I'm going to try that. Really, what's the worst that could happen? i'm not going for a Firestorm as much as a generic UFO, though. With a big ugly node on top for storing the five missiles I added.
The first version had two large issues with the engine: It not only drained all the fuel from the missiles, it wasn't strong enough to lift the ungaily contraption. I fiddle with the craft, replacing the Poodle with a Skipper and adding a small steel bar between the missile pod and the rest.
It went well enough, although trying to get to a proper hovering throttle lead to rising up and falling down unstoppably, exploding and killing..wait, no, the command pod was just separated from the fuel tank that was the first part. Well, let's try that again. The second test discovered that full throttle caused a gentle lifting off, while one tick less caused falling. Trying to find the point where lift
just equals weight discovered a new flaw: Fuel capacity.
These launches, incidentally, left no further than
30 pieces of debris, not counting the parts that counted as vehicles or which included the manned component of the vehicles.
Abruptly switching gears, I decide to try launching a probe into interstellar space, as well as using asparagus staging.
It looks silly, but let's see how it does! One thing that becomes obvious immediately is that there are structural issues, in the sense that the main engine got left behind on the launchpad due to evidently falling off.
The relaunch's takeoff, while faster than the original "Mainsail fell off" version, is still a bit more sluggish than many rockets. Still, it works well. Before long, I'm releasing my first set of fuel tanks. Overheat in the main engine remains pretty steady at 50% of the bar or so, but it's still a bit worrisome...
At the one-minute mark, we're at 5,740 meters and our second set of fuel tanks is half-out. Those tanks are released just under half a minute later, as we were in the middle of our gravity turn. One of them hit one of the remaining side engines! To avoid unbalance, I release it worriedly. Without stability systems, it soon enough begins rocketing towards the sea. By the two-minute mark, I have my spacecraft pretty much under control.
The mainsail gets released at a bit over 30,000 meters. By this point I had hoped to at least be in orbit, but instead I'm on one of my last stages (after this one big orange tank of fuel I have just a little Rockomax-8 one and the probe's own ion engines) and still struggling to get into orbit.
We hit space just after the four-minute mark, precisely a minute before apoapsis. Our last big engine has 3/4 or 4/5 if a tank left. We've got a pack of cigarettes, it's dark in space, a and someone left a set of sunglasses on the probe.
Hit it.,
We get into a slightly elliptical (100,742a/70,944p) orbit, perhaps 45 degrees off the equatorial, and still have 20-25% of our stage's fuel left. Now for a maneuver node...or several, each pushing the orbit THAT much further out, burning prograde at the apoapsis...wait, that doesn't sound right.
After some checking and stuff, I correct my escaping stuff and ready myself for a one-minute burn that whoops, I kept typing after alt-tabbing to KSP and wound up dropping my fuel. If I can still manage the ~1,230 m/s Δv, I'll get a nice little orbit tangent to that of Kerbin (of course) and with a periapsis a bit under eleven billion meters from the Sun.
And I did it. I still have a third of the fuel tank left.
For the first time, I have sent something out into the icy black of interplanetary space. No idea where the little Asparagus Probe will go, or what it could do...but the sky is no longer the limit for the little green men.
Or have ants provide the side thrust.
Ants?
