Explosives
Jul. 12th, 2018 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_sky_callsIn the early game, there are contracts to rescue Kerbals from competing space programs that have become trapped in orbit. The mission is pretty straight forward; go up with a craft, have the Kerbal EVA over to that craft, come home. But that leaves the module they were in still in orbit cluttering up space.
Space is big so there is a lot of room up there to leave things essentially lying about. The odds of running into one of those bits of debris accidentally is extremely low.
But not zero.
So, if you can, you want to not leave stuff up there. In the case of booster stages, I design them in such a way that I can discard the stage before completely circularizing the craft's orbit and have the booster reenter the atmosphere and burn up. Those modules you are rescuing Kerbals from are a different matter. With the Tech Level 6 node Actuators you get the Advanced Grabbing Unit with witch you can grab things and haul them down out of orbit,.
But the Tech Level 6 node Precision Engineering is more valuable. It has the Probodobodyne HECS probe core, the Communotron DTS-M1, the RA-2 Relay Antenna, the very useful Cubic Octagonal Strut, and, if you also have the Kerbal Inventory System mod. . .
EXPLOSIVES!
As if Kerbal rockets weren't explody enough.
KIS/KAS allows you to attach a block of explosives to any object and blow it up. After attaching the explosives part, you select the Setup button which gives you two settings to change. The first is the countdown time which defaults to 10 seconds. Ten seconds is not a lot of time so you will want to make he delay longer. I tend to set it to 180 seconds. Three minutes is plenty of time to get to a safe distance.
The second setting is the Explosive Radius. This is how big the explosion is. The default is the maximum of 10 meters, which is plenty for blowing up a single module but if you want to decommission a space station, it might not be enough.
The third button is Activate. Click this and then get the hell away because there is no way to stop the countdown. I have accidentally selected Activate before changing the timer and so needed to get away fast to not get caught in the explosion. To avoid that I went to GameData\KIS\parts\bomb1\part.cfg and changed the the default to delay = 100. That way it gives me at least 100 seconds instead of just 10.
Mission Designation : YT-6
Rocket Model : Yivotanang B-III
Mission Objectives : Rescue Lingor Kerman from low Kerbin orbit
Total Mass (Mass to Orbit) : 40.2 tons (6.0 tons)
Total delta-V (dV to Orbit) : 4,905 m/s (1,372 m/s)
Surface TWR : 1.28
Contract for Construction : Year 2, Day 283
Nominal Build Time : 25 days
Total Cost : 29,294 funds
Launch Site : KSC
Launch Date/Time : Year 2, Day 319, 05:16
Pilot : Magmin Kerman
Engineer : Joepont Kerman
The space above Earth has about 1,500 functioning satellites and some 17,800 other objects large enough to be tracked. But there are also an estimated 29,000 pieces of larger debris, 670,000 pieces of debris between marble and baseball sized and 170,000,000 bits of debris smaller than a marble. All moving at orbital speeds. A paint flake moving at 29,000 km/h will make a significant crater in laminated glass.
That's a lot of junk but, again, space is big. Really big. Even with that much stuff up there, the distances between each piece is fairly large so the odds of running into anything significant is pretty small. Even so, it is suspected that at least 8 satellites have been destroyed by space junk, each one adding thousands if not millions of pieces to the orbiting mine field.
It the real world, blowing something up with a block of explosives would be an absolutely insane things to do. Explosions do not turn things into a cloud of harmless vapor. Explosions turn things into death swarms of millions of tiny things, all moving at orbital velocities. The movie “Gravity” was a fairly awful movie but it does sort of present how badly debris in space could be.
And then each piece of debris that hits something else will cause even more debris. Theoretically, this could cascade to the point where there is so much debris in orbit that every satellite already up there would be destroyed and any attempt to launch a spacecraft through that hell storm would also be destroyed. Kessler Syndrome could trap us on Earth.
Thankfully KAS explosives will vaporize things within a certain radius, leaving no debris whatsoever. And the game is able to track any piece of debris. Plus, some debris such as aeroshell panels, simply cease to exist once they are outside of the 2.5 km physics limit.
And so, after Lingor Kerman was rescued and Joepont blew up his module, Magmin piloted the craft to rendezvous with a debris module from a previous mission and Joepont blew that up, too.
Mission Statistics
Total Mission Time : 1 hour, 53 min
Landing Site : 381 km east of KSC
Space is big so there is a lot of room up there to leave things essentially lying about. The odds of running into one of those bits of debris accidentally is extremely low.
But not zero.
So, if you can, you want to not leave stuff up there. In the case of booster stages, I design them in such a way that I can discard the stage before completely circularizing the craft's orbit and have the booster reenter the atmosphere and burn up. Those modules you are rescuing Kerbals from are a different matter. With the Tech Level 6 node Actuators you get the Advanced Grabbing Unit with witch you can grab things and haul them down out of orbit,.
But the Tech Level 6 node Precision Engineering is more valuable. It has the Probodobodyne HECS probe core, the Communotron DTS-M1, the RA-2 Relay Antenna, the very useful Cubic Octagonal Strut, and, if you also have the Kerbal Inventory System mod. . .
EXPLOSIVES!
As if Kerbal rockets weren't explody enough.
KIS/KAS allows you to attach a block of explosives to any object and blow it up. After attaching the explosives part, you select the Setup button which gives you two settings to change. The first is the countdown time which defaults to 10 seconds. Ten seconds is not a lot of time so you will want to make he delay longer. I tend to set it to 180 seconds. Three minutes is plenty of time to get to a safe distance.
The second setting is the Explosive Radius. This is how big the explosion is. The default is the maximum of 10 meters, which is plenty for blowing up a single module but if you want to decommission a space station, it might not be enough.
The third button is Activate. Click this and then get the hell away because there is no way to stop the countdown. I have accidentally selected Activate before changing the timer and so needed to get away fast to not get caught in the explosion. To avoid that I went to GameData\KIS\parts\bomb1\part.cfg and changed the the default to delay = 100. That way it gives me at least 100 seconds instead of just 10.
Mission Designation : YT-6
Rocket Model : Yivotanang B-III
Mission Objectives : Rescue Lingor Kerman from low Kerbin orbit
Total Mass (Mass to Orbit) : 40.2 tons (6.0 tons)
Total delta-V (dV to Orbit) : 4,905 m/s (1,372 m/s)
Surface TWR : 1.28
Contract for Construction : Year 2, Day 283
Nominal Build Time : 25 days
Total Cost : 29,294 funds
Launch Site : KSC
Launch Date/Time : Year 2, Day 319, 05:16
Pilot : Magmin Kerman
Engineer : Joepont Kerman
The space above Earth has about 1,500 functioning satellites and some 17,800 other objects large enough to be tracked. But there are also an estimated 29,000 pieces of larger debris, 670,000 pieces of debris between marble and baseball sized and 170,000,000 bits of debris smaller than a marble. All moving at orbital speeds. A paint flake moving at 29,000 km/h will make a significant crater in laminated glass.
That's a lot of junk but, again, space is big. Really big. Even with that much stuff up there, the distances between each piece is fairly large so the odds of running into anything significant is pretty small. Even so, it is suspected that at least 8 satellites have been destroyed by space junk, each one adding thousands if not millions of pieces to the orbiting mine field.
It the real world, blowing something up with a block of explosives would be an absolutely insane things to do. Explosions do not turn things into a cloud of harmless vapor. Explosions turn things into death swarms of millions of tiny things, all moving at orbital velocities. The movie “Gravity” was a fairly awful movie but it does sort of present how badly debris in space could be.
And then each piece of debris that hits something else will cause even more debris. Theoretically, this could cascade to the point where there is so much debris in orbit that every satellite already up there would be destroyed and any attempt to launch a spacecraft through that hell storm would also be destroyed. Kessler Syndrome could trap us on Earth.
Thankfully KAS explosives will vaporize things within a certain radius, leaving no debris whatsoever. And the game is able to track any piece of debris. Plus, some debris such as aeroshell panels, simply cease to exist once they are outside of the 2.5 km physics limit.
And so, after Lingor Kerman was rescued and Joepont blew up his module, Magmin piloted the craft to rendezvous with a debris module from a previous mission and Joepont blew that up, too.
Mission Statistics
Total Mission Time : 1 hour, 53 min
Landing Site : 381 km east of KSC
