KSP 2: Launching from a SR-71 Blackbird!

hello everyone welcome back to the channel and today I wanted to recreate one of the more interesting aircraft to come out of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works facility that aircraft being the Lockheed Martin d-21 a Mach 3 reconnaissance drone developed in the 1960s that would launch from the back of an aircraft that I'm sure needs no introduction the SR-71 Blackbird which of course to this day holds the record of fastest crude jet aircraft ever flown the D21 was an unmanned scramjet drone that flew to an altitude of 90 000 feet tall 27 and a half thousand meters and at speeds of up to mach 3.3 making it nearly impossible to intercept furthermore the fact that it launched from an SR-71 meant that the D21 could reach its maximum altitude and speed while still under the protection of the sr-71's high altitude and high-speed capabilities once the D21 separated from the Blackbird it would ignite its scramjet engine for the purpose of this video I'm just going to use an aero spike propelling it to its maximum speed and altitude after completing his mission the Drone would then fly to a predetermined location where a parachute would deploy and allow recovery Crews to retrieve it now I reckon all of this would be a useful tool to have in ksp2 when multiplayer rolls around I think it would be pretty useful to have a spy drone that can infiltrate a rival Space Center and then deploy an attack Rover to go and disrupt an ongoing launch but I think for that we need the Drone here to be a bit more capable than the D21 I'm aiming for this to be capable of reaching low curb in orbit selecting a target's destination from space and then gliding down to set destination land in a secret area and then deploy the Rover all very exciting stuff I hope you agree and I'm super excited to announce guys actually that you know I kind of have a bit of a line of communication with the developers there is actually a alpha build of multiplayer it exists for Kerbal Space Program 2. so I kind of asked the devs really nicely if I could maybe have access to the multiplayer system uh with a with a with another person you might know just for the purposes of testing my attack Rover idea and they actually said yes so I actually get to trust test this out in like a really early I mean it's like super not what KC multiplayer is eventually going to be like but we get to actually test it out so this is like super duper exciting so make sure you stay tuned make sure you like the video as well really helps me stay above water with all algorithm stuff and hey if you want to subscribe I do ksp2 and KSP one videos on a regular basis I don't do space news so there you go that's the uh that's the ad for the channel and all the uh YouTube stuff that I have to say over and done with here you can see me kind of building the SR-71 Blackbird itself well I guess it's the SR-71 white bird at the moment uh the scale is a bit wrong first of all you know I'm not the best at recreating aircraft shapes never claimed to be um and at the moment the wing span of the sl71 is way too wide and that's because the drone's wingspan is very wide so I needed to kind of enlarge the sr-71s but then I end up changing that to make it a bit more correctly scaled so it will change you will see the design of evolve throughout the build you might notice if you're all familiar with the D21 my version of the D21 looks nothing like it because it needs to be more capable than the D21 he's got to get into orbit and obviously it has a cargo bay that has a Rover inside it so really when I opened this video saying this is a recreation it really wasn't it's just uh it's a recreation of the concept of launching a drone from the top of an SR-71 Blackbird here you can see we're doing a little flight test of the Drone seeing if it worked and it took off quite well um pretty nice but in just a second it's going to start spinning out of control yeah and it just enters a flat spin I couldn't get this version of the aircraft to work unfortunately so it's a bit of a back to the drawing board sort of thing I ended up just shrinking its wings I figured that was probably the problem and then because we've Shrunk The Wings we can do what I mentioned earlier we can reduce the wingspan of the sr-72 on Blackburn make it a little bit more correctly scaled a bit more in line with how the real thing looks we are I'm gonna re recolor those Tail Fins as well and uh yeah I've used the blueprint mode here by the way um I love the blueprint mode it makes it really easy to line stuff up and get things make sure things are pointing in the right direction anyway while the build continues I'll tell you a bit more about the uh the real D21 uh the d201 was first used in 1969 during the Vietnam war to fly reconnaissance missions over China's heavily defended lobnor nuclear test site unfortunately the first missions ended in Failure one drone crashed into the Soviet Union the second and third crashed into the sea and the fourth crashed in China's yeonen Province where the wreckage was discovered by local authorities it was after these initial failures that the D21 was canceled in 1971 due to the aforementioned poor success rate but also because of the fact that satellite reconnaissance was quickly replacing the need for spy planes and drones but I do love me a good old concept and I do love the absurdity of launching a scramjet off the top of an SR-71 Blackbird but as you can see my sr-721 Blackbird and my not a D21 drone are pretty much complete oh I messed up the wing angle of the SR-71 I've just fixed that but other than that it's done let's just Crossfade to the launch foreign startup effect just the sound and the visuals although the visuals are a bit choppy in ksp2s will speed up to about double speed for now Ultra I'll probably modify the playback speed kind of according to how interesting it is so for most of this end we'll probably have it playing quite fast what do you think my little front landing gear by the way if stood away in that cargo bay yeah you probably already saw me doing that in the in the build I don't really know how easily it's going to be able to you can you would have been able to tell in the final time lapse obviously I'd not seen the 60fps playback version of this video yet because it's not I'm still making it right it doesn't exist yet here we are leaving my space center for good just here actually I tell a lie we will be returning with the Blackbird unfortunately I'm gonna have to do the classic trick of doing air launches in ksp2 which is right before you do the air launch itself you make a quick save and then do the air launch fly the spacecraft to space or whatever and have a great old time once all that's done load the save you made right before the air launch launch it again but this time switch back to the aircraft and fly that back to the Kerber Space Center so it's another one of those things where it's kind of like a a two two timelines one timeline uh the the launch failed but the SR-71 could return safely to the launch side and then in the second timeline the launch was a success but then the uh the aircraft just crashed and was destroyed so neither outcome is a particularly positive one I admit but you know that's just what we've got to do but maybe hopefully when we get ksp2 multiplayer like final like the final version maybe we could be we would be able to do missions like this where one person flies the s for this specific Mission I mean one person would fly the SR-71 one person would be standing by at the controls ready to assume control of the Drone upon second stage separation I don't know if we will be able to have two people controlling two separate crafts but hey if we can that'd be pretty nifty And to clarify that actually and then um two people can control two separate crafts that were initially at one point one craft so would that be possible I don't know maybe like you have one person controls one and one controls the other and then you dock them together on the runway and then do the air launch I don't know at the moment docking ports are like way too buggy to use them for air launches but hopefully as the bugs get squished out they will become a viable option for now I'm just deploying all my payloads with couplers or stack separators you might be wondering why the um the Drone has an air intake on it because it uses an aerospike which doesn't need intake air that's because when I started building it I had every intention to try and make it look like the real D21 but then I quickly just abandoned that plan I was like no I just wanted to be like capable you know so um it's very very long compared to the real D21 and it's uh and it also it looks nothing like the D21 so that's just why there is an intake at the front though here you can see I've paused the game unfortunately the jet engines of the SR-71 pulled fuel from all of the fuel tanks including the ones on the D21 so I had to quickly pause the game and transfer fuel across but look at that stage separation now we have to head on up to orbit I don't really like those uh two front canards there they are very obtuse and look really ugly but without them and I did try initially not having big canines at the front uh the Crafters would not pinch up at all so uh they're a necessary evil unfortunately but here we go well on our way to space and of course once we enter low curb in orbit we can deploy all of our reconnaissance equipment to our cameras uh the solar panels make sure our batteries stay charged and uh you know like a little Communications aerial thing satellite dish I'm gonna deploy all of that have a little look down on the surface see if we can find our a rival Space Center to go and invade and send in the Rover but yeah yeah I'll be truthful with you guys I've done quite a lot of ksp2 commentaries recently like I've kind of been batch producing videos so I don't really have that many funny stories or anecdotes to tell since I recorded the last ksp2 video and also a lot of my kspg videos are quite similar in the sense that it's either to local I've been orbit or the man and that's it because it's just such a hassle doing like going any further than the Monet this stage and uh you probably saw how broken I was after doing the vowel subsurface ocean missions although I keep things simple I've written down a bunch of ideas for like simple missions that shouldn't be too ruined by bugs in ksp2 as if you've got any ideas for things I'm always open to hearing your suggestions I've got a fairly massive list actually now and actually hopefully all of this will become a moot point because I'm guessing actually if you guys unless they've been any delays of course I think for you guys when I publish this video the first patch would have been released for ksp2 so hopefully things like trajectories past a celestial object thus priority Numero Uno for me uh hopefully that's been fixed and then that just really opens up the whole game uh being able to do that and I guess little things like docking port bugs and that paused unpaused bug would be nice if they were gone but really for me and I think most people not being able to see a trajectory past a celestial object is a big that needs to be fixed immediately anyway as you can see we are here in low curve in orbit cutting it quite close with the fuel was it I got 61 meters per second of Delta V remaining which is just enough to perform a deorbit burn so this drone will still be able to fulfill its mission objectives uh yeah it's always a bit it's always quite satisfying actually um when you design a mission or a craft that just barely has the right amount of fuel because then it looks like that you actually did calculations and figured out exactly how much fuel you would need when in reality it's just a it's just a bit of coincidence well I guess to me I did test a shorter version of this drone than enough fuel to get to space so I added the two black fuel tanks towards the front to see if that would work and it just about did anyway we must now revert to an earlier point in time is go back back back so here we are back here once again this time we're deploying the Drone oh no it's failed massively never mind let's just return to the couple with Space Center um I'll always be the footage of in just a second because it does doesn't fly particularly quickly the SR-71 I know this is like the uh probably the least interesting part of the video just watch me fly back to the killer Space Center having already watched me fly out this far but I don't know I think it's quite satisfying like watching uh fast playback of flights is like yeah it felt like a long time doing this but seeing it in time lapse I don't know it makes me appreciate the journey I don't know anyway then this happened that so that weird problem where SAS being enabled sometimes causes the uh control surfaces of wings to freak out and in this case they freaked out so much that they shook the plane to Pieces but as you can see it's still sort of flies like we're missing an engine and most uh some of the Wings but we can still sort of fly so I'm like let's see if we can try and land this thing uh in this in this state so yeah fun fun little challenge this let's see if we can get this to touch down and there's the runway looming interview just there you can see it's like drifting sideways every now and then I had to really fight with wasd to get it to work let's just drop the playback speed down to uh slightly close to real time so a little bit faster to you know improve the frame rate here we are touching down or beat up text a textbook Landing okay bit of a hop skip and a jump wasn't it but yeah still a text but and also we scraped the nose of the aircraft on the ground but I think at the ground's looking of things I mean this aircraft's probably a write-off right it's it's not gonna buff out that but there we are Jebediah Carmen and Valentina common have touched down in mostly one piece there they are all happy with their achievements they shouldn't look so happy right the Drone failed right so maybe they don't deserve to live after all when you go back to the other timeline now where of course they sadly perished wow that got dark real fast didn't it all right guys we are now back in space with the Drone but we are now in multiplayer you know I said earlier I got a Yankee view so it's like a self-hosted server thing but uh well let's just see what happens I'm selecting a Space Center Let's uh sit in orbit wait for that Space Center to emerge on the daylight side of the planet there we are and then we can think about doing a deorbit burn in just a second and make our way down there and check things out see what we can find so uh I'm just looking at kind of when to do my deorbit burn I kind of made a maneuver node that had it was roughly about the same amount of Delta v as what I have in this aircraft I thought right that looks like a good sort of spot to do the burn we'll just delete the maneuver plan and just expend all of our remaining fuel to do the retrograde deorbit maneuver and now that's all done not much more to do other than just you know uh time warped down and well we need to retract the solar panel I suppose and I guess we also need to uh retract that Communications dish oh I hate how there's like that big delay it's not a big delay especially for you guys where I've sped the footage up to be like four times faster than real time speed but it's like it's just annoying enough where it's like really annoying like when you click right click apart and there's like a couple of seconds to lay oh I'm a very fussy person as you can tell okay so we're just watching for the Kerbal space and around I was a bit worried that actually we were going to overshoot it a little bit it's like oh my gosh we're over the landmass that the KFC sits on and we're still coming in quite fast so I started initiating like some roll Maneuvers trying to create a little bit more drag so we can slow down in time to reach not to the runway right with this we're landing and another player's you know Space Center I don't want to make my entrance too obvious we're gonna aim for like maybe like a little clearing in the trees between some of the launch pads and we can play the Rover from there hopefully no one will see us I admit that maybe painting this drone bright red wasn't the smartest of moves I probably should have painted it and maybe all black or dark green like the same color as the as the ground would have been a smart choice even like brown or some things it looks like mud but alas we did not hopefully I mean I suppose once the Drone has landed all it needs to do is survive long enough to deploy the attack Rover right it doesn't need to be like particularly stealthy one thing you might notice testing this drone was very uh boring because you I have to basically fly it up to altitude every time and then deploy it to see if it works uh because that's how you test vessels in ksb2 I guess and it always took a long time because the performance is so bad and just generally the flight takes a long time anyway so the first time I tried launching this thing obviously it was the one it was the version that had the big large Wings which ended up going into a flat spin so I tried another version that didn't have those extra black fuel tanks on the fuselage and that didn't work and I was like right I'm just gonna add more fuel tanks I'm just gonna add some parachutes at the front of the vehicle as well so that if I go back down to a Kerbal Space Center and it can't Glide it just stools I'll add some extra parachutes so we could just land it like like a capsule so that's why there's some parachutes on this thing that I didn't use they're just there as a backup because I literally could not be bothered to keep on reiterating I just want this to work so it can't Glide it could just use parachutes luckily though I should have I should have believed in myself because it could it glided it was all it was all fine okay so we can deploy the communications dish and the solar panel and then we can deploy the attack Rover uh I've loaded this with C4 so we can go and disrupt any launch that we might see there's not a lot of launch activity going on I don't know if you guys saw but I was having a little look at the uh the launch pads around you know well just that's it I was having a look at the launch pads and the runway and I didn't see any Vehicles out so I'm guessing whoever saved this is um they're probably maybe in the Vehicle Assembly Building or something like that or maybe they're just not online right now we've got the whole place to ourselves but we can't assume anything it's like struggling to get the Rover upright uh yeah what we'll do is we'll um we'll have a little explore uh wait for anyone to you know come online and start launching something that we can race over there and uh ruin their day it doesn't control the best this Rover I've got that Reaction Wheel on the top just so that if I do flip over which I do quite a few times I can just enable talk on the reaction Wheels I can just flip myself back up and then disable talk again to continue driving I'm just gonna do it I'm playing the footage back very fast now hopefully it's watchable for you guys I want to show you guys a really cool Easter egg actually at the Kerbal Space Center that you might not know about uh in KSP one there was a KSC Easter egg that was uh if you destroyed the r d building there was a little toilet in there in case we do there there's a little capsule inside one of the pools not cool and it looks like the capsule from ksp-1 or that could be a coincidence at the end of the day that was modeled after the Apollo Command Module right so there would be similarities there so yeah I thought it was pretty cool and they went for another little bit of a drive and I saw one of the launch pads had a vehicle on it now I actually had my microphone on live so I'm gonna stop my commentary now and let you listen to uh Live Matt as this was happening because I was very curious oh my God there's like a space shuttle here welcome to another Kerbal space is anyone anyone here anyone hear anything wait I can hear it I can hear a voice another space shuttle because of course space shuttles are incredible oh my gosh I think and I think this is famous YouTuber and it sounds like he's recording a video for this Lord oh guys this is and releasing a special payload that is inside the kitchen I think it's noticed that I will find out about that later on obviously but for now I'm going to be keeping that a little bit of a closed kept secret hang on a minute wait what is that approaching oh no he's I've been seeing it couldn't be it is I not in this video but what is this thing Matt what are you doing with it oh this is just like a little uh little Rover it's just a little a little a little reconnaissance Rover it doesn't doesn't have a bomb or anything in it a likely story are you sure about that I just heard it say bum armed you just got unlaunched baby that's right there could only be one ksb2 YouTuber and it's not car NASA anyway make sure you like And subscribe unsolicited advertising right I'm logging off multiplayer I've disconnected from multiplayer ah there we are back in single player again I mean if can't ask I didn't want anyone blowing up his space shuttles whilst he's recording a video he shouldn't have been on a more player server um this wasn't really multiplayer I kind of Bamboozled you guys but I hope it was entertaining nonetheless and yeah Carlos has got a channel that'll be a link in the description if you want to check that out if you want to check out some more content from this channel there's some video suggestions for you on screen right now all made possible thanks to the wonderful names on screen and my patreon and my channel member supporters who help me to just stay afloat and all that so if you want to join their ranks you can follow the links in the description but yeah thank you for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 269,013

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay, ksp2, ksp 2 gameplay, kerbal space program 2, sr71, sr-71, d21, d-21, sr71 drone, carnasa

Id: JQjEk1ruCsI

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023