Tiny Titan

This craft I named Tiny Titan. A better name would have been - What was I thinking? After the success of the AliceK, I was ready to reach further out into space. This was not the ship to make that happen.

Tiny Titan

The lift stage has seven engines that ignite at launch. The outer ring of six have Rockomax Mainsail engines on a Rockomax X200-32 tank and a Rockomax X200-16 tank. I added AV-T1 Winglets for stability. Each engine/tank combo is mounted angled 5 degrees in at the top, for control. This combination of engines uses asparagus staging to drop empty tanks in balanced pairs. The center of the stage is also a Mainsail, Rockomax X200-32 tank with Rockomax X200-16 tank. The outer ring is well strutted to the orbit stage above. A Rockomax Decoupler separates the stages.

The orbit stage is six RT-10 solid boosters on TT-10 radial decouplers. Only two engines fire at a time. As they burn out, the next two ignite. Once they are used the center of the stage lights up the Rockomax Skipper engine mounted under a double stack of Rockomax X200-16 tanks with Advanced Canards added for stability. Another Rockomax Decoupler separates this stage from the remainder of the rocket.

Munar transfer is accomplished with four double stacks of FL-T200 tanks and Rockomax 48-7S engines. The tanks are mounted to girder segments because it looked cool. The tanks are secured with additional struts. The entire structure is ejected by radial decouplers when the tanks are emptied.

The lander/return stage uses a Rockomax X200-8 at top,  with a Rockomax X200-16 at bottom with 6 Rockomax 24-77 engines. Also mounted to this tank are three Batteries, six lights, and six landing struts. The smaller tank above has three radial chutes in case I bring the whole thing home. Above the lander stage is a FL-R1 RCS Fuel Tank and four RV-105 RCS Thruster Blocks.

Another decoupler can be used to separate the lander stage from the Mk1-2 Command Pod which also has three 3x2 solar panels on the sides and a main chute on top.

Tiny Titan on Mun

For all its promise this ship performs very poorly. To avoid exceeding terminal velocity the lift stage needs to be powered down to about 2/3 throttle but doing so really seems to save very little fuel. So why bother? The bigger issue is the orbit stage. By the time the Skipper engine fires the ship is only a few seconds away from apoapsis which is barely at about 53k at this point. Fortunately the Skipper is powerful enough to raise the apoapsis and reach circular orbit. So I guess in reality the stage accomplishes the job. It just isn't pretty.

The transfer stage does exactly what it was intended. So yeah, I did that on purpose. The lander stage also performs well - Go me.

The biggest issue is the lander stage is also the return stage. If you can land without circularizing or changing inclination then liftoff and return without circularizing, because you are Scott Manley, you can return to Kerbin with a little extra fuel. The rest of us are going to run out on the return trip. Even if you do, as long as you are in Kerbin's SOI, you can get home with this ship. In the next post I'll show you how.