KerbalX

Description

A stock rocket called Kitten I. Built with 109 of the finest parts, its root part is mk1pod.v2.

The Kitten I is a versatile vehicle, originally built in one of my career games. It’s initially lifted, Titan III/IV-style, by four Thumper SRBs. When the Thumpers burn out, they separate (promptly crashing back into each other just behind the craft and blowing up) and the lower stage’s Skipper engine takes over, propelling the vehicle onto a suborbital trajectory; after coasting up to space, the Skipper relights for the first portion of the circularisation burn.

Once the lower stage burns out and separates, the upper stage’s Terrier engine takes over and finishes the orbital insertion, while the lower stage falls back into Kerbin’s atmosphere. The lower stage has a Fuelled QBE Reentry Controller for control, a few OX-STAT solar panels to provide an additional electrical power reserve for launches in or into daylight, and parachutes for a soft landing. The reentry controller’s small Oscar-B fuel tank can be used for a small retrofire burn, taking off up to 80-100 m/s of downrange speed and making the stage land closer to KSC for increased recovery funds.

The Kitten I’s upper stage can burn the rest of its propellant to get the crew vehicle into a high orbit (once used up and separated, it can use its own deorbit/reentry controller and auxiliary fuel supply to deorbit and reenter, with its solar panels keeping the whole thing powered and its parachutes allowing a soft landing). Alternatively, for launches to rendezvous with a target in a low orbit, the upper stage can be detached from the crew vehicle and docked to the target to supply it with additional fuel and oxidiser (although the upper stage’s lack of its own monopropellant supply can make docking a bit tricky; I’ve found it best to use the craft’s RCS to align the whole vehicle with the target docking port before separating the upper stage from the crew vehicle, then separate the two and translate the crew vehicle out of the way so that the upper stage can dock, using the thrust from its Terrier engine [dialled down to a very, very low thrust setting] for the final approach and any remaining minor corrections).

The Kitten I’s original intended purpose was to provide a vehicle to return kerbals cheaply from orbiting craft to the surface of Kerbin; it would rendezvous, dock, and, later, deorbit using its ample monopropellant supply and RCS thrusters, and then use the twelve drogue parachutes ringing the craft for a soft landing (I chose them partly because the drogues, being smaller, would visually fit more easily than the big radial-mount main chutes, and partly because I wanted to build something that could safely soft-land on Kerbin using drogue chutes alone).

The big monopropellant tank acts as a heat sink during reentry, making the crew vehicle fairly resistant to overheating-induced explosions, although things can sometimes get a bit dicey if the supply of monopropellant is running low (requiring multiple aerobraking passes to reduce speed before the final reentry). Using a tank of unstable liquid that energetically decomposes if mildly provoked (for instance, by heating it) as a heat sink would most emphatically be a bad idea in real life, but this is KSP, where monopropellant (like any other resource) is completely inert except when burned in an RCS thruster or Puff engine.

Alternatively, the Kitten I can be used as a fairly cheap way to transport a kerbal, as well as some extra propellant, to an orbiting craft; to ferry kerbals between orbiting craft; or as a Clamp-O-Tron/Clamp-O-Tron Jr. docking-port adapter. The last of these, in fact, was the motivation for the particular launch featured in the attached photo album - I’d launched a Kerbal 1-5(b), which has only a single Clamp-O-Tron Jr. docking port, towards a Sally-Hut 1 with a VAB22 already docked, forgetting, until I got within docking range, that the Sally-Hut 1 is equipped solely with full-size Clamp-O-Tron ports, and that the VAB22 has only the single Clamp-O-Tron that it used to dock with the station. Once I realised that the 1-5(b) wouldn’t be able to dock, I backed it off to a safe distance and launched a Kitten I; the Kitten I rendezvoused with the station, separated into upper stage and crew vehicle, and docked, with the upper stage topping up the station’s supply of fuel and oxidiser and the crew vehicle providing an adapter that the Kerbal 1-5(b) could then dock to.

Another possible use is as a light-duty space tug for craft or debris equipped with Clamp-O-Tron or Clamp-O-Tron Jr. docking ports, by docking the crew transfer vehicle to the target and then using its monopropellant supply for an orbit-altering RCS burn. If the target isn’t in a very high orbit and isn’t very heavy, it can even deorbit objects this way, although its low-end parachute system means that it isn’t the best choice except for objects that have parachutes of their own (and also means that the vehicle should preferably be empty of crew when using it to deorbit something else).

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.0, although the original craft dates back a few versions (explaining the old-style Skipper).

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 109
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.0