Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 38
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.1

Description

The Ion Fastboat is the first product in KSC’s FastBurn™ line. By using a chemical ejection booster in tandem with a single Dawn engine and Xenon drop tanks, truly excessive interplanetary speeds can be achieved, cutting down trips from years to a mere few hundred days.

The main craft, seen above, is attached by a stack separator to a Rhino booster and reaction wheels. The Rhino provides around 5kms of delta-v to facilitate an easy ejection from Kerbin; once spent, the main craft decouples and fires up its ion drive. The ion TWR starts out at around 0.05 and initially drains from two out of the four large external tanks; this goes up to 0.11 after both pairs of externals have been depleted and jettisoned. Please note that the user is responsible for manually limiting the fuel flow for each stage, as Xenon will drain evenly across the vessel regardless of fuel lines.

The craft also has two reaction wheels and four RTGs, which provide enough power (through some weird math around electricity storage) to run the ion drive at 70% power even after the solar panels are jettisoned along with the external tanks. RCS and a docking port are included for docking maneuvers.

It’s hard to get an exact delta-v reading, as neither KSP nor KER know how to handle a staged Xenon craft like this. However, the central section of the ship without the external tanks gets nearly 9kms, and I suspect the total with the externals is around 40kms, maybe more.

Seats one. Snacks not included.

Hotel26 has also created his own FastBurn product here!

#

A stock rocket called Ion Fastboat. Built with 38 of the finest parts, its root part is dockingPort3.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.1.