Can You Use Ion Engines to Make a Plane in Kerbal Space Program?

in the past I've tried using only the smallest engine to get to Eve but I had another idea the other day can you use only the weakest engine to make a functioning plane now this is the ion engine and in the atmosphere it produces extra little power and you can see testing this car out on the ground it barely moves it forward but I had some ideas of how to harness this power so let's carry it into it now start now in the sandbox here the first thing I wanted to do is put down a crew capsule and on that I'm putting down a bunch of decouplers now already this is kind of weird but the reason I'm doing this is that I can launch myself into the air and then fire off the ion engines the thing with the ion engines is that they're most efficient the further out of the atmosphere I get so ideally I figure out some system to launch myself up and then I'll be able to fire them off with a pretty good amount of efficiency so you can see my original plan here is to build up a bunch of decouplers and start to put down a fuel tank and an engine on that soap my trended on launch pad now and you see it starts to separate a little oddly here and when I go to fire off the engine it seems to give it quite a bit of power and the spring does seem to be working now I didn't launch it off at the right time or anything so you can see it just sort of fell to the ground but it does get that springing effect that I want and I figured I might be able to store some energy in this so next thing I did here was deleted off that engine and a replacing with a Xenon tank and I'm putting an engine plate on that now the engine Plate's gonna me attach a bunch of ion engines right to it after I got those on there you can see I'm putting on some solar panels as well and this is to power those engines so it's time to give it a test and you can see it does kind of work it starts to move it up and down a little bit but it caps out very quickly and you can see it's just not that great I figured why not just add more of these engines and see how it'll do that's exactly what I did here it started stacking a bunch of these and it does compress a lot more as it comes down now but I noticed the solar panels were starting to oscillate a little bit and eventually they just did this and then fell apart so I just went ahead and braced everything together a bit better and giving it a test now you can see it does move up and down a lot more than before but it just really isn't that good and what I wanted to try instead was using an ore tank now the ore tank is just going to be really heavy so as it comes down it'll stretch the spring and I should be able to release that and fling myself up so you see here it bounced up and down pretty well and now letting go with these Grabbers you can see it really throws me into the ground here and if I do that in the other direction I should be good to go now once I had more weight here just to get this compress even more and you can see I get quite a long day distance on that now the final thing I need here to get this to work is one of these controllers this is going to allow me to time everything exactly the way I need so I let go of the ore tank and then once the spring comes up a bit further it lets go of the rocket and allows me to just continue moving up and you can see in this test here it actually seemed to work I went up pretty far but it really wasn't anywhere close to the distance I was gonna need but I figured maybe with some different timings I'd be able to improve things a little bit but surprisingly I pretty much got it right on the first try and anything else I did just ended up being worse I also messed around using larger decouplers for a stronger spring but it seemed like there's a lot of losses in those and I didn't really go that much further up the larger fuel tanks did help me out here but again I just wasn't going up that far and really I want to see somewhere in the range of like 5 000 meters not really the 1 000 I'm getting now eventually here I just decided to make everything massive and see how it would do so I doubled the spring length I doubled the fuel tanks and now giving this a test it seemed to do slightly better but there's just so much wasted energy that it really didn't go up that much higher and I'm really reaching a point of diminishing returns now also thought about making a trepy shape potentially and while this did sort of work the speed on it just wasn't good enough and that really wasn't going to get me up high enough I also thought about storing energy in one of these spinner mechanisms but these ion engines really just capped out at a low speed and I couldn't really get anything meaningful out of them now I decided I wanted to start working on the plane now and then I'll figure out a way to get it up into the air later this seemed like a better way to go in my opinion so now we know exactly how much weight I'm gonna need to fling up and you can see here I'm already starting to work on the body like seems like a bunch of structural fuselages and after that I'm starting to build up the wing now I'm using this Wing segment here and I'm stacking a bunch of them back you'll probably notice the wig is very large and while it might seem like it's a lot of extra weight it's going to be so I could fly at a really low speed I wasn't very confident how well this is gonna fly so it seemed like giving myself the best chance here was definitely the way to go so through the landing gear next and after did that you can see on the back here I'm putting down another engine plate now on that I stacked a bunch of these ion engines and I'm actually doing something kind of interesting here what I'm doing is taking off the engine plate pasting on the back here and push pushing it back into all the other ones this allows me to stack a ton of iron engines in a very small space and hopefully keep everything really space efficient I've ever got a ton of those on there next thing they just start to put down some Xenon tanks I didn't go crazy with it because I didn't need that much fuel after I got those in place I started putting down some solar panels and these I was just planning to cover most of the wing with it seems copying these all the way over and I did it for the first two segments here and with that done I wanted to go to test the launch pad now we already had some minor problems seemed like the wings really didn't like being this long so it ended up going back into the editor and just reinforcing the very edge of all of them now giving it a test here doesn't seem to be acting so weird anymore but I noticed that the engines were very underpowered and I was gonna need a lot more solar panels so I want to get everything working now before I did that though just wanted to add in the pitch control but with that done started copying back all the solar panels and you can see once I got this filled in want to give it another test now I forgot to reinforce everything again so it started acting like this but now I just wanted to spawn myself in the air and see how I would do now this isn't exactly an accurate test and in fact you'll notice this has physics easing in progress during this physics season there's actually a very low gravity state right now so this isn't exactly what's going to be happening once I actually test it out but I figured I could use it as a pretty good indication of what I'm gonna need to fix but here I can see I was gaining speed and I was gaining height that means that my plane's actually gaining energy and you can see here it started to go crazy with it and see how high I could get now again this isn't entirely accurate but I seem to be flying really comfortably here so I was hoping once the full gravity was enabled I would actually still be able to fly now to get this in the air I try to get into my spring mechanism but this was already getting really chaotic and really I just reached that maximum here and I thought of another way to actually get some height and I have a feeling a lot of people are going to call this cheesy but there is a major problem with this next solution you can see now putting in some structural fuselages and I'm using a motor now the motor is not an engine since it runs with electricity but it does have a major problem once I start getting up higher in the atmosphere these propellers that I'm putting on here are going to produce less and less thrust and at some point I'm not gonna be able to produce enough to even just fly I'm pretty much just hoping that that point is going to be at the same point that my ion engines are efficient enough to actually move the plane but if these two ranges don't overlap there's going to be a certain range where I'm not able to fly at all now trying these motors out in the ground here does seem to pull my plane forward and that seemed to be pretty good the problem though is I started capping out my speed at 30 meters per second and I really need around 50 to even get this thing off the ground now try it anyway because why not and it really didn't go so well to change the angle of the propellers and after I did that I started getting up to a much higher speed here I was capping out right around 50 and with that I was able to slightly pull off the ground now I realized I was getting height very slowly here and in fact only at 1 400 meters that ended up happening on my speed now again I was kind of guessing that my iron engines weren't going to really be able to produce enough thrust until about 5 000 meters this was going to be a little bit worried I figured maybe it was a Thrust issue so I added on some more Motors here and I wanted to see how I would do there's all these in place to try to take off again and while I was getting up to the same speed I wasn't really able to and I think all the extra weight from the motors in the front was preventing it from actually getting the angle it needs so retracted the rear landing gear and just barely managed to get off the ground here and start to move up once I was off the ground I started going up further but you can see I capped out right around 2 600 meters that again wasn't really high enough and it was gonna need to do better than that and I figured maybe if I pulled the motors back and moved the center of mass further back I might be able to tilt this more and do a bit better now already this is a really good sign because taking off the Runway I barely needed any help from attracting the rear landing gear and after that it was just time to go up higher now the good news is I pretty much blew past the mark that I was stuck at before but I didn't really get that much higher until the atmosphere was just too thin and you can see now around 3 200 meters I'm pretty much capped out now my next thought was maybe I just need larger propellers and that's what I wanted to add in next these propellers though are huge and they're gonna hit the grounds if I try to take off with them so my plan here is to use a hinge and fold out the hinge only once I get off the Runway and then I'll get a much more powerful propeller so copy this over to both sides and see now the runway him to the test now it starts to spin up and it seems fine nothing seems to be hitting the ground and you can see here I'm actually able to take off but once I try unfolding these I run into a small problem it won't let me because it claims that the part is moving that is true so I guess this just really wasn't going to be able to work now tried again here using even more Motors but now he's just running into the ground a lot more and it just really was failing they see next what I'm doing here is throwing down the decoupler right on the wing on that I'm starting to build up some structural pieces and you can see on that I'm putting down a motor this really raises up the motor and should allow me to use those really large propellers now I wanted to give this a test here and you see turning them on it seems to make things move around a lot more than I like but at the very least I am producing some thrust and I seem to be getting up to a pretty okay speed now I turned on auto strut here and I reverse the direction of the motors and you can see I'm actually starting to pull myself forward and giving it a test taking off here it seemed to performing a lot better as well because I didn't even need any help from retracting the rear landing gear then improved the setup even more I pushed the motors as far back as I could and this should move by Center of Mass Way further back and testing it out now you see takes off way easier than before now I also double up the motors again because why not seem like a good move here and for the first time I actually wanted to give it a somewhat decent test and while I was starting to slowly drift to the left for the most part I was able to keep this under control and I got up to around 5 000 meters that was pretty much as high as I thought I was gonna need to go and you can see now I'm starting to fire off the ion engines now I wanted to have a small overlap period where I had both the motors and the ion engines on to hopefully get up to a much higher height and only once I got up to about 6000 meters did I want to finally drop off the motors so I got very impatient and right around 5200 I tried turning off the motors and dropping them off once I did this though the whole thing started to turn to the left and it was pretty much unrecoverable so just loaded up my saves but that's what I ran into a problem for whatever reason the motor started off which meant that they weren't producing any thrust now because of that I was losing speed really quickly here and you can see that I ended up starting to tilt down dammit that my solar panels weren't producing any power anymore and at that point pretty much the whole thing was lost so I try tried again here and for whatever reason it just immediately started by disintegrating so just give it a few more tries and eventually I finally got it at the stage it was at before I tried detaching the motors here and it sort of worked now it's just up to the ion engines to see if I could produce any speed but it seemed like I was just a little bit too low here and I really wasn't able to get anything meaningful eventually it just ended up dipping and it just didn't quite work so next here I had on a vertical stabilizer to try to fix that turning problem now it again took a long time to get up in the air and you can see this time though it was getting up a lot higher than before I think just adding those stabilizers on added enough weight to the back that it really seemed to help things out a lot and you've seen around 7000 meters I tried launching the ion engines and giving it a bit more of a boost this seemed to help out a lot and you can see now I'm getting all the way up to 10 000 meters I figured for sure this was high enough and I dropped off the motors and tried giving it a test unfortunately though I just couldn't get this to work I was losing altitude and losing speed at the same time and because of that there's really no way this is ever going to fly that's when I got the idea though just go with a much simpler design here and try to keep the weight down as much as possible and you can see on that it put down an engine plate and a bunch more engines I also went for this large swooping Wing just because I thought it looked good but it seemed to be a little unstable and also I had some minor problems taking off so I gave it another try here but this time you'll notice I'm putting some Motors right on the front after I have those two in place you can see I'm putting down some propellers here and I was hoping that should get me high enough up also threw down a Xenon tank on that and after that I put down a structural fuselage on that put down my engine plate again and finally here I'm building up the wings this time I went for the simplest Wing design I could think of which is just using one of these Delta wings and it was time to give it a test Off The Runway it seemed to be okay but it didn't seem to struggle on stabilization a little bit so I added in a vertical stabilizer and after that I launched off the motors and tried to give this a test it seemed to work it got off the ground though it was very hard to control still so what I wanted to do here was take off the motors and add on the nose this should help it when just the ion engines are working since a lot less air resistance but also I thought it might be the reason that it's causing it to slightly turn to left and right so after got that nose on there you can see I'm putting back on the motors this time they're going on the top of the nose and I'm rotating them up after that try to give it another test for the launch pad here and it seemed to be a lot better it seemed to be going pretty much perfectly straight and you'll notice it doesn't deviate at all I even got this up to 10 000 meters here but it was having some minor problems with stability once the motors came off I think once the motors come off it really starts affecting the weight distribution and that causes my problems so move the wings further back to hopefully help things out and also I started adding on solar panels now at this point I just wanted to prove that this was at least theoretically possible so I added on the bare minimum panels I thought I need but because the panels aren't 100 efficiency this last Thruster is only at 65 power there's two more panels on there I finally wanted to give it another test but all the way to these panels was really pulling it down I was definitely not happy to see that and really it just proving that this is theoretically possible was already quite difficult purely because of these panels now the weight also seemed to affect the stability and you'll notice in just spinning out badly now so move the wings further back for extra stability and also added on some more stabilizers this seemed to be a lot better and now it was taking off completely on its own after that I actually launched this up and I wanted to give it a test now I was out making lemonade so I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on here and apparently it ended up capping out around 4 000 meters and then I just fell right into the ground so I found it pretty much in this state had to review my footage now try it again here while I was paying attention and I launched off the ion engines but it still seemed to be capping out and you guys need to change a few things to get a bit higher now notice the first thing I did was get rid of all of the solar panels after that I put on a decoupler to the wing and you'll notice I'm putting in a battery this is where I'm sure people are gonna get mad because my plan is just to get this battery in place for Mass reasons and I'm just using this to prove that it is possible to fly this for a very short period of time after that you see I actually put another wing on top of that decoupler with extra solar panels This is the power of those Motors and after I had that done it was time to shrink this down as much as possible to save weight and out on the runway I wanted to give it a test now launching off these motors here I did have some problems where it was very close to hitting the ground but fortunately I barely missed and I started heading up here this time the different weight distribution really seemed to help things out and I was pretty much getting all the way up to 6 000 meters right around here though you can see I'm starting to level out and after I saw that I started launching up the island engines and kicked everything else off now I do want to be clear I do have infinite electric charge on but because the battery is going to be able to supply electric charge for about 20 seconds of flight as long as I can prove it can fly here I think I'm good to go so I messed around for a while here try and get the right angle and I noticed that the stability system seemed to be flicking up and down all of my control surfaces a lot which is causing a lot of losses and you'll see him starting to slow down some footage here and you can see for an extremely brief period of time I managed to gain a tiny amount of height and also a tiny amount of speed this was exactly what I was looking for and even though it was definitely not that great it did work and finally I did make a plane powered by ion engines so prepare my electric charge here and after that just went in for the landing so guys thanks for watching this is one of those builds that I did not think was even going to be remotely possible but I'm glad I got something that at least was theoretically working so if you want to see more content like this make sure to subscribe leave any other questions comments so if you leave them down below if you have any other good challenges in this game make sure to leave those down below as well and otherwise till next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 223,666

Keywords:

Id: BjGRkAKmgss

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022