The Kerbal Space Program Total Sperg Zone

[Ulric]

Some exploitation of the construction rules might have occurred.....

 

[Ulric]

The Summoner.

 

 

 

~11300 ton SSTO.

 

 

The Conjurer class is intended to carry the previously shown space denial cluster warheads. The summoner ended up being that itself upon shedding the lifting stage.

 

 

 

Vessel stats.

 

 

 

Lightweight rigid tether system. Unlike the two piece version found on Ceres, the lightweight system cannot act as a tug.

 

 

 

Asteroid mining grapple.

 

[Ulric]

Various improvements where made to Summoner after some orbital testing, and it is now ready for missions.

 

The improvements include additional radiator panels, additional RCS ports, and structural stiffening. I need a mod that lets me use any engine that I want for RCS.

 

The weight is now ~1400 tons, and it has slightly over 16k ΔV

 

[Ulric]

Testing the asteroid mining arm.

 

[Ulric]

Somehow the decimal place in my orbital velocity moved one place to the right.....

 

~610TJ

 

[Ulric]

Testing an articulated mining arm. So far the concept is solid, but the mod would need some serious polishing before I would be comfortable taking this thing out of Kerbin's SOI.

 

The articulated arm is designed to be a drop in upgrade to the current one. It is normally stowed in the ventral cargo bay. When it is needed, the arm can rotate out 90° and extend to grab onto an asteroid to prepare for harvesting.

 

I will retain the original arm for now. During testing, the articulated arm has some compatibility issues with the physics engine. This was putting some serious strain on the rest of the ship components, and created a collision risk with the asteroid.

 

[Ulric]

XK-79

 

[Ulric]

Ceres and Cataphract rendezvous in Moho orbit.

 

 

 

Goliath Mk II mining vessel landing on Moho.

 

[Ulric]

The Kerfboard minimalist reentry vehicle.

 

[Belesarius]

The Kerfboard minimalist reentry vehicle.

 

Holy shit, that actually works?

[Vanagandr]

It's been a while since I've KSP'd, but last I knew air friction is only damaging if you accidentally leave your solar panels extended

Unless it's changed, sticking parachutes directly to the kerbal (if it were allowed by the game engine)  and letting him drop from space would be a totally viable reentry method

[Sturgeon]

It's been a while since I've KSP'd, but last I knew air friction is only damaging if you accidentally leave your solar panels extended

Unless it's changed, sticking parachutes directly to the kerbal (if it were allowed by the game engine)  and letting him drop from space would be a totally viable reentry method

 

There are actual reentry mechanics now.

[Vanagandr]

It feels like the small game studio meta is to sell a tech demo as a game, wait for sales, and then start on a new game. Props to KSP crew having had the game out for so long and still be actually working on it. 

[Collimatrix]

IMO they need to change to a better engine.  There are a lot of annoying bugs that are apparently ineradicable in Unity.

[Ulric]

The Boogie Board minimalist reentry vehicle. Geneemey Kerman was selected to test the smallest reentry vehicle built to date. He is the most experienced pilot of such vehicles, having made at least one other flight.

 

[Ulric]

Testing the first carrier type of vessel. Initial mass is about 1100 tons, and it has roughly 11,000 m/s delta v, with 2.8m/s^2 acceleration. It carrier up to 8 Stowable Atmospheric Reentry Craft internally. Class name and vessel name have not been established yet.

 

[Ulric]

A closer look at the SARC

 

[Sturgeon]

So it's a high altitude carrier that spits trans-atmospheric Fishbeds?

[Ulric]

Something like that. Unfortunately, KSP really didn't like me doing ground testing with the carrier. It corrupted my save file, and I lost a substantial amount of progress..... Basically, I am better off just starting anew. I'll just drag over all the ship files into the new game. Oh well.

[Ulric]

So, nine short days after the start of the brave Kerbals adventure into space, they have manage to research and implement closed cycle gas core NTRs, among other things.....

[Ulric]

Kerbal engineers developed a new long range research aircraft from the information provided by a group of kerbonauts rescued from low orbit. They claimed that to have come from an alternate reality. Catastrophic events involving the nuclear propulsion system of the experimental carrier forced them to abandon the ship. The details regarding subsequent events are unclear, but somehow three of the escape pods slipped into a different dimension.

 

[Collimatrix]

Has it been pointed out before that Kerbals are one of the scariest sci-fi races out there?

 

Forget Klingons, forget Daleks, forget Predators, forget all that shit.  Kerbals would annihilate them easily out of sheer curiosity or boredom.

 

Kerbals are absurdly tough, in every measurable way.  Sustained fifteen G accelerations, which would easily kill a human in a G-suit don't faze Kerbals.  They don't lose consciousness or even suffer any loss of fine motor function, as their ability to control spacecraft violently maneuvering at those rates are completely unaffected.  Conversely, years of weightlessness don't cause their muscles to atrophy measurably.  They can go years without food, and still operate at peak efficiency when called upon to do so after their extended fasts.  Indeed; being locked alone in a space capsule for months and years on their own without additional air, food or water doesn't even cause them to get lonely.  Given the visible lack of shielding on their nuclear thermal rockets, or on their craft designed to transverse the radiation belts of Kerbin or Jool, fairly stiff doses of ionizing radiation don't much bother them either.

 

Kerbals have no fear of death whatsoever.  They will merrily climb aboard rockets that look like they were slapped together by jihadis with a welding torch and Parkinson's disease and smile all the way to their pyrotechnic demise (that is, if you can manage to kill them, see above).  And you can have an identically bad rocket, and another Kerbal will happily climb in that one if you tell them to.  They have a level of fanaticism that makes Hashashin and Kamikaze pilots look timid.  Their risk assessment, or complete inability to do it, is legendary.  The Kerbal language has five hundred words for "rapid exothermic disassembly," and no word for "actuarial sciences."  The Kerbal brain is literally incapable of comprehending the idea of OSHA.  Instead of a portion of their brain devoted to safety and prudence, they have additional neurons devoted to understanding physics terrifyingly well.

 

Kerbal scientific ingenuity should make even godlike forerunner civilizations uncomfortable.  It's not too difficult for them to go from small, solid fuel rocket boosters good for little more than bombarding Fort McHenry to mature nuclear rocketry in a little over a week.  As soon as one of them figures out how to warp time space and travel faster than light, these little green bastards will be in your solar system, and you'd better hope they have good intentions.

[Sturgeon]

Suddenly, I want to write a KSP-Ringworld crossover fic.

 

I always saw Kerbals as an exaggeration of the combined ideas of "The Right Stuff" and that meme about how scary humans are to aliens. So, the scariest thing about Kerbals is that they are humans.

[Belesarius]

Heh. I love that meme.

[Sturgeon]

Has it been pointed out before that Kerbals are one of the scariest sci-fi races out there?

 

Forget Klingons, forget Daleks, forget Predators, forget all that shit.  Kerbals would annihilate them easily out of sheer curiosity or boredom.

 

Kerbals are absurdly tough, in every measurable way.  Sustained fifteen G accelerations, which would easily kill a human in a G-suit don't phase Kerbals.  They don't lose consciousness or even suffer any loss of fine motor function, as their ability to control spacecraft violently maneuvering at those rates are completely unaffected.  Conversely, years of weightlessness don't cause their muscles to atrophy measurably.  They can go years without food, and still operate at peak efficiency when called upon to do so after their extended fasts.  Indeed; being locked alone in a space capsule for months and years on their own without additional air, food or water doesn't even cause them to get lonely.  Given the visible lack of shielding on their nuclear thermal rockets, or on their craft designed to transverse the radiation belts of Kerbin or Jool, fairly stiff doses of ionizing radiation don't much bother them either.

 

Kerbals have no fear of death whatsoever.  They will merrily climb aboard rockets that look like they were slapped together by jihadis with a welding torch and Parkinson's disease and smile all the way to their pyrotechnic demise (that is, if you can manage to kill them, see above).  And you can have an identically bad rocket, and another Kerbal will happily climb in that one if you tell them to.  They have a level of fanaticism that makes Hashashin and Kamikaze pilots look timid.  Their risk assessment, or complete inability to do it, is legendary.  The Kerbal language has five hundred words for "rapid exothermic disassembly," and no word for "actuarial sciences."  The Kerbal brain is literally incapable of comprehending the idea of OSHA.  Instead of a portion of their brain devoted to safety and prudence, they have additional neurons devoted to understanding physics terrifyingly well.

 

Kerbal scientific ingenuity should make even godlike forerunner civilizations uncomfortable.  It's not too difficult for them to go from small, solid fuel rocket boosters good for little more than bombarding Fort McHenry to mature nuclear rocketry in a little over a week.  As soon as one of them figures out how to warp time space and travel faster than light, these little green bastards will be in your solar system, and you'd better hope they have good intentions.

 

I would just like to add to this by talking about the liquid-fueled rockets that Kerbals design. First, out of all the non-nuclear engines used in the Kerbal Space Program, the highest Isp value is found in their upper stage engine called the Poodle, at 350 (vac), and many of their engines have values at or below 300 Isp. This indicates that none of the conventional liquid-fuel Kerbal-designed engines use hydrogen fuel for their propellant, as hydrolox engines typically have higher Isp's than 350 (vac).

We can further determine the fuels used by Kerbal engines: All Kerbal liquid-fueled engines are capable of restart in any atmospheric conditions and any number of times even in deep space years after their first ignition, using only an initial electric charge to get going. This means that Kerbal non-nuclear liquid-fueled engines are hypergolic, in other words they use fuels that combust on contact with one another and do not need an igniter, just an electric turbopump to introduce the fuels to the combustion chamber.

Hypergolics are universally highly toxic; the list of chemicals used in these engines, like nitric acid, UDMH, hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide, and monomethylhydrazine, are a veritable "greatest hits album" of the nastiest substances in the universe. This obviously doesn't concern the Kerbals too much, since not only do they not have an equivalent to OSHA, but Kerbal test subjects have repeatedly failed to understand the point of having such an organization in laboratory experiments.

It seems, in fact, that Kerbals have such an affinity for hyper-toxic, hyper-corrosive hypergolics that they have substantially improved their designs beyond what is possible with human-engineered hypergolics. Earth hypergolic engines are essentially limited to an Isp value of 330 or so; Kerbal hypergolic engines can reach Isp engines of 350, even with short nozzles such as that of the Poodle engine used on their upper stages. It's unknown how they have created hypergolic engines with such high Isp values, but it could have something to do with what's called the "Kerbal Fuel Enrichment Process" (KFEP), which is where a naked Kerbal is dropped into a full hydrazine tank prior to launch. This was previously considered by Earth sociologists to be merely a sacrificial ritual to Kerbal launch vehicle gods, but in discussions with Earth engineers, Kerbal rocket scientists insist this process "makes the rocket happy".