While SpaceX is working on rocket reusability, other programs exist, ESA has patented a concept of a winged booster which flies back to the launch site, so, let's try building one of those in KSP. www.google.com/patents/US6612522
Love your disdain for the ESA guy. We get the same thing with people who want to be game designers. "I thought of that ages ago!" Well, so did this guy, and he actually did something with that thought, so we'll hire him thanks.
Why choose between the orbiter and the boosters being planes, when you can make *everything* a plane?? :) Planes lifting planes fueled by planes with escape planes in case of emergency flying up to dock with a station that is also a plane.
Well... not entirely useless. The first one, yes, but the altitude above you is useful if you're a fighter pilot, and the amount of fuel back at the airfield is useful if you're going there to get fuel lol
I hope when squad adds multiplayer they allow multiple players to act as mission control for a single mission (ie. shared crafts) That way you could launch this with one person in control, other people could adjust action groups. Once it seperates one player stays with the main ship and the other players switch craft to steer the boosters so they don't despawn and can land individually.
Scott, have you ever tried a mod for KSP called Chaka Monkey Exploration Odyssey? is a bundle of extremelly realistic real-design future NASA missions (recommend using it with realism overhaul and RSS, but works fine without too). It comes with a giant load of parts, which makes you able to reproduce real future missions, or just use your imagination and build something awesome.
I have to applaud your creativity in rehashing the tired, worn out "left turn contest" jab there. Although the cars in question already have airbrakes on them, used to help stop the car from spinning if a driver loses control.
Scott Manley → At about 10:17 in the video: "Height is life" and "altitude is life". Also known as the 11th Commandment: " *Thou shalt maintain thine airspeed at all times, lest the earth rise up and smite thee.* " {For rotary wing aircraft, replace " *thine airspeed* " with " *thy rotor rpm* ".} :~)°
Awesome, just was down in Orlando and saw the SpaceX launch this week and Elon has said that they use KSP to test stuff or a modified version (wasn't clear) I think with all the KSP masters (like yourself) that coming up with ideas like this that might be off the wall might actually be doable, especially if you need a really large rocket system that has multiple "reusable" reverse shuttle type systems. Excellent video as always.
Iv seen the Vulcan bomber come into land at Yeovilton airbase and it used its drogue shoot to slow down was amazing to watch. Thanks scot for some more great kerbal space goodness :P
I'm so glad they're going to be fixing the infiniglide bug for the next version (and working on aerodynamics some too). Now long-distance flights can be meaningful.
Man, landing gear must have been a lot more user-friendly back in the day. If I touch down at anything close to that speed a wheel will do something wacky and start me disassembling no matter how smooth the initial contact is.
They way I deal with clean separation is to attach a small fin to each side of the separated stage canted slightly outward. I put them about 3/4 of the way up the body. They have just a small amount of drag but the stages pull away instantly every time. I have not tried it with this type of recoverable booster but im sure it would work the same.
6:53 I wonder if they should add that for the stock game... it would certainly make re-using stages a lot easier, but on the other hand it might be adding too much macro-management to the game.
This is where multiplayer would be handy, have a player control each shuttle lifter while a main pilot cover's the orbit of the main rocket. I also had his idea but didn't know how for the life of me I'd accomplish it.
I love these videos, I have actually made a really good shuttle with kW rocketry and b9 and spacey pack, can lift large weights to orbit as well, also made a SSTO version as well
I was just about to say something about the wings being big and floaty and saving weight but as I was typing it, he mentioned exactly that. Glide ratio is better than a glider! You started your flare a mile away!
That looks like the separator bug, which was introduced in 0.24, and for which there are a couple simple fixes (the best of which is the set of DLL's that fix various stock bugs, including this one).
Hello Scott Manly! Love the channel. I think you could have come closer to stopping on the landing strip, simply because you've got a lot of Pitch Authority on the inverse shuttle. I would think the aerodynamics should model the elevators pitching up after landing. You had more ability to slow down after landing than you used.
btw- If you want to lose altitude without gaining airspeed perform a side slip vertically through the air. If you have enough torque/yaw control to keep the nose level you won't gain a single m/s of v. You probably know this ,but side slipping in this context is rolling the wings 90 degrees.
Scott, I was thinking about interstellar: if you're having trouble with the long and bendy spaceships then perhaps it's because it's akin to having a truss of a long span and not high enough upstand. How about having some struts strung between members sticking quite far away from the ship, like mast rigging (giving your straightening torque a larger lever)? Sure you can't launch with them, but can probably build them from KAS struts and small cubic octagonal thingies. The unfolding radiators would be a great attachment point but they're not a structural part...
You mean the Baikal flyback booster. It was designed for the Angara rockets. It will use a folding wing and a jet engine to fly back to base. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_%28rocket_booster%29 www.russianspaceweb.com/baikal.html
Christopher Woo as far as I know, it was originally planned to make them reusable by parachutes and retrorockets, althouth first ones were fitted with telemetry equipment instead. You might want to take a look here: www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-desc.php Flyback return of both boosters and core stage was planned for Energia II, which was planned for 1993, but was never realized.
About the javelin. Ya know the Dodge Viper? I can kinda picture the cockpit being at the very back with only the engine further back. Kinda like a viper.
Yo doing these kinda of shuttle booster sections is actually pretty awesome. Too bad 1 is lost in every flight (working out 1 now that makes it all the way to LKO with the rocket, then they dip down and land over 2 more orbits (1 for each booster) also they are manned (because, why the hell not) Found its very VERY helpful to throw a couple of retro rockets on them though because they like to stay pretty fast for gliding and will always run all the way across the runway
God, what if you had both systems of recovery. The boosters fly back as shuttles, the main stage lands on a barge vertically and the crew module also flies back as a shuttle. That would be the coolest thing ever. You'd literally only be spending money on fuel and consumables for every launch.
I think B9 parts would be helpful here. I find the brakes on the landing gear to work better, at least at high speed than the stock gear. Also you have useful things like airbrakes (if they don't explode from over heating due to Deadly Reentry like they did on my SSTO space plane).
I made an insanely laggy recoverable booster out of sabre engines. Sadly it was hardly bearable, took like 10 minutes to escape the atmosphere, but it could lift like 200 tons.
Just shoots that deploy at some time of shed, cause mean while u don’t have 2 friends to pilot them other booster and main flight which would be only reason to launch.. but the idea with a team is great
I think the "reverse-shuttle" design with strong aero-spike engines is the best way to build giant LH2-LOX rocket. Then we need to add a small, disposable, low-cost second stage and a giant liquid hydrogen tank with structural supports of the second stage. The tank can be either diched into the ocean and recovered or just disposed, it is not expensive anyway. All the valuable equipment would be on the shuttles together with the LOX tank, LOX is so much denser so these shuttles can have reasonable scale. I actually ran some numbers based on SSME performance and quite conservative structure mass, it out-performs the space shuttle design, in terms of both payload capacity and cost. However, I see little discussion about this design, so what do you think is the major shortcoming of this design in practice?
Would there be any weight effective ways of landing a booster with a parachute on land? I thought of a few ways but it would be hard to circumvent wind. Maby a powerful sky crane could extend from the nose cone and drop it on a massive cushioned pad.
SAS freaks out if your ship's control orientation doesn't match the body orientation. Looks like you could have landed both of them by switching back and forth. Get them both pointed back at KSC and when you get close, activate the air brakes on one of them to slow it down for landing while the other goes past, and once the first one is on the ground lock the brakes and bring the other one down. Assuming it'll let you switch like that anyway.
I was expecting craft where the manned capsul is placed at the bottom/back of the craft's stable flight vector, very near the engines in my attempts at kerbal designs.
Thats not fair... i was close to finish something like that myself :D. Well done. My design consists of 2 look alike shuttles being clipped together, one with fuel, one with payload. While the one with the tank doesent circularize and returns to the surface instantly, the other one continues on a regular shuttle mission.
"Thats not fair... i was close to finish something like that myself :D. Well done." Well too bad, now Scott has done it and patented it and you can't use it ever... no wait, that's the ESA... We can actually use and expand on each other's ideas in KSP!
the coefficients readouts seem to be a bit wrong it shows -0,006 lift coefficient and 0,051 drag coefficient with resulting cl/cd -0,12 which seems to be incongruent with way your aircraft actually flies.
It's worth asking Ferram about this, I think body lift is setup on the assumption that the tank would be shaped like a lifting body. The numbers do bounce around a lot since keyboard is not the best way to fly this
Scott Manley Awesome as usual. Could you explain the tailles deltawing planes someday, as they are pretty universal in space technology? I have never succeeded at building one, and I feel silly flying things that look like a passenger planes into orbit.
Dar Scott Manley its a pleasure to watch your Videos but i think its time for somenthing new we want to See a new Space Program includind Real Solar System. Sincerley a Follower from the first second
This is actually an idea I was wondering about after seeing the recent video of the SpaceX Falcon 9 working on new Drone Recover Stages. The video if the Drone Booster trying to land on the Recover Ship at sea. Looked like they were trying to have it hover into a landing. I was wondering why they don't make the stages glide back down like this design in your video. Lol, As I am wiring this comment, you're talking about SpaceX in the video... nice.
I see the bug with radial decouplers dragging the boosters inward is still in full force. :) That's what prompted me to make thrust-based decouplers for SpaceY.
***** Oh, I thought Ed was talking about the boosters leaning towards the main section after separation due to the drag of the decouplers still attached to the boosters. But if it's how you say, yeah that does sound unintentional to me.
***** Yep, it's actually a well known bug. The ejection force applies an inward and downward impulse when ejecting within certain altitude ranges in the atmosphere, that is proportional to the ejection force. That is, the higher the ejection force on the decoupler, the harder the booster will slam inward toward the center stack. For the SpaceY decouplers, I started out giving them a significantly higher ejection force than the stock decouplers, and it would destroy the rocket every time, so for large boosters (3.75m and 5m, for instance), switching them to be thrust-based instead of using a high ejection charge was really all I could do to make them reliable. And in the end, they're a lot more awesome for it. :)
Great video as always Scott Manley I've tried this with much failure, would you consider making a video to see how fast you can make a plane go within the Kerbal atmosphere? My planes always become really unstable and crash but I don't have your skill with this game.
how about an other type of reverse shuttle: from mun to kerbin then back to mun. I'd be really interested in seeing how you'd do it ! If anyone in the comments know if someone did that, please give me a link :)
