 Alright, hello everyone! You might know me from my channel, which would be the case if you're watching this on my channel. I am Amy, share a title from Vintage Space. Cheers to you. I guess I'll let you introduce your own stuff now. Hello Amy! So glad to have you here! I am so glad to have you here. And yes, I'm Scott Manley in case you hadn't know, and I didn't know. And I am not an astronaut, I play one on the internet. We have Kerbal Space Program here, and you, with all your amazing history of space knowledge stuff, have some real interesting corners which you are going to challenge me with. I think today we're going to challenge you to go to Mars as per Warner Fun Brown in the 1950s. To Mars! So I show a three-stage rocket here with a little mini third stage, I guess. But basically this thing, this thing is insane, right? It's something like 5,000 tons with 50 engines, and then 22 engines on the second stage, and then five engines in a third stage. This is what I've got. And it uses, you know, because cryogenic liquid oxygen was the fuel of the future. No, they're all about nitric acid and hydrazine, so basically an environmental nightmare and pretty much toxic to anyone nearby. Yup. It has wings on it as well. Yes, because you need to reuse that glider so that you can launch it multiple, multiple times to build your space station before you go to Mars. So it has to land. It's also quite to reuse the first stage as well. Yes, yes they did. So can you, can you do that? I'm going to fill up on very important fuel here. This is a, you know, golden state of mind from ale industries. It is a beer made during a hop shortage, and so they use tea instead. I found this because it looks pretty today. A fluctuate whiskey inspired by craft beer. It's also quite delicious. I've also had a decent amount of it, so. And you're not going to be doing the flying, so you can really get toasted. I don't have to be sober. I just have to tell you what to do. Yes. Well, I'm going to start with that first stage or that final stage, not the first stage, because you know, well, how hard could it be? Actually, I should just forget about the second stage and go and see if I can make this thing fly because they are in lies danger. Yes. Right? Yes. We are going to have this thing probably falling out of the sky. So first of all, we need to switch to symmetry mode and we get two of them. It's got, you've got, so you, it's got two wings towards the top and two much larger wings towards the bottom of the stage. Like the wings insert almost level with the engines, which looking at a drawing of it right now feels like a scary spot to have wings. Hope for the least number of explosions or at least the most entertaining kind of explosions. Do you have, how does a tailplane set up on these? Is it like a tail here or do we have tail planes on each wing? There are, there are little, like, I don't know what the right word for it is, like little, yeah, little, like, upy, okay. Here's, here's how I'm not, here's how I'm not an engineer, especially should we, like, can we preface this by saying it's 9 30 at night and I've been up since six and words are not my strong suit. So if your wing is like this, it's got little upy bits like this on top of the wing. They're like mini tails. They're about halfway down the, only on the big wings though, the bottom wings halfway down and they're like three quarters and they extend about a quarter beyond the wing, if that makes sense. That, that does actually, um, yeah. Yeah, okay, so I'm going to do that. And then what we also need to know, I think about it is, I think they're only looking at pictures, I think they're only on the upper, what I imagine is the upper portion of the wing relative to the pilots, pilots canopy. This is great too, because I've never successfully built anything with wings in Kerbal, so I've never ridden it when I can do this. This is awesome. It is actually way harder to build things with wings than it is to build rockets. See, rockets can kind of fly just through their sheer power, whereas anything with wings requires an understanding of aerodynamics. You know, you can make, oh, you can make a brick fly with enough rocket power, right? Yeah. But making something fly with wings, you have to kind of think about what you're doing. Oh, look at that. Truly von Braun. I mean, I know you're a professional effectively at this, but like, I'm amazed. Oh, you're not doing that. You're not making, oh, that's not good. That's not good. So what's happening here is the center of lift is in front of the center of mass, and that makes it aerodynamically unstable. Well, we didn't kill anyone. I get really attached to them. So all I'm doing is I'm moving these wings backwards. So the reason is that there's too much weight, wait a second, there's too much weight back here and too much lift. So I can just grab these wings and slide them back and that should make the thing a little more stable. And now we maybe know why von Braun's wings are awkwardly directly next to the engines. Well, I was reading and apparently the design that we kind of know about is, in part, designed by a cartoon artist from Disney because his designs were a little more practical. And the Disney designer decided to want to make it look a little more, you know, what's the word? Like crowd-pleasing? Crowd-pleasing, yes. There's some more artistry involved than just straight-up engineering. Okay, no, it is still not liking that. That's not awesome. You know what? Oh my god. Wow. How are they not dead? Good on you guys. Cheers, boys. Science, science. I'm going to actually see if this is stable after I burned all the fuel, but I'm also going to shift these wings back a little further. It's these big ones. Maybe if I scale these wings down a little, not quite that much. The big ones? No, the ones at the front, if they're a little... I'm going to learn. I'm going to learn. They are quite small in the drawing. So are they too big that they're generating too much lift for the thrust that's at the rear? Right. And so the center of mass, if we bring this up, center of mass is like right there. Right. And the center of lift is in front of it. So there, that is our problem. Oh. Sorry, I'm leaning away from the mic so I can see in the screen. Yeah. You know, in aviation and spacecraft design and everything, it's quite common that they have to put like ballast in things to keep it stable. Yeah, look at this. I have to move that way forward. Okay, I'm going to take these and just move that. I mean, we could, we could double up and like fill it with water as ballast and then release it into the ionosphere with like project high water because science, right? Yeah, we could. This is a happy place. This is a happy place. Let's go to the happy place. Oh, that's less of a happy place. Ah. It's still a bit unstable. And that, that really is a bad sign. Okay. Can I ask a question that's maybe a dumb question, but I'll preface this by saying I am not the engineer here. Is it going to make a difference that we're only going to be flying this thing in the upper atmosphere? Well, we eventually have to land it. I guess we do have to land it. Here's the thing, right? Notice how I have burned fuel and it is now a lot more stable. Yeah, except that it's sideways. How is it flying sideways? No, just because I'm turning so I can try and aim for the runway. So I've now got it back under control because I have, oh, wait a second. Where's the gear? There we go. We're going to try to land it on the runway here. See this? Oh my God. So the beautiful thing is that because I burned the fuel, I moved the center of mass. Right, right. And by moving the center of mass, it became stable again. So it's unstable. Okay, now I need to... Oh my God, it's really fast. Okay, I kind of did a little hard. A little hard, he said, that there's just fire issuing from the space plane, but it survived and our carbon. It was a dead stick landing. That was, I mean, for a dead stick landing like Caronia. Yeah, and I stopped on the runway in plenty of time. Yep. And the crew is fine. I need a number from you. Yeah. How many engines in the second stage? The second stage. So we're counting the... So that's, yeah, okay. It's the middle stage of the main rocket. 22 main propulsion rocket motors. Okay, what's the layer? Are they later in range? They look to be... Let me see if I can find a better image. They look to be honeycomb-esque. Honeycomb-esque. Okay, so they're like... So it looks like they're sort of lines, like they're rows. So they're like here and then they're sort of like, they're space so that it's like, they're here and then they're kind of offset from the other stage, from the other ones and then they're back so it forms a honeycomb. Okay, how's this looking in terms of proportions? Let's zoom in a bit. It could use a bigger... This stage could be bigger down here, I think. Let's just try and fit 22 engines on this thing. I think if we then go from there and just continue the line of that onto the first stage, it'll look good. It'll look like a Frankensteinian monster but it'll look good. Wow, is Frankensteinian an adjective? It is now. That's 22 engines and there it is. It can manage one sheet, which is enough. That looks pretty cool. That actually looks amazing. Okay, now we need to get that first stage. Okay. I'm getting excited. I have no idea if I have enough delta to do that's the only thing. Should we talk about retro rockets? You mean for landing this thing? Yeah, for deorbit. I didn't think about that. Is it complete? The rockets on this for deorbit. We'll just turn the thing around for now. Yeah, okay. Ooh, I like blue. Oh, that looks awesome. Well, let's get with blue for now. Let's just make it blue. Is that... I don't want to say how many engines is that. So that's three groups of eight, so 24. You math. You math, 51. I'll do math. There's so many engines. There's so many engines. Again, we're not sure this will get off the ground so I'm going to save it and we're... I'm actually going to put this on like a launch structure to hold it still. Yeah, that's because it will probably crush these poor engines under the weight of the fuel. Yeah. The von Braun proposal was over 5,000 tons. That is... That was just to get to all of it. 5,000 tons. How many... Do you know... How many... What was the 7 and 5 weight? 3,000. 3,000. Okay. I love that you know that I'm talking about. Almost twice as much. Yeah. Do we need to think about, and I don't know if the system actually had it off the top of my head, but hold down arms to let it build up thruster. We just kind of like... Yeah, I think we're just going to go... For lack of a real word. Yeah. We're not going to go with the thing, but we will have to add wings. Let's see if this works. No. Not quite as expected. Oh, it's just on fire. Are the two first and second? Are they all... What has happened? I can't even tell. The window is like tiny on my street. Like what is happening right now? It is trying. It is trying. Oh. And they're still alive. Oh. The whole rocket exploded and then they were showered with a storm of rocket nozzles. That's really, really funny. I love the idea that your rocket explodes. It's mostly intact, but all of your rocket nozzles just kind of like pepper the area. Let's be clear. They would have been covered in nitric acid and hydrogen. So, they'd be dead. You know, I believe the Russians call this kind of combination the devil's venom. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, let's try this. Let's shrunk it down, put it on a diet. Maybe it will get airborne into these animals. So I found a couple of versions of this that looks like they have wings on that bottom stage. Would that help or would that just make it worse? Oh, we absolutely need wings on this bottom stage. And I suspect we need a big pair of wings here. Yeah. Maybe smaller pair of wings here. The images I'm seeing have two large wings at the bottom. Just the two. Oh, wait. Hang on. No, four. Okay. Four. Weird angles. Yeah, fins. We have fins. Finish. Basically fins, but they're massive fins. Like that size of fins? I got a Skype. Maybe not quite that massive. They're not dwarfing. In these images, they are not dwarfing the upper fins, the upper wings. Okay. So... A little bit bigger than the big wings on the upper stage has that for vague, vague directions. That is stupidly vague. And I will endeavor to take your design specifications and turn it into a flying vehicle. Ah, yay. There you go. I think those are too small. How do those look? I'm going to say that looks pretty cool regardless. It looks pretty cool. It looks way too big, but... It looks way too big. Oh, I like the look of those just fins. Yes. As I learned... As I learned, I think it was Jim Lovell who mentioned at a Apollo 13 event that fins were Von Braun's trademark, so can't not have fins. Well, Von Braun was working in an era when he needed them, right? And the Saturn V had them because they weren't sure, but in the end, the flight computer was capable of handling it. And so the next generation of Saturn V wouldn't have the fins, but of course they never... There was no next generation. There was no, but they had it. They had it designed. Oh, it's still not right. Come on. I don't... I don't even know. There's just so much fire going up the rocket right now. Really? I did the math on Von Braun's engines and they're actually a lot more powerful than I expected. So he might have been very optimistic with his math on this. Also, he was pretty optimistic with his timetable, but whatever. That's so many engines. Yes. Oh my god, I'm just like... I love the line down the side of the screen of just like... Yep. Yep, that's all those engines. Oh, and we're losing control. Ah, why? You see, we need bigger wings here. You were telling me those wings were too small. I told you the wings had to be bigger. No, I believe that if you looked at the recording... Not the big, big ones. I mean, try it with the big, big ones. Maybe I'm wrong. The big ones will be awesome, but I will definitely... I'll make these bigger, right? And you know what? I think... The other two. So I didn't notice that they should all four be big. Oh, okay. So we'll make them all big. So... I don't know if that's going to make enough of the difference to losing control or not. You know what? What will make a difference is just making them bigger. Okay. Longer and bigger at the root, just increasing the control surface area. Right. It can only lead to good things. This is a monster. Oh my god. Right. I mean, the Soviets built the NK33 for their N1 rocket, which was the best thrust to mass ratio of any rocket. It was insane. Until the Merlin, but it also had amazing specific impulse. But there's interesting history, and I don't know. I need to go through this and like make a map of how it worked. And maybe you know offhand because you never forget anything you hear or read, but like different design bureaus, right? Like it's not the same as the way NASA has centers that all work together that do different things. Like there are different design bureaus, different chiefs at the heads doing different things. And the thing with the N1 rocket was that they wanted... I can't remember. It transferred so many people, but at some point it ended up under Korolev. But I think it was Korolev then that wanted bigger engines for it. But the guy running the bureau that had the technology to build bigger engines said, I can build your engines, but I don't want to work on the N1 rocket. I want to build this rocket. And I think he wanted to do nuclear propulsion with these rockets. And Korolev... Was it Glushka? I can't remember the names on the top of my head. I'd honestly, I'd need to double check my notes on that. But because... And then Korolev was like, I'm not using something that's that scary. I want to use this fuel. He's like, well, then I'm not building you a rocket engine. So you have to go with this guy. And this guy was like, well, we only have the... What was the engine called? Not the N1. That's the rocket. The NK33. So he's like, well, we have this. We can't make it any better. We don't know how to make it bigger and more powerful, but we can just shove a bunch more of them to give you the extra lift that you want. Because the N1 was not designed initially as a moon rocket. It was designed as a heavy lift to orbit vehicle. And then when it was suddenly repurposed for a moon rocket, that's when they had to add more engines to give it more thrust to actually launch something heavy enough to go to the moon off the planet in the first place. It's really interesting. The stories behind that, the way that structure, the structure of the Soviet program works so differently from NASA's is really, it's, I just need to, I need to map. I just need to map it one day. It's so, it's crazy when you look at the infighting. Like you think the infighting of like US military is bad. Right. I mean, the Navy versus the Army and von Braun. Yeah. And the Air Force trying to ek out its little spot with its own rockets that are also derived basically from German engineering. It's just like. But it was a, so Glushko was the guy that Kareliev wanted to build the engines N1. But Glushko was basically saying, no, we can't do this using, you know, liquid oxygen and RP water, sorry, kerosene. He was absolutely not going to do it unless he could use hypergolics. Kareliev did not want to put any person on a rocket, which was using hypergolic fuel. Right, right. You know, hey, scary dissolving flesh kind of problems. Right, that's literally what happens. Yeah, scary dissolving flesh kind of problems. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And then I forget, I forget what happened. I did this in my N1 blog post a few weeks ago, but yeah, when Kareliev died and then the N1 was transferred to another design bureau and somebody had to take it over even though they didn't want it. And it was all kind of an interesting disaster. And that was it. It was mission or mission. Yeah, mission. Yeah. But did he take over the one that pre predated OKB1? I mean, he was the Kareliev's next in line. But wasn't the N1 then transferred to a different design bureau or was it that OKB1 merged with Energia and then formed another design bureau that took that over as heritage technology. And then it just became sort of like the rocket that no one really knew what to do with or why it to you. Because it ultimately ended up that it was, this is impressive, by the way, I've been yammering and not watching this, but you're doing good there. I think my problem is my ascent is too vertical. Oh, and I'm scared to actually let this thing go because as soon as I let it go aerodynamics are going to kick in and it's going to. How high are you not 25 kilometers right now? I know it's still high enough that aerodynamics is going to be important. There's no there's no like thrust control system. Reaction control is still on that, isn't it? There is no reaction control system. There's no, not reaction control. There is no thrust vectoring on these engines. Because according to the post I read, no thrust vectoring. So I'm just going to let this get down to about 30 degrees and then I'm going to fire up the engine again. There we go. There now I'm telling it to hold attitude. Okay. And so now most of this control authority is actually coming from computer cockpit. Yeah. Yeah. That's not good. I'm not happy. You're not. Well, you know, you have no right to be happy. Given how terribly I'm doing this. Okay. I'm going to try it. I have Delta V to spare. Right. There we go. And let my Apple apps get out to about 100 kilometers. And we totally did it. Now watch, we totally haven't done it yet, but we, oh wrong button, but we will get into orbit now because we have control and we have tons of Delta. We have like we have enough Delta V to go to the moon because of corbalness. Yeah. So yeah, I was going to remark, do you know about the British interplanetary society's moon landing design from the 1930s? I know of it, but I have not read anything specific about it. So you can tell me details and I will not know much. Well, it was just your commenting about, you know, things that people thought might make sense at the time and it turned out to be bogus. And one of the things they had was their design included a heat shield for ascending through the atmosphere at great speed, but did not include a heat shield for returning. Oh no! Really? Really? I love that design. It's so insane on so many levels. That's such an interesting thing to have it be a heat shield. Was that, I mean, was that by design or was that just like? Like that was so design. Their design was like, well, we're going to be traveling through the atmosphere at great speed, therefore we need to protect the moon. But did they not think that we will be traveling through the atmosphere at great speed coming back down again? I don't know, you know, these guys, they were not really, they were looking with the big picture. Oh, oh, we're spinning. This would be the worst re-entry right here. This would be pretty close to the worst re-entry. This would be like, not just central right now. I don't know. I'm sure Geo-Angle could handle it. Yes, if anybody could handle it, it would hands down be Geo-Angle. Jude? Could it get so hot that the friction somehow burns through and ignites the remaining fuel? Yes, things can explode and catch fire or whatever. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's stressing me out. No. Oh my God. Yeah. I think I'm going to be able to recover this. If I don't recover this, I'll be pretty impressed. Now I'm going to only Mach 4. I'm much more survivable. I might have to land on the desert though. I guess the goal. So are we going to say that success is living who do we have here? Jeb and Bill? Jeb and Bill. I should have put Valentina in there because we need to represent everyone. Do you know the story about, who was the guy that was in the X-15 on the test stand that exploded? Scott Crossfield. Annie, that line, you know, wet pants. Yep. Yep. Yes. What was the, yeah, they, um, they were just firing the engine and somehow like the engine exploded and it's like the cockpit shot forward and everybody thought he was going to be on fire and then they doused him to something. They doused him in water. They were, yeah, but yeah, how did that end up being the headline? I think he was forwarded, but he was contacted by some news people. Yeah. Well, the only problem is my pants are wet. Yeah. Survived explosion, wet pants. Yeah. At the time he taxied a plane through a wall. That's a really good story. It was like, I forget what, I think it was like the X-2. Like it was, it was like an insane multiple like, you know, past Mach 1 flight, all kinds of crazy good piloting. And then he taxes and he's like, I've got this and he goes right through a wall. Yeah. Then there's, yeah, his first ever flight when he landed with one bare foot in the X-1. That's another really good one. He, uh, the, the windshield iced over and he had to like scratch out a little spot. I'm sorry. I'm very distracted watching this now. Oh my God. That's okay. You're really, really fast. I have gone. How are you going? How fast? I'm only going 115 meters per second. I don't. Now I just need, now I just need to flare it just right and then apply the brakes. So the problem is that the ground isn't perfectly flat. This is like landing on a lake bed that's had waves on it. Oh, oh, okay. We lost the wings. We lost the lower wings. But to be fair, you did tell me those wings weren't in the original design. So actually we've made it more faithful to Von Braun's design. Ah, well played. That's awesome. There, mostly success. I like how Jeff's really excited by this. Yes. He's always so excited. That's why I kind of love Jeb. This is going to be magnificent. Yes. Wow. Oh, that was good. How far from Halleck? Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Slaunches. Slaunches. That's amazing. Givily. Oh, look, we caught him out as well. He's here. Oh, don't fall. Don't fall buddy. He's going to totally jump. Hey buddy. Oh, he's so top heavy with that head. Yes, they are. What's up, dude? They're so cute. I love these guys. I had a total blast shooting this video with Scott Manley. He's so much fun. And those of you who know him know that he is great at the nitty gritty details of Kerbal Space Program. So if you do want to know more about the decisions he made in building his Von Braun ferry and all the little game things that he did, be sure to check out his video. And if you just want to see more Kerbal videos, definitely head over to his channel and see all the cool stuff he's put up there. And Scott and I are talking about maybe doing more of these collabs when we have time. What missions would you guys like to see us do in Kerbal with some commentary from Vintage Space? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. 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