Kerbal Space Program - Apollo Style - Reddit Challenge

hello its scott manley here and this week's reddit challenges are paulo style so well it's a polo style we're going to fly to the moon up all the style now I've done this a million times before you know the drill you take a 3-man capsule you put in a big orbiter you have a landing module which carries two kerbals you get into orbit you land using the lander and edit it then it then returns to moon orbit docks with the parent ship and then the whole lot goes home so yeah I spent a lot of time designing that the important thing I spent a lot of time on actually was hard mode which is of course bringing a rover I figured that since I actually did this did the whole guide on how to put Rovers down on surfaces I probably should actually do this just to demonstrate that it is practical so yeah we're bringing along a rover and another gizmo as well to balance it out remember how I said you can balance all these things out well with one Rover and we have one other gizmo which I'll show you when I'm actually on the moon the rest of the rocket below the actual the main lifter stage is not very apollo like i'm frankly ashamed to include that in a nepal challenge but i spent so much time on the rest of the rock including that escape tower which i just jettisoned that i just couldn't be bothered building out a proper apollo style rockets especially since i have would have some major trouble fitting all that stuff into the fairings you know rovers are a whole lot larger than the lander cabin that we would expect for the moon anyway yeah we get ourselves up and we practically find that as we're setting up our yes we're setting up our circularization maneuver that it basically is close enough to the burn position for the moon that we might as well just forget about circular rising and go straight to the moon this is using the rocker max poodle engine that's going to do the majority of our in space maneuvering getting us places we'll ditch it eventually and drop it onto the mineral surface just to make sure that it doesn't form any space junk but there we go is going to be a 900 plus meter second burn Joffrey jebediah and Kanuri Kerman are the crew for this mission and they will be a drawing straws no doubt to decide who gets to stay behind in the command module because there's only room for two in the lander although jebediah has volunteered to sit on one of the exterior seats on the rover but uh not sure his helmet would fit it might be a little close to the rocket exhaust but anyway look we've got ourselves onto our onto our encounter we'll just get that a little closer once again throwing caution to the wind who needs a free return trajectory when we can actually get close to the target and get ourselves more efficient encounter because efficiency wins lots of points here so yeah the red challenge as I said require our hard mode requires putting a rover down now Apollo 15 was the first Apollo mission to actually bring the rover to the surface and it was strapped to the site that was a trying it was James Irwin and who else someone I forget Dave Scott Dave Scott was the the commander the command module pilot was al worden as well so yeah it was a win and Scott that basically landed in the surface and and got to do all these you know drive around and in the lunar module the lunar rover and overheat things and everything there we go getting ourselves into orbit we still have loads of fuel in this tank in fact we have way too much fuel so I'm going to try and use as much of this as possible um so there we go just bring this down no we're gonna bring it into like a thirty kilometer or I think a 30 kilometer orbits pretty good that that's still relatively high compared to you know for scaling reasons let's see but given the mountains and the surface can be pretty high we don't want to get in that close just circularize this even more and we're ready to transfer the crew so yeah let's bring them across we'll bring one of the white suits over get in and yes we got to bring jab although you can't tell from there say that is indeed jebediah we need his skills for the landing I like how the the toroidal tanks they are seem to be glistening as if they're containing some sort of like fire it just makes it look as if there's a fire down there all the time okay so we're gonna fly across just surveying the the moon we're doing one extra orbit here I'm just kind of taking a look to figure out what I'm doing there and bringing the orbit down and we're gonna go in for our final approach we'll use I'm just arranging the staging here because the way it was set up I was gonna accidentally fire an engine that I wasn't supposed to so just making sure I adjust the staging so we don't have a problem there we still have this thing attached because hey it's free fuel but also I want to put it down close enough the way actually get to see it crashing into the moon you know we've been told to make sure that everything is destroyed no evidence is rich remains so therefore we're gonna see this with our own eyes but that's mainly because we like the same we like the sound that it makes except we can't hero in the moon we like the flames that it should make even although it shouldn't make fire a vacuum it's just gonna explode right seriously there we go let's drop that off and ditch that fire up the main engine and that is our command module I like the way that spins off as well just trying to look exceptionally stylish it's getting extra points from the judging crew no doubt so we're just gonna kill velocity and there you see look you see the shadow there we go and yes excellent I think we're coming in a little flat here um let's let's make sure we don't crash okay okay just kill lateral velocity bring ourselves down we're using the the LV 909 the little one and we are feeding that from three of the half-size tanks we also have toroidal tanks in there but you see we have ridiculous amounts of fuel we totally mess that up I guess the in the transfer stage was far too big really I could have cut down the size of my launcher quite a lot quite a lot here I think there's really supposed to drop the stage that you use to do the transmitter injection on a trajectory that will hit the moon and that's us Darren excellent and so let's let's uh get jebediah out come on ello you make sure we bring the ladder out jebadiah the hero of the kerbin the hero of the Kerman family yes oh crap yes well it's a good thing that they didn't have a camera on he's gonna have to set the camera up in fact he'll set up the flag first as well here we go I claim this moon in the name of the kerbals which we call it um we brought stuff we brought a car do okay now let's say get that car off so you see it's attached to the site there and we can decouple it no this only has one seat I tried repeatedly to get a rover that was in this form factor with two seats I found that the rover would literally spontaneously explored on the other side there's another guess well will will show that later it looks like a what it's kind of like a probe but it has ladders attached I think you know what I'm think you already know by now what this is all about see he should be able to get in and demonstrate this drives yay jebediah about to get his first interplanetary speeding ticket what should we do take off the brakes first it uses electric charge charges up from the solar power and there's a bunch of batteries there let's uh let's hide behind that big rock and confuse the other guy play hide-and-seek right that's why astronauts we're sending astronauts to the moon so they can play hide and seek behind the giant rocks there we go it looks it looks pretty good actually as a takeover yeah I don't know there was some bizarre problem that if I put the two seats on either side by side or in line it doesn't matter how far apart or how close they were they would just kind of everything would start wobbling and the whole thing would explode so I had to resort to a one-seater version of this you note that I put the attachment points for the wheels really high up so that he can ass it slow down we got nice low center of gravity here and actually it has it drives really well unlike a lot of Rovers it doesn't want to flip over nearly as much I I'm quite enjoying this as a vehicle compared to many others now for this other gizmo I'm gonna need a hell of Ahlan tier actually I need you I need the dude in the command module because we need two two guys on this oh wow he's just gonna spin around in a circle here come on let's go and get on this yeah you see this has ladders on the side and it's designed for kerbals to hang off the site this little rocket motor in there and to make it balanced we obviously need one Kerbal on each site now what this is supposed to be is an incarnation of less the lunar escape system and the idea is say this command module or the landing the lunar excursion module had some sort of critical failure which meant that it could not return then a NASA had this idea that they would have a an emergency spacecraft that could be built and fueled using fuel from the actual lunar module and they could fly this thing into orbit and get rescued it would obviously lack amenities that were on the regular lunar module such as you know guidance computers and you know a breathable atmosphere but you know the astronauts would have four hours they would launch up and if they could get on there get on there yes there are four hours in which the command module pilot would have to rendezvous with them and rescue them from their fate which would be a slow suffocation in moon orbit or lunar orbit because of course this is a real concept it never actually went to the moon but they spent a lot of time you're investigating however I can demonstrate this thing flying around it does have more than enough Delta V to bring this crew up into orbit safely but uh I can just kind of use it to fly around the surface look at it looks pretty good like that huh it can go and investigate some targets you know we can boost it up or something I'm just gonna demonstrate that it flies nice and slowly over the surface here and with those struts it's actually pretty tough the struts are of course exceptionally tough and can you can use those as well you can use those to absorb the impact of practically anything if you want but yeah not the easiest thing to control although actually it is very easy to control with the SAS number thing that the hard part a gas is just knowing what was the correct way I should have put a big arrow on it so I knew what we was north or what we was up so get the torque and everything all correct yes it's an exceptionally inefficient way to travel around the moon when you have the rover there but maybe there's you know maybe if we're by an arch this would be a great way to go and invest it you know the arch from all angles okay as the wave travels maybe less than a hundred yards let are hundred meters let's travel back now see if we can how close we can put it not close enough that the weak it gets knocked over that would be unfortunate yeah there we go so yeah just skipping a row across the surface is actually so I'm flying this slower than the rover although I didn't theory is capable of traveling much faster I think I would uh it would have a great potentiality for your death and destruction therefore since this is a challenge I don't want to screw it up so let's put this down gently and we shall send our crew home and for that I shall rien VOC steam acceleration yes back to four times time acceleration because this is now back into post-commentary time get him on and get him on and now this is just set up very similar to a polo style the Apollo Lunar Module style because it has a separate engine for leaving the moon as one engine for landing any weaker engine for lifting off it leaves the base behind so that's what we're gonna do we just need to get this thing close enough ditch the extra mass that those things have and eighty kilometers out well yes time acceleration seems to cause things sitting on the surface to spontaneously explode and there we go look it's got one of those new one of the what you call those one of those newer tiny engines that the new rocker max minister orange tiny thing it's a boosting us into orbit we're just gonna try and match match orbits with this thing ASAP and we're getting pretty close so I'm adjusting see how what I'm doing is adjusting my thrust above and below the plane to try and bring bring the close approach close to the sending or the sending nude in the ski the ascending no there we go yes I wouldn't know they ascend of a node from the descend of the node haha yes nevermind okay so just the circularization burn is gonna be set up to bring us within 400 meters we'll do a bit of a bit of messing around with that but hopefully not too much do that burn just circular eyes how close are we point eight point eight so we just need to lose some more adjusting here point five point four point three ah okay might be that we need to adjust the inclination I don't know let's try that now I never mind I'm gonna leave it here I'm gonna leave it parked in the north orientation and that should make it easier to talk with no it's time to go back to the command module and this guy finally the mission in his is in his hands because he has to perform the docking he's finally about to earn his salary not that I pay my guys anything but hypothetically if they were getting paid they would be getting with it would be a he would be earning his salary yes so we're just gonna orbit around and wait for that close approach once we're that close approach we're gonna try and dog and I think far since I've docked a million times I'm going to try a docking from within the command module this time or from the IV a only so what we're gonna do yep turn that on do some minor adjustments get there and then we're gonna try and cruise in close there we go okay so now we're just doing everything from using the information that is presented on this nav ball so I'm moving towards that are about one meter per second and as you see because I'm moving slowly the curvature of the orbit means that this thing will drift so I keep making corrections unfortunately double-clicking on the window seems to have rune removed my remove my target over I got that back not a problem and closer still so we're now moving about two meters per second and just keeping these things adjusted now I'm really close I want to kill the velocity and we'll switch to using RCS to perform the actual rendezvous so there it is there we need to come out to actually target the docking port and that brings up this little uh the docking navigation aids the Navy fish jet created so I'm gonna use this and see if I can't dock this oh look I can see the moon at the top there you know what I completely did not realize the moon was there when I was doing this previously I was just like you know floating around through space and I'm some trying to keep the docking alignment marker correct just moving this across but I think I think the spacecraft may actually be rotating a little cuz I left it pointed in the north-south direction and it seems to be rotating away from that very slowly so apparently I'm trying to dock with a rotating target which is fun but just trying to juggle both the nav ball and the navigate you know the docking alignment system and I can see the object there I think I might be a little high might be low I don't know oh there we got something we are docked we are successfully docked it is time to bring the crew home and while they're doing this they you know there was a bunch of things that they actually did while they were in orbit the they had a handheld satellite that they deployed on a couple of the Apollo missions they just basically threw these things out and they were mostly for you know examining well what are the best most interesting things was they discovered the new gravity the gravitational potential of the moon and they discovered that their only certain number of stable orbits the other thing they had to do during e VA was they had to go and retrieve a film canister from the back of the spacecraft so that would take like I would take like 40 minutes to do this thing but anyway we've got our injection or Return button burn we're heading back and we're aiming for the surface of carbon no the thing is we have to hit ocean and this is the kind of harder thing I'm gonna ditch this and bring it down like a 30-kilometer thing now you see it says 7 hours and 30 minutes that means that the planet is going to rotate one and a quarter times and if you looked the extra quarter will bring me a slightly West hour east of the Kerbal Space Center so I think I'm right on the money here so since we're on our final approach we got to ditch this and unfortunately cuz of the staging I thought I activated the parachute so I sent this guy out to repack them but apparently you can't repack a parachute that hasn't actually been deployed yet so yeah that would be a nice thing to fix there should be like a deployed but not actually are ready to be deployed state which you can undo the B cannon nice because I really don't like deploying parachutes into you know a jet stream a stream of air that is being shocked heated to several thousand degrees Celsius no that's not a good plan at all um also this only has two parachutes for us of course the Apollo missions has three but but Apollo 15 only actually landed on two good parachutes the third one had collapsed so as a matter of realism this one's actually doing pretty well since it brought the rover and it landed on two parachutes but that is the challenge that is hard mode and you know maybe a little harder mode because I brought the fly thing regardless I'm quite happy with that I'm Scott Manley fly safe you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 859,769

Rating: 4.9256625 out of 5

Keywords: Kerbal Space Program (Video Game), Reddit (Website), Apollo Program (Space Program), Kerbal, Space, Program, (Video, Game)

Id: cdtpfushCr4

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/jdwsummer]

Scott, this is awesome! Thank you for producing these types of videos, as they not only show advanced techniques to playing the game, but you also show cool real life things like the LES.

[u/mr1337]

Awesome video. Much more elegant than my attempt.

Too bad you were disqualified for using a mod! :P

[edit] I'm kidding, you did a fantastic job!

[u/Avatar_Ko]

I can't believe you docked it from within the ship. I had Apollo 13 flashbacks while you were doing that.

[u/[deleted]]

Holy smokes, I didn't know you used reddit as well! Thanks for all the uploads and helping me not suck so bad at this game Scott, I really appreciate it.