations that's why your last stage always veered to one side
If all you are going for is height, you might have eeked out a bit more performance if you you waited to light your upper stages until your speed dropped below supersonic. You could have coasted a bit higher with the last few stages and kept your speed low enough that you weren't exacerbating the aerodynamic drag. Light a stage, coast up as high as it will get you, then light the next. It wouldn't be as glorious as a burning death bullet, but might have been a tiny bit more efficient since mach 2+ under 20k meters is a recipe for drag loss and burning glory ;)
A bit of advice, all of your designs turn because the LES is built to turn so it can wrench the command pod off the ship. If you look at it you can see a thruster on only one side.
Lower the throttle on the LES (not possible irl but in kerbal you can) to reduce drag losses from going too fast in a thick atmosphere (you can leave the upper stages at full throttle because that reduces gravity losses. And try to make it as taper from top to bottom and as thin as possible to reduce drag
True dat, usually you don't want to exceed mach 1 below 10,000m because of how high the drag is, and 20,000m is basically vacuum wrt to engine efficiency
The escape rocket system is designed to go off to the side for a reason. You want to get the crew capsule out of the path of booster you are escaping from as quickly as possible.
@@ReidCaptain the reason for the escape tower tilting is because it has 4 central boosters and 1 tilt booster built to pull the capsule away from the rocket
I think you kept running into an aerodynamics bug with your probe core stage, which is why you were losing speed so quickly Also, the batteries probably weren’t doing much other than weigh you down (except for the ones powering the probe)
@@ReidCaptain The batteries definitely helped you keep your momentum through the atmosphere, but I'm not sure how many is too many though. You'd have to test that. I also don't think you were losing a lot of speed from any bugs, I think it was mostly just that air resistance is exponential with speed. As a rule of thumb, when you start to see the white air effects around your craft, you usually don't want to go much faster (ignoring spaceplanes because of lift and some spaceplane engines working better at higher speeds.) KSP's aerodynamics aren't very accurate though so sometimes your optimal speed can change unintuitively.
@@ReidCaptain try putting upside down nose cones on the bottom of some of the center stages. Unoccupied nodes cause drag, so putting nose cones will reduce your drag coefficient at the cost of increased mass. The reduced drag at the bottom might cause instability though, causing the craft to flip. But definitely something to try.
This is one of the most genuinely Kerbal videos ever. You sound so serious and curious as you proceed to try and solve every problem with more boosters.
"Oh dear, it appears our space base is about to explode! get in the escape pod!" "But sir, we're on the ground, what's that gonna do for us?" the escape pod:
It seems like you're loosing out on a lot of ∆v due to atmospheric efficiency early on. Essentially you're going to fast through the thick parts of the atmosphere. When you see the air effects start getting really heavy - or even turning orange - that's you going to fast. Coast higher and a more controlled speed. Firing off more stages later on will get you higher up with the same amount of rocket!
As someone who's spent way too much time trying to optimize for drag in KSP, I have one suggestion: put nose cones on the back end of those LES's. It'll reduce your drag tremendously.
@@nikkiofthevalley Drag works on both sides of an object, both in KSP and in the real world. A flat plate being pushed through the air compresses the air in front of it, and also creates an area of low pressure behind it. The high pressure in front and the low pressure in back both resist the forward motion.
You should try placing nose cones on the underside of the boosters, that flat surface creates a lot of drag. And for the bending you can use autostrut instead of placing struts manually
Am I dumb or would it be more efficient to wait a bit before activating the next row of rockets when you're going really fast? Because drag does get very strong the faster you go.
All the unoccupied bottom nodes on the launch escape systems and the probe core are causing aerodynamic drag. I'd try putting upside down nosecones on the bottom, at least for the center stages.
Technically an escape pod is a crewed compartment. The rocket mount that is part of the same escape system is commonly referred to as the escape 'tower.'
I second this. Couldn't get into the game the first time, but after I went back and actually learned the game, I ended up dumping over 1000 hours in it.
15:10 I had just had the same thing happen to me with the used stage, that survived falling from orbit onto the polar shelf, staying 100% intact... until it bounced off and was broken in half. But hey, the engine survived!
The reason your crafts kept spinning is bc the LES has a motor that fires to the side for some reason, most likely to help it move away from debris, but it messed with your craft's thrust
I would just like to say that at 6:44 problem with the main capital getting hit by the Rockets were caused by the thruster boosting them in words instead of out words
6:38 That's the problem with going super light, It's got hardly any momentum. So it slows down really fast once it runs out of thrust due to air resistance and gravity.
You did it wrong, because you lost way too much delta v to drag. The final few stages should have had a lower thrust limiter set, and/or you could just wait more between the stages - you should usually aim to avoid seeing orange air drag in the second and even third layers of the atmosphere, and avoid seeing white drag (keep it to 200-300 m/s) in the first layer of atmosphere (below 10 000 meters). Could probably make it to 80-100k height if you'd do that
I was expecting the missile that came crashing down (cause that's obviously what it was) to just clip into the ground. Or explode. Then it just went *donk!* and was... anticlimactic. Thanks for the video!
