KerbalX

Hercules

Reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle

The Herculese was built in an effort to improve ease-of-maintenance relative to other super heavy-lift launch vehicles. This lowers the lifetime costs of the vehicle, and thus the launch costs. Early in development it was realized that the use of thermal tiles was one of the most significant maitenance costs for other reusable rockets, and so it was decided that a metallic heat-shield, that would be structually stonger and need little servicing, would have to be fitted. But due to the lower safe use temperature of such a heat-shield, the vehicle had to be more blunt, so that the shock cone would be further away from the heat-shield on reentry. It was decided that the ship would be of a double-hulled design, increasing the surface area.

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The ship can carry a rather spacious payload of 200 tons to orbit at most, while being fully reusable. The payload mass simulator that is mounted in the download is a little over 200t, and that is probably the absolute maximum you could take to orbit. It’s adviced that you use a lighter payload, as the margins are very slim. You might want to take this out for your first flights.
The ship also has 4 ore tanks to simulate the weight of the heat shield. You can take these out if you want, they are located in the payload bay.
You need about 700m/s of deltav to land the booster, but it really depends. Just make sure you have enough.
On reentry, the rear flaps are actuated manually only, either through the panel in the hinges themselves or the KAL-1000 controller at the front of the ship. Strive for a reentry AoA of 60°. At some point the ship will naturally point retrograde when you are slowed down enough. You need about 300m/s at least in order to land the orbiter.

Action groups:
1: Stage booster.
2: Toggle vaccume engines.
3: Toggle atmospheric engines.
4: Toggle payload bay hinge lock.
5: Toggle payload bay hinge position.
6: Undock payload.
7: -
8: -
9: -
0: Toggle proppelant draining.

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 496
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.12.3