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Sturgeon's House

The Kerbal Space Program Total Sperg Zone


Sturgeon

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RusFed-themed two-man Minmus mission:

T85jdWm.jpg

 

I went a quasi-realistic direction with this save. The mod I am using is a combination of several things, but key is the altered set of KW Rocketry engines, which have been changed to resemble real-world engines. On this rocket, the first stage is a central tank with an RD-180 equivalent and four strap-on boosters with RD-191 equivalents. All of the launchers I am using in this mod are modular with standardized components. Core first stages can be either 1.25m diameter units like the boosters shown here, with RD-191s, or the 2.5m unit used for the core stage of this rocket, with the RD-180s. Various combinations of these allow me to achieve 200km LEO payloads of 6, 12, 25, 50, and 90 tonnes, or more, using only preconstructed boosters with two types of engines. Upper stages are also modular, with three basic types.

The engines I have modded KW engines to represent are:

RD-191
RD-180

RD-170

RS-25/RD-0120 (in KSP terms these are identical)

RD-120

RS-68

RL-10 (downrated, because the RL-10's Isp value is super OP in KSP)

F-1

 

Currently, I am waiting for some of the Russian-themed parts packs to become compatible for 1.1.3. Not holding my breath, but I would love a few more capsules...

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The level of overthinking going on in this thread makes me extremely happy.

My take is that kerbals are simply the solution to the central problem of human spaceflight (ie: that human physiology makes us intrinsically unsuited for space travel).

Kerbals are what a far future bioengineer would come up with if asked to design a species adapted for travelling the interstellar void. As such they exist almost as a critique of our failings, and a reminder that the stars might be gifted to our progeny but will never be ours to own.

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The level of overthinking going on in this thread makes me extremely happy.

My take is that kerbals are simply the solution to the central problem of human spaceflight (ie: that human physiology makes us intrinsically unsuited for space travel).

Kerbals are what a far future bioengineer would come up with if asked to design a species adapted for travelling the interstellar void. As such they exist almost as a critique of our failings, and a reminder that the stars might be gifted to our progeny but will never be ours to own.

That's a much less fun answer than the (most likely) correct one, which is that Kerbals are an entire species of exaggerated spaceflight history personality archetypes.

They use nothing but hypergolics? That's a parody of how crazy the first guy who said "man, we should fill a thousand gallon tank full of hydrazine and ignite it using nitrogen tetrozide!" must have been.

Kerbal's apparent conplete lack of safety protocols? A reflection of the sort of crazy assholes like Gagarin and Glenn who would strap right in to a little metal coffin at the top of a retrofitted ICBM to be shot into orbit.

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That's a much less fun answer than the (most likely) correct one, which is that Kerbals are an entire species of exaggerated spaceflight history personality archetypes.

They use nothing but hypergolics? That's a parody of how crazy the first guy who said "man, we should fill a thousand gallon tank full of hydrazine and ignite it using nitrogen tetrozide!" must have been.

Kerbal's apparent conplete lack of safety protocols? A reflection of the sort of crazy assholes like Gagarin and Glenn who would strap right in to a little metal coffin at the top of a retrofitted ICBM to be shot into orbit.

Or, you know, the designers were too lazy/canny to implement realistic life support, and made the kerbals the chipper little buggers we know and love to avoid rubbing the player's face in the horrors of space flight gone wrong.

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There are a number of mods that do this.

 

Near as I can tell, they basically raise the exponent of the mass of a craft as a function of distance.  Orbital and sub-orbital stuff is barely affected, but going to other planets suddenly gets much, much heavier.

 

Which is why God gave kerbals closed-cycle gas core nuclear thermal rockets.

 

Interestingly, life support and food requirements drastically change the early game balance between Mun and Minmus.  Supply requirements for Mun are pretty minimal, but reasonable orbital paths to Minmus take so much longer that suddenly all the weight savings from landing on a lower-gravity body start to evaporate when you have to pack on enough food and O2 to actually make it there and back.

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The first of the binary core interplanetary heavy transport ships, The Controller.

 

I'm estimating that the total launch weight will be about 50,000 tons to get it into orbit. No final cost estimate yet.

 

The propulsion system consists of 44 "Nuclear Lightbulb" closed cycle gas core NTRs for a total thrust of 19.8 MN, accelerating the 4156 ton vessel at 4.764 m/s^2. Total delta V is 13810m/s.

 

73j8MgN.jpg

bZI1LaY.jpg

M81v4Zy.jpgy05JuQP.jpg8mEyUma.jpgoXz057N.jpg

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Messing around with acceleration in KSP. Naturally, this design session was an impromptu collaborative effort between Collimatrix and myself.

 

The SRB space hexagon. Not very impressive accelerations, but cool.

 

ET5AFhK.jpg

 

 

 

The Blue Dragon: an unspecified number of KS-25s attached in the "pine cone" configuration.

 

0UHwDPs.jpg

 

 

 

And finally, the Seperatron Wing

 

qPTxYIO.jpgtToLROU.jpg

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