Can you use Nuclear Power to Get into Orbit in Kerbal Space Program?

hey guys today megan kerbal space program and i want to try getting into orbit using only deep space engines now there's two main engines i'm talking about here the nuclear engine and the ion engine these are pretty awful as you'll see so it'll be pretty interesting to try to get it to work so let's get into it so i'm just starting out here in the sandbox and see the first thing i'm doing is putting down a crew capsule and i figured at this point i might as well just try making a simple rocket and seeing how it goes so you can see i have a liquid fuel tank and a nuclear engine on the bottom of it and it's time to go so i went to the launch pad and i went to launch and you can see nothing happened well there's some thrust being produced but like literally nothing happened these engines are so bad that they can't even lift a rocket like this so managing to get it off the ground at all is going to be a struggle now you see here i'm deleting everything and it's because i also wanted to try out the ion engine i wasn't really convinced it was going to be better in fact i thought it was going to be a lot worse since it produces less thrust but it was worth giving a shot so put it on the launch pad and you can see it's the same effect in fact you can see here just how fast it's training the electric charge so these engines are going to require either a lot of solar panels which are going to be heavy or a lot of batteries which are going to be a lot heavy so to get this off the ground i'm going to need to do something kind of weird so i wanted to start out here at the motor now i would be cheating if i spun this motor up but what i want to do is just use you guys a bearing right now and on the end of this motor you see i'm putting down two of these structural pieces and then on those you can see i have this one engine here i'm hoping to spin up this bar and hopefully i can get some blades on it so that as it spins it's almost like a helicopter now the other advantage of this is you can see i'm putting down these batteries here and i can detach the motor part from everything else so that it just flies up on its own and basically i'm using it as a massive flywheel to store a ton of energy so you can see now got on the launch pad and i started it up and i was surprised at just how bad this engine was i knew it wasn't great in the atmosphere but i mean this is just like actually terrible now it did fall over prematurely because it was kind of unbalanced so what i ended up doing is actually putting another one on the other side as well and you can see after i do that i'm gonna have three more sets of these and once i have that a total of eight engines i figured should be able to get this up to speed so those changes done put it back in the launch pad and you can see here it is better it's not great but it's way better than before and in fact if i'd like it up to speed here you can see it's not terrible so we ended up doubling the amount of batteries and adding out a whole bunch more engines and i figured here for sure had to be fast but it just seems like it reaches a point where it can't really go that much faster so what i ended up doing is actually pulling all these into the center like this and i wanted to give this a shot now also you'll notice it's really stable there's no really long arms or anything so it should work out great now i messed up my standing a little bit so i had to fix that and once i did that you see giving it a test now it's actually getting up to a pretty good speed that really just doesn't stop in fact at the very top here you see just how much speed it's gaining and the engines are actually spinning so fast they're starting to expand out from the center of the motor so i figured if i get some blades up to the speed i should be able to get some decent height now past 400 rpm it actually gets a little unstable but that's probably fine because i figured once i had all the extra wings on here it should end up slowing it down enough where it doesn't actually get up to the speed and i ended up just choosing these blades because i thought they looked pretty cool and you see now i have them slightly angled up so i'm gonna give this a test i was hoping i get up to a pretty good speed but i really don't it actually seems to cap out somewhere around 120 or so it's just impossible to get past that and you see here as i try to drop it and immediately loses all of its speed and just falls to the ground so sort of as a last-ditch effort to get this to work what you see what i'm doing here is changing my launch pad and what this is going to do is actually start me up 800 meters in the air and this is really good because these engines actually get more efficient when there's less atmospheric pressure so the higher up i go the better they are and i figured if i got up to about 2500 meters i'd be pretty solid and you can see even now in this test before it holds its speed for a bit and actually seems to glide for a little bit on the top of the rocket so those ion engines are kind of garbage and i ended up switching them out for these nuclear engines and you can see here they are way better now it was a little unstable so i ended up moving the fuel tank and doing a few other things to kind of get it balanced better but once i did that i gave it another test here and you can see now trying to spin up it accelerates way faster than before and just in general it is performing way better and as soon as i release you can see it actually does bounce up a little bit it does end up destroying the crew capsule but even after it does that it slowly glides to the ground so this design actually seemed to be pretty good and once i saw this i actually had the idea that maybe just trying to go straight up isn't what i should be doing and instead i should make a plane and just try to gently get up to about 2000 meters at which point the engines should have enough thrust to really start to get things going so you can see now loaded in the space plane hangar and originally i was gonna put my propeller design on the front of this plane but i realized i could probably just put an engine on the back and i might actually be able to just take off that way so you can see here i ended up putting that down i also put down a fuel tank as well i ended up deleting the motor on the front and once i did that put a little nose cone and i just wanted to give this a test to see what acceleration i get and i ended up messing my time warp up a little bit and it did that so trying it once again you can see here it's actually working out pretty well and at the end of the runway i'm going about 85-ish meters per second and that should totally be enough so you can see here it's added some wings and want to give it a shot to see if it would do anything so it started off a little bit slowly but once i got about halfway down the runway i was going about 40 meters per second at the very end of the runway you see him going about 60 so less than before and it's actually not going enough to be off the ground you see it just instantly explodes when it collides with it so i doubled the amount of engines i had here and gave it another test so racing down the runway again you can see about in the middle and going to like 45-ish and at the very end we're going 70s but better than before and it actually did seem to perform pretty well except for the fact that the engine sort of scraped the ground at the end and destroyed everything so added in the second set of control surfaces in the back and you can see accelerating down once again ends up going off to the side but like flicks is pretty late i can correct for that right around the end of the runway i'm going like 55ish meters per second and i ended up continuing off the end of it for a bit and eventually here i found this little lip on the end of the terrain and it was just enough to get myself up and it actually looked pretty good at first you can see i'm off the ground and appear to be getting somewhere but this is where the problem started because i realized i'm not only losing speed i'm also losing altitude so there's no way i can gain any height like this especially since the engines produce less thrust the lower i go so if i start losing height at all it's pretty much over and you'll also notice here i'm starting to drift off a little bit and eventually here i do a full 180 and this is because i have no vertical stabilizer so there's nothing preventing this from happening so there's quite a few problems going on here and i need to address them now so started out the vertical stabilizer is pretty easy to put in place see it's got that in the back there after that you can see i'm replacing my double engine setup with a triple engine setup just to give myself a little bit more thrust and i figured with this it was probably just enough to get myself off the ground you can see now racing down the runway again i'm going about 64 meters per second in the middle and it was actually enough for me to start getting some lift but i accidentally clipped off two of my engines by going up too quickly so to be a little bit more careful and you see now waiting more towards the end of the runway and you see i'm very slightly moving it up so that it doesn't quite hit the ground and you see here actually do get off the ground and the good thing is i'm not only gaining height i'm also gaining speed so this actually does seem to be working and i just sort of let it run for a while here now this seemed to be going really well but there's a few problems that really i could only feel and it's hard to describe and you see what happened there is i just completely wasn't paying attention what was going on for like a second and it just flipped over so i actually decided to do a slight redesign of the top stage and hopefully just improve things a bit now notice here i have this first stage and this one's actually just the fuel tank and the rocket in the back so once i get up to a really good height that single engine is gonna have a ton of power and really get me going where i need to go you can see here next thing i'm doing is putting on a second stage and this one's sort of similar to before but you see here i have two on each side and this is really just for balance and stability reasons i didn't really want the nose to be really long because i'm just going to start drooping and it makes it really awkward when trying to control it but you see here i ended up getting all my stuff from the sides and after that you see i'm putting down some wheels now now the next thing i'm doing is just putting down some wings like this and originally it's gonna go for these delta wings and just have these l ones on the side and you see in this test here it wasn't that great now the first problem is well these rockets are yeah but besides that there's also some other problems you'll notice that it actually doesn't really get up to that great of a speed we're in the middle of the runway and we're about like 35ish meters per second at the very end we're like about 55 60 and the wings just aren't doing anything like i literally can't get any lift out of this and i ended up just running into the light and completely destroying the rocket so the first thing you did was just brace the top boosters so they wouldn't droop like that after i did that you can see here i'm replacing the delta wing with these much larger wing segments and i'm hoping that this i'll get a lot more lift and actually be able to get somewhere now these wing segments tend to be a little more flimsy than just the dedicated wing piece so to be careful to brace it and it actually kind of works here you see it get off the ground but it's just too back heavy right now and it just completely flips over each of these engines weighs a lot and considering it produces very little thrust it ends up being really expensive to have to put all these on but you see here i put out a bank of 16 of these i tried a whole bunch of different things moving stuff around getting things to work out right and nothing seemed to work but in this test honestly i didn't really change that much i added on a few more stabilizers suddenly took off and just seemed to be good in fact i'm gaining height reasonably quickly and also gaining a bunch of speed now this wasn't crazy or anything it was still kind of slow we're only going about 80 meters per second and you see here how much i'm flipping it up and down it's just because it's kind of unstable at the very end here ended up completely flipping up so i tried to launch the next stage but it was just too late at that point and the whole thing just disintegrated so i launched it once again and added a little bit more stability to prevent it from just doing what it was doing it seemed to be a bit better so after deployed that stage you can see here it actually looks pretty good and at first i thought for sure this was gonna work out great i was gaining a bit of height but i was still losing speed and you see here after a long time it ended up just sinking so four rockets literally isn't enough to move this at two thousand meters i was honestly amazed should hopefully salvage this you see here i have this massive bank of rockets on the bottom and these aren't meant to take flight at all they're literally just to accelerate the rocket while it's on the ground and i'm hoping i can save a bit of fuel so i can get up a little bit higher and when i launch that top stage we'll have enough thrust to actually increase my height once i got those on want to give it a test here and it just didn't work out that great so to fix that you can see here i'm putting in some structural tanks after i get those in place just putting some wheels in the back like this once i have that done you can see it's a little glitchy and it's very laggy at this point but it does seem to be working now here i think this is two time speed you can see it looks normal so the lag is definitely getting very intense right now and i want to add as few rockets as possible because it's just kind of becoming unbearable but you can see here i ended up doing a weird turn off the runway and it's because i have no control over where this is going it's pretty much wherever it wants to and you can see there eventually i launched the rockets for the top stage as well and once it's getting completely out of control i end up launching and it looks pretty good so i ended up going for a redesign again but this time i actually had some good ideas basically the point of the redesign was sort of just to smash the best aspects of the two other designs together and also incorporate some other ideas i had to make something that can actually get into orbit and i ended up actually just going for a two-stage design at the moment so i just have the one that's on the ground and the one i actually take off with now you'll notice here i have a lot of rockets and lag when i hit space is insane before the rockets actually end up going but they do end up going and you can see here i think this has four times speed ends up working out pretty well but it's not even that much faster than before when i just had the single line of rockets so i realized this was definitely overkill and you see here once i get up to about 65 meters per second and once i was on a crash course with a bunch of random buildings i ended up taking off here and the lag waiting for it to calculate all these explosions was just insane but eventually here you can see i ended up breaking from it and actually getting to take off now this rocket with only four engines actually seem to be doing really well and you can see here it's gaining height much faster than any of the planes i've tested with and you can see here i actually ended up flipping it over this one was completely my fault because i wasn't paying any attention to it but already this redesign was looking way better than four and you can see here with proper handling i got it all the way up to 10 000 meters before there's a problem and at this point i actually didn't run out of fuel or anything the atmosphere is just so thin it's so hard to control where this is going so that looking good i want to add up one last stage consisting of a single fuel tank and an engine and this is just for the final burn in the atmosphere so once i got that put on there i also added on two more rockets to the end of the first stage just to give it a little bit more power and once like that you can see here i'm all the way up top my flight again and it's still kind of hard to control even with these extra surfaces and once you completely lost control i ended up going to the small rocket and had some good power but it just didn't have the stability at all i'm still too far in the atmosphere to really ignore any effects of wind or anything so you can see here on the top stage putting down some fins like this and once i got those in place you can see it burned all the way up to the top and once i had that done i ended up deploying it it looked great you can see here it's staying true but eventually it tried to correct itself and that's what it flipped over and it's an easy enough fix just to move the wings back just a little bit and once i did that it was time to actually try to get the whole mission done so starting out in the launch pad here you see in this first test things looked great at first bottom rockets fired i was accelerating a bit i went off the launch pad that's actually not that big of a deal though but stuff started exploding and that was kind of a problem and you can see i did end up separating from it but it was way too early i didn't have enough speed so i had to try again here and see in this test i ended up launching up the boosters they actually stayed in the launch pad for much longer this time again not that it really matters but it just ends up looking good but you see here continues going straight for a while and eventually up to about 80 meters per second and this one ended up deciding to fly off of it now it's kind of turning at extreme angle here and i just didn't really want to have to deal with that so launched off of it there and i really had enough speed anyway so it was fine and you can see now i'm just starting to burn up have my rockets going and i'm actually gaining a decent amount of speed here as well as altitude i figured that this angle was probably the best i could do because i wanted to get up as quickly as possible but i didn't want to stall as well but i noticed there was a slight problem with this rocket i hadn't really seen before you can see that the tail is moving up and down just slightly and so it's amplified more and more throughout the flight and i'm not really sure what's causing this but i'm able to correct for it enough and you can see here i end up burning out all the fuel and launch top stage now this stage has quite a bit of work to do to get into orbit i need to increase my altitude a ton and also get my speed probably around 2000 meters per second so you can see here it's continued burning up more and more and i'm basically just waiting for the game to consider me not on the surface but in orbit and you can see this down here and i ended up looking back and forth for a little while and while i was burning here just checking my trajectory and you can see here i actually did get into orbit so these awful nuclear engines i actually managed to get into orbit i was so happy about this but i had one more goal in mind that i thought would be pretty cool i wanted to get out of the atmosphere and that means i need to get my apple apps it's right above 70 000 meters and you can see after this long burn here i check and i'm at 74. so i just barely did that as well after a little celebratory spin you can see here i'm going to start descending and try to actually land so guys thanks for watching it's definitely a fun video to mess around with and i'm glad i got these nuclear engines that actually do something they were definitely not intended to do so if you want to see more content like this make sure to subscribe feel free to leave any questions or comments down below and otherwise until next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 245,746

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Id: sLTbc6y-rAY

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022