Dark Souls Prepare To Die Edition CRACK ONLY-FLTl
Marketta Filipovich
This person continues to top their previous missions listed in the album. First visiting Jool and the planets from the Outer Planets Mod (which inspired me to revive my KASDA thread), then conducting a Daedalus-style interstellar flyby ("Star Boom 1") with a fusion-powered spacecraft assembled using Extraplanetary Launchpads and KSP Interstellar Extended and fueled using a Jool SSTO with nuclear turbojets - that's right, it enters Jool's atmosphere to scoop Deuterium and Helium-3 (although it would take days of real life time, so save file editing was used), then returns to orbit. And now, they've made an interstellar probe that slows down at the target star, using a small miner to build bigger miners, which are then used to build exploration probes and copies of the interstellar spacecraft itself. I've never seen anyone do anything like this before, and it deserves more attention. Here's just a preview:
Okay, I will list their every image/clip and caption under these spoilers. (I think your computer's freezing because of all the .mp4s trying to load, so they are only listed as links [plus, I can't even embed them anyway])
It is the distant future, 250 years after the founding of the space program. Kerbalkind assumes type 1 status on the Kardashev scale. This album is a part of a series I'm making. It seeks to colonize the stars using only well known physics and nonexotic matter (no antimatter, warp drives, EMdrives, etc.). Previous albums, below:
The mission here has the same Δv requirements as a real world analogue. Throughout the album, we'll occasionally draw parallels to a real life real life starship proposal first drafted by nanotechnologist Robert Freitas, which you can read here:
6 years ago, the Kerbals of Laythe conducted the first ever interstellar flyby. The flyby probe was sent to the nearest star system, "Nova Kirbani." Nova Kirbani is an Alpha Centauri analogue from the "Kerbal Star Systems" mod by StarCrusher96. It hosts three stars and many habitable planets. Its distance was manually tweaked to replicate the Δv requirements of a real mission to Alpha Centauri.
The interplanetary ships (example shown here) are modified versions of Star Boom 1's upper stage. They feature smaller fuel tanks, bigger engines, and oversized RCS thrusters mounted on a foreward facing "docking bus". Some craft also feature adjustable radiators for use in the inner system.
Nuclear pulse engines have sweeping effects on society. For one thing, they present regulatory challenges. At 0.2% the speed of light, a run-of-the-mill 1000T freighter (shown here, in real time) has a kinetic energy equivalent to the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
The governments of Kerbin and Laythe each implement their own interplanetary licensing system for the sale of relativistic vehicles. There are also strict speed limits. The speed limit within Kerbin controlled space is 0.1% the speed of light. Even at this speed, you can still do some heavy damage. A single vehicle striking the atmosphere could produce a field of charged particles strong enough to damage unprotected satellites for years. The effect would be very similar to a high altitude nuclear weapons test.
With a large enough fleet, it's theoretically possible for a single bad actor to inflict a thermonuclear holocaust on a planet. In practice, only the largest governments and corporations are able to possess fleets of this size.
Nuclear Pulse engines also have sweeping effects on the economy. These engines rely on Deuterium and Helium3, which plays a vital role in the interplanetary economy much like crude oil does in the real life global economy. All interplanetary trade relies on the fuel. Entire industries emerge to mine and ship it. Entire economies rise and fall by its price.
The fuel is an extremely precious substance. The Kerbals of Laythe must mine the fuel from Jool using SSTOs of titanic proportion. As atmospheric launch vehicles, the SSTOs can't rely on Nuclear pulse engines. They have to rely on conventional nuclear turbojets with nonrelativistic Isps.
The mining industry also requires manpower, and most of that comes from Kerbin. Kerbinese passenger liners like the one shown here can comfortably accomodate 60 kerbals at a time. However colonial populations are reaching self sustaining numbers, and passenger transport isn't as lucrative as it once was. It was never as lucrative as H2/He3 mining, to begin with. Kerbin spends more in H2/He3 than it earns in passenger transport. A dramatic trade imbalance results - Kerbin owes a lot of money to the Laythans.
Kerbin must change its business model or suffer economic ruin. The policy makers of Kerbin set out to enter the H2/He3 market. That's petty ambitious - H2/He3 mining is a well established industry. That, plus there's not enough H2/He3 on all of Kerbin to power a single spaceship.
There are some things that work in Kerbin's favor, though. Laythan corporations may hold a monopoly on the H2/He3 industry, but their prospects are dwindling. Jool's gravity makes mining difficult, and it appears mining operations have maxed out. Joolean SSTOs can only lift 1000 tons of payload at a time. The engineers of Laythe try to scale SSTO payload by an order of magnitude, but the resulting craft is... large.
It's so large it pushes the boundaries of KSP-IE's vanilla tweakscale config. Reactors and fuel tanks only scale up to 40m in diameter, and this places limits on payload size. Its flight characteristics are also way different from the old miners, and that means it needs lots of testing. The new miner languishes in development hell.
While Laythe stagnates, Kerbin does its best to correct the trade imbalance. The ice giants are still unclaimed territory, and their comparatively weak gravity makes them much easier to mine. It's not easy to reach the ice giants, but Nuclear Pulse engines are making it easier. Perhaps now it makes economic sense to mine them?
With little fanfare, Kerbin establishes a small mining base over Tal. Tal is the sub-satellite of Wal, which itself is a satellite of Urlum. The Kerbinese see Tal as a location of strategic importance. Wal's gravity well makes it easy to intercept, and Tal's small size makes it easy to mine.
In just several years, Kerbin floods the market with cheap H2/He3. Costs for H2/He3 plummet, and Kerbin seizes a substantial market share. By the time Laythe catches wind, Kerbin already has a firm hold on the Urlumese system.
Despite their economic rivalry, Kerbin and Laythe get along fine politically. Its been almost a century since Laythe succeeded from Kerbin's interplanetary empire, and tensions have long since eased. In fact, the next interstellar mission will be a joint venture between the two worlds. Laythe manufactures hardware while Kerbin designs spacecraft and supplies fuel.
Star Boom 2 measures 1/3 km in length. Its length and mass are comparable to that of a real life Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Thrust is twice that of the Saturn V, and payload is comparable to that of the Falcon Heavy.
Payload is only a third that of Star Boom 1. That's 50 tons. Star Boom 2 won't need as much payload because it will decelerate at its destination, and thereby make heavy use of ISRU. Payload is mostly comprised of communication equipment.
Decelerating also means the upper stage engines need to power back on after several decades of disuse. That requires a reliable power source. Star Boom 1 used fission reactors, but its fuel was nearly gone by the time it reached its destination. So the upper stages of Star Boom 2 use a combination of fission and fusion. A 500MW fission reactor can sustain minimal power for several decades, after which it has just enough juice to kickstart a larger fusion reaction. The fusion reaction can then reliably power the lasers that initiate the explosive fusion reaction that propels the ship.
Last but not least, deceleration means double the Δv requirements. Two stages have been added since Star Boom 1, which serve to accelerate the craft. Their engines are also powered by fusion reactors, the largest being 50GW (enough to power all of Great Britain). The radiators on the lowermost stage are disproportionately large due to a simple scaling law: thrust scales with volume, but thermal dissipation scales with surface area.
It's also worth noting this is the first craft I ever designed using a computer algorithm. I used a gradient descent algorithm to determine the size of tanks, engines, reactors, and radiators. This is the same sort of algorithm that's often used to train neural networks. The algorithm easily halved the fuel mass of the craft while keeping mission time under 60 years.
Star Boom 2 undocks from the shipyard. A small dedicated tug (bottom left) pushes the ship out. At first, the tug only uses RCS thrusters, lest it irradiate the dock workers with its nuclear pulse engines. When a sufficient distance is reached, the tug ignites its nuclear pulse engines, and the ship is off.
The fuelling process is completely autonomous. There's not a kerbal around for several million kilometers. The only oversight comes from the ship's artificial intelligence construct. It is a neural imitation network that has been trained to imitate the behavior of retired astronaut, Bob Kerman.
It takes five SSTO flights to fully fuel the star ship. That's 3 kerbin years worth of atmospheric flight. The nuclear ramjet aboard the Urlum miner can keep it aloft for decades, so fuel isn't a problem, but it would take a human player 3 real world months to fuel the miner at x4 physics warp.
As I mention in the previous album, I fuel up using save hacks. However, I do make sure the miner is able to reorbit with max payload. I do try to ensure all craft are at least capable of conducting their missions.
The ship enters cruise mode. The blastshield separates from the starship. To reduce the risk of secondary debris strike, the blastshield will drift out several kilometers beyond the ship. The blastshield is equipped with its own RTG powersource and RCS, which allows it to maintain distance from the craft after debris strike.
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