Can You Use Only One Engine to Get to Moho in Kerbal Space Program?

I've made Rockets a Kerbal Space Program with dozens of engines in fact I even tried making one using every engine in the game I was thinking though and I want to try getting to moho using only a single engine this will require an unorthodox approach and my first idea was using the CR7 engine now the Vehicle Assembly Building here you can see it started out by putting down a command pod on that I put down a fuel tank and on that I put down my CR7 engine now this engine is really useful because it can both work by using oxidizer and by using air now I was hoping this was going to give me a huge efficiency Boost after putting on a nose cone and some fins here I want to give it a test to the launch pad and starting out it didn't seem too bad at all Ray notes and oxidizer mode but it does seem to be burning really well and I got a pretty good amount of thrust so I decided to remove the nose cone and I replaced it with one of these air tanks after that I added some liquid Fuel and with that I want to give it another test this time is turn it out in air breathing mode and it was a lot worse I could see that it was on but it wasn't producing enough thrust to get off the ground so I figured the lack of air speed is probably a large problem here so I decided to do is use the normal mode get off the launch pad and once I got up high enough I wanted to switch back to using the air breathing mode now one interesting thing about this engine is that when it's in air breathing mode the Flames are a little more yellow but an oxidizer mode it seems to be a lot more purple but you can see here in this new mode it's saying I have a lot more Delta V and I'm getting up quite a bit higher I did have a problem though where once I got up to about 16 000 meters the engine was really starting to struggle I'm not sure if it was struggling because I was going too fast or if I was up too high but switching back into the normal mode here I wanted to see if I could finish up in orbit now seem to pick right back up pretty well here but I did have a problem once I tried finishing up my Orbit here I ran out of fuel and I really wasn't all that close to finishing it up at all so this engine while it's interesting I don't think it really has enough thrust to get me all the way to moho now I had another idea here and you can see I'm deleting everything off the rocket and I'm trying to use this Mammoth engine this is the most powerful engine in the game so if I threw a fuel tank on it you can see even with this huge tank it's still really easily getting off the ground here and I really liked that now to hopefully make it slightly more aerodynamic I added on some more fuel tanks here to give it more of a cone-like shape and after putting that on here I wanted to add another fuel tank I could see here my thrust to weight ratio was still really high so I added on another fuel tank and after that it was more under reasonable level my rocket was still really tall though so what I wanted to do is switch out these fuel tanks for ones that are a bit fatter so the whole thing ends up being shorter and this design seemed to push me right to the limit of what I could do and I could see here at about 5 500 meters per second the Delta V now I wasn't convinced that was going to be enough at all to get to moho but I did have an idea notice now I'm putting on some Landing legs but after that I'm taking off the engine and adding on a docking port now my plan is to get this rocket in orbit but once I do that I want to detach the engine de-orbit it and have it land back at the Kerbal Space Center after that I want to take that engine and put it on another rocket I also had it on a couple of motors and ore tanks this might seem weird but the plan was to throw these tanks off so I could de-orbit the engine the issue though is these tanks are so heavy I can't even take off anymore now I cheated this up into orbit just just to see if it would work and while it definitely looked interesting here as soon as they tried to turn up the motor speed The Ore tanks ended up hitting into the landing gear and starting to explode so the deorbit this engine I wanted to go for a more normal way of doing it and for that I put in a couple of modern repellent tanks and I put down a bunch of these linear thrust ports now I can use these to push my engine back and slightly dip into the atmosphere and after that you could also see here I added a fairing to the top and that's to cover up the really tiny crew capsule after that I also stuck in a mod repellent tank here and you see I also added in another fuel tank this will be my final stage for the rocket and would say that looking good I also had it on another set of D couplers between the two big tanks and after replacing the top tank for a much larger one I finally had my full rocket next though I did still need to design the fuel delivery rocket and for that you can see I'm starting out by using this engine now this engine isn't going to start on this rocket and I'm going to need to find a way to put it on the bottom here but just for testing I wanted to put it on and see now what I'm doing is putting down some fuel tanks in the bottom of the engine now each of these tanks is pretty small and the plan is that once they empty out I'm gonna be able to drop them down and keep shaving off weight and of course the nose cone and some stabilizers it was time to give it a test and a launch pad here it didn't seem that great and that's because the engine was overheating the fuel tank below it and not producing any thrust at all so I had to remove my fuel tank stack and add in some of these structural pieces these physically separate out the engine a bit more and my staging was slightly wrong at first but once I finally gave it a try here it still was too close to the engine and overheating so I added on one last structural piece and with that it finally was producing thrust didn't really seem like I was moving though and it's because the rocket was pretty much perfectly balanced here so I shaved off one of the fuel tanks and started to head up here now going up further it did seem to work pretty well but it was starting to turn and there was definitely a lack of stability so to fix that on every stage I added on some fins just to give it a lot more Authority and I wanted to give it another test now this time it was a little bit faster off launch pad and you see me starting to ascend here now fortunately the way I positioned all these fuel tanks in the bottom they fell off really easily and I had almost no problems at all in fact once they got all the way up to the top here I wanted to see if I could finish up my Orbit and while I did mess it up a lot here and didn't end up circularizing I could see that I definitely had the fuel to do this and with more careful piloting I should be able to get this done so this system mostly proven to work I got rid of the engine now and it was time to switch back over to my main rocket I did want to make one change though before I launched and that was adopting my system from before where I can drop off the fuel tanks in the bottom this was really efficient and being able to do this really helped out the rocket now in my first test flight it was a little too heavy and was slowly starting to sink down so after removing one of the fuel tanks here gave it another test and now we finally started to a set now going for the full mission here you can see I'm doing pretty much exactly what I did before as the fuel tanks the bottom emptied I started dropping them off but once the last fuel tank emptied it was time to switch over to the main stage and start draining the main fuel tank now overall this rocket was pretty stable and fairly easily here you see I got my APO apps just above 80 000 meters now let's get out of the atmosphere I could deploy off my Fairing and save a little bit of weight now that deployed it was time to finish up my Orbit next here and you see it's exactly what I'm doing now once I finally got my periopsis to appear I wanted to get it just above 70 000 meters this was really important because I needed to make sure that my engine was going to be able to fall into the atmosphere and I didn't really have that much fuel to push it back and now with this main stage in orbit it's time to take off the engine here and see if I could de-orbit it now once I turned on RCS here I could see that it's starting to correct itself and going into docking mode I was able to push away from the main rocket and slow myself down a little bit now it ran out of fuel pretty quickly here so I wasn't really sure if it was going to get down that low but I could see on the other side it was down to 45 000 meters and that was definitely low enough to Slow Me Down really quickly so I ripped into the atmosphere here and after that you can see I started to fall down at around 50 000 meters you could really see these atmospheric drag lines start to show now see me slow down pretty quickly here and once I slowed down below 700 meters per second my first parachutes deployed and I started plan my Landing so like sending out my landing gear and I could see that it was falling on land that was a good thing but there was a minor problem I seem to be on the opposite side of the planet from the Kerbal Space Center which was going to make it really hard to get this back at the very least though I did want to test out everything just to make sure it wasn't going to explode and the landing legs got very contracted they did seem to work and overall this seemed to be fine but I decided to load back up my save here and you can see I'm doing the same thing deorbiting my engine but I did it in a slightly different spot in my Orbit this time I was a lot closer to the kernel Space Center but I could see how it's definitely gonna be quite a bit short of it and after a bit more waiting I was gonna land in the ocean which I wasn't really sure if it was gonna be okay now in another attempt here it seemed to badly overshoot the Kerbal Space Center but finally here on this next attempt I started to fall into the atmosphere and while I was gonna overshoot the Kerbal Space Center I was gonna be pretty close to it as well and you can see now I'm falling into the ocean now I was hoping I was going to be able to float here because if I was at the very least it shouldn't be too bad to get this engine back and you see here I did see stay above the water now I ended up developing this little boat thing to go rescue it and you can see here just a bunch of fuel tanks and a couple of propellers to push it in the water so I slowly made my way down the runway and entering the water here also seemed to work really well but once I turned on the motors I guess I put them a little too far forward because then the boat just ended up flipping over so I went back to the space plane hanger and you can see I pushed those Motors further back after that I got right back into the water here and this time I didn't seem to flip over at all so I started heading over to the engine this took quite a long time here and I was maxing out around 25 meters per second after not too too long though I did make it over the engine and I wanted to attach it to my boat now I did this here by extending out the arm in the front and after floating into it here I grabbed on and it was time to head back to the Kerbal Space Center I did have a problem though where it was really hard to steer this thing with the engine on the front it seemed to be causing a lot of drag and making it hard to go in One Direction with enough trouble though I was able to vary the power going to each of the motors here and with enough help from SAS I was able to stay going for forward I was going a lot slower though than I was in the way there and this entire trip took about three times as long finally though I got over the shore and with that I was gonna need a car to bring this over to the launch pad now I made that up here and exterior design is pretty simple basically I just have a couple of pistons in the top that extend out and one in the front that extends down these should allow me to grab onto the engine and pull it off the ground so I'm able to drive over to the launch pad now on my first trip down to the shore though for whatever reason it started going way too fast and hitting the brakes I did this interesting flip which didn't really work out so well so I drove down a bit more carefully and this timing see here I grabbed it under the engine and I pulled it up and into the body of my car now once that was in place it was time to bring it over to launch pad here and now I just need to figure out a way to get the engine up and onto the rocket for this my plan was to make a crane the idea was I'll be able to grab the engine and pull it up to the top and rotate it very carefully onto the docking port on the bottom of the fueler rocket now after building up a bit of a base here I built up a tower and you can see I used a bunch of hydraulics and these are gonna pull up the engine now I put an arm on the bottom of these to grab onto the engine and after that I realized I could push these Hydraulics into each other and that lets me get them a lot more compact now I threw down some Wheels here to make it a bit less likely to tip over and also I won that on some batteries as a counterweight I needed these anyway so I may as well just stick them onto the ends here and make sure there's enough weight to keep it from falling over once the engine is on now after attaching up an engine here just as a test piece I wanted to try pulling this up and seeing how it would do I'm not sure what exploded there but at the very least it did seem to pull up reasonably well but once it started to swing out it definitely was starting to tip the crane over in fact here once I got it up high enough I seemed to pull it up a little bit too fast and it was just enough to get the whole thing to tip so I moved the crane off the launch pad and the reason for that is so I could spawn in my fueler rocket now the Vehicle Assembly Building I also pushed it over to the left more so it'd be a little easier for the crane to get in position but it pushed it over a little too much and bet it seemed to clip into the terrain so we moved it back a tiny bit here and with that it seemed to be pretty stable so it get my engine in position here you can see I detached it from my main car and I had another car that rotates the engine to be straight up once I did that it was time to use the crane and grab onto this engine now if enough moving back and forth I did get it grabbed on here and I started pulling it up now I did this very slowly because I really didn't want it to swing back and forth too much getting up the launch pad here was kind of causing some problems that if it went too fast the engine would start to tip me over finally though I got in position here and started pulling up on the Hydraulics now this first test had a few problems and one of them was that I wasn't actually able to pull it up high enough the Hydraulics were really starting to bend and stretch here and I think that was causing a lot of problems with lining it up so I sent over another crane to position here that could pull up a little bit higher and now while it was getting up to the right height I was having a lot of trouble with getting it to a line where I needed to so to rotate it up in place I added on two servos here and these allow me to rotate it both side to side and up and down to align perfectly with the docking port and with enough tuning I did get these aligned up just right so I could see no gaps at all but for whatever reason it wasn't docking them together so to encourage it slightly more you see a hacked gravity here and with this off the magnetic attraction gets these things that's perfectly touch together and once that happened I turned off hack gravity now for the record I had about three or four hours of crane footage trying to get these to touch together and for whatever reason it just wouldn't want to happen so while I didn't really want to hack gravity at the very least I am happy they are touched together and with that it's time to get this viewership into orbit now at first here it seemed to be perfectly fine but as soon as it started to gain any height at all it was slowly starting to tilt one of my theories though is that once I attached the engine it wasn't aligned perfectly on one of the axes so use the docking ports to align the engine to be slightly better now this seemed to help quite a bit here and already getting off the launch pad it wasn't tilting quite as bad it was still starting to go over to the side though and I wasn't really happy about that so I decided to reload the game here and after I did that the Rockets seemed to be performing a lot better I guess it just has do something with me having the game open for like eight plus hours at this point but it seemed to be working fine now and I started to get up into orbit now once I got out of the really thick parts of the atmosphere I threw off my nose cone and after a bit more waiting I started to finish up my Orbit and once it was in orbit it was time to wait a really long time for these to finally get a good intersection now since their orbits were so similar it took quite a long time here but eventually they did get really close together and once I saw that I did a couple of burns here to get right in close to the rocket I could see I had a separation of only a hundred meters here I have enough waiting I could see it all the way out in the distance there so I did one last burn to get their speeds together here and after that they used a bunch of RCs fuel to get them to touch together unfortunately it wasn't the most satisfying at first and they bounced off each other but for giving it another try here that did seem to touch up and it was time to transfer in the fuel now I had a tiny amount of fuel left in this big tank and I decided to transfer it into the small tank here once I did that I didn't want to carry around the empty tank anymore so I detached this rocket again and I wanted to throw off that tank now to do that I pushed slightly away from the engine and you can see there I rotated the engine down so I could throw it away and with that I wanted to dock up these small tanks now my first attempt was a little too fast here but with a bit more tuning I did get these touched together and with that it's time to plan my trip to moho I really did not have a lot of fuel at all and I was estimating about 5000 meters per second the reason I wasn't sure is because for some reason the game just wasn't telling me so the first thing I needed to do here was get a gravity assist off the moon this was going to be a really cheap way to fling myself out of curbin and get myself a lot closer to Eaves orbit next see already this burn is 852 meters per second and I'm pretty sure it is the most expensive burn I'm going to have to make now once I was in position I fired off the engines here and I started to extend out my Orbit and after getting right around the Moon I tuned the orbit a bit more so I'd be able to scrape the moon's surface now let's slide that down to about 9 000 meters I wanted to go for that encounter so ripped away from Caribbean and started to work towards the moon and this assist was pretty dark here but you can see I was pretty close to the surface and I ended up warping away here now once I got to the other side out of my Orbit here I wanted to go for another gravity assist and this is the one that's gonna fling me out of the carbon system so I got this down to right above 7000 meters and this gave me a nice scrape of the surface now with that I was about halfway over to Eve but the problem is if I try to directly get there it's 373 meters per second which is kind of a lot so instead what I wanted to do was go for another gravity cyst off curb and to pull in my Orbit even more once I finally got a close encounter here I tuned it up and got my Orbit pulled in quite a bit here now I could definitely tell if this was saving me a ton of fuel here so it's getting about half of the distance I needed to eat but I was only using 15 meters per second of Delta V so with all that planned I warped under the maneuver and I wanted to try giving it a shot unfortunately though I kind of forgot solar panels so I had to use the RCs fuel to slowly bring my way over to the maneuver and one says pointing in roughly the right direction I use my main engine at 0.5 power to get the encounter that I need and I see Corbin warping in here and after that encounter I was quite a bit closer now I went in for one last curb and encounter here and after that I was finally able to get an even counter now I wanted to get this one right above Eve's atmosphere to make it as efficient as possible and of course here you see me warping around Eve and after that it was a very slow process of waiting for another encounter and flying by Eve again this took a very long time but eventually I finally was starting to get some encounters in moho now I didn't want to land on it immediately I wanted to use it to kill a bunch of my speed and exceed my first encounter here this one wasn't even that close to the surface and it's because if it got any closer it started to fling me further out of the system which I really didn't want on my second try here I was able to get a lot closer and it was time to go for some really tight scrapes now I could tell this one was gonna be really close it was only about 6 000 meters above sea level and unfortunately I would have made it if it wasn't for this single Mountain here so I redid this but slightly moved myself over and you see me avoiding them out now and getting the encounter that I need and it was pretty much just this over and over again moho is not that massive so it takes a lot of gravity system to pull in your orbit to where you need to get it I think this assist was technically the closest that I got and it still wasn't that productive so after many many assists later I finally got something that was pretty close here and I wanted to fix up my Orbit to go for a landing now I was also at this point I used up all of the fuel in my bottom tank and it was time to switch over to that top tank of fuel so my plan was to do pretty much what I did before and as to detach the engine rotate up the two tanks here and fling one off after it's far enough away I can use my RCS fuel to slowly get these together and get them to finally dock back and these attached at about 3 000 meters per second to Delta V and it was time to go for the landing I was pretty confident at this point that I had enough fuel to do it so you can see I pulled into my Orbit really close to moho I worked over there and it was time to start facing in the right direction I exited out my landing gear here and started my main burn I was a little worried I was gonna slam into the surface because I started it too late but fortunately it seemed like my timing was pretty good overall and near the surface here I went for one last deceleration burn unfortunately I messed it up at first though and I was landing on a bit of the slope and my landing gear really didn't seem to like that so I went for one more attempt here and this one seemed to go a lot better now one interesting thing here is you can have about 600 meters per second of Delta V left that's not enough to get off moho but with a little bit more careful planning I think you might even be able to get home with this engine overall though I'm still really happy that this came out and I really didn't even know if this was going to be possible so guys make sure to subscribe if you want to see more content like this if you have any other ideas for future careerble missions make sure to leave them down in the comments below be sure to like the video if you like the build and otherwise until next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 182,569

Keywords:

Id: nbnoh0uWYrw

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022