KerbalX

Description

This spacecraft consists of a manned capsule lofted into orbit by the Globus stage-and-a-half booster.

The Globus has three engines, all started on the ground; the two side Reliant engines are jettisoned partway up to save weight, while the center Swivel sustainer engine keeps burning until the rocket reaches orbit.

A stock rocket called Globus-Quicksilver. Built with 105 of the finest parts, its root part is adapterSize2-Size1.

My recreation of the Mercury-Atlas missions, incorporating the original Atlas’s iconic stage-and-a-half system (with two booster engines on a ring-shaped thrust structure and a single central sustainer engine firing through the center of the booster structure) plus my attempt at a faithful rendition of the whole Mercury spacecraft and ancillaries. The Mercury’s retrorocket pack (with three solid-fuelled sepratrons) is mounted on the bottom of the capsule’s heatshield (hidden inside the interstage tube until the capsule separates from the rocket), while the escape tower is on top of the parachute end of the capsule (I had to do some fiddling with surface-mounted octagonal struts and part clipping in order to get the parachute and escape tower both attached on the same end of the capsule).

Since stock KSP doesn’t have an LES that’s the right size for the Mk1 command pod, I had to improvise with struts and sepratrons. Note that (as can be seen in the staging panel) what looks like three sepratrons in the escape tower is actually fifteen, clipped into each other (and offset by one pixel to eliminate the ugly z-fighting that occurs when two parts exactly coincide, while still maintaining the visual appearance of three rocket nozzles as per the real-life Mercury LES). While testing the homemade LES, I found that, although three sepratrons did, in fact, generate enough thrust to lift the capsule free of the rocket, the thrust-to-weight ratio of the capsule-cum-firing-escape-tower was just barely above 1, and the capsule rose far too slowly for this to make an effective LES. Increasing this to nine sepratrons greatly improved TWR and separation rate, but it was still a bit slow, so I went to fifteen.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.0.

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 105
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.0