KSP: REALISTIC Shuttles are a thing now!

what is going on guys welcome back to another Kerbal space program video and i'm a little bit late to the party but this is my official first venture into the new KSP 1.8 1.8 Update more boosters which as the name implies adds more boosters among other things but one of the things it adds is indeed more boosters specifically more SRBs which is a feature that we've been asking for for quite a while and it's nice that they finally added some bigger solid rocket motors what this means is that we can finally build space shuttles realistically when I say space shuttles I mean the NASA kind not the Russian variety which didn't use solid rocket motors the NASA one did though you know the NASA space shuttle had the big solid boosters on the side of it traditionally cold space firm has never had boosters that are correctly scaled to make realistically sized shuttles so what I always did in the past was just strap four boosters together to kind of create a single booster another solution that I saw a lot of people employ was just using the two point five meter liquid fuel tanks and just using liquid fuel Rockets as the side boosters either way if you went with solid rocket motors versus liquid fuel you would always be making a compromise of having a perfect Space Shuttle replica but that is no more my friends because now we finally have the correct size for solid rocket motors for a NASA style space shuttle so that's what we're gonna be doing in this video here you can see me constructing the orbiter here it's pretty much a carbon copy of my Tatsu space shuttle though I think I published that video in 2017 so while ago so I think it's really do a refresh anyway couple of changes the original tatsu had a jet engine at the back just to help people get it back to the runway but this time I decided no we'll just glide it if we're gonna be realistic we may as well go all the way and glide it back to the runway rather than use engines and think I think that's the only change to be honest there are a couple of things that make this not that realistic in terms of being a clone of the NASA space shuttle one thing I'm using Terriers as the vacuum engines in reality the NASA space shuttle used monopropellant the monopropellant engines incur with space from her a bit weedy I wanted something with a bit more power so I'm using liquid fuel and oxidiser for our vacuum maneuvers rather than a mono propellant and we have those front a live elevators as well which the real shuttle didn't have I don't think they're actually needed to be honest but I've added them anyway just help keep our nose lifted as we approach the runway for our landing and I think that's it actually I think everything else is pretty good I think I got the look right I think I got the overall scale of it okay so there's that now we're building the fuel tank itself now there is a new color scheme for those big parts there they can be painted orange to match the color of the NASA external fuel tank but I'm using the mark 3 fuselage piece as well to kind of I don't really know actually I just that's the original tatsu used the mark 3 fuel tank pieces as well as the cylindrical rocket pieces and I always liked the way that looked so I decided to do that again and it makes it looks a little bit more unique to me you know so that's kind of why I went with this look but little known fact the first I believe was the first two space shuttle launches the NASA did did in fact launch with a white external fuel tank because they used to paint it and then they realized they could save a lot of money and a lot of weight by not painting it and just leaving it orange so there you go there were a couple of space shuttle launches with white external fuel tanks so let's say that this is a replica of those missions very specifically although this mission is not a replica of any NASA space shuttle mission because we're going to be extending our space station so actually yes that is something that's this vegetal did quite a lot off but at least not in this kind of capacity the rotating ring station that we have in low kerbin orbit has you know a lot of habitation modules and a lot of fuel but we can always add more fuel you know this update is about adding more stuff let's add more fuel to those to the space station so that's what we're doing here I'm adding a little crew modules well I like to think of it in my head Canada's a sort of engineering quarters for that specific fuel reserve I don't know or like a way of accessing the pumps if you wanted to service it something like that I tend to sort of make up in my head what's inside those are habitation modules and not rather than them just being you know seating oh just extended it a little bit just to give it some SAS control battery power and a probe course we can dock this thing to the space station autonomously obviously we need more fulfillment through stirs as well it will actually getting a high off its own supply so to speak it will be using its own mono propellant in order to dock itself to the station we kind of want to leave it attached to the station with a full tank of mono propellant so we're going to read we're gonna top it up with the space shuttle itself once it's docked to give it a full tank of fuel so we're gonna enter the map screen here and select the ferrous station as our target and we'll go around I usually like to wait until it's about over that little Peninsula on the continent to the left of the curb with Space Center that's just how that's just the kind of window I try and aim for and we get ready to launch and you may notice actually first of all we didn't boot to the launch tower a little bit there there's a little purple thing you see it there floating at this bit of a graphical glitch that's because I still got a few graphics mods installed I think it did make the game look a bit weird by the way did you see how detailed the ground is around the Space Center that's one of the other things this update is added it's added enhanced visual ground appearance it's that could have done with some scripting couldn't it but the ground looks better and I think it's Juna Aikman minimus even Gilly and Kevin obviously I think they're the only places that have had that treatment so far but I would have to check this and maybe next week we could do a more comprehensive overview of the 1.8 Update no but as I was saying you may have noticed that a few things might look a bit off so there was that floating purple thing just then when we launched and also we opened the map view and what we get into load curve in orbit the colors to give it off Urban's got this weird sort of purple hue to it I don't if that's the mods kind of not working correctly and the clouds themselves you can see they look a bit minecraft esker I think that's just the the shaders are working properly had to uninstall uninstall scatterer that completely broke I think Raman shine was a bit working a bit iffy as well so at the moment I've just got astronomers visual pack and environmental visual enhancements but there they go ah brand-new SRBs have fulfilled their purpose and we can now detach them and let them harmlessly smash into the ocean hopefully there's no dolphins or turtles down there at the site of impact but let's press on and not worry about that that's pretty much actually everything that's going to be showcased in this video with regard to the new update I don't think there's any other showcase no actually there is something I need to show case because this mission is to fulfill a few objectives first main objective of this mission is to expand the fuel reserves of the space station it's also to show you guys the new boosters but also do some vital engineering works to the Space Station's rotors for those that haven't seen the spaces before you may have been wondering why it's called the ferrous station and that's because it has two rotating habitation like gravity rings in order to simulate artificial gravity to make a nice good environment for our curve Wars and make sure they don't get any muscle atrophy or anything like that however I kind of messed up the action groups when I built the station and in order to start and stop the Rings you have to zoom right in and move the camera into the guts of the space station itself and then manually activate the rotors one at a time it's a real faff and a real pain and every single time you enter or leave physics range of the station the motors always reset and so you have to keep doing it over and over again but with the new Kerbal space program 1.8 Update they have finally added the ability to change action groups mid-flight which I gotta be honest I dunno why it took this long but I'm very grateful it is finally here it's funny how we're all still we're getting all these amazing improvements it is a bit unfortunate that it's so close to the release of the new game we're now getting all these things but at least you know better late than never I say so here I am just deactivating all of our elevating surfaces sir this is not necessary really but it makes it look a little bit cleaner I've also locked the gimbal of those vector engines because we won't be needing them we're gonna be using the terrier engines for the rest of this mission and when it comes to you know flying back to the space station Space Station Space Center runway will Judy gliding who ain't read any engine power to get there or well we got to keep a few twists in stall we won't I'm not gonna I'm gonna bait you like that we can't we glide back this this mission went swimmingly given the fact that it was quite rushed anyone that follows me on instagram will know my situation as to why this video kind of came a bit later than everyone else's I'm currently doing major renovation works to my house and the office is a bit out of commission right now so I had to sort of cobble this together in between sort of me painting coats of paint funnily enough on the walls letting it dry quickly do a bit of Kerbal space program through a for like 40 minutes to an hour and then going back and doing more painting and more sanding and building furniture so it's kind of been a real mess this week but I'm I'm happy with how this mission came out and I hope you'll agree it's it's looking ok I'm currently recording this on Saturday morning so it is my hope that this video goes live within the next couple of hours so if you're watching this at the time of upload I will probably now be working on my house again so I won't read your comments for a couple of days maybe that's I don't why I felt that it's just highlights this this is just what's going on in my life I'd like to keep the connection between viewer and creator as open as possible if you want to follow me on Instagram I post lots of tickets all fall but I post a lot of low effort pictures there but it's a nice way to see what I'm doing if that's the sort of thing you care about if you just care about my Kerbal space permits also fine I get it you don't have to follow a histogram but you do need to smash that like button because this is what you have to do on YouTube apparently is tell everyone to smash the like button so please guys every smash of the like button is another prayer from me I don't know I'm just kind of stalling time really because we're getting to the main crux of this video which is of course docking the orange tanker to the space station now you may have noticed that this space shuttle does not have any and thrusters itself that's because I just think it looks a bit messy having RCS blocks just there on the pieces there it doesn't look very realistic which is especially frustrating because that mark 3 cockpit I believe does have a monopropellant thrusters built into it but they're just cosmetic they don't actually function well though I'm squinting I can't see any maybe they removed it I'm pretty sure originally when this piece was first added to the game it had monopropellant ports but they were completely non-functional it would be nice maybe if they did this is what they did with the mark 3 cockpit mark the command pod even and that is you know make them functional but for now we wait after use RCS block so I decided to just not bother with Mali Poland and we'll just dock this space shuttle at the hard way because I hate myself first thing we need to do though is dock the module to the space station which we can do with mana planner thrusters but there was a bit of a hitch oh yeah undocked and then it bounced back and then read acht itself to the back of the space shuttle and for some reason this started accelerating us upwards and it caused us to smash into the space station I don't know why maybe I've discovered some new form of kraken drive where if you undock and then redock apart it accelerates you upwards by one meter per second not a very good crack and drive but a crack and drive nonetheless we can reload that quick save and try again where i did was i just right-clicked the docking port and set to the docking acquire force to zero and I hoped that they wouldn't automatically dock together and it worked success it's now we can get this thing clear of these shuttle cargo bay and get ready to dock it so I wanted to dock it to I wanted to dock the habitation module to the space station because then it would be more believable that kerbals could directly transfer although looking at the piece I'm docking it to they would have to transfer through an ore tank and a battery in an SAS unit so maybe not that realistic in retrospect but regardless I think it looks a bit cleaner to have you know if if a ship was going to dock to a fuel tank it would look better if it was docking directly to the fuel tank rather than I don't know haven't the fuel how much transfer through a habitation module it's shame that there are no other sized docking ports on this tank a ship can only dock to it if it also has a senior docking board but if you looked to the other fuel tank on this space station that's there to serve as a refueling Bay that does have lots of docking ports I figured this could just be a backup reserve tank for the other one so that's that's the purpose of this I mean realistically I'm probably never going to use these tanks for refueling so it's all there just for the just just for the bragging rights of saying I have this big station in orbit and it's running really well by the way have you noticed how well KSP 1.8 handles things there was a I think there was an engine upgrade and the game runs a lot faster and much smoother and it's great like this is completely lag free and I remember back in day when the game first was in its infancy this would have caused the framerate to tank granted when I first start playing this game I was playing it on my laptop which was uh terrible I think the graphic the CPU was some rubbish 1.7 gigahertz dual-core thing and the graphics card was a GT 640 mobile edition slenderman GTX cut it was it was awful it was a secondhand laptop in 2012 and my first KSP videos were actually recorded on that laptop so if you look at any my videos from 2015 then they will look terrible I did I think they look alright in terms of framerate because I would just speed them up in post but I have to speed them up like 12 times for the footage to be like watchable I remember having a Gamecube on my desk next to my laptop and as I was launching a rocket I would just play a Zelda game or something whilst the launch was happening because I would regularly run at like 4 fps and that's not even an exaggeration that was pretty much the standard by the way Here I am docking to the DA keyboard it was a bit of a tricky process getting the space shuttle lined up to a you know be perpendicular to the docking ports we could coast towards it without having multiple and thrusters but it worked out alright so there you are there's an example of docking a space shuttle to a space station without monopropellant I know it's not a very realistic take on the whole space shuttle docking procedure but you know I've already said that this thing does take some artistic liberties over the NASA shuttle so I I wasn't too worried about having a slightly less conventional method of docking now I pause the commentary just then to take a sip of my drink or something and I thought I took a video of me playing Kerbal space program back in the day when I was like 19 at university and I found a video of me playing KSP on my old setup so here it is it was a bit of a revision nest I was coming up to exams and the desk was a bit messy and cluttered but here is my my my old Kerbal space program gaming setup yeah wasn't that a little blast to the past from nineteen year old Matt there thank you very much for according that I don't know why I felt compelled to but I guess it worked out pretty good in the end so here we are toggling the action group you know I said earlier that I messed up the action groups of these rotors we can now fix it using the action group editor which is extremely intuitive I know there are mods that would allow you to modify action groups mid-flight but I always family quite difficult to get the hang of because I'm an idiot but this is brilliant it's basically exactly the same as the vehicle assembly building action group editor and it's really really easy to switch out action groups which is great so there we are there are the rotating rings we can now toggle them using action group 6 I believe I already forgotten which number I bound it to but it doesn't matter all that matters is it works and there was a lovely cinematic overview of the space station so as you can see it's getting pretty nifty you know it's getting pretty big and expansive and the footage that you're watching right now is not sped up this is all recaptured in real time and rendered in real time as well and I'm sure you can see that it's running pretty smoothly I don't know what framerate this is and I'm kind of bothered to reach over for the mouse and check so but I think the footage shouldn't speak for itself that it looks at on-site better than how older versions of KSP might handle crafts of this size especially given that it has moving parts so I'm happy thank you thank you KSP 1.8 now it's time to say nope it's not time to say goodbye just yet because there is one other thing we need to do and that is you know I said earlier we need to top up with those modern pennant tanks with the space shuttle that's the main reason why we needed to dock the space shuttle to the station itself so we could do the fuel transfer and there it is and now the space station has full mana propellant tanks we can get ready to disembark I think you'd be doing a quick pan around just to make sure there's no other modern tanks that might need a top-up but I think I was satisfied so we can time will I'm just warping a bit actually just to make sure that the Kerbal Space Center is definitely going to be in the day when we land it's not essential but it's good for videos because videos always look better when they're bright and yeah everything's easy to see especially given that YouTube's like a video compression algorithms generally make videos darker so I try and do as much as I can on the light side of planets rather than you know at night so that's why I waited a bit there but now we can get ready to deorbit ourselves so we're gonna use the terrier engines again we don't need to use the vector engines it's not gonna take much just the old ourselves we look at that there it goes the space station and we're gonna just watch our orbital line we are gonna be passing directly over the Kerbal Space Center so our actual inclination is correct but once we established that was fine we can get ready to get this thing prepared for Atmospheric flight again so the first I'm going to do is deactivate to the Terios and I lock to the gimbal as well just to make it look a little little bit cleaner on the descent and we can also reactivate the elevators I'm gonna leave the front canards deactivated although they are activated there but I'm pretty sure I did go back and deactivate them again because it was getting a bit the Space Shuttle did have a bit of a tendency to flip this was I'm not I'm not going to lie to you I did have to do this twice the first time the Space Shuttle flipped on reentry so the second time I attempted I disabled the front canard and pumped as much fuel as I could into the forward tanks try and shift at the center of mass further forward the further back your center of mass the more flip happy your space planes and shuttles and other flying vehicles will be I don't think it would've made that much difference to be honest because all the tanks are in such close proximity to each other but every little helps as they say and yeah there's not much more to add we can Coast down you can see that she they're about purplish hue I don't know if that's a bug or if the mods that I'm using just happens to induce a bit more of a purple tint and scatter are always masked that I'm not sure I will address my visual mods for next week hopefully this weekend which I didn't have much time to do much modification to my game data file I just needed to get the footage together to make this wonderful video I hope that I hope you it's been enjoyable and yeah just looking at those clouds they do look bat it Hey I'm guessing that over the next few weeks as well mods will get better and better you may have noticed actually the lack of Kerbal engineer readouts in this video that's because the COBOL engineering work with this update it kind of works to an extent like it works a bit in the space plane hangar and vehicle assembly building but it doesn't give you the in-flight readouts for the space I probably should have mentioned this during the ascent but during the Space Shuttle ascent I wouldn't need to use the map screen because the apoapsis height and time to have lapses and all that are in stock KSP now if you click the little purple button on that staging panel on the bottom left of the screen it gives you the apoapsis details that you need to do a map screen less ascent and if you guys I guess if you rewind the video you can see that that's how I did that against any of you were wondering how I was able to do a good ascent well satisfactory but ascent without the map screen a speaking of a sense the opposite of that is dis sense and that is what we've just done best free entry I did overshoot the runway a bit not to do some messy spinning to try and slow ourselves down nice and rapidly once we touched down we can stars delves down a bit more realistically we can deploy those drogue chutes it's let the Space Shuttle Coast to a nice gentle stop hopefully we won't run out of runway space there we go and our curb wasn't happy so yeah there's that that was the video I hope you enjoyed this mission I'm sorry that I had to kind of be rushed out a bit I would have liked to have done a bit more of an in-depth more boosters coverage video but unfortunately real life just sometimes gets in the way regardless I was still very excited to try and build a realistic Space Shuttle and I hope you enjoyed this endeavor with me I'm gonna leave some links on screen if you'd like to watch those you're more than welcome to but don't feel obliged you know remember to smash that like button I'm joking of course there are some links in description as well if you want to check out this cool Twitter Instagram patreon what else is in the clothing merchandise lots of things in the description for you to take a gander at I'm gonna leave it there guys I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and indeed your time in 1.8

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 2,708,351

Keywords: ksp, kerbal space program, moar, moar boosters, boosters, SRB, update, 1.8, matt lowne, matt, lowne, matt lowne ksp, space, shuttle, space shuttle, spaceshuttle, tatsu, brutus, space station, spacestation, station, orbiter, matt lowne space shuttle, realistic, recreation, replica, epic, british, commentary, nerd, funny

Id: 1KTsdd043t0

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019