Introducing the European Agency of Space Stuff

Kerbal Space Program is a simulation game that lets you build a space program using a mostly realistic physics model. It's designed to teach people unfamiliar with space flight how to build rockets in a fun, sandbox environment, while providing for lots of depth for people who want to really challenge their rocket science knowledge. It's sort of like 'Lego Space Program' and includes collaborations with NASA.

A typical game of Kerbal Space Program involves building simple rockets and payloads to complete space missions to earn enough Credits, Reputation, and Science™ to build bigger rockets (and spaceplanes!) and complete more complex missions.



This blog will follow the European Agency of Space Stuff (EASS) through a modded campaign with some big changes from the normal game:

1. The RSS/RO/RP-1 mod pack which includes a Real Solar System (Earth, Mars, etc), Realism Overhaul, and Realistic Progression One. The game starts in 1951, everything takes time to build, and everything is much more 'true to life' than normal Kerbal Space Program. Instead of starting with crewed missions, you start out with Sounding Rockets and slowly build up to a life-like space programs.

2. The RasterPropMod, MAS, and Kerbal VR mods, which allow you to sit inside the cockpit of your spacecraft and control it completely as an astronaut would.

3. A bunch of other realism mods that I'll mention if/as they come up.

Obviously these mods make the game much harder, and planning in advance is very important to ensuring that EASS doesn't run out of money and astronauts. I want to try and capture this added complexity and difficulty in this blog and perhaps draw parallels to real world NASA and Roscosmos missions along the way.

The most interesting milestones (such as the first orbital mission, first Moon landing, etc) will be live streamed and/or recorded, flown from the cockpits of the spacecraft in VR! The rest (such as test flights or uncrewed probe missions, etc) will just be documented in this blog. I hope readers will enjoy following along with this journey at a leisurely pace as I try to build a space program worthy of the adventurous spirits of the Kerbonauts who risk life and limb to bring Science™ to us all.

Next post: Our first, less than modest, Sounding Rocket


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Space Program Tycoon

Image
Date:  1951-03-10 With new research on the horizon it's time to start training our Kerbonauts as test pilots and scheduling in new programmes. We're going to be working to meet two different mid-term objectives: Get a rocket plane programme up and running to perform crewed test flights. These will involve Kerbals and atmospheric flight, which poses quite different problems from our uncrewed sounding rocket. These will drop (eheheh) soon. Develop more sounding rockets capable of sub-orbital flights to do longer and faster 'downrange' missions on the way to our long-term objective of getting to Earth orbit. Roadmap heading in to 1952 Both of these programmes will provide more Science; especially landing our first crewed flight! Here's a sneak peek of a possible Y-Plane prototype (Y-Plane as in, Y are we wasting time with planes in a space program): Next up though, are our next sounding rocket flight(s)... Next Post: Continuing the SR-1 Project
Read more

Not every rocket's a winner

Image
My initial concept for the SR-2b was to adding staging to the rocket design to be able to get more distance out of it and perform sub-orbital re-entry tests: This design certainly fit the bill in some respects. On a good day it could achieve a height of 250km, double what we'd managed previously. Having similar fuel tanks and engines reduces the tooling cost significantly. It also had no issues around recovery of the payload vehicle (a biological sample)... when it worked. Despite these plus points, I ran in to a major issue with the design. Notice how severely tilted the wing fins are; this was the level of spin stabilisation required to achieve the needed level of spin to keep it going straight. Precession is a natural consequence that comes with spin stabilisation . If the spinning of the rocket is too strong, a large degree of precession occurs. Precession is best demonstrated with a spinning-top example: Source: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/top.html As our leve...
Read more