KSP 2: Saturn V Eve Mission!

hello everyone welcome back to another kbal space program 2 video and today I wanted to do something that I've always enjoyed doing in Kerbal Space Program 1 and two and that is looking at a real world mission that was planned often to a very detailed extent but never actually executed and some of the most interesting missions in that vein are the stuff that happened immediately after the Apollo moonlanding so kind of the future of Apollo the future of so and all of that and in this video I thought why not recreate you kind of do a soft Recreation at least of the planned Apollo Venus Mission that's right the Americans actually planned to use a Saturn 5 to send astronauts all the way to Venus on a flyby and then deploy some probes into the atmosphere Venera style I guess uh very very interesting stuff but of course as we know never actually happened but I thought it might be interesting cuz it did have some very um well interesting components to it but I don't want to keep on using the word interesting but it was a very interesting old time as you can see the rocket is pretty much built I didn't feel the need to spend too much time showcasing the build of the Saturn 5 itself because I'm guessing you guys have seen videos of Saturn fives being built in ksp1 and ksp2 AD norum at this point so I didn't feel there was too much need to dwell on the specific build of the rocket but here you can see we sort of zoomed down in I'm building a couple of probes little detach for I guess exit from this small car cargo bay in order to descend down to the venutian surface taking some uh readings of its atmosphere I put the little sniffer experiments on board the probes they the the probes are a clone of each other I didn't really know how to kind of make them different the science experiments in Kerbal Space two are very big and the little sniffle was really the only experiment that would have fit I did consider just having one bigger probe that descended down but the real um Mand Apollo Venus flyby Mission uh most of the plans involved send two probes down so I figured why don't we just do like a redundancy thing so this the same probe but there there's a redundant one so if one fails there's the other one basically so that's that and there's the s five now we've zoomed out of course it still needs painting which is what I'm going to do uh now and I'm just staring at the screen scratching my head trying to think if there's anything else I need to discuss with the build of the sattin 5 but I don't think there is uh one thing it's it's quite difficult to make a goodlooking Saturn 5 in curbal Space Program 2 because we don't have that little engine cluster piece to attach the F1 engines to at the bottom so I had to use nose cones and kind of clip them into the bottom fuel tank and also there isn't really a very good analog for the F1 engine in Kerbal Space Program 2 we got the main sail which is a bit too small and we've got the mammoth which to me is a bit too big we already got an engine that kind of Falls in between the two so that was kind of a shame we also don't really have a J2 equivalent either so in this video I'm using the skipper as my J2 engine standing although as you may know the second stage of the Saturn 5 has five J2 engines so in this case I need to arrange the Skippers in a pattern of five but the skipper engine is really big like above the the top part of the engine that attaches to the base of the rocket it's got this really wide flange and so to try and squish five of them to kind of be contained within the interstage fairing the engine Bells would always clip into each other and then the center engine would just get destroyed by overheating so for the purposes of this video cuz I wanted to have five engines in the second stage right the center engine I've swapped it out for a reliant engine so it's slightly different it's not five of the same engine but that's just a compromise I had to make now you can see on the upper stage I added two large solar panels and some twitch engines as well H intriguing what could they be used for I'm sure we'll cover that later on in the video when we're in flight but right now we need to go to the tracking station and time War to an eve transfer window yes of course there is no real Solo System in ksp2 so we're going to be going to Eve for this Mission cuz Eve is of course the in-game analog for and an eve transfer window draw a line from cban to the Sun to Eve Eve should be 54° behind kban as in the the angle that line forms in the sun should be 54° and with that we can cross fade to the launch pad and well launch oh it's a beautiful thing the Saturn 5 taking flight now it is probably worth noting that the the Saturn 5 of course is a is a real life rocket or was a real life rocket I guess would be more accurate uh designed to get off the real planet Earth in Kerbal Space Program cbon is substantially easier to reach orbit than Earth because it's much much smaller and so if you build an accurate Saturn 5 although actually looking at it maybe the top stage is a bit long I don't know it looks pretty I think it's pretty close building an accurate looking Saturn 5 is always a little bit over cool you always have a bit more Delta V than you really need at least when I'm fly maybe I'm just that good at the game JK JK of course uh so uh yeah we are going to have to dump stages before they fully run out of fuel not the first stage though we're going to burn that one to completion because the second stage it hasn't got very good thrust weight ratio so it's going to take a while for us to get to space and there we are staging got the little separat Rons on both the uh detached stage and the remainder of the rocket these would normally detach as well as would the inter stage ring but I I I feel like I don't making things too complicated in ksp2 I still don't quite trust things not glitch out and spaghetti but maybe maybe there's a future video I can make where I just really really spend many many many hours trying to make as accurate as at five as possible but there are people who are much much better at building accurate rocket replicas than I am so there's probably really people that have done it way better than I ever could anyway here we are on the way to space there goes the launch Escape system and you can see our Cales there at the top now you might think it's a bit cruel right sending astronaut like it's one thing sending astronauts to the Moon in an Apollo capsule okay boring cramped conditions it's not that long though a mission to Venus is substantially longer amount of time surely surely NASA would not have done this well you're right they wouldn't have done this because uh they didn't but also they wouldn't have they would not have sent astronauts to Venus in just the capsule you probably noticed in the build that we still have like a space for the Apollo Luna Lander on the Saturn 5 but we don't need an Apollo Luna Lander right because we not landing on the moon and we're not landing on Venus would definitely be a one-way trip if we were so instead of having the Lem module there would have been like a laboratory module I guess kind of inspired by Skylab inspired is really the right word but based on kind of Skylab and all that there would have been a laboratory there for the kerbals to live the kerbals the human astronauts to live on and there would have been something else as well to make the space even bigger we'll get to that in just a second cuz right now we got to reconfigure this thing y much like the actual Apollo moonlanding missions uh the Apollo Venus flyby Mission would have seen a similar maneuver where the the Command Module has to detach from the lower stage then do a big spin around redock with it but of course this time we're not docking with the Luna Lander and pulling it away from that stage we're just going to dock with the lab and we're going to keep it attached to that lower stage because of course the lower stage is our power bus right it's got the big solar panels on it as you can see when the stage is detached for some reason some rotational velocity was inative upon that lower stage I just got Jeb to do a quick slam down ground pound on it to get it kind of aligned I think it went pretty well and we can use his magnet I tried to walk around it using his magnetic boots to get back to the hatch but it didn't really work very well so back to the Eva pack it was get Jeb die coming back on board and there we are nice big healthy space for the astronauts and that's as big as the space he going to get for them for now but it will expand a little bit later on but not right this second first of all I'm just going to get this thing into a nice stable curb in orbit before going ahead and setting up a maneuver plan that'll get us on our Eve SL Venus flyby and to perform our orbital insertion and indeed our curbin to Eve transfer we're going to use the third stage of the Saturn 5 with its singular J2 engine just like the real plan in NASA's manned Venus flyby Mission I can't W to say luna for some reason I guess Apollo Luna and all that stuff there's probably going to be at some point in this video where I say the word Luna and just miss it I guess when I'm doing some proof watching and there's probably going to be some smarty in the comments who's picked up on that like aha Matt said lunar or Venus or Eve or kban or earth when you should have said the other one I don't know uh so there there's a little challenge to write in the comments below but hey speaking of the comments below you're enjoying the video so far leaving a like on the video it really does help channels out guys so if you do leave a like on it I always do appreciate it now you can see me planning our Eve encounter now you may may be familiar with the concept of the free return trajectory made use of in the Apollo Luna Landing missions whereby if for some reason in say for example in the case of Apollo 13 Luna landing and you know indeed Luna circularization couldn't take place the capsule would just swing by the moon and just return to Earth no problemo same thing would have been the case in the Venus Mission uh the well slightly different in the case that it was always planned to just be a Venus flyby the Venus flyby would have set the capsule on a straight back to Earth no course Corrections required now this is possible in cbal space Barum I know this because I did I do this all the time in ksp1 when it comes to doing really fuel efficient missions to either the jewel system or elu where you go to do an E flyby followed by a curban flyby and then another curban flyby to kind of save loads of fuel I've done missions where I've done got an eve encounter that immediately puts me on a curban encounter but yeah I can't figure out I don't think you can do that yet in ksp2 because I know there's a patched conic setting but I can't seem to get my um my maneuver plan line to continue after a certain point so I couldn't literally set kban as my Target and set up my flyby of Eve such that we would then encounter kban so slight deviation I guess from the real mission that we're going to have to do some correction burns when we're at Eve to ensure we reach kban again but I guess kind of I don't want to say too much at this stage because I want to spoil thing I want to keep the video engaging but there were there were means for the real Mann Venus flyby missions to you know make use of course correction Burns that's not with the uh the Saturn 5 third stage which is on its final burn right now getting us all the way to Eve well actually you know the maneuver planet in KSP it ain't that accurate and with a big burn like this a kind of a weird angle right we're doing a bit of normal burning as well as prograde burning the accuracy is never really that good so at the end of the burn we actually didn't even have an even counter at all let alone an fly by like the one I'd set up so we're have a couple of extra Burns just actually get the EV counter just in the in your head Cannon of this Mission uh just pretend it was all one burn the maneuver plan was just accurate and it all worked out well the first time I did it that's just one of the compromises with KSP is that it's not always well the maneuver planner I should say is not always the most accurate maybe it'll improve with updates but right now that's uh that's how it' be and it's it's workable it's workable I think if in terms of the stuff the KSP Dev team needs to be working on uh this is much lower priority but speaking of things that the dev team needs to be working on there will be a bit of a bug we're going to encounter in a few minutes and it kind of it doesn't ruin the video but it does degrade the quality of the video slightly I think and that you know you can probably hear there right the engine's burning basically uh yeah in my when I make Kerbal Space Program one and two videos I always disable the in-game music because when I'm editing I like the videos to be a really nice Snappy pace and so I always play around with the playback speed so right now I think the footage is playing back at like three times faster than regular speed just to keep things engaging but of course if I let the music play in the background that's just going to mess with things so it would sound weird right to have the background music constantly changing in speed but I the same isn't really the same for engine noises because it's just like a a rumble right it doesn't really make that much of a difference if it's sped up or not uh so I always turn off the music in the game so you can hear the engine sounds but for the in about a minute or so there will be no more engine sounds the rest of the video because I had some really weird glitch I don't know has this happened to anyone else I by the way just looking at the screen we're setting up for kind of our Eve encounter correction burn that we shouldn't have needed to do if the maneuver plan had worked accurately that's what I'm just setting up there in fact setting up is probably the wrong word we are currently executing as you can hear the engines are burning uh so I just keep dragging out like oh what's it going to be it's a glitch it's not really that interesting yeah basically I don't know if this is happened to anyone else where the engine sound of the game like the sound of the engines burning just starts playing and it just doesn't turn off even if there's no engine firing and it was fine like now it was triggered by me loading a quick save basically I had to do an engine bu that you'll see in a second I tried using Time Warp and it just glitched the game out and I couldn't cut the throttle and it was a disaster so I had to load a previous save and I'm now going to Crossfade to me loading that previous save here can you hear that there's an engine burning in the background my throttle is zero there's nothing activated I've never had this glitch before I think it might be to do with the separat trons because I don't typically fly Rockets with spent separat trons attached to them but it's anyone's guess if you got any theories do let me know of course now we are burning an engine I'm burning those twitch engines I got four of them on this rocket pointing backwards and forward so essentially completely cancel each other out because I wanted to vent the fuel of the SAT 5 third stage uh unfortunately Kerbal Space Room 2 does not have fuel vents yet at least like we did in Kerbal Space Program 1 so in order to vent the fuel I just put these tiny engines on that would just burn the fuel it took ages it took like 15 minutes in real life CU I couldn't use Time Warp because as I mentioned when I tried using Time Warp I then couldn't cut the throttle even when I dropped back down to one times Time Warp and I couldn't I I still can't figure out how to what triggers this glitch and how to stop this glitch from happening again Amal is if you know the answer down below so I had to do in real time so it was literally took like 15 minutes it was I I went off and did something else to be honest uh so yeah and but look there's still the engine sound so I tried loading a quick save and it still I did this a couple of times I pressed F5 F9 F5 F9 going back and forth nothing was happening I don't know what caused it so then I just muted CLE space b to and I just listened to some podcasts what did I listen to I think I just uh I got a second screen right so I to watch YouTube videos so I believe I watched the latest half in the bag from red letter Med media uh great Channel I think what's the what's the quote I've heard before that red letter media is every YouTuber's favorite YouTuber definitely a case for me I've got got loads of favorite YouTubers I can't I can't pick a favorite side for myself obviously what can I say I'm just so humble anyway I kind of got a bit sidetracked there I never actually said why I wanted to drain the fuel tank of the Saturn 5 third station that is because uh NASA looked into something called a wet laboratory after the lower agage fuel tank had run out of fuel uh it could then just be opened up and then the astronauts could convert it into a functioning laboratory module and uh from now on all course correction Burns and all that jazz can be done by the Apollo Command Module because obviously we' got the full fuel tank there with the kind of I know it's a bit rubbish cuz it's a dual nozzle engine whereas the real Apollo command modules engine was just one engine Bell right but that we haven't got the Wolfhound anymore in kv2 and I couldn't really think of a good I couldn't find a good analog for the Apollo command module engine in KSP 2 I did think about using the is it the trumpet you know the one with the extendable engine Bell but I just thought that would be a bit Na and the terrier engine isn't quite beefy looking enough so dual nozzle poodle it is it was a compromise much like a lot of things this hey look at that i' we're at Eve that was quick wasn't it I guess we didn't even need the extra space provided to us by the wet laori because only took a matter of seconds thanks to the power of Time Warp and the power of video editing now we're going to deploy our two probes now it's just as well oh by the way I should have mentioned I did put myself on a sub orbital trajectory or suborbital flyby trajectory so a collision course would be the correct word there just so that the probes would then you know enter Eve's atmosphere because the probes h't don't have any engines or fuel themselves just the profile I needed to get them to fit inside the cargo bay there I just couldn't find any elegant way of including engines and fuel tanks to them so I went with this option where we can just use the Apollo command modules engine put ourselves on an atmospheric Collision Course and then the probes can then just detach from the mother ship and then the Mother Ship can then course correct so it doesn't enter evees atmosphere and in doing so we can actually course correct properly and make sure that we encounter kban I was getting this weird glitch where clearly my encounter nodes there on the maneuver plan are close enough that we should be encountering kban right it's got a pretty big sphere of influence but for whatever reason the encounter wasn't showing up so I'm like well this clearly looks close enough so let's just execute the burn and maybe a curb when encoun will just appear as we get close to that closest approach point it's happened to be before where ksp2 just says oh you're not going to be encountering but I'm like I'm literally within 5,000 km of the planet which is well within its feere of influence so I don't know if the game again this is like the patched conics issue I mentioned earlier where the maneuver plan doesn't really isn't really able to plan so far ahead on your Maneuvers maybe you'll get fixed cuz kv1 could do this uh at some point in the future maybe I'm an idiot and there's a setting I've not enabled who knows could be of them really so I don't want to put too much blame on ksp2 just in case it it was all my fault and I've just slandered the game for no reason now this is where the fun begins we can uh Time Warp down to a nice close approach of Eve and get a good look of well apparently I've gone to the map screen now so we can't get a good look but now we're nice and close as you can see the probes are miles behind us so we just do our nice e flyby with our crew possibly get them out on Eva maybe which was I don't think was part of the original NASA plan but I'm G to one up NASA this could die this could even be the next installment of my space race speedrun series remember that that was that was that was a that was a video series that I did H there's Jeb is that Jeb or is that bill does it say on the screen oh yeah Bill coming yeah there Bill coming recording his observations of the situation we can getting back on the ship and then just a second I'm so this commentary has been made after I've edited all the footage together so I'm like you now now I'm going to switch the probe now I'm going to save then I'm going now aha now we switched to the probe absolutely fantastic video I know I know now I noticed well I didn't notice I just observed that ah yes the probe doesn't have any engines right so maybe I can unmute the game and we can record audio again and it turns out we're not getting that weird engine audio glitch so you can actually hear the Magnificent sound of Eve deadly entry here we go very quickly getting those Flames up here and there we are uh it was was it was work really well I was very nervous actually about the solar panels as you can see they are jutting beyond the safety region of our heat sheld but there wasn't even a temperature gauge and I was playing with 100% re-entry heating normal settings all that stuff I guess just the thermal hit box detection range of the solar panels is actually just like flush with their attachment point rather than the panel itself so there we are look at that the original NASA Mission we deployed probes inter us to kind of learn things about the way the universe works and we've actually done that in but it's like but it's meta right we've learned about the meta of KSP 2 by doing this Mission what a brilliant what a brilliant Discovery we've made we've learned how solar panel thermal works so we can design craft and not have to worry too much about whether or not solar panels are jutting out at least these very specific solar panels I cannot say if this applies to the others now you might remember I said you know oh we'll have two identical probes so that one can be the Redundant for the other and we can't control two probes simultaneously in KSP so actually that's the cannon version of what happened one of our probes failed so now we've got this one to actually work as you can see we've run our atmospheric analysis now we need to transmit it but we've run out of electricity so we're kind of having to just like pause transmission wait for the batteries to recharge a bit with the solar panels then resume transmission repeat repeat repeat but now it's a bit too low we're just going to come in for a landing so I'm going to retract the antenna there we are we don't actually need the antenna we've got a direct connection to the Mother Ship which has a big communication dish on board but I don't know looks a bit cooler doesn't it having the uh antenna extended then we can just Time Warp to recharge the batteries and complete our transmission of our Eve atmospheric data analysis can't bring back the samples but you know that's the uh that's the reality of this Mission maybe at some point I'm sure there's a way you can build an Evander in the profile of a Saturn 5 I've done a sattin five mission to Tylo so I'm sure it's possible to do a sattin five mission to Eve someone's probably already done it to be honest but yeah that's maybe something I could do in the future but that's the uh that concludes our Eve atmospheric SL Landing adventure with the unand Lander so now it's time to cut back to the ship and I did leave the audio unmuted just to see if the engine burning sound glitch persisted and it unfortunately did so we're have to have the rest of the video in silence now or at least gameplay in silence right you still got my uh my obnoxious voice to to tolerate as we make our return back to kban as you can see we still don't have a a perfect curban encounter so there we are just a minor a minor midcourse correction bur will be required just to get ourselves on a curban atmospheric entry course but you know we got a lot of Delta V remaining over a kilometer per second and this is only going to take us what 35 m/ second according to the maneuver plan right now I can't remember if we need to do like a second burn because of the accurac of the REM plan maker it doesn't always perfectly get things right but for now at least it's going to be very cheap and if we did need to do a further correction it's going to be essentially zero isn't it so I hope you uh enjoyed this Mission by the way I think it's a really really interesting one because when you first hear oh NASA was planning to send astronauts on an Apollo spacecraft to Venus you think how how logistically would that work and then you think okay maybe you know in the space of the LM there could be like a laboratory or something but still seems a bit small so it's really interesting reading about you know the concept of the wet lab whether or not the wet lab would ever actually have been a Thing Remains to you know remains to be seen this is never going to happen the satin 5 will never be built again unfortunately but you know there have been other plans made by NASA to have you know a wet laboratory one was like a I don't it's was ever actually called Skylab 2 but it's essentially the sequel to Skylab which would have involved the spent stage of a well the a spent upper stage of the SLS which of course is a rocket that's currently operational so that could wet Labs could still be a thing who knows they might even add a wet lab to the Gateway station as an experiment thing we know space stations are a big thing right now aren't they because obviously China's got a space station BL origin's on about building a space station we're currently getting ready for Luna Gateway the ISS is coming towards the end of its lifespan uh all lot lots of space station talk recently and of guess Starship that's its payload Bay is the size of of a space station uh here we are meeting a speak of Starship we're meeting a similar fate to old s28 right now aren't we we're completely disintegrating but luckily the bits that we don't want disintegrating you know the Apollo re-entry module well that's holding up nice and fine it looks like we're going to be coming down to land on the mainland this is more China SL Soviet space program or you know or blue origin Space Program you know that comes down uh Dressed basically right next to its launch pad because that's a sub wble to hop but it's still landing on land regard there go the parachutes and uh yeah that's uh I guess that pretty much wraps the video I'm trying to think if there's any any burning things I need to address before it all comes to an end but I don't think there is like I said I hope you enjoyed this Mission hey maybe I've inspired you to um read more about I'll put some I'll put some links to uh the NASA official document about the plan for the uh Apollo Venus Mission which you can try and read like I tried to read and then got a bit bored and I just read the Wikipedia page you can just read the Wikipedia page as well I put both in the description why not and uh yeah there's our capsule safely landed so we can zoom out and check in on the other the other one of course our Probe on the surface of Venus sleve and also the names of my patreon supporters and my YouTube channel members who I really really appreciate they make all of this content possible the massive thank you guys for your support if you want to support my channel as well you can click that little white black logo I hate the new page on Logo so much it's on screen as a link in the description I've already said I hope you enjoyed the video and all that so I'll just say thank you so much for watching goodbye

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 71,973

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, apollo, venus apollo mission, eve, venus, manned venus flyby, manned venus fly by, nasa, recreation, saturn v, saturn 5, block 5

Id: vgkfbAyQ5rg

Length: 25min 36sec (1536 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024