KSP: Hypersonic Space Airliner SSTO!

hello everyone and welcome to today's Kerbal space program adventure and in today's Kerbal space program adventure we will be adventuring to the surface of kerb ins mint iasts at alight the flats of minmus and will be doing so in this as yet unfinished SSTO which you can see me constructing here if you cannot for time lapse builds then you can skip ahead to five minutes 20 to get to the flight itself but it would seem that the majority of you enjoy the builds and given that this ship's design is heavily centered around its unique aesthetics I I thought to be a good candidate for a speed build video it's kind of placed before the mission itself now some of you may have noticed the rather striking parallel between this craft and the one I uploaded last week namely by the fact that both aircraft have this closed box wing design I went for the box wing again for a few reasons first and foremost people responded quite positively to the wing layout of the last aircraft and it was generally quite well received and secondly it actually inspired quite a few people on my discord server and you know even on the KSP subreddit to post pictures of their own interpretation of a box wing aircraft which I must say you know it's rather flattering I'm glad I could provide a source of inspiration for your builds however the aircraft last week was just that an aircraft today's craft will not only be able to dominate the skies of kerbin but also to breach the final frontier of space itself as such we've discarded the whiplash engines in favor of the rapiers with some added nervous as well to facilitate hyper efficient flight once we're in space this thing has also been kitted out with massively increased fuel reserves to enable its increased range and it has been stripped of its command pod and one of its passenger Bay's just to help keep its mass nice and load to enable us to flight to minmus and back however i'd say that this is still quite a capable ship it has capacity for 48 passengers in its cabins as well as ample room for heavy cargo as well and it probably won't be 48 passengers when we actually get to it because you know they need their space it'll probably be more like 20 passengers maybe so lots and lots of room for walking around they'll be bars in here there's a gym showers just you know all the all the bells and whistles really will have a pool table that's all it took it's gonna be great but the others there's room for ample cargo as well for this video I'll be demonstrating its cargo carrying abilities by loading up the bay at the back with three thousand two hundred twenty five units of ore which has a total weight of just over 38 tons which is heavier than the rocker max jumbo 64 fuel tank or you know that big orange one as it's more commonly known I've actually I've actually got the wiki page open on my other monitor just so I could remember the name of that tanker so I could you know do you could do a good do a good commentary here because normally I don't really help I don't really know I'd already have a reference and I always just say I'll look it up afterwards so no it's it's the job it's the rock ooh max jumbo 64 fuel tank aka the the big orange one I don't know why this was a weird tangent wasn't it yes whilst the craft can carry the weight of the the big orange tank to minmus surface and back again it's optimized to assume that you would sort of drop the cargo off whilst on the surface the reason for the cargo bay as I briefly mentioned as the overall goal for this mini series last episode is to help with the infrastructure of my upcoming Hotel and Casino base on minmus which will be my tourism outpost that I can charge huge amounts of money to eccentric billionaires to stay out in order to help fund my space program so this craft will provide the means to get passengers to and from the hotel however you know it would need cargo space to both carry the passengers possessions as well as to restock the base with food water shampoo gym equipment in those those miniature chocolate to get on your pillow you know or all the stuff that hotels need to keep running I thought that one orange tanks worth of mass would be a good value to aim for with regard to how much cargo capacity we'd need so that's why I've gone for this value and yo just to really prove that it can we've actually gone slightly over that weight just so we can absolutely confirm without a shadow of a doubt that it's capable also it means that we can dump the or quite easily without leaving any big debris on the surface of minimus because you know when you dump or it doesn't leave anything behind so yeah that's why it's a Norton cannot the actual orange tank itself I know I mentioned earlier that this thing has some resemblance to a craft I uploaded last week but it also has near identical well it is identical to a craft i uploaded this week on tuesday i think it was like an explosion montage I called it the Kraken play where this thing just kept on spontaneously exploding on the runway not actually a problem or a design flaw with the craft itself as such basically to do these kind of nice slow panning shots around the craft I often use the slow motion physics mod it's from better time warp you can do physics mod but slow motion and when you do slow motion mods you can Pan the camera around a lot slower but it can sometimes cause grack crack and glitches hence why that video is also in slow-mo so don't worry this craft doesn't really spontaneously explode on the runway you know unless you kind of really force it to by jumping in and out of time warp in quick succession but with that here we go firing the engines ready for launch now unlike a lot of engines in this game the rape is don't start out at full thrust when you're coming from a standstill so I initially set the engines off with the brakes of the aircraft on to allow them to the rapiers to spool up as much as possible before we switched off the brakes and allowed ourselves to power forwards unfortunately the runway is not quite long enough to enable this thing to take off I don't think it's anything to do with the design of the craft itself because it does start to get off the ground but then we just end up running out of runway but luckily KSP is runway kind of ends on like a sort of cliff edge not cliff edge but there's a drop-off after the runway so you can just get anyway but that's the same thing I didn't like about this craft it's one thing I wish I probably improved upon I mean it does I think it does take off pretty well when you don't have the orange tank in the cargo bay or as I during this video locked or in the cargo bay but yeah that's the only issue really that I had so maybe I'll try and iron that out before we put this thing into service for real with the tourists now the flight plan is pretty standard we're going to be coasting around that pretty much sea level or at least below 1,000 meters whilst we throttle up to about 420 440 meters per second this is the point at which the rapiers kick in and have the maximum amount of thrust and then we'll start to rapidly increase in speed and then do it and when we're in this phase of the flight we can start pointing ourselves upward and rapidly gain some height so you can see me here powering through the sound barrier now island runway in the distance there and now we're kind of you know about that point where the rapiers are throttling up at their maximum amount of thrust we can put a thumbs up and coast our way up to the two space I guess I was it to the upper atmosphere but I guess you know we will still be going upwards after that point so I guess - space will be firing up the nuclear engines once are a little bit higher because they have pretty bad efficiency on the ground level and so a lot people don't know this about the nuclear engines because they're the most efficient engine in the game after the ion engine but would in thick atmospheres that they're very bad they're really only designed for vacuums not that they'd be much help in the lower atmosphere anyway because their thrust is so bad but in addition to having poor thrust they actually have very bad efficiency as well in thick atmospheres as well you can pretty much get away with it on junuh but Lathan Eve especially Eve you got no chance with nuclear engines at ground level but ground level is something that we are not at right now as we pass the 14 kilometer mark so we're getting to that point where we can start to think about firing the nuclear engines it's not much point at the moment because we're still getting plenty of speed from our rapiers they haven't started to drop off in terms of their thrust just yet generally I try and aim for about 1500 meters per second on rapiers and air breathing mode with the nuclear engines being activated sort of between the 107 200,000 meter mark that's kind of a good point at which the atmosphere is thin enough where we may as well be in a vacuum with regard to the efficiency of the nuclear engines and there they go now so we got four of them and I kind of liked the way the plumes appeared and this sort of flat to play I thought it looked pretty nice we've got one of them we've got two of them offset into the middle of the the four rapier engine clusters and we've got two more either side of those rapier clusters and I think it just really came together I really like the way this craft ended up looking actually now we've also got some Verna engines at the very front of the craft these are basically they function exactly like monopropellant and Jones is in there enabled by RCS and they're designed for reaction control but they use liquid fuel and oxidiser rather than mono propellant so we didn't have to worry about adding extra mana Pelin tanks in order to fuel monopropellant thrusters and this thing does have excessive oxidizer engineering to it first of all because your cargo capacity may vary in terms of weight so you know you may want to increase the mass of the cargo slightly and also the food due the fact that you know it will account for any in efficiencies or pilot error whilst you're flying it it's nice just have a little bit of room for error so I like to always like to pack a little bit of extra oxidizer maybe not quite this much we've got over a thousand units of oxidizer left which is a little bit overkill that's almost over ten percent of our total oxidizer amount mate I think five percent is pretty a better thing to aim for but you know it's fine now there was a little bit of a weird glitch here with the thing kept on pitching forwards Nick watching the nav but we keep on pitching forwards below the blue marker on the nav ball so I then started using the vernier engines to kick ourselves up but I forgot we're on time with times for physics walk so then we end up kicking ourselves way too much what I did was I just quick loaded what I quick saved then quick loaded and then the problem stopped because this shouldn't be pitching forward with the nuclear engines firing because they are pointed along its center of mass so it's not like it's not in balanced or anything so not quite sure why this was happening and it's never happened to me before or since it was a bit of a weird glitch really always if you're planning on flying this thing will need to deploy the solar panels first of all so we can continue generating electricity because we don't have an RTG on board this thing because I thought you know RTGS they're made of plutonium and you know the our tourists they're not built to with and radiation as well as our astronauts who we bombard with radiation to get them immune to it it's like you can vaccinate people against gamma radiation I think that's how it works right that's how it works you can vaccinate yeah yeah that's that's why I inject myself with plutonium every day so that when the inevitable nuclear fallout war happens I'll be fine so but obviously our tourists won't have undergone this process so we ever got any lead lining either so it probably better better not have any RTG on board this thing that's that's the reason why I went for it not because I thought solar panels looked cool oh no no it's that that's the reason but yes like I was saying not only do you need to deploy the solar panels to keep this thing powered but you always need to deploy the aerial on top of the the cabins which as you can see I forgot to do at this point because of course I did and then I couldn't figure out why I suddenly lost control of this ship as we got further away from kerbin and thus out of range of the probe cause you know connection range basically because as you as I've mentioned earlier this thing has no crew cabin this time because I wanted to rehab this this sleeker looking appearance and you know again to save weight its probe controlled which of course means it needs a connection to the KSC in order to maintain functionality now due to the abysmal thrust-to-weight ratio of the nuclear engines we couldn't really do one burn alone to get to members so we're doing two and up side of this is that we can maximize the Oberth effect make our flight more efficient although we didn't really need the extra efficiency because this thing is packing more fuel than it needs so it wouldn't matter either way but because the burn was going to take so long to do the whole thing in one big go it made more sense just from her you know making sure we didn't re-enter the atmosphere standpoint that we did two burns rather than one so this is me doing the second one here oh I guess more accurately that was me doing the second one there because it's now done unfortunately misses location at the time of our launch meant that we couldn't get a direct minmus encounter from one burn at kerbin alone because of our inclination when we could have but it would've been expensive to adjust our inclination that close to the planet it would have made more sense to sort out our app elapses hi first then do a mid-course correction out in deeper space where would have been much more much more sort of cheap from a delta v point of view although I did overshoot a little bit here so yeah misses on a tilted plane versus carbons equator so we actually inclination adjustment for minimus normally I find I don't need to I just get lucky that it's always seems to be that I can make him a new node at the ascending or descending node on carbons equator and then I can just get an encounter without having to do this but on this occasion unfortunately didn't really come together but you know it doesn't take a huge amount of fuel as you saw and I probably today even more efficiently if I tried a bit harder but again as I've mentioned we have it we have excessive fuel for the what we need to have on this mission really so there goes our deceleration burn now to get us on an initial captured orbit at minimus but I will then be lowering our orbital height just make it a little bit easier to pick out a landing spot it's far easier to land particularly on minimus where the gravity is so low it's much easier to pick a landing spot and land in a specific location from a lower orbit because you can just find it easier to eyeball I don't actually is easier or anything but I personally find it easier you might not but I do and it's my video so we're doing it this way but yeah just made a maneuver note here you want to aim a little bit ahead well in this case if your orbit is with the rotation of the planet you want to aim a little bit ahead of where you want to end up because the planet is going to rotate and put you in them in the correct place if that makes sense if you have a if you plan to overshoot a little bit and then we can just decelerate got a little bit liberal with her with the time warp and end up getting a little bit too close at two higher speed so I did some extra kicking with the rapier engines with our extra amount oxidizer just do that last bit of slowdown and then we can make sure we don't slam into the ground too fast and hard well with the front side of the ship by using the vernier engines to dampen our impact I'd say that's a pretty nice landing to be honest probably not the smoothest but again it's just the it's just a test run it's just jebediah bill and Bob and they're hardened veterans of space flight and they can they can handle the g-forces there so we'll try making a little bit more gentle and we actually have tourists on board this thing but for now we can it's fine and then we can test out this thing which was I thought it was a really cool feature at the time we didn't really work out that well so I'll probably end up scrapping it and it's this the the landing leg feature so I thought if this thing is going to be spending long periods of time on minimus probably not best to have it sitting on rubber tires the whole time because I don't know the rubber might get perished or damaged if it's constantly taking the way to plane I don't know but I thought it might look cool if this thing was like sitting on landing legs when it's on the surface of minimus or even on the surface of curb in it it's just being parked there but you can see the suspension just constantly bounces it around and there's no I couldn't really find a way of making it stop doing that so that was a shame and there was another problem later on when we would redeployed the wheels the physics flipped out and it kicked the plane way up into the air or you know waving to the air you know way above the surface and then crashed it back down again which you know not not a particularly realistic thing to happen but there you go you get a nice little view there of the the actual shape of the craft now we're on the surface of minimus and we could do a nice cinematic flag plant and this is going to be our location for the hotel because not only was this mission designed to test out the capabilities and you know making sure that the ssj2 could kept the member sandd back burrows had to do a scout mission to find a location for our minmus Base Hotel and Casino and this seems as good a place as any I thought the flats would be the most ideal location really because then we can have like you know cars and stuff like they can do some salt flat racing we know the equivalent of salt flat racing on the surface of minimus I don't really know watch that surfaces I guess it's ice cream I think that's cannon right there's a quick little shot of the cargo bay by the way you can see the oil tanks there I'm not gonna be dumping the or actually just yet I'll wait just make sure that this thing could take off from minmus with the cargo still in there but then once we do get off the ground we'll then just dump the or I think we've done enough we've seen we've seen the sights we've had we've taken our photographs we've got our t-shirts it's time to re-embark the ship and get ourselves back to curvin and start you know cooking dinner I guess so we can take some surface samples and stuff because this is a science this is a science mode save so we could benefit from science even though we have the tech tree unlocked if I ever got a mod or though some new parts released and necessitated having more science it's always good to have that extra little bit you know saved up for a rainy day so to speak and now you can your bouts easier one of the flaws with this craft really as I mentioned earlier that'll happen imminently whilst we do all the other preflight checks before our launch doing some final little shots seeing what it's like with the flag there as well fluttering majestically in the wind no that was true fluttering and it's not in the wind either but you know you get the you get the sentiment and that's what I was saying about how when the wheels deploy they kind of kick him to the ground that engages it a bit and throws the craft up into the air luckily the solar panels or nothing else was destroyed in this process so it wasn't too bad but I mean just from a realism standpoint not really the best so I'll probably just end up taking those landing gears off and I'll probably put one on the back tail fin you know kind of got that biplane esque tail fin at the back I'll probably stick a couple of landing legs within that structure so when this thing touches its tail onto the ground at minimus it won't be you know landing on its elevator fins it will land on a thing that can absorb impacts I thought make make a more realistic thing and then we can begin our takeoff here so another good thing about the flats is that you know they provide a nice natural runway for a spacecraft to take off horizontally and we're just skimming the ground here this would take off a better if you didn't have all the ore or any other cargo on board because as I said earlier the idea would be that you dump that prior to takeoff but just to prove that it can take off in case you land it in the wrong spot but you need to move it or you just want to get the cargo back you can take it out so you're out see our Delta V that's shown at the top right of the altitude gauge just to the right side right outside of that you're about to see that jump up that's why because we're just going to dump all the ore and that's obviously going to reduce the weight of the craft quite significantly so we'll gain a couple of hundred meters per second of Delta V but you know we end up finishing the mission with a goal of hundred Delta V to spare so we could have made it back to curb in quite easily and you know I'm not doing the most efficient flying as you can see here just making sure now that we can clear those cliffs and then we can prepare to dump the oil okay so jettison the oil tank there jets in the or time here one thing I never understood that isn't in the game I would really like is the ability to dump fuel as I mentioned earlier we have a way more oxidized and whatever needs it would have been nice to be able to dump the oxidizer you know in orbit or somewhere else well I guess there's nowhere else we would have dumped it because they've been but it would be nice to be able to jettison fuel I'm not quite sure why we have the ability to jettison all but not fuel maybe it's just something that you can't I guess you can't specify how much or you're dumping it's an all-or-nothing thing so I guess maybe would be the same oxidizer but then again you could dump as much oxidizer you want to get rid of just put that into one of the empty tanks and then just dump the contents of that tank and then you'd effectively you know be dumping a specific amount of oxidizer but I'm sure squad have their reasons I don't know I don't really question it and there we are just getting ourselves on a curve in encounter so we don't have enough Delta V to do our you know return to the Kerbal space center using engines alone we will have to make use of some aerobraking but luckily this thing is built to withstand their heating effects of re-entry so we should be able to do aerobraking no problems especially coming from minmus which you know relative to interplanetary space it's not that far away from kerbin so we won't be coming in at a particularly high speed compared to what we could be if we were coming from say Eve or Juna well you know even somewhere further away from those not that this thing would be able to get to those places very easily it can definitely it'll probably be able to do do now you may need to get rid of some of its cargo but you know I think this is pretty much this is a Juno capable ship it's certainly capable of Mun and Gilly and Ike so I see no reason who I could do junuh but again you probably have to dump some of its cargo just to ensure that you'd have enough fuel left over to her to do those missions hula lass besides the point that's not the focus of this video and that's not the purpose of this crap this craft is designed to get people to and from the surface of minimus if you wanted to retrofit this to have your own purposes though I've know tried to make it so you can remove the cargo bay part and replace it with I don't know another passenger compartment because the passenger compartments weigh less than the Norwich tanks you can kick this out to carry more passengers at the expense of having the ability to carry less cargo if you so wished you can download this from the description of the video if you look down below people saying they were having trouble finding the link last time I'm not sure why because it I think it's pretty easy to find it just says craft file follow up i link you click the link and the link will say do you want to download and then you click yes and then it should download and that's how you download crackers from the description also uh near the description is a little a little like button and a little a little subscribe and share button if you if you so wish feel like you have to say that on YouTube these days to uh you know beat the algorithm so you know always appreciate it always appreciate it but don't feel obligated if you don't want to and leave a comment as well about what you thought of this design I'm always looking for inspiration from real world concepts about you know things to base my craft upon obviously the box wing is a real world concept it doesn't really exist on scales as large as this it's mainly small aircraft and experimental ones that employ box wings but like I say it is a design that has been considered nonetheless if you've if you've ever seen a cool concept like Rio like Khurana plans or box wings things like that you kind of like to see me try out III I'd like to review leave it in the comments below I do read all the comments so you know if I like your idea I might just do it so whoo what have you got to lose I say there we go done so we don't most of our air breaking now we can do one more to bring our apoapsis right down we're gonna be aiming for about a hundred kilometers above the surface that's generally the height the altitude I aim for when we're doing aerobraking and then we'll do one little final burn at Apple APS's to bring our Paris's above the atmospheric line so we could more accurately plan our Kerbal Space Center encounter so yeah doing a little bit of shaking around here doing some rather eccentric flying as we ascend out of the thicker parts of the atmosphere to do is much slowing down as we can you can see our perhaps is gauge on the top left rapidly falling as I'm doing all these kind of crazy turns using the burner engines to you know increase the amount of spin we're doing just to create as much drag as possible again probably wouldn't do this if we had tourists on board but this again is just a experimental mission and we do have you know super qualified pilots and astronauts on board they can handle it so we can get some of our electricity back signage that was starting to run a little bit low and our adapts this we can circularize by burning pro-grade just to bring our retrograde marker above the 70 kilometer mark which of course is the Atmos border in Kerbal space program there 72 kilometers nice and safe we are on a slightly inclined orbit but is not too much of a problem to be honest just wait until the Kerbal Space Center is rotated to be roughly below your orbital line then you can pretty much just burn retrograde and you should bring yourself into a nice encounter this time we're orbiting against the speed of the planet remember I said earlier on minimus we had to aim slightly ahead everybody wanted to go because we were orbiting with the rotation of the planet now we're orbiting what moon actually said now we're orbiting against the rotation the planets we want to aim to quite an undershoot by quite a bit because by the time we get to our you know impact location or you know I predicted impact location the curbless space center would have rotated accordingly so we need to understand in the correct place unfortunately I didn't do a particularly great job here I actually didn't understand wind it up you know flying over the top of the curve of space under which you're about to see now spoiler that sorry but yeah that's inversion would happen but it didn't matter if we did make it back one thing to make note of though is that this thing doesn't fly quite as well as it does when the fuel tanks are full this way nice to just disable the front canards completely and actually increased the authority limiter of the rear elevators just to help keep our center of lift nice and far back as possible just to link this thing nice and controllable it still is quite it's quite easy to put it into a stall especially when we're still very high up in the atmosphere there's not much atmosphere for the wings to really generate lift from so especially whilst we're very high up at ye it can't really fly too well at all once you below the cloud layer or at least in my version of the game which is about ten kilometres once you below that level it will fly pretty well because the air is nice and thick and provides plenty of buoyancy for the wings to keep this thing up and that's jebediah loving the view as the hot plasma licks the sides of the windows but you know we we don't we don't mess around Lao and aerospace we make sure our windows are created from the finest in a mould glass to ensure that it can withstand reentry heating plasma and there we go overshooting the curb with Space Center if this was Taurus I probably would have quick saved and quick loaded and tried again and made sure we got a more optimal encounter but again jebediah bill and Bob they love a bit of I love a bit of thrills through seeking and are quite happy to force this thing into a stall by doing lots of crazy turns and spinning it around like this to generate lots of drag to slow ourselves down horizontally and then we could do a nice turn around kissing the ground almost just to get ourselves back to the curl with Space Center so yeah I just forced a stool there because I slowed down a little bit too hard and too fast this you don't necessarily need to put it into a stool in order to get down to the runway but because I was overshooting I just wanted to bleed off as much speed as pastas possible just you know because this videos gone on what we are 25 minutes premier neck long video to kind of wrapped up fella to relatively quickly so you may as well just force a stall and get ourselves on a want to return back to the course pace edit but that's pretty much me running out of things to say and so I kept on repeating that I just realized how much I repeated the words just words in general in that last statement but whatever this is us coming down to the runway so this is me preparing to sign off this commentary if you like this video then obviously like I said you can leave a like and subscribe if you so wish there is also links to my Twitter and discord and patreon in the description if any of those things appeal to you we really trying to get the Twitter off the ground you know even playing the Twitter game hard we're posting memes actually that's it so if you like that sort of thing then you might like my Twitter deploying the parachutes there as we touch down and there we go so as I said all those things are in the description there is also a link on-screen now to take you to some more stuff but that's it thank you for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 3,748,958

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, kerbal, space, program, jebediah, kerman, matt, lowne, matt lowne, nerd, british, funny, epic, commentary, abridged, amazing, gameplay, spaceplane, sph, plane, hyper, sonic, hypersonic, boxwing, box, wing, box-wing, closed, closed wing, aircraft, airliner, elon musk, esque, minmus, ssto, single, stage, to, orbit, single stage to orbit, minmus ssto, aeroplane

Id: GM3dPFGNhhU

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2018