Source
Telesphoros•

Holy crap. This is utterly amazing.

5
16807OP•

:D

3
linecraftman•

I wish I could play KSP this much :(

How long it took you to plan Star Boom 1 mission?

3
16807OP•

Execution took 3 months, off and on, but I've had plans for the starship on paper since May. Once you have orbital construction the turn around time increases immensely. More a matter of persistence than time.

4
linecraftman•

Awesome mission! But what I want to know is how often the game crashed?

3
16807OP•

I was surprised how stable the game was. Framerate was good during most of the megastructure scenes because part count was low. The trajectories in the orbit window were rock solid while planning for the flyby, despite the distance from Kerbin. Probably because the speed was so fast. Something has to be done about the mk3 centrifuges, though, because they are really laggy. I think I'm going to use the Civilian Population mod for the next album in the series.

KSP still crashes frequently on startup, but that's a Linux issue.

2
PyroblowoutMaster Kerbalnaut•

Man I love this series.

3
BaneJammin•

I don't usually read through every word of these campaign albums, but this is just incredible. Not only is the mission itself beyond imagining, the backstory and Kerbin-Laythe plotline makes it much more immersive.

Very interested in the next installment, keep up the good work!

3
16807OP•

Yeah, I usually don't read much text either and I try not to write a lot, but this mission felt different. I don't think a lot of people write a lot about this kind of mission, so I kinda felt responsible for documenting it. It's also really cool.

1
prototype27•

This mission is incredible. Your real-time fly-by footage is gorgeous.

3
kadrore•

I am in awe, a truly epic quest. I dream of one day having the paitience to do something similar. I wonder, have you noted the periapsis altitude over the red dwarf? Also, for the next part- you might let kerbin catch up with a mining parts' mod letting you set up large enough autonomous(or manned for the engineer boost) production plants. I imagine massive, ideally tweakscaled, several thousand tons heavy stationary miners 60 parts max, 5-10 of them spread out, that can between them fill a star phage-capacity manned tanker(or unmanned) flight in a month or two. The tanker can stay in orbit, unfuelled and inactive when out of use. I would probably try to make tanker that's not quite purpose-built, rather a kind of habitable general-purpose space freighter configured for this task, to simulate a living transmunar economy, and let it serve as home for a crew and as rescue vessel, auxilary retrieval ship or miner, small cargo transport(f ex local system sattelite refuelling or replacement rounds), etc. Probably even atmospheric capability of some kind, to torture myself.

3
16807OP•

That touches on a whole can of worms.

You could probably tweakscale the drills on the star phage. Drill output scales with surface area, so if it takes 1000 years to do it with the star phage, just scale up the drills on the star phage by a factor of 10 and it'll be done in 10 years. And now that fuel requirements for the next mission are up by a factor of 100, the drills on the Star Phage would need to scale up to 100 times the original size if they're to do it in 10 years. The other problem is the regolith drills aren't set up in the tweakscale config that comes with KSP-IE. I chose not to tweakscale any part from a mod that already came with a tweakscale config, since that could be considered cheating.

You could also manufacture He3 from tritium breeding. I seem to recall it would still be very slow, even with large 50m reactors, but I'd have to redo the math. You would still need to find the Lithium used to breed the Helium3, and the deuterium that goes with it. Also, there's a bug in very large reactors that prevents you from turning them on. That's not a problem if you launch them from the pad because the reactor is automatically turned on before launch, but it is a problem when you build things using Extraplanetary launchpads (As a matter of fact, the 17m reactors aboard the Jool Thief suffered the same bug - I actually launched the Jool Thief from Kerbin because the bug prevented me from assembling it in orbit)

I really really wanted to do it on Minimus, though. It would have really simplified operations. But when you look at it, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense IRL because why spend 100 years doing what could be done in 10? It doesn't make sense in the game because the mechanics are meant to simulate reality. I could use an automatic mining mod, but I'm not sure if it would even be applicable to reality then.

Project Daedalus had a similar choice between Jupiter and the moon, and they had every interest in designing the simplest thing possible, but they came to the same conclusion. As crazy as it sounds, it's easier to build an SSTO for Jupiter than it is to mine Helium3 on the moon.

2
kadrore•

Fair enough, though I would chalk the cheating thing with tweakscale down as "incremental effeciency improvements due to technology" and get on with it. Gas giant fusion planes are deciededly more awesome though, and certainly I would go that route as well(or try the aerostat mine, with some balloon mod). Further, as you say, why take 100 years when you can do it in 10?

Though what you might have done, is build an enormous reactor complex right at the KSC with the maxi-size pre-activated reactors... and lift the He3 from there. You'd have to lift it all the way out of kerbin SOI, but hypothetical production speed is unlimited(assuming unlimited funds).

One more question, is there a rationale behind choosing the turbojet nozzle rather than the ramjet one for the thief? I'm not sure about the composition of Jool's upper atmosphere, but I can't imagine it not giving sustainable thrust at a mach or three when coming down from orbital speed. Much higher ISP in closed cycle than the turbojet, much better high-speed atmospheric performance. If the low speed performance is too poor for your reentry pattern, carry som kLs of LqdN2 to boost with.

2
16807OP•

In KSP that's probably the easiest route without orbital construction. You would have to design a rocket that gets 1000T off Kerbin, but that's still easier than 1000T off Jool. If you do have orbital construction though - which you need for the starship - it would be unnecessarily hard compared to Minimus because getting 1000T off Minimus is easiest of all. Also, you'd probably have to worry about your 50m reactor array exploding on the pad. Biggest advantage of all is that it works around the reactor bug.

I might have messed up choosing the turbojet. I didn't even consider the ramjet. That would definitely effect the design of the craft. Better TWR, lighter engine, less fuel. I'll have to toy with it in the next mission.

UPDATE: figured out why I might have chosen the turbojet. The turbojet had more thrust in all the experiments I conducted, but I only conducted static fire tests. That would never reveal the ramjet has better characteristics at high speed.

1
mikusingularity•

Late commenter here, but I have to say that this is the most epic mission I have ever seen in KSP.

3
16807OP•

Thanks! Work continues on Star Boom 2 - just recently decelerated into its target system and is currently manufacturing some infrastructure.

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Temeriki•

I was just sent over here from the kspie forums, someone linked this a few days ago. This is absolutely amazing and youve given me fantastic goals for my current playthrough with OPM.

2