Скачать или смотреть Catching a Super Heavy Booster with the Tower in Stock(ish) KSP1 | Kerbal Space Program

After SpaceX actually managed to catch B12 with Mechazilla during IFT-5, I figured it would be a good time to show my 62% scale Starship stack doing the same thing in stock Kerbal Space Program! This video is just the booster launch and landing, but if you want a detailed build breakdown let me know!

I made sure the designs worked using only stock+DLC parts, but the full stack with the tower eventually got to just under 3000 total parts, so I needed to take additional steps to reduce that part count as much as possible for performance reasons, especially on my baked potato of a computer. The solution for the was turning every "dumb" structural subassembly into a single part in Blender (OLM, HSR, grid fins, stringers, tower supports, chopstick arms, flaps, ship TPS, etc), which got the total part count to a much more manageable 1400. I also made a lot of parts stronger and/or massless and added a bunch of fuel units to the fuel tanks to get realistic mass fractions on the vehicles so they'd perform similarly, as well as just copying and editing the configs for Swivels and Skiffs to make Raptor 2s and RVacs instead of overclocking them with KALs (also saved parts).

The grid fins and flaps actually work (the flaps much more than the grid fins), and there are tons of controllers for all kinds of systems on the booster and ship, and I even made some GSE including a megacrane, ship and booster SPMTs, and a vertical payload integration vehicle for loading and/or unloading freshly caught ships before restacking.

Almost everything on the booster is automated on various KAL controllers from ignition to boostback/orbit insertion for various payload upmass (and even deorbit and belly flop with variable downmass for the ship), other than some minor attitude control and manual landing burn start. The launch sequence basically goes like this:

0. When first deploying tower, start Power Generator, turn on lights, check docking port connections
1. Press AG1 to start countdown
2. Lock to prograde when Launch 1 controller is at 25s
3. Set target as launchpad if I forgot to right after liftoff
4. Lock to anti-target when time to apoapsis is 0s during boostback
5. Lock stability when Navball cursor is between 15 and 20 degrees
6. Use RCS translation to make initial adjustments to trajectory and maintain it on the way down
8. Set throttle to ~1 TWR level and press AG2 to start landing burn at around 500m altitude
9. Use RCS to get lined up for catch
10. Switch to tower and press Backspace/Abort AG to close chopsticks
11. Switch back to booster and use RCS translation to connect with grabbing units on the arms
12.* Switch to ship and wait until ~30s past apoapsis to hit AG2 for orbit insertion
13.** Line up booster with OLM umbilical using SVI on various grip pad stabilizer pistons
14.** Lower booster into and dock with airlock on OLM
15.** Use engineer to re-apply ground clamps for next launch

*Still trying to perfect orbit insertion timing/calibration, since it seems to still vary by payload
**13-15 are still being worked on because I haven't really managed to find a perfect solution other than a crane yet, which I'm trying to avoid because using one kind of defeats the purpose of Mechazilla

MUSIC:
"Lucid Dream" by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio