Zaxton Space Program: Luna 2: The Quest for Kethane

Luna 2: Doin' it Right.

So, way back during the first Heinlein mission, you might recall me vaguely mentioning having brought along a probe named Luna in the nosecone of the craft.

Now, Luna was constructed using parts from the fairly popular Kethane mod for Kerbal Space Program, an add-on that adds resource gathering gameplay to the game, allowing you to essentially create fuel in-situ in a properly designed craft.

The Luna probe, with its clumsily slow Ion drive and not enough power to really run it, wasn't all that helpful in finding the kethane from orbit, since its orbit wasn't very efficient. If you want to scan the whole surface of a body, orbit it pole-to-pole. As it rotates underneath you, your flight path moves across the surface, and after a number of revolutions you'll have pretty well mapped the whole thing.

Barbara on the Richeleau Heavy

Of course, once you find the kethane, you have to actually collect and use it. Nothing I'm aware of can actually use Kethane as fuel, so I'm also going to need that craft to either carry enough fuel to move the Kethane somewhere useful, or have the collector craft capable of the converting the kethane directly into fuel for itself.

Positively Titanic Thrust

This concept has actually been come up with for real-world space travel, most popularly in the Mars Direct program.

Now, the other major problem is that ZAXA (Zaxtonian Aerospace Exploration Agency) is a little nervous about sending perfectly good little Kerbals up to the Mun again after Heinlein, at least until a less ad-hoc rescue infrastructure exists. The decision was therefore made to take a mechanized jeb module and use that for the basis of the craft design.

SRB Sep and Burn.

Now, the finished unit, which we're going to call Barbara for the sake of continuing our theme with names that tangentially mean something, was going to wind up being the biggest object I ever put into space both in terms of volume and mass, so I had to construct it a 3.5m launch vehicle using the Very Large Rocket parts added by KV Rocketry.

Staging and Circularization Burn all at once.

The launch actually went rediculously smoothly, following a gravity turn right out of textbooks and not even suffering overmuch from a slight delay in staging between the SRB and the first liquid stage.

It also turned out, less from math or intuition than a happy and nifty coincidence, that I could get the apoapsis all the way up to 80km on the first stage. That lead to a nifty trick where that first stage de-orbits properly, and I could photograph the first stage tumbling away even while the circularization burn was happening.

Barbara unfurls herself

So, once we got up there I realized we had enough fuel left in the remaining launch stage to execute a Hohmann Transfer burn, so I set that up, popped out the radiator fins and the solar panels, and let that pretty well handle itself. The radiators are a novel addition from the Interstellar pack that I frankly like - the game now tracks waste heat and leaves it up to you to manage it, which is frankly a big problem in space.

Hohmann Burn on the Night Side. Sorry.

From there, the landing went smoothly, and there was literally nothing else to do but to camp (in the gaming sense) on Barbra and let the kethane drills do the work.

Next time I'm going to show you what I plan to do with all this fuel.