KSP: I changed my mind about ion engines...

hello everyone and welcome back to another Kerbal space program video and you join me first of all in the space plane hangar where we're building a fairly unusual looking aircraft or at least it will be fairly unusual in just a second when we add this massive fuselage constructed mainly of batteries we've got seventeen of the big batteries of a thousand units of electric charge as well as three more in that little faring piece at the front of the aircraft with some RTGS inside the fairing as well the reason we've got such a ludicrous amount of batteries is because this is going to be an ion powered SSTO and ion engines are something I've not done I've very rarely used because they are very tedious they've got incredibly low twr they make you know they make the nuclear engines look like vectors to be honest and you know they are quite complicated because they don't just use the liquid fuel and oxidizer instead they use the Zeon gas and indeed electric charge so it's a slightly different system than what a lot of players are generally used to so it's kind of these things I don't tend to use them but I decided I would this week because I had an idea for a lathe SSTO you see well I guess all latest stos have somewhat of a barrier to entry because SS tos especially interplanetary ones can be quite tricky to design in this game and when you're going for an unrefueled mission with an SS tio2 somewhere very far away like lathe you have to do a big series of gravity assists in order to make sure you have enough fuel to do the mission typically with lathe and Alou and whatever SSTO is that far out you have to do a gravity assist of eve then off kerbin and then off kerbin again to gain the velocity you need without expending too much fuel such that you've run out before you were complete your mission however ion engines are so efficient I mean using ion engines and a rapier in this case but by using the efficiency of ion engines you don't actually need to do gravity assists at all if you can tolerate the incredibly boring nature of the ion engines with their incredibly low thrust to weight ratio then you can do a lathe SSTO mission without any gravity assists whatsoever and that was the thesis for this mission here so I do hope you enjoy the journey as we as we as we do it but yes could have scripted that a bit better anyway our adventure begins quite close to the ocean at first in order to gain the maximum thrust that rapier engine can provide we need to reach the magical speed of 440 meters per second so I try and get out get that out of the way as fast as possible that's now happened I am playing back this footage a bit faster than I can talk to keep up with it but I have done SSTO missions in the past I've talked to death about ascent profiles that sort of thing and I feel like you know the speed at which the time-lapse is playing the fact I'm keeping the camera still and you can kind of see all of the key information as it all happens I'm hoping I won't need to explain too much if you want any kind of a timeline of when things happen you can just watch the footage on the screen I can let I can let the footage do the talking because goodness knows I don't have the ability to do the talking myself anyway I'm now going to speed up the footage playback quite a bit because the rest of this mission now up until when we get to lathe is gonna be done with those four ion engines that's why our electric charge is depleting very very fast and our orbital speed actually seems to be changing at quite you know a good rate is because this footage is be playback between four times and twelve times normal speed so that's just one way I'm getting through it and if you value your sanity then I would strongly recommend using the mod better time warp but like I am going to be doing in this video better time warp enables you to increase the maximum physics time warp rate from four times to however much you want but you've got to bear in mind that the higher you raise that rate by the more susceptible your craft will become to crack an attack so in this case I'm using 16 times time warp as my maximum physics time Bob it makes the ion burns go by so much quicker as you can see we've got to do quite a few at periapsis because a our thrust weight ratio is so poor we can't reasonably do one to get us all the way to the jewel system in one burn but more importantly you can see that our burns are limited quite severely by our electric charge that's why we've got that giant Bank of batteries at the front of the craft I know in theory our electric charge is infinite because we've got RTGS to continually charge the batteries but as you can see the rate the ion engines drain the batteries is much much quicker than the rate by which the RTGS can recharge them so we have to basically we are limited by the number of batches we have to do our burns and that's why we couldn't do our kerbin to Joule transfer burn from kerbin periapsis obviously burning a pair upses is the most efficient place to perform burns such as this but we just don't have the twr and the electric capacity to do such a burn it takes so long on ion engine so I got as far as I could burning it kerbin periapsis and then we'll have to leave the kerbin system and do the rest of the burn in deep space that's what I'm doing here because you had to do quite a few just to burn let the batteries recharge burn again and just so on and so on now here I'm creating a maneuver node to get ourselves a lathe encounter but in just a second I'm gonna crossfade across because for whatever reason and I don't know why this happened to be a few times as all recent update I don't know if it was 1.9 specifically if it was 1.8 or what but a lot of the times if I'm trying to go to the Joule system whenever I make a maneuver node to try and get an encounter with Tyler or lathe or what-have-you it causes the game to just crash repeatedly I tried so many times of this vision to create a maneuver node they can actually get us a lathe encounter nice and accurately and every single time the game would stutter freeze and then just completely crash to desktop it finally got to the point where it was actually causing my computer to blue screen where I just said you know what I don't need this in my life so I just improvised so we got a fairly good laser cutter but that's why we got this lathe encounter by doing things fairly and efficiently first why did eh I think was an anti normal adjustment then played around burning pro-grade retrograde radial in radial out etc just to get to the encounter actually wanted so in case you're wondering why I didn't do a maneuver note just then because that would have been the sensible thing to do that's why but it doesn't matter all in the past we have a huge amount of Delta V on board this spacecraft and well you know I was planning on using most of that delta-v we've still got enough to do a little adjustments like that and compensate for I guess it's not a cracking attack because it's actually the game breaking but what's more per a Cthulhu attack it was a Cthulhu attack is what that was anyway here guys I must break the bad news that yes you got click baited it tests it you have been click baited I am sorry I lied to you all I said that this mission would not feature any gravity assists but unfortunately similarly to how we couldn't just do one single burn to get ourselves out of the kerbin system I literally just couldn't do a big enough burn well at least you know I couldn't burn for long enough to actually capture it lathe in one go so I'm gonna have to do two flybys of lathe to get captured I don't consider this a true gravity assist which is why I'm happy to still declare this a gravity assist less video but it means we're gonna have to just go up get another encounter with lathe and then continue slowing down at the moon so I hope it's acceptable on a similar vein of the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that during our initial escape from curving I got another gravity assist off the man in fact I got two gravity assists off the Mun but actually that gravity assist I would call that an antigravity assist because it didn't actually help us at all it actually slowed us down and cost us more delta-v and I couldn't I clearly didn't plan for that to happen I just didn't plan well enough to make sure it didn't happen so yes okay there is this gravity assist and then there was those two gravity assists of the man but again they don't could they did the mana gravity assists they didn't contribute to the motion in any meaningful way in fact they were actually quite detrimental to the mission so I once again I'm still happy to declare this I'm having more and more caveats to the whole no gravity assists thesis for this mission but I do I'm still happy calling it that now you can see me doing this a death spin just because as you can see those two temperature gauges at the front of the craft are getting very very toasty the reason for this is because I decided it would be clever and really epic of me to put the RT Gees inside that faring piece that sits just behind that shock cone intake I guess the fairing doesn't actually provide that much thermal protection but the RTGS because during late entry and indeed later on for our urban reentry those RTGS get very very hot in fact for our urban reentry spoiler alert we're going to be doing it backwards just so that the RT jeans are not getting as much heat exposures there would be if we went in go going forwards so I don't know if it's because the fairings don't provide much the oil protection what I should have probably done was use the the mark is the mark one payload Bay you know the you know the service bay of that diameter part I probably should remember what the term others of the various particle space regard but that that service way I polished it on that I don't know if that provides better thermal protection I think it does but it weighs more that's why I went with the fairing I thought I was being really sneaky and it turns out there's probably actually a reason that most people who build these sorts of craft use the service bay rather than fairings anyway see we have touched down on leith don't worry about the fact that we just glitched through a rock it's fine it's not actually a rock it's it was it was a it was a mirage it was far too Morgana it's just one of the side effects of long-term stasis which is what jebediah has been sitting in you know we can I'm just sitting there conscious for the entirety of his flight he'd go insane he's been in you know stasis so I'm just trying to simulate the hallucinations he might be undergoing for you guys I dunno why I'm dragging this point out so long to be honest but it doesn't matter we've got another thing to talk about now and that is the jebediah is finally able to breathe fresh air once again inexplicably it'll really make that much sense that late has the same atmospheric composition as kerbin like it's got presumably water in the sea I'm pretty sure like the scientific reports stay so the oceans of late are water given the fact that Laith is so much further away from the Sun than carbon but you know what I'm a jewel actually is very warm and I'm pretty sure that's the reason that's the kinda logical reason I mean that was one of the things I wanted to address in my series life on lathe when that was a thing was a you know uncovering the mystery as to why lathe does have an atmospheric composition so similar to curtains I mean this honestly everyone asks when's life on where's life on lathe when's it going back I do want to bring it back really really badly but look how laterz man like it's not it doesn't look very good does it especially now that we've seen how good things like Juna and Moho and Yvette cetera have become with you know texture updates I really want to not do anything on lathe now or not nothing extensive on lathe until it gets a texture revamp because my goodness it would look gorgeous so I wanna I will revisit life one late but I would like to do it when lathe looks life when lathe looks a little bit nicer than it does at the moment anyway I have just just rambled past the actual take off from lathe surface again but again there's not much to really discuss just firing up that rapier I'm not going to be using any oxidizer to circular eyes you could actually get a fair amount of speed built up in latest atmosphere without needing oxidizer in fact most most lathe SST O's that I build don't actually use any oxidizer burning with the rapiers closed cycle burning probably the best ascent it's just them but you get the picture usually I can just get enough speed up using the air breathing mode of the rapier engine which is of course the most efficient mode at the rapier engine and then we can just circular eyes with our low thrust of vacuum engines and even though we're using very low thrust vacuum engines the ion engines they do still provide enough twr to just about get us into a circular orbit and this is one of the critical points as to why I needed so many batteries because I wanted to circular eyes at lathe purely on ion engines which of course means we will need a massive electric reserve to ensure that we won't run out of electric charge mid burn and see ourselves hurtling back towards the surface of the Moon but as you can see didn't happen we were all okay we have now circularized latest atmosphere ends at fifty kilometers so easily gone enough jebadiah's going to quickly repack that parachute for no particular reason we don't actually use it again I actually did want to use it when we landed back on kerbin but it's not actually bound to an action group I was just using it I was just using the stage action to deploy it and since it's now been staged it won't actually work again unless I bind it to an action group which I guess we can now do with the 1.9 update but I forgot so we were actually using it again but I know we now we just know it's not going to get unravel and I don't know get tangled up in any moving part so it's safe and packed and now we can just start we could just start we could have start burning right we could just do a quick pro-grade burn at lathe and in a similar fashion to how we left kerbin sphere of influence we're going to do a few burns at lathe periapsis in order to get ourselves on to an escape velocity just because it's more efficient that way and I know we have an absurd amount of Delta V we're going to be needing a lot of that to actually slow ourselves down at curbing because we can't rely on any gravity assists and I didn't want to do a similar thing like I did on lathe and do multiple passes by of kerbin because that's a bit more difficult to do then it is on lathe and I thought that's a bit too close to the hole you know breaching the hole no gravity assists thing now here I did this part of the mission I don't want to talk too much about because it I didn't do a very good job basically I've not been feeling a hundred percent guys don't worry I'm fine I just have really really bad hay fever and like seasonal allergies it always strikes around this time of year I'm aware that I probably sound a little bit more nasal than I normally do so I'm trying my best to remain as articulate as possible but that might be why I might be sounding a little bit more I don't know different to how I normally sound that's because I've got horrible seasonal allergies my office is very very warm and I just wasn't thinking clearly I was think I was just trying to rush this video out I don't know what happened but I ended up in a very very inefficient I had a plotting a very very inefficient route back to cabin we are now at a very very high height above the Sun we could have done all of this look I'm having to do a retrograde burn way beyond joules orbital height if I just been a simple escape burn just out of the jewel system we could have then done a much more efficient burn to get ourselves onto a kerbin encounter and more crucially we're gonna have to do another burn to lower our Apple abscess we could have to lower our up abscess by quite a fair chunk more because we started out so much higher so not the best planning or not the best execution I should say because let's face it not much of this I didn't actually plan any of this I just sort of did it I didn't practice the mission so I was actually sometimes I get quite worried that nothing's gonna work or it's not gonna come together quite as it intended when I do these sorts of missions like a lot of these big long-range missions you're watching the first take I know a lot of my Kerbal space program contemporaries I mean I've had chats with people like straat some blitz and Bradley westerns and they all plan their missions obsessively before and I mean that in a nice sense of the word like they've they've planned their missions very meticulously and all that before they actually go and record I just wing it and like I didn't probably work let's just do it and you get stuff like this where actually it was not a very well executed flight but hey that's part of the charm part of the relatability like now you know that if you make a mistake in this flight you will probably be fine and that's the lanayru space motto you'll probably be fine and it's a great motto for a a rocket building company now in case any of you are wondering why I did do that giant retrograde burn at our Sun periapsis before our initial kerbin encounter the reason for this is because at the moment we are going far too fast to circular eyes at kerbin using our ion engines we will enter and leave kerbin sphere of influence before we can actually slow down enough using the ion engines secondly we don't actually have enough del to be left with the ion engines to do such a burn anyway so we're going to have to be doing some arrow breaking and you know we would be going far too fast to safely arrow break especially now we have the knowledge of just how you know fragile those RTGS are inside the fairing at the front of the craft so that's why I did a big retrograde burn in Sun orbits in our orbit around the Sun just to kill off as much of our velocity relative to kerbin as possible before we actually get our encounter with kerbin you see the thing when it comes to entering kerbin sphere of influence in order to do error breaks the closer your orbit is to curb ins orbit the slower the relative speed you will be going relative to curving like if we were entering curve in sphere of influence with an apple abscess where Pat jewel we're becoming in way way faster than we would otherwise be so we have now entered kervins sphere of influence let's take a look at what we have to work with we're coming in at just under two kilometers a second this far out we're going to accelerate quite substantially as we descend towards periapsis so we're coming in very very fast so we can't do much aerobraking because we overheat especially with the newfound knowledge of just how ineffective that what I assumed would be fairly good thermal protection for those RT G's would be turns out they're not very well shielded so we got after being a backwards air break just here to minimize the heating on the RT G's which means that our actual aerodynamic profile is relatively slim like we're not creating as much drag as I was hoping we would be able to generate so we're after doing some retrograde burns with the ion engines but as always they have terrible thrust to weight ratio we're probably not gonna be oldest decelerate enough to capture a curve in and I was adamant that I would not be doing any gravity assists or second curve in encounter so I did a quick cheeky puff with the rapier engine just used some of our remaining liquid fuel and oxidiser and as you can see it was fine and once again the mum is here to ruin our day if he got another encounter with the month we didn't want so I had to burn a little bit more than what I've needed to do in order to make sure we wouldn't be getting another gravity assist off the Mun and get ourselves onto it orbit far too eccentric to recover from so it means that our pair up sis is now a bit lower than I wanted it to be so a quick probate burn waste even more of our rapidly depleting delta-v to correct that and now we're just gonna do some aerobrake passes once again we're gonna have to maintain a fairly sleek low drag profile to make sure that the RT G's are not being exposed to too much heating just in case any of you are interested we are playing on 100% we are treating we're not playing on any custom value or anything like that so I can't do much we're gonna have to doing some a fair amount of error breaks and you know since you've already seen me do air brakes in this video there's not much I can really add to what I've already said this gives us the perfect opportunity to do a whisky review and today's whisky review is a whisky very close to my heart it is Jack Daniels but it's not Jack Daniels old number seven it is Jack Daniels single barrel select that's right you know a lot of people associate the words Jack Daniels with cheap bourbon and you know whilst Jack Daniels is you know it's not expensive it's it's it's not it is one of the more budget-friendly Berman's let's say that this is a completely different beast you see Jack Daniels is merely a brand but it just so happens that old number seven is so popular that it has become synonymous with the words Jack Daniels but Jack Daniels single borough select is the whiskey that they actually put a lot of effort into it's a bit pricier in fact I believe it's the most expensive whiskey I've covered in this series I yeah the only other really expensive one I've covered is Old Pulteney and I think this does talk in a bit more typically being about forty five pounds per bottle in the United Kingdom but let me tell you guys it is absolutely worth it I mean I only ever buy on sale to be honest so I don't ever pay that much so it's a fairly pricey whiskey at least one we're still talking about consumer grade whiskies yes I know you can spend quadruple digits and even more when you get into the really high grade stuff but I ain't I ain't got the money for that sort of thing so this to me is an expensive whiskey and it is my favorite whiskey thus far that I've had my palate is not that expansive because I only really have the whiskies you could buy in a supermarket so this is what I have to work with but Jack Daniels single bar select I love Bourbons and I do love me the jack down is even the cheaper Jack Daniels it's got a I've got a soft spot it's got a place in my heart so Jack Daniels single bar select really takes all of the boxes it's got a wonderful taste you can drink it easily it has very very minimal berm everyone I show it to if they were like I don't like whiskey or they've only ever had like you know JD and Coke and stuff they don't really like the taste of it I show them the Jack Daniels single barrel select and their eyes they open to what a whiskey can truly be so if you have not if you don't really like bourbon or whisky in general then you probably you might not like it to be honest if you really don't like that the taste of whiskey but if you want to maybe appreciate bourbon a little bit more than I would wholeheartedly recommend Jack Daniels single barrel select and I don't I've never given this score up before so you guys know I don't give this out like candy but I would be happy giving Jack Daniels single barrel select a 10 out of 10 on the whisky review scoreboard so there you have it the first 10 and that's not to say you know these like seventy thousand pound pop whiskey's are you know not as good or yo if there are 10 as well then they are the same level there could be lots of whiskey's at our attend Jack Daniels single brass select is 10 there could be others that attends you know it's just there's not I can't conceive of many ways it could be improved I love Jack Daniel's sing a bar selector I am very happy giving it the 10 out of 10 score and as you could see I have ruffled on about Jack Daniels single bar select for the entirety of the rest of the descent so I so I apologize sir I mean this must be really confusing now these whiskey reviews people that haven't been subscribed to the channel for that long or haven't seen my last whatever 5 uploads it kind of started as a joke for the whole copper thing that you've got to make your videos appeal to children over the age of 13 or you know adults so that's kind of where it stand for it sort of it's a joke that's been taken too far really but anyway on screen there was an end screen left hand side was a video chosen for you by YouTube's recommendation algorithm the right hand side was my most recent upload they used to subscribe patron all that good stuff description for more thank you for watching guys goodbye

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 772,216

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, ssto, matt lowne ssto, ion engine, ksp ion, long range, laythe, laythe ssto, dawn, xeon gas, xeon, spaceplane, futuristic, jool, life on laythe, electric ssto, ksp ion engines, ksp ssto, single stage to orbit, epic, funny, british, commentary, nerd, challenge

Id: -opLu2yFHLM

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020