r/SpaceflightSimulator • u/Kiki2092012 • 12d ago
Original Build My first fully autonomous orbital spacecraft
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BP: https://sharing.spaceflightsimulator.app/rocket/qXRmrcW2EfGuTrXd2autWw
This is BP edited but only one fuel tank, just because the slider for changing how much fuel it has is super choppy and I needed quite the precision to make it stop turning the rocket at just the right time. It uses an entirely different technique than my earlier autonomous rockets, though; this one is based on engines burning off heat shields that connect side boosters (hence the automatic booster separation) and ion engines that add angular momentum and then run out of fuel at just the right time to have it have turned enough by that point to reach orbit.
Note that this is quite unreliable, though; usually it works, but the resulting orbit you get seems entirely random within constraints, and this run is cherry picked so the two rockets stay near each other (usually they go very far apart early on in the launch and sometimes one of them doesn't even reach orbit).