Hauling Shuttles to Woomerang :: Mission Execution

Not exactly surprisingly, the winner of the Cargo Wing competition was the 3rd iteration of this uninspired named vessel called 'Carg Wing', those first iteration caused some commotion by lifting 500 metric tons in payload on a recent public demonstration.

Since using SRBs for civilian operations are considered too ludicrous even for MaKLA, it was determined that each mission's payload should aim between 300 to 400 metric tons as a middle ground for a middle ground between efficiency and safety.

The craft

Craft files available here, a clean profile and the fully loaded used on this Mission. The version uploaded is the Mark 3 revision, as I had reworked her a bit since the shooting.

This craft needs the following mods:

Atmosphere Autopilot is highly recommended.

The keybinds are:

  • 1 : Spin up/down the Wheesleys
  • 2 : Spin up/down 1st Inner Goliath Engines (left and right)
  • 3 : Spin up/down 2nd Inner Goliath Engines (left and right)
  • 4 : Spin up/down Middle Goliath Engines (left and right)
  • 5 : Spin up/down Before the Outer Goliath Engines (left and right)
  • 6 : Spin up/down Outer Goliath Engines (left and right)
  • 7 : Spin up/down the APU
  • 8 : Deploy/Retract Flaps. Essential for Taking Off, not that essential for landing - but advisable.
  • 9 : Open / Close Front Ramps, Extend/Retract Front Legs.
    • Attention never retract the legs without manually extending the Front Wheels first!!
    • Neither retract the Front Wheels without extending the legs first!
  • 0 : Open / Close Rear Ramp
  • R : Activate/Deactivate Thrust Reverser

For Taking Off:

  1. Extend the Front Wheels. Be sure to engage the parking brakes.
  2. Retract manually the Front Legs (appears to be a bug on KSP?)
  3. Close the Front Ramp
  4. Close the Rear Ramp
  5. Stage to spinning up the engines
  6. Full Throttle
  7. Keep her on the center of the runway, or you risk losing some engines at the end. She barely fits the KSP runway!
  8. Between 70 to 80m/s, deploy flaps
  9. When the tail wheels touch the ground, activate SAS
  10. She will take off by herself.
  11. Once airborne, retract the Landing Gears
  12. Once at least 500 m/s above the ground, retract the Flaps. Caution: she will drop her nose at this point, intervene to keep the attitude or you will go into the drink pretty fast.
  13. From this point, she's yours to fly. Best altitude for cruising starts at 5.000, going up to 8.000 once fuel is consumed.

For Landing:

  • She's fatty. Do a gentle touch down, or she will implode.
  • The wheel breaks will not cut it. You need the Reversors.
  • Check Yo Staging!!: keep the chutes ready while landing on shorter strips.

Notes

  1. The Rear Ramp only touches the ground with the Front Wheels deployed.
  2. The Front Ramps only touches the ground with the Front Wheels retracted.
  3. You can't load/unload cargo on both ends at the same time unless using some auxiliary ramp by some ground support vehicle.

Disclaimer

While preparing the material for being published, I dumbly screwed the initial shots and had to redo the first leg of the mission.

You will notice something that should not be there (no spoilers, read the Mission Report for it) because on the second run I had fixed the problem.

And... yeah, last week was a riot. 😣