KerbalX

Above: The Kaminari on a satellite-deployment mission to keostationary orbit (from Woomerang, the highest-latitude stock launch site, no less). As in, the Kaminari flies up into an approximately-keostationary orbit and releases the satellite, with the satellite itself performing only the final minor fine-tweaking of its orbit.

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: spaceplane
• Part Count: 283
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.1

Description

A recreation of the Soviet/Russian Energia-Buran space shuttle, which was intended as a counter to the American STS space shuttle (represented in KSP by the VAB13), but made only one spaceflight (a two-orbit unmanned test flight in November 1988) before the programme was shut down a couple years after the breakup of the Soviet Union (due to the end of the Cold War and a lack of money).

Unlike the VAB13 (or the real-life STS), the Kaminari’s main engines (as with those of the real-life Energia-Buran) are on the bottom end of the big external tank, rather than on the orbiter. As such:

• The main engines are discarded each flight rather than being recovered (this is one of the factors making the Kaminari considerably more expensive to use than the VAB13).
• Without the heavy main engines weighing down the aft fuselage, the Kaminari orbiter is lighter and less tail-heavy than the VAB13 (in fact, it can sometimes be mildly nose-heavy, though generally not excessively so), making it significantly easier to handle in subsonic gliding flight than the VAB13 (and less likely to balloon back upwards if overenthusiastically flared for landing).
• Launching in a heads-down configuration (i.e., one with the orbiter on the prograde side of the stack, so that, when gravity-turning, the vehicle pitches back [from the pilots’ perspectives] and the orbiter ends up upside-down on the lower side of the stack), the usual launch configuration for space shuttles, the SAS-induced main-engine pitch gimballing compensating for the vehicle’s offset center of mass causes the Kaminari to powerslide in the direction corresponding to that of the eventual desired orbit. In contrast, a shuttle with the main engine(s) mounted on the orbiter (such as the VAB13 or VAB21) will tend to initially powerslide in the wrong direction (unless launched from an already-significantly-tilted-back orientation, such as the stock Dynawing or the Dynawing X), requiring a considerable pitch input to tilt the stack over far enough to arrest this unwanted uprange drift and start the vehicle moving in the right direction.

The other immediately-obvious difference, as in real life, is that the Kaminari has four liquid-fuelled boosters (each powered by a four-Skipper RE-170 engine cluster), rather than the VAB13’s two Clydesdale SRBs. Each individual booster is somewhat less powerful than one of the VAB13’s Clydesdales, but this is outweighed by there being twice as many of them, and the Kaminari’s liquid boosters are more efficient to boot. The much-greater total booster thrust, plus the greater center-of-mass offset (a product both of the main engines’ mounting on the external tank rather than the orbiter, and of space constraints forcing one of the two pairs of boosters to be mounted significantly ventral of the vehicle’s center of mass), requires that the boosters be considerably throttled down late in first-stage flight to avoid a loss of pitch control as fuel and oxidiser burnoff shifts the vehicle’s center of mass more and more dorsally; as the boosters’ engines use independent throttling rather than responding to the main throttle controls, this is done using a KAL-1000 controller (mounted on the aft wall of the orbiter’s payload bay) which, when activated, smoothly ramps the booster engines from 100% thrust down to 40% over the course of ten seconds. Starting at about a minute after liftoff, closely monitor the pitch needle in the flight-control-input display below the staging pane; when the pitch-input needle comes within about half a notch of full nose-down authority, press 6 to tell the KAL to start throttling down the booster engines.

The more-efficient boosters, together with a somewhat-greater propellant-tankage capacity, give the Kaminari appreciably-better performance than the VAB13 for an identical payload, if you can handle the greater pricetag.

A stock rocket called Kaminari. Built with 283 of the finest parts, its root part is mk3Cockpit.Shuttle.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.1.

About the name: Kaminari is the name of the main character of an in-universe anime/manga series in the webcomic Rain. Given that a) I love Rain, and b) Kaminari is a really-cool-sounding name (which, to make things even better, just so happens to start with K)…

Above: Several different views of the Kaminari in the VAB.

Left: The Kaminari orbiter, safely landed on the hard desert floor at Dessert Airfield (ersatz Edwards Air Force Base, I presume?) following its mission to KEO and back.

Below: The Tugginator 1 tows the Kaminari orbiter the rest of the way to the Dessert runway.