Using Every Engine to Get to Laythe in Kerbal Space Program

hey guys today i'm back in kerbal space program i saw a comment from someone saying i should try making a rocket using every engine in the game and i thought that was pretty funny now i could just make a rocket like this and call it a day but that isn't any fun and instead i wanted to try making a rocket where every engine has some actual purpose so let's get right into it now starting out in the sandbox the first thing i did was put in a crew capsule and after that i'm putting down one of these really tiny fuel tanks now the reason for that is that the last few stages which are the first ones i'm putting on are gonna have a lot of the really small liquid fuel engines on them so i just want to make sure i could stuff as many as possible in this area so i don't waste a ton of weight now i started out with the spider engine which i actually have a whole video on but after i put that on i put the very similar ant engine on now i ended up deciding to switch them because i thought it looked a little bit better to do this and after i had that i just started stacking a bunch of these side mounted engines the reason for this is that i didn't want them to get in the way of any of the bottom stages so keeping them higher up was a little bit better and after that i just sort of stacked a whole bunch more engines on and with that done you see here i put down a stack by coupler and i started working on some larger engines now for these medium engines here i started out with the reliant engine and then i went to the swivel engine now these are actually really similar engines except the reliant i think has a little bit more power and the swivel is able to swivel which will be important later but after i got all that done i slapped on a couple docking ports and i put down some decouplers here and these are for some landers now in order to give some more engines actual purpose i wanted to put down a couple landers and i wanted to land on the moon and minmus so i just put some docking ports on those and you can see i started out by putting down some vector engines now i was gonna put a different engine on one side but i wanted to start out the two vector engines keep everything symmetrical make it a little bit easier to build now with all that done i also picked out a probe core and put down a nose cone and i'm not gonna be landing any kerbals i'm just gonna use the probe core to conserve a little bit of weight because the more tanks i add onto this the more difficult it is to get into orbit and actually get to where i need to go now once i had all that done i added in some more decouplers and these are for some xenon tanks then these are meant for my deep space travel and you see it slap those on there and after that just add on some nose cones and added a bunch of solar panels and these are meant to power those electric engines now if all that done added on some more decouplers here and i used some really large fuel tanks and now i'm getting up to some of the larger engines now i started out here at two of those cheetah engines and originally i was gonna do an engine for every single layer but then i quickly realized there's way too many layers to do that so i ended up deleting this bottom stage and i deleted one set of the cheetah engines and i added another set on the other diagonal now these engines are slightly different heights and that becomes very obvious here so to fix that i ended up adding in some decouplers to hopefully bridge the gap a little bit between the two and after that it looked pretty good so i added an adapter and i started working on the large engines now struggling to find a fuel tank that was actually this size and i'm pretty sure there isn't but at the very least i can use the fuel in the adapter to power the next stage now i ended up pulling out all of the engines that were the right size and you see here there's six and that's actually a good thing because it means i could attach them in pairs and only have three stages here and it started out these two engines which actually looked pretty similar but then i realized the thrusts were incredibly different and instead this poodle engine was gonna be a lot closer to the smaller one so i just ended up putting that on there and the size difference became very obvious so i had to use a whole bunch of decouplers to fill that gap once i did that though just slapped out a couple undersized fuel tanks and i put down a couple more engines once i had that just had to put down the last two engines like this and all that actually ready to go for the boosters now to do this you see here i have a couple of decouplers on the sides and i'm putting down these really large fuel tanks now fortunately there's actually two engines here which are really big and take the size which means that i can perfectly fit them on the stage and you see me doing that here now with all that done slide on a couple more decouplers and next thing you do is add on these sort of pre-configured engines they already have fuel tanks on them which is pretty convenient so i just stacked a whole bunch around and i was going to move on to solid fuel next but i realize there's actually a really small solid rocket fuel booster here and i could use this for the very top stage as my last acceleration and once i did that i also added a mono propellant tank because i forgot about these puff engines so i just put a couple of those on on top like that and here you can see i'm actually switching out one of the landers engines and i'm replacing it with this other one instead now i didn't know this at the time but it can't swivel at all which is gonna make landing a little tricky but it should work out and i should have most of the engines except the solid rocket fuel boosters but it it was a little struggling at the moment so to hopefully prevent whatever that was from happening again you can see here i'm adding in a whole bunch of struts i also turned on auto strut and after that it seemed to be performing a lot better in fact it got off the ground and it was actually really fast i guess all of those really large engines i put around it are really pulling their weight and i actually had to turn down the throttle at a certain point it was going a little bit too fast now i guess all the disjointed engines probably make it pretty weak here but this is kind of unusable and it's gonna be impossible to control so i added in some more stress to deal with that and after that i also added in some solid rocket boosters and i'm gonna do this pretty quickly on the bottom here but i ended up doing them diagonally so that every single booster had an equal one on the other side so there's an equal amount of thrust going up and it shouldn't want to tilt to one direction to the other with that done though you see here i'm adding in some more landers and these ones i'm actually using jet engines for now i was a little unsure of what to use these for at first since they're kind of weak so in kerbin's atmosphere they're not really gonna do anything to get me out here but the only other place i can use is sun lathe so that was the plan now basically these are all identical boosters with different engines at the bottom of them except this one here i'm actually making it a two-stage booster so that has one of these really small jet engines on it and the hope is that once again in the atmosphere i'm actually able to eject off the bottom part of it and at least turn it on for a short period of time with that done though i ended up adding in a couple more solid rocket fuel boosters that i hadn't used before and finally here i'm adding in some more boosters at the top and these ones i was either planning on using as boosters or as landers i wasn't quite sure yet but i ended up just putting those on i put a probe core on on the off chance i wanted to land with them now that done i had one more engine to put on and it's this really large jet engine and this one's actually going to be useful for getting me off the ground so let's put that down there and with that done i also had to add in some fins now started out by adding in some fins of these landers here and i'm going to need these in leeds atmosphere so just put those on there and finally here you can see on the bottoms of the boosters i'm also putting down some of these large fins and some of these large elevons now that done it should be pretty stable and you can see here i'm actually going for the full flight now the first test i wasn't really paying too close attention and i realized the booster fell off and it caused me to just fall over so the new plan was to take off immediately and that seemed to prevent anything from falling off so yes it works out and with that done i just kept burning up now once i got up high enough i started to do a turn and i was doing this very slowly because worried a quick turn would be pretty much unrecoverable but in the atmosphere is actually pretty stable here now i had some boosters burn off and i'm not dropping them just a little bit worried about the stability here cause when i'm in the atmosphere i don't need one of these to turn and hit me and i just wanted to do this as safely as possible so i ended up dropping both stages of boosters at once and it did cost me a little bit of fuel to do this but again i think it was a little safer this way and with all that done i ended up into the apoapsis and this is one of the easiest parts of the flakes i just have so much extra fuel and it's not actually that laggy so it's pretty easy to just get in orbit here now i ended up extending out my orbit here and i ended up passing the episode by kind of a lot and i misjudged just a little bit but inside that last stage burned out i started on this next stage here and it seemed like it was going to be unstable but it seemed to hold itself together well enough if that done it's actually good enough to get me a full orbit here and once i had this it was time to work on the first part of my flight and this is landing on the moon now once i got an encounter here i ended up swerving around to that maneuver node and once i got there i just tried to do my burn now i ran out of fuel this bottom stage very quickly and i had to start going into this next one so you'll see here i actually got reasonably far and the first engines ended up burning out so i just had these weak engines next and with that they actually burned out too and i started going on my next stage here now this one actually was enough to get me all the way to encounter with the moon now getting this encounter was pretty easy and see here started to approach the moon and all i had to do was warp until i got pretty close to it flip around so i'd be retrograde and start to do my burn so i got captured now i also extended out the solar panels and i did this just to make sure everything was topped off before i sent off the lander and if those all extended i started to do my burn here now pulling in the orbit wasn't really that hard again i had a bunch of extra fuel at this point and finally here you can see i ended up getting the orbit and i ended up pulling it in so it'd be reasonably circular now at this point i just sort of randomly chose one of the landers i popped it off switched to it and started to land with it now notice i only have about a thousand meters per second of delta v which is kind of a problem because it's not really going to be that much try to get back up here and i was kind of wondering if this is even possible and of course when i was landing here i wasn't paying that much attention and i was starting to land at night so i ended up raising the brightness for you but it's still ridiculously dark here and trying to do this landing i realized it's actually very unstable as well and with all that combined it basically became impossible to land with this and i just ended up hitting the surface so i just flipped it back into my save and i actually chose the other lander and i noticed this time i've about 2000 meters of delta v and that's probably a little bit better and i also chose the warp this time so that i'd be landing during the day this landing at night is very difficult for everyone now i started here by facing retrograde and i was going to start doing a burn but the rocket's actually really unstable and it's because this one doesn't have any gimbal so i have to rely on the sas to pull me in the opposite direction and it's a little annoying i realized the maximum throttle i could use was like pretty much 10 percent which is not great but it actually should be enough force to get me off the ground so i wasn't too concerned but you see here starting to do my burn i'm slowly falling down and i'm just making sure i don't get too fast because again i've limited throttle here so if i go too fast there's no chance of recovering it now i ended up landing in this crater partially by choice partially by luck but anyway i ended up hitting the ground here and i wasn't really planning on sitting there for a while so i fall over there's no chance i'm getting back up so ended up barely touching the ground and stopping and once i did that i was right back up and ready to reconnect now i tried to save a few times we had to be high up enough to do that so eventually here i boosted up enough and i could drop a quick save and try to get this done so the first thing i tried doing here was turning a bit to the side and this is because my orbit needs to be in this direction but i ended up being a little bit too low and it burned a little bit too hard and that just caused me to run pretty much straight into this crater and there's basically no recovering from that so loaded up again and this time i tried aiming up a little bit higher and this seemed to be a lot better i was still pretty close to the ground for a while which is a little scary but once i got into this crater it gave me enough time i was able to burn up high enough and i was pretty much good to go now ended up stopping burning and a warp to the apoapsis and with that done ended up continuing my burn here and i just slowly circularized the orbit now i kept it pretty close to the moon and i actually switched to my main ship and i used my main ship to connect with the little one now the little ship i was running out of fuel so i just wanted to make sure i definitely had enough to get this done with that done i ended up getting them close together and i just slowly started bringing them close together after a while i got them a separation of only 600 meters and that was close enough to pretty much get everything done so i see my ship over there and i just try to do a burn so i get their orbits pretty much identical with that i started facing towards it and burning a little bit after a few of those cycles you can see here i actually got all the way to 200 meters away but i ended up warping until the day so it'd be a little bit easier and at this point i was only about 300 meters away and with that done repeat the same steps burn retrograde to kill my speed burn straight towards it and this time i was close enough i could pretty much kill my speed and start using my rcs thrusters to bring my way towards it and after a little while you could see there slowly got my way in i actually ended up bumping off it at first so i'd be a little bit careful but i reconnected just fine and with that done it was time to extend down my orbit and get to minmus now the reason i want to go to minmus is that other engine since it's so weak and has so little fuel i needed a pre-light body to land on and this minimus sardi right here it's pretty easy target to go for so i ended up just waiting until i got an encounter at for that point and i slowly messed around my orbit and eventually here i end up getting a pretty close encounter and you can see minimus now so with all that done it's actually pretty similar landing on the moon just had to make sure to burn retrograde kill my speed pull in the orbit a little bit also got it reasonably circular time to deploy the lander and try getting the landing done so just face retrograde and i actually burned for a pretty short amount of time here and that was enough to get me all the way towards the ground now when i was burning down here i had a great flat area to land on those awesome but i realized i had limited control and i wasn't able to turn up my thrusters at all so there was really nothing for me to do here and i ended up changing my landing zone so that kerbin was just barely over the horizon of minmus i was actually able to find a relatively small flat spot on menmos and it was just enough for me to get my lander on and unfortunately i couldn't land straight up and down but i figured this actually shouldn't be too big of a deal since the vector engine can gimbal so much i should be able to just tilt it and get myself up off the ground now it took a couple involuntary front flips but it was still enough to get me off the ground here and started to burn up now reconnecting was exactly the same procedure but it was a lot easier this time since there's a lot less gravity here and with that done ended up using the rcs reconnected the docking ports and had it all connected up again so finally with that done i ended up warping away from minmus and that was actually time to go to joule now getting there is going to be a little annoying because normally you use kerbin's rotation to fling you out in the right direction but since then all the way out towards minimus it's actually going to take more fuel to get me up to speed so ended up setting my maneuver node here and i wasn't expecting it to be this high so i have the fuel to do this i just prefer not to and ended up getting it down by about 250 meters per second of delta v and i was pretty happy about that and once i got there it was time to burn the very last of my fuel here and that was enough to get me an escape but after that i had to move on to the next stage and it's going to be the xenon engines now i turned them on and the first thing i noticed is that they're extremely slow and i actually went to check and you see how slow the delta v is going down and the burn times a day which is only six hours but that's still a really long time but i pretty much have no choice at this point so i just turned on physics warp so i can at least get four times speed and once i get that done i just let my computer run for an hour and a half here and just let it slowly expand out that orbit and finally here you can see after all that time thankfully i was at my computer at the time so i was able to catch it as soon as it got the encounter now it still took a really long time for me to pull that in and get it really close but fortunately since these engines actually are so limited in their power i was able to get it really really controlled to three million meters that's gonna save me a lot of time later trying to move around this because ideally i want to be 200 000 meters away from joule so i could just barely avoid the atmosphere and get the most efficient burn possible and you can see here with an adjustment burn i managed to get it all the way up to 200 000 meters so so far everything looks good and next i did just warp over to jewel and i had to get over to the periapsis but i have to be really careful here because i pulled it in so ridiculously close to 200 000 meters if i go below that if i hit the atmosphere at like 9 000 meters per second i'm just gonna explode so to be really careful here i ended up throwing away my xenon tanks and i realized this is kind of a mistake because it had a little solar panels on it but also i could have used a little bit more of that fuel but i ended up switching to the next stage here and it seemed to work out just fine ended up getting my orbit here and because it doesn't cost too much fuel i ended up pulling in the orbit a bunch which saves me a lot of time waiting i ended up getting a lathe encounter here and i wasn't going to try landing on lathe yet i just wanted to use it to pull in my orbit and make it really limited so after i had that looking good i ended up just doing that burn here and you can see me get that orbit and slowly pull myself in like this with that done you can see warping towards jewel and work towards lace now let's sort of jump scares me here but after that's done ended up working a little bit closer to it and no burns need to be done here yet i just wanted to get a bit closer and about looking good i did not swivel and available kind of a problem because you can see here as i crank the engines i slowly start to rotate out of position so it's not going to work out so well and what i ended up doing was transferring some extra fuel in and getting rid of my extra two ships here because i didn't really need these anymore with that done i tried doing the burning gun it was better but it was still moving to the one side so all i could really do here is burn at about a third throttle which wasn't really that great but i ended up turning on rcs temporarily and that was enough to counteract the turning motion i ended up burning as fast as i could for a little while here and ended up using a whole bunch of rcs fuel but it ended up being okay because you can see here i ended up getting most of the burn done i just had a little bit left to do without the rcs so once i finished that i ended up getting rid of that stage and it started working on a nuclear engine now this one actually isn't that fast but it was definitely fast enough and you can see here ended up getting fully captured with it and after that i actually didn't pull it in or anything i just left it as it was and i ended up taking the time to fully charge all of my batteries here and after that i ended up deploying my first lander now it didn't really matter the order in which i did this but i figured that this one would probably be the easiest to start with it has the most wings so it makes it a lot easier to land with and also it was nice to compact so i thought i had a pretty good chance of surviving the atmosphere i ended up using my rcs to slowly pull in my orbit and i ended up going into about 41 000 meters now i was hoping that i'd be able to just start to fall into it and slow myself down enough but it was a little bit too harsh and it ended up blowing up my air intake which pretty much makes it useless so ended up pulling it into only about 47 000 meters and that helped a lot this time it was actually burning up in the atmosphere a lot more controllably and i had to do another warp around but after the second time it was actually enough to get me all the way in and i slowly started to fall down they also noticed i'm kind of spinning this around a lot and that's to prevent any one part from overheating too much now i'm using some rcs fuel to do this i'm almost using a bunch of electric charge here but it's worth it because it definitely slows me down faster and it also keeps me from exploding now after a little point you can see there ended up losing my rcs fuel and things actually started to stabilize quite a bit and i started to turn up my throttle here and i didn't see any thrust being produced at the moment so i was a little concerned but i figured maybe i need to dip a little bit deeper and eventually here you can see i get some flame in the back and that means the engine is starting to work wait for the thrust to start picking up and see i actually am sort of flying now i got to the point where my height actually did start to increase and a little bit later than that i also managed to increase my speed as well and with both of those things increasing it means i'm actually gaining energy here so i am definitely flying and at this point i was just happy i got something to fly so i just kept going for a little while here but i realized i had a ridiculous amount of fuel i had like 26 000 meters per second the delta v and i could have flew for a really long time here but i ended up deciding to do a quick dive and see how i would do it wasn't really that great though and i was unable to come out of it and was really happy that successful landing and after that i ended up deploying my second lander here and trying to land this one is super similar i ended up burning up the atmosphere twice the second time they ended up dipping in and it did fire off the engine but i couldn't get this one to come up it was either the lack of engines or a bad weight distribution but it was basically impossible to fly and even though the engine technically worked it wasn't that great so i was a little unhappy about that but at least i had two more to get through here instead of kicking off the next one and trying to get this one to work as well and this one you can see the engine working in the back and it's really powerful but i just couldn't get this one to nose up as well it seemed like it really didn't want to work and this one similarly just went straight into the water so it wasn't doing so great in late landers here and i was really hoping this last one be able to take it home but this was actually the least confident in working because it was the one that had the double stages and has a limited amount of wings so i wasn't that confident in it but you see here it's burned up in the atmosphere and doing my technique of moving back and forth a lot to prevent anything from overheating after that low enough the engine finally actually managed to fire and i was actually really happy about this and i started to pitch up but i noticed i also just didn't have enough force but my thrust wasn't all the way up and i really didn't want to try doing this yet because warrior's gonna push me into the ground harder but it clearly seemed to be needed and once i tried doing it near the ground it had a really positive effect i had a lot more control over it but it seemed like it was just too late and i ended up hitting the water so i ended up loading my quicksave when i was in the air and this time i just started out with full throttle and i wanted to give this a shot and it actually pitched up quite well and with this done i actually managed to gain some speed and gain some height so i was actually flying now this one actually did not have that much fuel the engine's not that efficient so for quite a while i ended up running out and tried deploying the top stage but the engine just ended up exploding and it didn't really pop off too well but this one at least seemed to mostly work so i'll take two out of four when you think about it one half rounds up the one so it was pretty good and with that done i ended up just trying to burn here and now i'm trying to get away from lathe now i wasn't too confident that i had enough fuel for a return trip and i had a bunch of extra engines so i figured i might as well try to get home and i had some staging issues at first and i ended up losing one of my boosters but after i managed to fix that problem i started out with the dart engine here and this one's really good but it seemed a little unbalanced but fortunately i actually managed to fix that pretty easily just by burning a little bit lighter and once that was done i launched the next stage and realized i accidentally put two dart engines on here which isn't really that big of a problem just give me a bit more fuel but i definitely didn't need to do that and finally here with that done i ended up warping away from leave and i got back into jewel's fear of influence now to get away from jewel i ended up going for a ridiculously close tylo encounter here i was hoping to just scrape it to hopefully fling myself away now i ended up pulling it into about seven thousand meters and that i figured would be pretty cool if i could make work and you see here a quick time left me pulling it in and ended up boosting the brightness as well just because it's really hard to see and i guess i didn't realize how close i got at the time but i really scraped the surface there finally with that done i worked away from jewel and i started to do some burns to get myself an encounter with kerbin so starting out here i think i launched the terrier engine next after that dart engine and i realized instead of launching the next stage what i could do is try launching the solid rocket fuel boosters to help me out now at first they were a little chaotic so i ended up launching one of the engines at the left side to balance out the torque a little bit and that seemed to work pretty well and once these boosters ended up completely finishing the burn i needed to do i ended up just launching them away after that i just had a few more burns to do to pull myself into kerbin's orbit so it launched away that really small engine you saw there after that i just went for these small white engines which i'd never end up using and i ended up trying to launch them away and they seemed to explode but it didn't break anything on my rocket so not really my problem after that just launched off these big powerful engines and finally here you can see i got those spider engines going once that was done i had to do the ant engines next and for that i have these puff engines and at this point i was actually pulling in my orbit just where i needed it to go so with that done ended up doing a few more maneuvers got myself near kerbin and i quickly realized i have nowhere near enough fuel to do this so i ended up using my very last separatron engines here to get myself an encounter so i'd fall straight into kerbin to the very least i got that satisfaction but using those completely finishes the challenge so guys thanks for watching this video took way too long to make this like 16 or 17 hours of footage and get it all added together was quite a lot as well so if you have any questions comments feel free to leave them down below subscribe if you want to see more content like this and otherwise until next time

Channel: Reid Captain

Views: 454,520

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Id: yP_qn9zIZpk

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022