Hello, it's Scott Manley here
Taking another look at Kerbal Space Program 0.90
Now, if you've been looking at my hints and guides for beginners you'll know that I am a big fan of stage recovery.
Recovering stages early for extra cash to help you in the early game with upgrading those buildings.
Well, there's a couple of mods I want to talk about to help you with this.
The first is Stage Recovery.
Now, you can see this is active down here with this icon here.
I click on it and a message appears in my inbox which tells me that with the current fuel values, the stage will be destroyed.
However, when it's empty, the terminal velocity will be 6.6 and I will recover 99% of it.
So what that's saying is this middle stage here with the liquid fuel and the liquid engine - All those expensive parts.
Those have parachutes to stop it and Stage Recovery will recover it for me.
Okay, so let's get this show on the road; firing up that main solid rocket booster and throttling up the main engines
in preparation for their firing.
Ah, this is of course running with a Stayputnik probe. I'm still early in the tech tree; that's where I think the real game is right now
for newbies
Ah, this means it does not have SAS for automatic stability control.
Therefore, I have to fly it manually, just like the good old days.
Wait for things to burn out and immediately switch over.
Okay, so that stage is going to fall back towards the ground.
And I can click on the Stage Recovery window here.
So this is a stage recovery mod. There was another mod called DebRefund which was supported for a while but it doesn't look like it's being updated.
So Stage Recovery appears to be the way to go.
Ah, there we go. Destroyed stages. Mun probe debris.
That would be the stage I dropped to the planet.
It was a stack decoupler and a solid rocket booster.
I lost 465 funds because I did not have any respect for it.
I probably could have brought a parachute on it. I'm not sure it would have been worth it.
It's a relatively small amount of cash. You know, if you add extra mass to that of course it means less fuel
And stuff on the rest of the rocket. So you have to weigh these decisions whenever you're trying to design a rocket.
Obviously, unlike real rockets we don't have to deal with the problem of cleaning salt water out of engines or things like that.
Which is quite expensive given the fantastically high tolerance required of rocket engines and things like that.
You really don't want to have foreign objects - foreign substances inside your fuel lines and things like that.
But, yeah, we're not dealing with that. *laughs*
So, yeah, we're getting up to speed - Let me see. We're on to our last tank.
Now, normally we would have to fly this on a much steeper trajectory because you would have to make sure that we got
Above the magic 20 kilometer mark with sufficient vertical velocity to get our spacecraft boosted up to its insertion velocity.
Before the main stage fell back. And that did mean that we weren't flying things perfectly and efficiently as we would like.
So, yeah, we're going to ditch this now and off it goes. And the main engine now fires on this - This is a lot more squirrely
There it is, falling away on its parachutes.
Now, that will continue beyond 2 and a half kilometers.
The magic limit, I believe, for removing objects from the game, is below 20 kilometers
Objects above 2 and a half kilometers away are removed.
And therefore, considered destroyed.
What the Stage Recovery mod does - If it sees something in this situation, it will then
It will then figure out if it has enough parachutes to successfully soft land on Kerbin.
Kerbin's obviously the one it's interested in - If you have something soft land on Duna I don't think it even cares.
But, yeah, here we go...
Yeah, that might be something for future versions.
This might be going a little flatter than I would like.
The orbit is perhaps a little flatter but it shouldn't matter too much.
Let's see if we've got Stage Recovery yet on this.
We should go to the map, actually, so we can see this thing getting removed from existence.
There, let's mouse over it. You see how it's falling down?
As it gets below 20 kilometers, that
OH! AH! I guess it wasn't even 20 kilometers.
It's been removed from existence.
But hopefully, it has been recovered.
There we go! We get our successful recovery.
We recovered 5,000 funds.
From making sure that we had the right kind of parachutes on that thing.
So yeah, that works with the rockets that I've got. However, it only - It needs parachutes.
Right? It's not going to work like SpaceX's attempts to soft land a rocket on a barge using rockets rather than parachutes.
It's not going to work with things like SpaceShipTwo where you have carrier aircraft that flies up to altitude and launches a smaller spacecraft.
Which actually flies up and performs the mission into space.
So, if you want to do that, there is another mod which will help you out with that.
So yes, if you want to land anything using a process more complicated than parachutes, then one of the things I could suggest is the
Flight Manager for Reusable Stages Mod by SIT89
So this will work if you want to land a spacecraft or if you want to land a spaceplane, perhaps
A carrier plane. If you want to land something on rockets. Or perhaps you want to land something on a combination of parachutes and rockets
Because parachutes actually work very well for helping keep things stable.
So this is a Pegasus style launch. We have a plane which has just turbojets on it.
And in the payload bay, we have a space probe that has some problems launching...
But once we get this going, it will be marvelous!
Point in the right direction and light up that candle! There we go.
So, this is a very cheap system obviously. It's just a solid rocket booster with a very small space probe on top.
The space probe has enough fuel for orbital insertion and maybe a whole lot more. We don't really know
The bulk of the mass is coming from that large, single-use solid rocket booster.
Now, you see we've already gone off the range and that spacecraft has actually disappeared.
However, on the left here, you see FMRS v0.3.01 - the window.
We see that stage 3 seperated at 2 minutes and 51 seconds.
And there's a button for the air launched ship.
So we're going to go back to that once we've got this thing into orbit.
We just need to let this thing carve its way through the lower atmosphere.
It's going pretty fast, but I think it will get up into orbit without me having to light off the liquid fuel engine.
And it's actually pretty stable now that we've let everything calm down.
Now that the forces of the atmosphere are no longer acting on those little fins there.
The main problem with designing this is putting those fins inside the cargo bay in such a way that they give control but don't cause the spacecraft to be supremely overpowered.
73 Kilometers! We are now above the magic of time acceleration.
Normally, going up to this altitude would take far too long
Whatever stage I had used would have fallen back to the surface.
But instead, it's still being kept in cryogenic suspension with the Flight Manager.
Now the Flight Manager, what it's done is it's created save states. It's created a bunch of automatic save states for me.
If you use the software Version Control it's kind of the same thing. It creates a fork of the save file which you will then be able to work on and ultimately merge the chnages back.
Maybe that's a little obtuse to people who aren't into programming, but it makes sense to me!
So there, we get our stuff circularized... Just get this nice and circular.
Great! We have a spacecraft in orbit. Now to deal with the landing.
We're 17 minutes into the mission now, and we're going to jump back to about 3 minutes into the mission.
So here we go. Click on this, and... It thinks for a second as it reloads...
And there we go!
Now we're flying things as it once was.
The space probe is obviously removed from the vicinity.
Since time travel is involved please don't build a space probe that flies back and then just kills the main spaceplane because that would just lead to weird casuality violations.
I'm going to try and turn this around then send it back to the main Kerbal Space Center.
The fastest way to do this is to actually dive down.
So I'm deliberately pointing the nose downward and I'm going to do an inverted loop here.
The idea being, we're pulling ourselves deeper into the atmosphere, and the deeper you go, the harder you're going to turn.
So I don't want to go a really really long way away from the space center because I'm going to have to fly this back manually.
Interesting question... I guess mission time says we're about 3 minutes and 40 seconds into the mission
And we know the space probe achieves a stable orbit at around 17 minutes.
I wonder if I'll be able to get it back into the landing site inside the 17 minutes.
Obviously, I'm going to put this in accelerated time to make sure a little more quickly.
This is all running 4 times regular speed.
Just because it makes the whole thing a little more watchable.
I do actually gain a little bit of altitude on the way back and I used some debris that's sitting near the space center as my guide for altitude.
When you're landing a spacecraft, it's a good idea to try to follow a kind of flat, steady descent profile.
So what I try to do is keep my velocity vector pointed just roughly where the target is.
Although you can see the target is slightly to the left, so I'm really just using the vector as an altitude control
Also, make sure you're in surface mode, otherwise, you'll be subtracting the velocity rotation of the planet which is about 175 meters per second
And that can lead to some very strange and frustrating and scary numbers when you realize that you thought you were travelling at 100 m/s but in fact, are travelling at 0.
*laughs* and you're stalling out of the sky. Yes, I have done that before.
There are actually real satellite orbiters that do this. The Pegasus by Orbital Science
It's made something like 40 launches, I believe, and it's pretty reliable. It uses solid rocket boosters again for super cheapness.
The carrier aircraft on that, incidentally, is called the Stargazer, and some people think that's deliberate because
William Riker served aboard the Pegasus and Jean-Luc Picard served aboard the Stargazer
Coincidence or magic? Who cares!
Anyway, this thing is actually suprisingly difficult to land because it has no airbrakes.
We really need some stock airbrakes in the game, guys!
Yeah, so I'm flying down at about 64 m/s and it barely wants to touch the runway.
It has to go at such a high angle of attack to get the rear wheels down that then makes it lift back off the runway. *laughs*
So, yeah.
On the ground, activate the brakes. Ah, actually this is going to be pretty good. We're going to park it next to the runway here.
Next to these highly explosive fuel tanks.
That's exactly where you want to put a spaceplane, right?
Next to the expensive fuel that could explode and kill everyone.
So now we've stopped. We can recover the vessel.
And... Magic magic magic...
It should go to the recovery screen, and I think this is not actually in career mode so it just shows that we've recovered the crew.
But if you're in career mode, it will recover the cash and the science. The science may not recover from returned stages I have heard.
But that may have been fixed by now.
Should check that out.
And the game automatically returns control to the satellite.
I'm Scott Manley! Fly safe!