Can you Use Only Mammoth Engines to get to Pol in Kerbal Space Program?

hey guys today i'm back in kerbal space program and i want to try making a rocket using only mammoth engines to get to pole and back now these engines are really heavy and awkward so it's going to be a little cumbersome trying to make a lander but let's get right into it just starting out in the sandbox first thing i do here is put down a crew capsule and after that i want to put down an engine and you can just see the size difference between these and it's a little ridiculous so put down a small fuel tank and a parachute just for fun and i wanted to see what this would do now i don't know what i was expecting here but it just took off so fast and then ran out of fuel immediately so to hopefully solve both of those problems i'm adding on some extra fuel tanks like this and you can see now i've got somewhat of a slope going down i replace that top adapter to make it a little more gradual and you can see here it just rockets off the launch pad again now after i limit the throttle a bit it becomes a little bit more normal and actually has a pretty good amount of fuel it's not enough to just immediately get into orbit but it's honestly not half bad and i figured for just being a pole lander it should be pretty good now i had another docking port here so that you know i could dock and after that i wanted to add on a decoupler in the bottom but you can't attach anything to the bottom of the mammoth engines so to get around that what i want to do is add on some radial decouplers to the sides like this now i ended up putting some medium-sized fuel tanks on the sides of these and the plan for this stage is to be the orbiter so that once my lander comes back up it'll redock with this and get down to the ground and you can see here i was messing around adding some fuel tanks in the middle too maybe it's a separate stage or something but it just looked weird and i didn't really like it so i ended up deleting those and i'll put a large fuel tank and i liked the look but it was sort of clipping into a lot of the tanks so what i ultimately decided on was using this cone shape that comes down and sort of fills in the middle and after that i put down the engines but they're actually a little too small for the big tanks which doesn't really matter but just to make it look a little bit better filled it in with the frustum once i did that put down the engine again and put it on the launch pad now launching it didn't really go so well because it wasn't even able to lift itself so to give it a little bit more thrust i had it on a bicoupler like this and once i did that use the move tool to offset it a little bit so i can add a second one in place as well and you can see here i end up doubling my engines and with just these two stages i actually was able to get a decent orbit here now i'm not planning to use these stages around kerbin but it's just good to see that they definitely have the power and probably the fuel i'm gonna need to get back now as a final touch here i added on some docking ports in the middle and i'm gonna use some rcs thrusters which i'm putting in now to push these two tanks together once the lander goes away and once that happens they become just one object it's just a little bit easier to manage in orbit when that's the case and considering they're already gonna be right next to each other it should be easy enough to put them right next to each other now while i was talking about that i also added in some boosters as well and these are literally just a nose cone a tank and the mammoth engine and you see now getting on the launch pad two of them are behaving well and two of them are doing this and trying to take off probably wasn't the play here so i went back into the editor and see added on some extra struts also turned on auto strut and once i had that done you see actually sort of holding together now and i went for a launch now taking off it was really stable and it was working a lot better than before and in fact just as a test and partially because i kind of got distracted i flew all the way out to eve with this now i had like no fuel so i wasn't gonna be able to get home or anything but again it was just good to see that it had the fuel to do this and also it was kind of fun to see it explode in the atmosphere like this so after that very scientific test i added on some extra boosters like this and what i wanted to do was add on one extra stage in between a couple of my other stages you can see here i put down some mammoth engines sort of in the middle of the rocket and what i wanted to do is put a stage underneath the stage now again you can attach directly to the bottom of these engines but you can sort of get around that by using a lot of structural pieces like this and then connecting to the bottom of these structural pieces and you can see here the looks actually pretty close but i knew i was gonna need a lot of struts to make this work because it's really unstable at the moment so if you're putting all those in place i added a bunch of extra boosters since i just added on a bunch of extra weight and with all that added on i was finally ready to launch now getting off the launch pad was a little slow but it wasn't too bad and you can see here ended up getting high enough that it was time to drop the first set of boosters this worked almost perfectly because fly away like nothing and honestly that couldn't have gone better now after a little bit more timing see all of my ring of boosters ended up deploying wrong and this is where things went very wrong the boosters seem to just fly straight into these rockets and cause some problems but i decided to at least use this as a staging test so you can see here next stage launched just fine and after that was gonna launch this hop stage but i forgot to turn off the boosters first so they ended up just running right into the rocket but it seemed to decouple just fine so it's really just that one stage with a ring of boosters that's the problem now once again here ran out of fuel and you can see a bunch of explosions and stuff and you know this really isn't ideal but at least it kind of worked but things started to look even worse because i really only had about 11 000 meters per second of delta v and to get all the way to pole it was gonna take probably about 11 or 12 if i was really trying and doing it well so i tried out some extra boosters and adding on some extra tanks but at times this even seemed to just reverse my progress and this design had so many moving parts it fell off the launch pad a lot of the time things just seemed to randomly fall apart sometimes and with all that i just eventually decided to get rid of the bottom two stages and start over again but this time i had a little bit of a better idea instead of just randomly putting a ring of boosters around i wanted to put them closer to the bottom but you'll see something else i have in mind here now i'm just building up some basic boosters like the succeed nose cone the fuel tanks and the engines but after i had those i actually decided to stack these on each other like this and i figured this would probably go better instead of having the boosters falling from all sides of the rocket they're just falling off two sides and this makes it a little bit easier on the rocket now i didn't brace them so well again so they just sort of did this after bracing them up a little bit here i actually decided to triple the amount i had i understood that by putting two on the sides of these boosters now this should allow it to fall off quite easily but still give me a ton of power and you can see here i have about 12 and a half meters per second a delta v which should be pretty good so added in a couple of extra boosters on the sides and with all that done i waited for a launch window to get to juul and i'm finally here going for the mission now taking off was a little bit better than before got a decent amount of speed wish it was a little bit better but it does the trick and you can see here i'm actually turning 90 degrees this is partly my fault i should have just done this in the editor and the reason for it is that as they start to turn here i don't want the booster to be on top of me because otherwise it's going to come down and hit me as it falls off and you can see these boosters on the sides fell off and at first i thought it was just fine there's a few explosions shouldn't have been too big of a deal though but i only noticed this in editing while i was coming into the atmosphere and gave myself a little bit more light i'm actually missing a booster on the side here and that's the reason that my rocket keeps turning to the side slightly i was kind of wondering why that was happening but ultimately this didn't really end up being that big of a deal anyway and i just continued to burn now i didn't want to get an orbit around kerbin or anything i'd set myself up so that i could just keep burning and i'll get ejected out of caribbean in the right direction and finally here you see after growing for a little bit i ended up running out of fuel in the bottom stage and it was time to deploy it and i was a little nervous about this see i actually started out just a little bit of thrust going away from it but by this point it seemed to be mostly fine and i just started to burn now the stage i'm controlling right now only has two engines on it and it's pretty heavy so it's kind of annoying to control you saw there i set jules the target and i'm slowly starting to burn up towards it now i should have set myself up for it to be pretty close but with a pretty minimal amount of effort i actually got a reasonable encounter here now it is like 2 billion meters away but that's not half bad and i got it down to about a billion just by burning a little bit more with all that done i added on another maneuver and it's a little bit further in the flight and with this maneuverous forest to get me all that much closer now i'll end up fine-tuning this once i actually start to burn but i want to get it about 3 million meters away and you can see i just got that here and you can see here that all set up started to work away from caribbean and towards that maneuver point and once i was there i ended up deploying the solar panels and the antennas and i needed to deploy the solar panels to be able to rotate myself but it took an unbelievably long time to turn around to where i needed to be and you can see finally here when i'm pointing in the right direction i started to do the burn and it's about 130 meters per second which is kind of a lot of fuel but this burn is gonna save me way more than that once i get two joules now the reason i want to be as close as possible once i get to duel is that you end up burning a lot more efficiently the closer you get to a planet after a bunch of failed attempts to get really close i ended up getting into a little over 200 000 meters and that's good because joule's atmospheric sends out to 200 000 meters so i need to be a little bit above that and this gives me a little bit of wiggle room in case things go wrong and you can see here finally we're up in all the way over jewel and then finally jewel coming in for you now and i'm slowly warping over to the other side and once i get down to about 240 000 meters i decide it's good enough and i start to do the burn and i just barely let myself get captured here now the reason i don't try pulling in the orbit a little bit more is that i want to try getting a gravity assist to do that for me ideally i'd spend a little under 100 meters per second here and save probably about a thousand so on the other side of the orbit i ended up making maneuver like this and i played around for quite a while and finally got an encounter with lathe and i actually messed around even more and got a better encounter with tylo and tyler's a little bit more massive so it can do a little bit more pulling and you can see here i get a much better result i actually pull myself almost exactly where i need to be so i eventually just warp all the way over to the maneuver node which takes quite a while since the orbit's so large and once i got in there i made a very descriptive quick save which i definitely wasn't gonna forget the name of and once i did that start to do my burn now it's about 30 meters per second which is amazing considering it's gonna save me so much fuel but you can see here slowly start to burn and actually get an accidental encounter with lathe but just burning a little bit more i finally get that tylo encounter and you see here pulling it in i finally get to the spot where i want to be after that i make once again a very descriptive quick save and i just start to work back into place now at this point there's nothing i really shouldn't need to do so i'm just going to sit back and watch the gravity exist take place they see me warping right in front of tylo and this makes sense because as i start to fall towards tylo it's gonna kill a ton of my orbital speed and see here once i come out of that orbit it's much smaller now than it was before soap i set poles my target and after did that i made one last correction and the thing with poles has such a tiny sphere of influence i really need to get as close as possible so i'm trying to get the descending node down to zero degrees and once i have that there all there's really left to do is make once again a very descriptive quick save and slowly try to get an encounter now eventually here i got an accidental encounter with lathe so i had to be kind of careful here and burn just a little bit to get out of the way of that and it only cost me about three meters per second so it wasn't really that expensive but you see here i actually got a pretty close encounter and once i saw that i started to use a maneuver node to get as close as possible and finally here you can see i got it in just to about 250 000 meters that was pretty much the closest i could get and with that done it was time to wait for that encounter and you can see now pull over there after waiting a little bit and now i'm just flipping around so i'll be facing roughly the right direction and it ends up warping so i'd be right on top of a pole now i worked a little too far actually you know slightly past the periapsis but it was good enough and i started to do my burn here and all i want to do is try circularizing now i figured i was going to need to kill pretty much all of my speed and you see that i finally ran out of my second stage so i went into my top stage here and that's going pretty much as planned and if anything it's actually slightly ahead of schedule i figured i'd pretty much need to use the third stage for the entirety of this burn i got a little extra out of that second stage so you can see here i finally ended up getting captured and once that happened i tried pulling in my orbit and i wanted the periapsis to be right about at 14 000 meters that was for no particular reason other than it just sounded pretty good and you see here just how little i turn on my engine and just how much distance i got out of it i turned up a little bit more at the end here but i thought it was kind of crazy how much i got out of that little throttle so after making that first burn then one more correction burn here you can see finally i got an orbit that's right about at 14 000 meters pretty constantly so now that i'm finally in a stable orbit around pole what i want to do is tricep bring off my lander and combining the orbiters and this is where things started to go wrong you see they immediately started rotating out and they were getting further apart from each other so what i did is just loaded up my quick save again and once i did that i had a new strategy you can see i separated them off and then boosted away quite quickly after that i got out of the way i went to the tracking station and immediately selected one of those orbiters to control once i had that i tried boosting them into each other and this is where things started to go really wrong in fact all of the footage you've seen before was actually from my second attempt getting the poll this was the first attempt and this is the reason that it didn't work out i ended up putting rcs thrusters in the wrong spots partially because i forgot partially cause i ended up moving stuff around and i couldn't get them to come back together i'm sure it was possible but it literally just wasn't worth it and there's also a few other improvements i figured i could make while i was in the vehicle assembly building so eventually here you can see i tried moving around with the lander attached to just one of these but it still wasn't able to get them close together and i ultimately decided just to try again but this time put some more boosters on there so you see i have four boosters here that should push them closer together and i also added a whole bunch of docking ports and these are for the lander to connect to and i decided to put a bunch of them just because why not it seemed like there was no reason not to and just makes it way easier later so once i had that going see i'm back in orbit here and i'm trying to put them back together and this time it was actually kind of working see they're slowly starting to get close together but eventually i ran out of the rcs fuel on that tank so just switch over to the other rocket and start to get closer to it with that one now once i did that i ended up killing a little bit too much speed and stopping so i had to re-accelerate towards it and it actually seemed pretty good but i misaligned the docking ports a little bit and this first attempt didn't quite get there so i tried again but this time i was a little bit slower i ended up getting those docking ports just close enough that they ended up touching and they ended up sticking together that took quite a while for them to settle in and you can actually see here i just speeded up a ton but eventually they did sort of straighten out a bit it'll connect together just fine and with that i had one orbiter unit and it was time to go back over to the lander and try to get this on pole i started by expanding everything out now that i don't have the orbiter's in the way and with that done it was really time to just face retrograde and start to kill a bunch of my speed and i only had to use a little bit of throttle since pretty much any change in velocity is gonna kill my speed and after just killing it for a little bit longer i eventually decided on this trajectory now there really was no reason for me to pick anything specifically but one thing i definitely should have picked was daytime so you can see here i ended up boosting the light so it's a little bit easier to see what's going on in the video i'm slowly just dropping down this landing is honestly really easy since the gravity and pole is really small so you see here it slowly started to get towards the bottom and eventually here i settled down and i don't have any landing gear because i figured i could just land on the engine and that sort of was true here i did end up landing but the issue was it was on a slope so the sas was actually working overtime right now to keep myself up so i ended up having to turn that off to slowly fall down and after balancing it for a little bit i used a solar panel to burn myself into slamming into the ground and that done i was laying down but i was still sliding a bit so i just had to turn myself to increase the friction and finally here you can see i stopped myself and i was technically landed on pole so of course i had to take the kerbal out and plant the flag so doing that here and the following was quite slow so i warped the daytime to make it a little bit easier to see after that you can see here plant the flag and that done it's time to get back on the ship and get back home now this is a little harder than expected i ended up starting out by just retracting everything and once i did that i need to somehow get my nose up and it's a lot easier said than done now i did end up having that happen here but only after my solar panels flew off and unfortunately both of them flew off which meant that even though i have an orbit here this is going to be really annoying since i will need the solar panels to generate electricity around the reaction wheels so without that i ended up deciding just to load the save and try again i ended up taking off here and you can see here i just clipped light on the terrain but i didn't really care about the light at this point so that was totally fine and it's starting to take off here everything looks great i started to extend out the solar panels to get myself some electricity but it looked at the world map and noticed a major problem there's just no orbital trajectory at all for me and that's just really bizarre it's also considering me landed right now and i'm not exactly sure how that works and i can't really rendezvous with the orbiter without having the orbital trajectory so i ended up trying again and you see this time i also slammed the light on the ground but i figured it was probably just a one-off thing before this time it really wasn't as good you can see here i'm started getting this weird turn but as long as i get some sort of orbit it's fine and considering it's so easy to get off pole i wasn't too worried but the game still wasn't showing me an orbital trajectory so i ended up restarting the game and i tried taking off much more carefully i really tried not to break anything at all since i kind of suspected that to be the problem and i got a really terrible spin here but i did end up getting off the ground for just long enough that i was able to start boosting up and you see here when i go into the big mode i do actually have an orbital trajectory so i suspect that breaking that part on the ground somehow confused the game and it just thought i was landed i'm not exactly sure how that happens but whatever it worked out now and the next thing that i had to do was just run the way with the orbiter now i wasn't really too concerned about doing things that efficiently since poles gravity is just so late that really even the most extreme maneuvers are like maybe 100 meters per second of fuel so it's just not really that big of a deal after waiting for quite a while here you can see i got a really close encounter it's just under a kilometer so just wait until that point and once i'm there i can see it way off the distance so i just turned the lander towards it and i just did a slow burn towards it and after that you can see here it started to come into view and it's now much closer and in fact here i ended up shimmying around for quite a while i ended up skipping that since it ended up being really boring but you can see here only 15 meters away and last thing to do is just retract all my solar panels so i'm able to connect to it and just get near it then for quite a few tries i finally got those docking ports to meet up and it was slightly turned and that did cause some problems now you can slightly turn these two things relative to each other in the docking port settings but it still was off by a lot as i tried to burn just a little bit here you'd see me just wildly turning out of the way and i tried enabling all the engines at once to see how that would work out but that just broke the docking port and it just did this so eventually here what i realized i could do is just transfer all the fuel into the lander and if i did that i have about 3 000 meters per second of delta v which i figured was probably about enough to get home so once i transfer all the fuel i could i ended up undocking here and starting to do my burn now what i wanted to do was burn off from poland away where i'd kill a little bit of my speed going towards joule and it's a little counter-intuitive here because normally i'm trying to get away from joule so i actually want to increase my speed there but what i want to try to do is get a tylo encounter and then have tylo throw me out from joule and i figured doing this would save me 600 meters per second as delta v i'm making that number up but it's probably somewhere around that point so after waiting for a transfer window here i ended up playing with the maneuver node a little bit and eventually here i got a really good boost off of tylo and eventually tuned it just enough that i got a really really good launch so i ended up turning myself so that i'd be able to do that burn and start to do that here now fortunately since the lander is pretty much just an engine strapped to a fuel tank it really really goes and that entire burn took me almost no time at all the last segment here though to be a little delicate with so i turned down the thrust percentage and i'm just slightly making that now so i get around jewel and you see tyler coming to view here and i'm getting pulled towards it that's flinging me out from jewel's fear of influence so with that done you can see jewels slowly go out into the distance and finally here i'm in interplanetary space to save you the trouble of watching every single step i did here i ended up showing the important ones first one is getting my burns that i just barely touched urban and you see that happening here and we'd be about 50 something million meters away from it once i had that i ended up doing one correction burn to get myself into right about 70 000 meters now the advantage of doing this is the closer you get to a planet the more efficient your burn is going to be and i didn't really think this one through fully i actually did want to be slightly in the atmosphere and that cost me just a little bit so if i just worked all the way around to where carbon is and once i thought i was close enough i started to do my burn and you can see here i do end up getting captured but then i run out of fuel and this is sort of a problem because my periapsis is above 70 000 meters which means i'm not in the atmosphere and i can't aerobrake so i'm going to be eternally stuck up here so i did this once again but i actually dipped down so it'd be about 60 000 meters and this time i'm actually gonna have an unstable orbit so i should be able to just use the very top stage which is literally just a heat shield on top of that crew capsule to slowly come down and finally here you can see i'm slowly starting to fall down and i'll show you that here as i go through the outro so guys thanks for watching this definitely a super fun video to make and it took quite a while to get everything together and big good target to do build the rocket and get the multiple attempts done to make it happen but if you have any other cool video ideas make sure to leave them down below subscribe if you want to see more content like this and otherwise until next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 361,252

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Id: -WeVNnx-cxs

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022