KerbalX

Description

A vehicle for klawing asteroids and tugging them out of, or occasionally into, harm’s way. Has a big efficient upper stage for oodles of delta V, and docking ports to allow refuelling or recrewing by other spacecraft.

This craft is optimised for grabbing the asteroid and thrusting it into a stable orbit; it does not have parachutes to actually land the thing, which is a task for another ship.

(The launcher’s core stage does have parachutes, but these are for landing the stage - built to be fully recoverable - itself.)

Can also be used to klaw other things besides asteroids, although it’d usually be overkill for the job at hand except in extreme situations.

The RCS is mainly useful for fore-and-aft velocity trimming, as all the quads are well ahead of the craft’s center of mass, causing it to rotate badly if you try to use them to translate laterally.

The core stage’s Mainsail engine has a tendency to blow up during reentry, due to said Mainsail’s great mass (which causes the stage to be most aerodynamically stable going tail-first, overpowering the destabilising influence of the six fins just above the engine) and the stage’s high entry speed and (relatively-) steep descent angle (due to the upper stage’s low thrust-to-weight ratio, the optimum trajectory is somewhat lofted; by the time the core stage burns out and separates, the vehicle is already only 250-300 m/s short of orbital speed; and the core stage continuously accelerates as it falls back towards the atmosphere, due to gravity; all this means that the reentering core stage hits the atmosphere at about a -15° descent angle and reaches a top speed of ~2250 m/s - having been accelerated approximately 400 m/s by gravity on the way down - around the time it descends through 30 km AMSL, resulting in very severe aerodynamic shock compression heating). Fortunately, the sudden loss of the Mainsail’s mass abruptly massively destabilises the stage, causing it to violently swap ends, with the resulting massive drag increase almost instantaneously slowing the stage to well below stuff-blowing-up speeds (with peak decelerations in excess of 20 Gs), preventing anything else from being fried on the way in.

Originally, all three Mainsails were old-timey; I swapped the core stage’s engine for a new-version Mainsail, but left the booster engines with the old style because I thought the mix of new and old engine styles looked nice.

A stock rocket called Lemur I. Built with 105 of the finest parts, its root part is landerCabinSmall.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.10.1.

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 105
• Pure Stock
• KSP: 1.10.1