KSP: Building the International Space Station in ONE Launch!

hello one and all and welcome back to another kerbal space program video and in today's kerbal space program video we're going to be building something rather special that's right we're going to be building my interpretation of a one-to-one recreation of the international space station uh but with the twist which i'm sure you probably have no because of the title and the thumbnail uh with the twist of it's going to be launched in one go obviously the international space station is not a particularly aerodynamic shape it doesn't really lend itself all that well to uh being launched in one go but we're gonna have a crack at it anyway and i'm gonna try and make this as sort of to scale as possible so i'm kind of having to use the kerbal pieces like the in-game parts to set the scale for the crew modules which you can see me placing here we're currently constructing the russian module of the space station and then once you've kind of established this as our scale we can then construct the stuff like i don't know the canadarm2 the truss structure etc etc so that's what i'm doing this week and uh yes you can see me building it here now one thing i wanted to um try and do as i built it in the space plane hangar which is what you're seeing now i realize that it's going to be a very very long build process the time level so the other time this is like 10 minutes long or something there is a timer at the bottom of the screen so you can kind of see when things happen so you kind of know what to expect but i thought i'd try and make things a bit more interesting despite this by uh building the parts in the space plane hangar when the part was added in real life so i'm building this space station in the space plane hangar in the same way and same order that the actual international space station was built in real life now there are a couple of caveats to this right now what i've got here as it was when it was looked like this there was a big solar array above that little silver module just there but um yeah that that was that gets removed so for the most part i'm just saying for the most part this is pretty much how the international space station was constructed uh i'm not gonna talk about all the individual components as i place them just because uh the footage is going by way too fast i think i'm playing it like 12 12 times faster than normal speed and it's still a very very fast paced video to be honest guys i don't know yet if what you're what i'm what i'm watching now is gonna be the final cut because it might just be so fast paced and too nauseating and too motion sickness inducing to really shows i'll have to try and slow the footage down and come up with some other creative way to make it not drag on too long but i'm hoping it will work okay so that's the main by the way i've now done the main part of the space station for now now it's time to get working on the iconic truss structure that goes that runs along the top of the space station now visually it's not a particularly accurate look the actual real international space station does not have those cartoonishly large windows on any of the modules i kind of wanted to strike a balance really i wanted this to be a fairly faithful recreation to the you know shape and design of the international space station but i also wanted it to look like a kerbal interpretation of it and therefore use the actual kerbal pieces because that would not only add a little bit of kerbal charm to the construction but it would also add an actual functional interior to the space station as well so that's kind of a it's a little bit of a compromise i think it's very hard to do a no compromises build of the international space station without using mods and uh i i just like having the windows on the ship quite frankly like when they're all lit up it looks really really nice sitting serenely in orbit and um and that's that so that's kind of in case anyone had that question as to why am i not building this out of fairing pieces like most people build international space station replicas or any other space station replica i guess that's why whilst i'm going for their general shape i also wanted it to be kerballized and that's why the actual gaps between the modules as in where they connect to each other it's a bit of a bigger gap than it is in real life because again i'm using the in-game docking ports so that you know you could see how this thing could get built in aircraft now properly rather than this ridiculous way i'm building it you may have noticed the eagle-eyed among you may have caught a glimpse of the fact that this truss structure is actually attached to the main station via a rotation server so servo sorry so my idea was that i'm building the space station as it will be in orbit in the space plane hangout so i can get the scale right but when it comes to actually launching this thing this whole truss structure will be rotated to be in line with the actual main stage space station itself so it's a bit more kind of friendly in terms of launch ability that's uh that's why i've got a rotation servo there and uh and now we're working on the construction of the gigantic solar arrays and look there's another little feature i decided to add these themselves are attached to a rotation servo because much like the uh real international space station i wanted the arms that you know hold the solar panels in place to be able to rotate to make sure they're always facing the sun that's how the real space station can you know keep the solar panels pointing towards the sun it's got these big rotating arms that the solar eraser attached to and i kind of wanted that to have be some a functional thing on my recreation of the international space station so that's another thing that i thought would add a nice little layer um to this space station's build uh now we're going to continue constructing some of the uh components is this the unity module i'm like this is the i know this is the esa module i don't want to start using my like vague knowledge of the international space station like oh yes here we are constructing this piece and it's completely wrong so what i'll probably do is put some annotation hopefully i'll remember to put some annotations on screen showing you kind of what i'm building as it happens in the time lapse uh and here we are adding a little thing this is called the dexter which is like a sort of robot that can sit at the end of the canadarm2 allowing greater functionality so my interpretation is just instead of one docking claw it has three docking clause whoa and also uh two eva seats so that a kerbal can you know ride around with it it just makes it a bit more fun at the end of the day this space station does not have any function like it's pointless to build space stations of this proportion in kerbal space program but it's something that's fun to do and since we're building it for fun we may as well add some fun little features for the kerbals to uh to experience now we're adding i believe this is the japanese lab module i'm sure i could put the proper name on screen uh this is like the external experiment area with another little robot arm that can service those experiments uh yeah anyway some of you might be wondering matt why are you building a single launch international space station on this particular week and i will tell you ladies and gentlemen that's because in a few days we'll be able to celebrate 20 continuous years of humans comprising 64 crews inhabiting the international space station which began on november the 2nd in the year 2000 i mean viewers of my space this week series will know about this already but uh yeah we're approaching uh the anniversary that marks 20 years of continuous human presence aboard the international space station which is a huge a huge deal if you ask me and you know the international space station's only got funding until 2024 so we may not have that many years left in the old beast so i thought now would be a good time as any to present my ridiculous interpretation of the space station uh for your eyeballs but speaking of you know the space station and indeed its construction it's pretty much done there's not much left to add we've got this little inflatable module just here which is now over that's how fast the footage is playing back i am very anxious about how watchable this is going to be when i actually render it i mean in the preview window it's running at like three frames per second so it looks tolerable to my eye but then once it's rendered we might find that the camera just moves way too fast to get any sort of meaningful idea of what's happening on screen but fingers crossed it works out fine anyway now is the very tedious step of uh folding everything up and getting it nice and ready for launch i'm gonna just fade across because this actually took quite a while to do all the solar panels and the pistons they're attached to are now folded in as small as they can go and uh just before i rotate the truss structure into a better position i thought it might be a good idea to have this little piece here fold away so that it doesn't get in the way but i i couldn't i couldn't sink it low enough but then i thought uh in ksp parts can just clip through each other it's not a big deal it should all still work even though there is part clipping so sorry guys you'll have to forgive my very unrealistic use of part clipping in this otherwise flawlessly realistic spacecraft i think the ridiculousness of this craft it kind of permits a few little cheaty moments here and there but now comes the difficult task of constructing some sort of rocket that can haul this leviathan into curb in orbit and i decided to build this sort of scaffolding structure around the space station these fuel tanks will give us loads and loads of places to strut the various station components to a more solid structure that'll hold it all in place now it was very important that i didn't have any struts linking uh two space station components together like i couldn't strut the truss to the main station core itself because that would then stop the truss being able to rotate into its final position so i had to make sure that if i was strutting the space station in place which i needed to do for this thing to actually launch i had to strut it to something that was going to get staged away which is why i wanted the actual ascension rocket to also serve as a structural scaffolding anchor point that we can uh you know strut all of the wobbly flimsy space station pieces to uh so that's kind of the upper stage there we're gonna add a cluster of vector engines below it in just a second the vectors were a great choice because a they have quite high thrust and this is quite a heavy payload but they've also got really really really high gimbal range which will help us keep this very very unbalanced payload under some level of control finally for our lower stage we're just going to go all of the boosters we're adding a huge cluster of the mastodon engine which are of course are the um the in-game analog for the massive saturn 5 f1 engines and actually what i'm doing here as well i can talk about this once it's on screen i'm adding a little probe chord to that lower stage just so we can deorbit it because it's going to carry this thing all the way into a stable orbit but obviously i don't want it to be left in orbit so once it's separated from the space station we need to have some means of it being able to steer itself away and now we do so it's fine there were a few uh mistakes and glitches and disasters during this process so i'm gonna leave that as ambiguous as it is to get that view of attention up and speaking of uh things youtubers have to do guys if you are enjoying this video it really helps me out if you do leave a like it helps favor me in the eyes of the algorithm tm uh so i really do appreciate it if you are liking this video a little like down below it goes a long way and uh yeah wow that sounded really insincere this is it let's move along to adding the crew oh never mind we've added the crew now we need to add more boosters because you can never have too many boosters and we're going for very big boosters indeed in fact these parts before the making history dlc came out were the biggest fuel tanks in the game we have the mammoth engines powering them and mammoth engine is of course the most powerful engine in the whole of kerbal space program however it's not enough i tested this vehicle and it didn't have the control i needed it to for some reason it wasn't a very easy craft to fly i'm not quite sure why or how this happened but uh yes aerodynamics didn't really like this vehicle too much so i actually ended up swapping out those mammoth engines for clusters of vector engines just because the vectors have a higher gimbal range than the mammoth nozzles do which just makes it a bit easier to keep this thing under control we're also going to add some big uh wing pieces to again just help facilitate controlling this vehicle once it's in flight we've got these two big buran shuttle style fins on the actual side boosters and then on the main stack we're gonna add four um four tail fins as well i guess and now it's only four vector engines on those side boosters so it is effectively still the equivalent of a mammoth engine but with much higher gimbal but i think that's pretty much everything built so we can crossfade across to the launch pad now before we launch it's probably a good idea to quickly take a look at how our kerbals are doing oh my goodness they're watching one of the many thousands of streamable documentaries from curiositystream the incredible streaming service that has sponsored today's video curiosity stream has an immense library of streamable documentaries and non-fiction tv shows that span a wide range of topics from history and nature to science and technology curiosity stream has a plethora of award-winning exclusives and original shows and is available on a huge number of platforms meaning you can stream their content to any device for viewing at any time anywhere just use the code matlow or simply click the link in the description to get 25 off and pay just 15 for an entire year and with a massive library and 35 collections of curated programs hand-picked by curiosity streams experts that is an insanely good price i've been a huge fan of curiosity stream for a long time now and i and the crew here it seems cannot recommend them enough give it a go for just 125 per month this is the best value streaming service money can get and while the crew watched their documentaries here at mission control we can just take over and initiate the launch first things first i'm gonna slowly throttle up the engines because i find that just initiating full throttle straight away causes the whole thing to shake about a bit so gently upping the throttle to max before hitting spacebar to separate those launch clamps and off we go to a blazing start okay it's very slow let's just we'll speed up the footage a bit for the sake of you know viewer enjoyment of the video but just bear with me guys it was a it was a very very long launch i mean i'm trying to think back to uh how long it actually took to launch when i did it in real in real life terms and i believe it took about half an hour to get from launch pad to stable kerbin orbit so uh i do it for you guys and i do it for curiosity stream curiositystream.com link in the description anyway the ad is over now we don't need to talk about that anymore um yes as you can see we are beginning our gravity term but some of you may be questioning mata what are you doing you're pitching the wrong way and aha that's because we're aiming to go for a polar orbit because i added one of those um resource scanning things to the space station because i've never done that for kerbin on loudoun aerospace before and i thought it might be something worth doing for my aerospace company to have a good sense of what's actually in kerbin so this space station will actually be serving a purpose it's not going to be just some useless art piece orbiting the planet no it's going to serve as an actual really useful thing i mean it's something i've considered doing for a while like i should probably do a polar orbit space station at some point so we can incorporate that scanning tech and why not do it in style so and as such the real reason for doing this space station makes manifest its ugly head but uh yeah that's why i'm launching into a polar orbit as we uh we saw past the 20 kilometer mark nearly i got a bit i forgot how slow the footage is playing back even at time lapse there we go 20 kilometers surpassed uh i'm going for a slightly steeper gravity turn than i typically do because i don't know if it's obvious to you guys but despite my efforts of making these structural fuel tanks a bit pointy at the end this thing is still not particularly aerodynamic so i'm going for a nice steep ascent profile so we're not having to you know we don't we we minimize the risk great sentence there we minimize the risk of flipping over lower in the atmosphere and uh that looks like that first stage there is burned out when i say first first stage but the first core of the first stage obviously the side boosters decoupled long ago but that's now gone no i'm trying to say here guys it's getting late what can i say i'm pretty tired getting a bit loopy not eat anything all day and uh i'm doing a commentary okay so now we're on that upper stage with the cluster of vectors this is going to be what's going to get us all the way into kerbin orbit and obviously it's going to decouple itself as well although there was a bit of a problem with this you may have noticed in the vehicle assembly building can you see those front fuel tanks that make the point uh the idea was that those are attached to hinges and just before i decouple the lower stage i can flat i can adjust the angle of those hinges so that those fuel tanks are in line with the rest of the fuel tank structure so when i decouple that lower stage they won't slam into the space station they'll angle themselves to be clear of it and separation will be you know all fine and dandy and nominal however i stupidly put struts joining those four fuel tanks at the front together which means that those hinges are useless because the struts will just hold them in place oops my bad so we're going to have to uh get creative when it comes to decoupling this lower stage and by creative i mean exploit a glitch in careful space technically technically it's doable without using glitches because as you can see the space station can move laterally out of this frame here no problem but i didn't want to risk you know having things accidentally boop each other because it's a fairly fragile structure and i say that i'm well aware i'm saying this as we're blasting it through the atmosphere at 1700 meters per second but just bear with me here i was still a little bit nervous about actual physical things hitting it rather than just heating effect so when i say the glitch all i'm going to do because i think it happens fairly quick with the footage playback at this speed i'm just going to decouple that lower stage and then activate uh non-physics time warp so i guess just normal time warp and then collision physics stops being a thing and we're gonna just allow the two craft to separate through each other uh it doesn't matter because it's time warp and that's that's the glitch i'm talking about well it's really hard to continue talking about relative relevant things because we're still ascending this is a very slow set i did consider speeding the footage up a little bit faster than the speed it's currently playing at but at the moment it's playing back four times faster than regular speed and four times speed as in like post-production time-lapse is the maximum speed that sony vegas can uh speed footage up without distorting the audio well i guess distorting the audio is the wrong word without desyncing the audio like it can't speed up the audio any faster than four times speed so if you were to speed up the video faster than four times the audio would be all out of sync which you know it's not a huge issue we could just mute the footage or just you know try and come up with it i could just make the sounds of my mouth like i did with that with that one ksp tutorial that did really well actually because maybe that's something i maybe did i learned something just now i don't know anyway it probably would have been that danger metal but i think it really adds something when there is the relevant in-game sounds happening with the footage that's kind of why i went with a four times regular speed and i don't know i think it's quite therapeutic to watch a ship that is vast in size that would normally make ksp's frame rate tank to uh you know single digits uh fly really really well with a really fast frame rate because obviously it's been sped up i think there's something quite cool about that and uh you know it's cool kind of seeing the whole thing happen at not real time speed because again i'm not going to subject you guys to a half an hour video of i don't know 10 fps gameplay of getting this leviathan into orbit and um you know on the subject of that we've nearly got this leviathan into orbit we have now passed the kerman line and uh we are now in space of course we are still on a sub-orbital trajectory so we need to perform a pro-grade burn at apoapsis to get ourselves stabilized and that was in like in a stable orbit and then we can decouple that lower stage and then get ready to uh deorbit that lower stage but there were some issues and not just the issue that i raised that the actual scaffold structure can't unfold itself like i originally intended it to do uh the kraken did rear its ugly head and you'll see it was quite funny actually so you'll see it just a second in what way it did that but i think we've just circularized now it's time to uh decouple that lower stage so we're going to decouple it and then we're going to quickly initiate time warp so again not physics time warp just regular time up as you can see the two crafts separate beautifully and that's all that that is i did it turned out i did actually have time to talk about the glitch as it happened as in like the glitch i was exploiting as it happened but i don't know i i decided to mention it earlier as well just because i i don't know in my mind it's just it can wonder and i didn't know if i'd be on some random tangent about something oh there's i probably should have quickly cancelled out the movement using time wharf or get crackers get kraken enjoying himself can we overcome it i can't remember if i did succumb to a cracker attack but yeah i probably should have slowed down the uh rotation speed of that rotation servo that the uh the truss structure is attached to maybe it's the damping that we're seeing now rather than actually the kraken freaking out so i was kind of just intermittently dropping in and out of time warp to kind of calm the ship down a little bit and then once we kind of sufficiently reduced the wobbliness we can extend those solar array arms and then once that's done which uh hasn't actually happened properly because i think i forgot to uh bind a few of those pistons to the action group that deploys these arms i'm gonna quickly find the culprits and extend them up to the length that i need them to extend it to and then we can hit the action group that deploys the solar panels themselves and there we have it wow come on didn't everything just oh i just moved the camera around and saw in the distance uh wacky waving arm flailing tube man having fun there so yes uh i the kraken enjoyed i think the kraken stopped playing with the space station when it realized that this thing looked a lot more fun so i'm gonna quickly i quickly reloaded a quick save uh and then started the orbiting this thing before the kraken had a chance to start ripping it apart and as we commenced our deorbit burn it started going a bit hairy but watch that periapsis thing on the bottom left hand side of the screen you can see that it didn't matter because just before it ripped itself to pieces our periapsis was sub-orbital so i think it was i mean i don't know if the cracker might have flung stuff out of the orbit again but i think it was all fine so now we can just uh inflate that experimental inflatable module there and uh that's it that's actually that's the space station done so uh yeah i guess we can get one of the kerbals into the airlock just there so we can go on a little eva and survey the uh the structure of the guardian wow it really puts into perspective the actual scale of this thing oh we've got that i deployed that antenna there as well so we can actually do some resource scanning as you can see you can still see the ui on kerbin down below those pink bands there don't worry about them there's not a visual glitch it's just part of that scanning module and there is the space station and like i say i know it's not completely realistic like we've got those gigantic windows like it looks very very curbily but that was kind of the point i was going for and now we can put him on that little seat on the dexter module and uh play around with the canadarm2 and uh carefully maneuver him to um to somewhere yes i i really should have probably slowed down the traverse rate of these robotic parts but hey i'm sure our little kerbal there is having lots of fun being flung around uh precariously against the space station so i'm trying to maneuver him to the japanese module just that whoop play a little bit uh but it's okay can we now steer him around maybe we should go for the columbus module instead the e the esa module that one on the kind of lower left well that's out of view now there we are now one thing that's not realistic the thing that kind of two is attached to is like a that thing can actually move along the truss structure i couldn't really find an elegant way to do this in ksp oh my goodness oh and now he's glitching through the japanese module what was that what would that look like on the inside he's like a phantom just drifting in and out of the walls oh there we are is the real international space station haunted if it is it might look something like that that's what i'm recreating here guys and i think that's a good enough demonstration of the canadarm2 there uh the kerbin arm too if you will it worked pretty well and there we are i mean there's not much more to say really i'm really happy with how the space station turned out in fact there is stuff i need to say because i bound those motor one actually that's what i'm doing here i decided to bind the solar array motors to uh j and l which is translate left and right on the action group menu so that we can actually rotate them to face the sun and again i didn't i probably should have slowed down the rotation speed of those motors so i quickly dropped them down to the absolute lowest possible value they could be uh quickly again just stabilize the craft by dropping it in and out of time walking time warp in quick succession to dampen the movements and then we can just you know play it at a normal speed i will speed the footage up so it's not quite so boring to watch but that means that the actual physics don't freak out and the ship stays you know more or less stable so there we are a little demonstration of how the solar arrays can turn much like the ones on the international space station so we can always make sure they're facing the sun i think the space station's actually facing the wrong way really so it's not it's not a great demonstration of it actually working properly but it's a demonstration at least that this thing can move like the real space station albeit in slightly wobbly fashion but you know it's a kerbal space program replica there's always going to be a little bit of a compromise but that pretty much wraps up the core subject of this video and that is launching this thing in one launch getting into orbit and unfolding it so guys i'm just going to leave it there i think but if you do want to check out curiosity stream and i highly recommend you do i cannot endorse a curiosity stream enough uh they have great great great content there there is a link in the description to pay just 15 quid a year that's that's that's the same value really and uh you can use the code matlon or one word as well to get the 15 off anyway i'm gonna leave it there for realsies this time there's some things on screen isn't end screen you know they work by now it's youtube in it uh i'll see you next time it's probably on monday in space this week what a great sign off see you bye

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 2,237,823

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay, iss, ksp iss, international space station, ksp international space station, matt lowne iss, matt lowne space station, single launch, breaking ground, iss20

Id: BukDVPasPro

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020