Kerbal Space Program First Contract 13

Channel:

TroZ

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909

Published on September 3, 2014 12:20:23 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0g15HjFcoU

Game:

Kerbal Space Program (2015)

Duration: 54:36

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Today, we head for the Mun in Kerbal Space Program. This episode has some bad omens.

We quickly look at the R&D lab, and find that we are just about 50 science short of unlocking the final science device, which would be really nice to have on our trip to the Mun, so that we don't miss any science from the locations that we visit.

So we decide to quickly put together a test of a small decoulpler to earn the science we need. We use a solid booster on probe with a small liquid engine to get a bit over 10 km at the speed we need, and get the test done, and safely return to collect the science and unlock the Gravioli Detector.

We then begin designing a rocket to go to the Mun! I had a design in mind, but I don't have all the parts unlocked that it would require, so I had design something similar with what we do have available. This took a while to build, so most of this is shown at 4x speed.

Here are where the bad omens come into play. Besides it being episode 13, when we get to the launch pad to attempt to get to the Mun, a solar eclipse is beginning! We launch anyway, and things seem to be ok, but it appears the rocket got hung up on one of the launch clamps, and it tilts over a good 30 degrees! We recover and slowly straighten up the ship, and nothing seems to have exploded. As we reach 4 km, we are ready to drop the first stage. however, The staging was setup for the solid boosters to run out first, but the liquid boosters has run out first. So when we staged, the solids when flying up in front of the ship, taking about 1/3 of their remaining fuel with them, and leaving the empty liquid engines still attached.

We quickly dropped the empty liquid engines, hoping that my typical overbuilding would save our trip to orbit here as well, but it became obvious that it probably wasn't going to work out when the stage meant to get us into orbit ran out of fuel at about 36 km. At that point, we scrambled to attempt to get the Mun transfer stage's engines going, to hopefully make orbit, just so that we could get a decent landing back at KSC, but when we stages, the lander's engine came on! Another staging misconfiguration! We had to manually shutdown the lander engines and start the transfer engines, but by that time, we were already heading down.

We continued to burn fuel in an attempt to slow down, and just so that we would loose the weight for landing, but once we got down to about 2.5 km, we hit the abort button. This would cut the engines, disconnect the orbiter stage, pop all the parachutes on the lander, and extend the landing legs. This seems to work well, but since we were over water, the landing legs wouldn't help.

We were coming down a slightly fast, at just over 7 m/s, so with about 50 meters to go, we attempted to throttle up. The problem was, we were already throttled up. The engines were shutdown by the abort sequence, and before we had a chance to re-enable then after noting that they were shutdown, we had already hit the want and the ship broke into many small pieces! The capsule survived, but basically everything else was a total loss!

We may have failed, but we learned a lot from the failure. The first liquid stage could use more fuel, as it is fueling all the engines initially. This would allow it to last longer than the solids and fix the staging issue there, and also allow us to reach a higher altitude overall as we will have a higher thrust for longer in the flight, allowing us to reach higher speeds earlier. Fixing the staging will also allow us to take advantage of the lost thrust from the solid boosters that were jettisoned to early this flight. We will also change the launch clamps to hopefully fix the issue that caused us to tip over at launch. The staging the the orbiter's engines will be corrected, but hopefully they won't need to be used to achieve orbit with the previous corrections applied.

Next time, with these corrections applied, we will hopefully have a successful mission!

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