KSP: Building a Space Station with an SSTO!

hello and welcome to this mission which I am very excited to show you guys today it is constructing a Space Station using an SST Oh which admittedly is not the most original idea but as you can see that as the modules were going to be putting up there and there's the fuel truck because what makes this different I think to the other SSTO built Space Station videos is the fact that we're only using the one SSTO and it's going to be a constant mission as in I'm not gonna be recovering the fly I'm not gonna be using the space plane hangar at all everything is gonna be done you know life as it were what I mean by this is that once we've delivered our first payload into orbit we're going to be flying the SSTO back to the runway then a truck will come and fill it up with fuel and another little car will go and push the next payload into it before taking off again and then coming back and getting the next payload and sending it off once more so while the actual design of the station modules of the station itself might not be the most impressive things I think I kind of wanted to showcase this more from an actual mission standpoint and the way this is built because I was really this is something I wanted to do for a little while and I've never already got round to doing it so you know this is that I've also never designed a cargo SSTO before not like a proper one I did do one in my collaboration station video but that really couldn't carry very much to orbit it was basically built to be a long-range thing that had sort of a small card nasty insider now I didn't mean to crush this car here but that will buff out don't worry about it I actually parked it here just so we could have something to target to mark the end of the runway when we come in to land this plane because unfortunately you can't target buildings in Kerbal space program yet I don't know why but you can't and we want to really keep aiming to under super runway we need the entire length of the runway for this orange tank payload because it is the heaviest payload by far the other ones are over 10 tons lighter so you really need the entire length of the runway in order to get airborne the subsequent flights won't need the full length of the runway where it will need as much runway as we could possibly get so no and because of the fact this thing can't taxi and I didn't design any tugs for it we want to be landing in a position where where as far back as possible in order to get as much yeah speed as possible before taking off I hope that makes sense it will hopefully make sense once you see it so at the moment we're currently pitching up at around 20 degrees which is a fairly conservative pitch the other flights that we're going to be doing in this video will be will be able to be a little bit more aggressive during a flight but as I mentioned the orange tank is by far the heaviest payload the reason I'm that's the remaining reason I'm sending this off first not only because of the whole runway issue I mentioned but also because of the fact that because it's the heaviest payload by far we're going to have a lot delta-v to work with and we actually get into orbit so if we had to rendezvous with another station part without food we very will be very tight too in terms of the numbers so it before it make amis makes a lot more sense it's far easier to put the heavy bits in first and then getting lighter and lighter as you go on one of the nice things about this aircraft is that we can build up a pretty impressive amount of speed like 1500 meters per second just then we are dropping a bit now but yeah over the sort of previous updates and things heating has been buffed a little bit so we can get to quite a bit of speed and want to be getting as fast as possible on the air breathing mode alone because the closed cycle mode of the rapist is not very efficient but here we are gradually approaching our co-op system as well pick up nice and aggressively and fire up the closed cycle mode because now we just want to get out of the atmosphere so I did start watching the thing here and I realize that I forgot after the artist that's been drained of its fuel so I quickly disabled that don't worry will we we will be depositing it full we'll just pump some of the fuel from the SSTO back into the orange tank but I think in a way that was actually quite a that worked out quite well because it meant the aircraft was quite balanced if the fuel if the orange tank wasn't used then this would have ended up becoming quite forefront heavy and may not have been quite as easy to pick up here we go we'll just pump some of the fuel back in I guess we could just skip through all of that process there we go so don't worry we will be putting the full orange tank in orbit and we still have a pretty generous amount of Delta V left obviously we're going to be spending about 400 meters per second to circular eyes but we still have a load of oxidizer left over after that manoeuvre - well tweak our orbit a little bit you don't really need to see me doing that because it was a bit of a long process but ended up getting an orbit of roughly 90 thousand meters which is nice and high up but it's not so high that we it'll be difficult for us to you know get a high and there's a nice little beauty shot of the cargo doors closing again all looking nice them and we'll just focus on deorbiting ourselves once again so some of you are wondering how this thing is getting power because it's not really running out of electric charge even though there's no visible solar panels the reason is some of the eagle-eyed among you may have already seen this but inside the cargo bay there is that's where the probe core is it's controlling it as an SAS wheel as well as some batteries and some RTGS that are generating power for right now we are gonna overshoot the care see here where looks of things that's it there we're passing over it right now always thought underneath is clouds here on that little Peninsula so we have to do some rather aggressive banking of the play and then we gonna have to swoop down and pass by on the right hand side and swinging around again this way we can make sure we're all landed the back of the runway we don't want to be to get enough speed up so we can get our next descent on the go now as you can see at the moment we currently have that crashed Rover set as our target this just helps us line up with the runway because it's not always easy to reliably line yourself up by eyeballing it so here we go swinging down keeping us being nice and low we're going to deliberately undershoot just so hopefully we roll up that little Ridge bleeding off just enough speed so that we end up I didn't I didn't do a particularly good job here but we can bleed off some of our speed by going up that small hill now we've ended up pretty far back so this could been a lot worse and we can just time warp just to get ourselves point in the right direction physical Time Warp just makes SSTO is easier to spin around on the spot and we can begin our next stage so in order to get the ramp to touch the ground we do need to retract the front landing gear and we can just reduce the deploy limit a little bit to make this a little bit easier to load cargo on til we still need those arrow spikes on those cars just so they can grab enough speed and acceleration and just general pushing power to get the cargo of the ramp but we only need a little bit of fuel expenditure to actually do that so again just time warping here to get to the actual loading itself just being very careful to load this on firing up that engine and sparingly but you know just enough to get it on and there we go all docked now obviously the craft has a very very small amount of oxidizer and liquid fuel so as I mentioned earlier we're going to be having to refuel it and we're not gonna be doing that wheezing in is are you even though we've just loaded one on because yeah I actually capsized the row but using the weird collision quirk the the physics engine has we can use those side wheels just helped flip itself back up when we go and park this somewhere we don't need to destroy it there's no need you know I'm a I'm a peace-loving person again I mean yeah we need to watch the entire Drive that we'll just swing it around to this building here and park it up in the carpark anyway like I was saying we could refuel this using the is are you aren't we just loaded up blister we're gonna do it properly we have this fuel took I've constructed here obviously we have two of these fuel tank trailers just because we're gonna be refueling this thing again to get the final module up but for now we're gonna drive forward we need a lot Wheelz here just to provide enough support without breaking and also to provide enough driving power to actually get there are electric charges driving quite rapidly we do have solar panels and RTGS we can recharge ourselves intermittently but other than that there's not very well to it other than just you know reversing around and then backing it up until we got our encounter and here we go just with a camera zoomed righty and I presume quite far in to get the alignment right but I knew these things would be the right height anyway and there we go so it was quite a long process in order to transfer all the fuel over manually because regrettably the SSTO has quite a lot of fuel tanks on it so we can just skip through most of the actual fuel pumping itself but here's just me selecting the tanks just to demonstrate to you how it worked but like I say you don't need to see the whole thing long and short of it is we can undock that the truck trailer and drive this thing away out of the way of the plane so this thing doesn't no there's not the best turning circle but you know it works it'd be nice if maybe I could have been cooperating some sort of stock hinge for the actual joint between the truck and the trailer but again it didn't really matter too much I mean this has steering on all the wheels so it wasn't too much of an issue and we can just undock the trailer and get ourselves ready to talk on to the next one but we can do that later because for now I think we're ready to launch the SST Oh once again so there we go par closing up the front end of the cargo bay just having a look at the map view here I'm gonna start launching it you can see the space station there so we've just over the desert at the moment so this is well as good a time as any to actually launch the SST once again so I'll go firing up the rakers there we have the station set as our target and you can see this time we don't even need to get to the end of the runway to get ourselves airborne and this isn't even the lightest module so but it's time to get to the third module very much runway space motive to get ourselves off the ground but as you can see we are able to pick up much more aggressively than before almost sort of 35 degrees supposed to be less than 20 degrees I was pitching up at before because we haven't a lot more power to wait in terms of what we have this time around so it's much much easier more forgiving to collide so if you are not the greatest SSTO pilot and would like to get better then perhaps skip over the actual orange tank payload and just use the lighter ones for now because they're far more easy to fly and there's a lot more forgiving so getting really high up into the atmosphere now so this is a good time as any to fire up the closed-cycle mode of the rapiers and get our orbit nice and high now you see my encounter isn't the greatest so I continued to burn to get the markers closer together I like to play around with the new videos until I got a you know a desirable encounter so we haven't actually circularized at this point so we're not gonna be getting anywhere close but you know it's good to at least somewhat plan ahead so we are our separation still quite a fairly far apart but I guess you can just see how I'm playing around with new for notes we can skip ahead to the actual encounter itself so yeah just doing some small puffs from the rapier and here we get attacked by the Kraken you can see I undocked it here and everything just exploded and shook itself to pieces and I tried this again again and again thank you for quick thank-you quick save for that but it just didn't work so in the end what I had to do was use the orange tank as a sort of tug so I maneuvered it to the front and undocked the whole thing is one piece and that for some reason it seemed to stop everything going wrong so I'm not quite sure not quite sure what was happening but I'm glad I could find a fix for it so we can close the babe modules again and do a quick Beauty shot of the lights lighting up and deploying the solar panels we will be deploying a larger set of solar panels in the final module but we've got these little ones for now just to provide some power for what's up there so far although at the moment and then we can burn and once again to get our encounter with the Kerbal Space Center now for the sake of keeping this as a sort of reasonable time length I didn't show it in too much detail what I had to do here was just pump a lot of the fuel from the posterior engines a lot further forward into the front tanks namely the liquid fuel tanks you can't release in two hours I'm doing this crazy role to try and bleed up enough speed because I was worried I've got an own keyboard I was going to overshoot the curb with space center again but I it was alright in the end as I'm saying I managed to pump in a lot of pumped a lot of the fuel from the posterior tanks into the front tanks namely the mark 1 fuselages that flanked the actual cargo bay itself just provide a bit of stability because if the fuel if there's too much fuel in the rear tanks you end up being quite rear heavy and it becomes very very hard at unforgiving to steer so I didn't do a fantastic job here I ended up stopping almost halfway up the runway but you saw how quick easily I was able to take off before and again this module is a lot lighter than the last one so I wasn't worried at all about not being able to get into orbit so other than without further ado we can just maneuver the car into position and drive it onto the drive it into the cargo bay preparing ourselves for the third and final flight of this video we could have gone on like I say because it built more trucks and more modules and continued going this on but anyone this beautiful be going on too long and case please frame rate when there are lots of vehicles within the physics range is pretty atrocious so I didn't want to be playing at 5 fps for the sake of you not to do more modules so maybe I could do a follow-up series of this perhaps even using a rocket ala like SpaceX would do rather Jesus can accessed here but that's all for the future this is really just thing I wanted to do with that space play and refuel isn't everything just Rockets off not only the space plane but also to show off the truck this is an actually the first video that that truck has been shown in although I'm talking about it now watch come and see it mature just start talking about it when it's actually in shots we can just park up the calf and I'll leave it in the car park and get ready to open up the docking bays there we go it's like I said this isn't the first video used this used that truck I did use the exact same craft file in June our attacks I didn't actually show it doing its thing but it was used to refuel one of the SST O's that was used in the I think there's a penultimate episode the truck made a very brief appearance of the first order 20 seconds or so obviously the trailer for this one needs to be much bigger to fully fill this new SST area so the trailer in this video is different but the truck itself is completely unchanged engine attacks so some of you may recognize it from that a lot of people thought it was hazardous his truck that I just use it's not it's different because there are quite a few big differences of it but regardless we can reverse ourselves slowly if you choose to download the craft file for the truck which I'm bundling with the SSD which you can get in the description as always one thing if you're struggling to get it to dock with the trailer one thing I did build into the trailer with some aircraft and wheels just at the front of the trailer so the idea is you deploy them and it raises up the front just so you can more easily drive the truck underneath the docket I would also recommend having a engineer come in the show just showing some of the fuel get in pump again I'm not going to share it is entirety because it took a very very very long time to actually do it and they were like I'm saying I would recommend having an engineer and at least one of the crew seats in the truck just because the front wheels have a bit of a tendency to break unfortunately but luckily they can all be repaired from the cab itself you just take the curl out of the command C but then they can just stay they just walk around the cab in order to get close enough to the wheels to repair them so you know it's just something I recommend and we can park it up in the carpark before preparing to set our encounter with the final with space station so fast we can close off the docking port I don't we kind of launch it we're kind of launching at the same kind of period as the other one left it a little bit later this time because I was so far so far ahead of my target last time so I left a little bit later this time but the best way to learn how to do this is just through trial and error yourself so you don't need too much about anyway pitching up fairly aggressively and not quite as steeply as last time because it was just ended up being slightly easier to reach the magical 400 meters per second for quiet for their greatest to fully engage in terms of their thrust they don't thrust that much until they're going past about 410 per second something like that and then we can pitch up in close cycle mode and get our orbit finalized so if we just raise our parabola as you can see already were much closer than the target nodules appear and we're pretty close we're not it's not perfect but we are pretty close so I'm not gonna worry this time about setting and renew no the guess is nice and closed because we're fairly close anyway we just need to circular eyes because this time it's going to take about 600 Newton per second to sacrifice so we're not gonna be able to get a very accurate maneuver note in terms of getting an encounter anyway so I wasn't too worried about doing our encounter there and then we can just wait our time and I kind of skipped ahead of it because there was quite a lot of fine tuning and tweaking everything it's the most engaging thing for you to watch so I skipped through most of that if you'd like to watch a tutorial about rendezvous then there are other youtubers have already done that so I really feel the need to explain it in detail especially given the rather challenging nature of this video other than this is the best thing to try and emulate if you're not that great at docking or rendezvous or anything like that so there goes our final module so we just have some nice crew capacity storage some batteries and a couple of command pods one of them being the observatory so we can just dock that on to the science lab module I try and design my station so that the crew wouldn't ever be transferring through batteries or fuel tanks or anything like that because a little bit unrealistic so as you can see they would just be moving through docking ports between habitation modules and then I thought it would be look look a little bit cooler if the orange tank is coming off of this angle here it doesn't really serve any additional purpose there but you know whatever actually I think in hindsight probably more sensible to dock it to the station using the senior docking port because most ships are we look into this which is the normal sized docking port but we can reconfigure it later if you want and obligatory beauty shop there there now in this I guess we can leave it now that's that's the station or just the station that's the station all built so we can take this thing back to curvin for the final time so we can fire up the engines for the final time and plan our encounter with the runway now like I said this mission is pretty ridiculous it doesn't serve any real practical purpose but it is very very satisfying to pull off our there's a quick shot of me pumping the fuel for words like I say if you wanted to do this I mean it's not it's it's it's a bit of a chore and it's a bit of a pain in the neck to actually deal with the low frame rates on the runway at first and it's far more sense to just do it from the space when I open your SSTO doesn't you need to worry about loading cargo onto it but this is just such a satisfying mission to pull once you do it it's very it's a pretty gives you a pretty good sense of no yeah I that's a thing I did because he actually massively massively overshot the Kerbal space center this time so I can start flying back we do have enough Delta P to get anywhere 7,000 meters per second of fuel I was very liberal in my use of it though because I resided that you know what I've landed at the Space Center quite a few times already let's land somewhere else so we're gonna land at the second runway that's the one just over the sort of ocean that separates those little islands from the curb space center itself as is this there's this airfield here well got to be nice just land it here but that's about it that pretty much wraps this video up so I guess we can do the nice cinematic zoom out effect and then just have a look at the space station itself in orbit for you know properly this time so there is a see our science modules there we've also got up a little shot of the observatory there Carol chilling in there having a look at the view of nothing because it's not facing the planet and there's the other two chilling in the lab there but that pretty much wraps this video up so I hope very much that you enjoyed it on screen in a minute there's gonna be some videos that take you to some other things I've built okay so top left is a roving base I sent to Juna top right is the music video version of this video which are very proud of and highly recommend and the bottom right is one specially selected by YouTube for you and other than that thank you for watching this this this one

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 1,143,205

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, ssto, matt, lowne, matt lowne, matt lowne ssto, space station, station, matt lowne space station, building, building a space station, single stage to orbit, orange tank, orange tank ssto, truck, fuel truck, commentary, british, funny, nerd, tutorial, guide, blue yeti, squad, amazing, epic, mind-blowing, recovering, madness, rendezvous, docking, docking guide, tips, tricks, rapiers, lko, kerbin, base, orbital, orbiting, modules, stock

Id: vis4yunGbEA

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2017