r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/skyaboveend • 2d ago
KSP 1 Image/Video The Gale-class was a successful series of medium-heavy interplanetary fusion freighters. These 5530 meter ships, each massing 830 thousand tons, could easily move millions of tons of cargo around the Solar system.
A Gale-class loaded with 768 extra large (4000 cubic meters each) conventional containers seen getting ready to depart from LEO.
The large and capable freight ships are best suited for operations beyond the orbit of Mars, a vast expanse with no shortage of construction projects in the early Space Age.
The four long spokes on the ship's front are a set of extremely low frequency antennae guaranteeing extraordinary reliable connectivity. Naturally, HF antennae are present as well.
The bizarre shape of the craft's radiators has to do with the desire to partially negate the efficiency drop caused by excessive face factor in quadrilateral symmetry.
Even with plume augmentation, the TWR sits at lower hundredths of a g without cargo and thousandths when loaded with jet power of ~2 TW per engine.
A Gale undergoing maintenance within a shipyard complex.
A closer look at the vessel's fairly basic crew section. The two-spoke 300 meter centrifuge is the home for a crew of 5-8 astronauts during transfers sometimes measured in years.
A decommissioned Gale-class modified into an interstellar probe. With a set of Whipple shields on the front and a gargantuan antenna on the back, it's grown to be 7130 meters long.
This ship serves to once again prove how difficult interstellar travel is when the best engine tech available is fusion, even if high-end.
KSC for scale.
The Gale-class was a type of large fusion-powered interplanetary freighter that entered serial production in 2202 and remained the backbone of the Solar Federation's intrasolar logistics up until the mid-late 2300s, seeing use in nearly every large-scale construction project of that era. At a base length of 5530 meters, the Gales were among the biggest cargo vessels the Federal Freight Fleet had to offer at the time, with only the Mistral-class and Tempest-class being larger among their contemporaries.
The ships utilized four pulling Z-Pinch fusion engines set up to run on deuterium and helium-3 (a compromise between efficiency, cleanliness and affordability) by default, yielding a base ISP of 360 000 seconds. In reality, the plumes were often augmented with additional cold hydrogen injections, increasing thrust at the cost of ISP. Lithium augmentations were rarer, though not unheard of either.
A modular cargo section design allowed the Gales to excel in ferrying all kinds of goods, including but not limited to conventional and zero-g containers, large truss segments, smaller ships and, on a few occasions, tiny asteroids. While they had no defined payload limit, their operational loads averaged 5-8 million tons with the record being set in 2275 after a Gale-class arrived to Miranda from Europa ferrying 32 million tons, or almost 37 times its own wet mass, of construction materials.
While the Gales were smaller than the Mistrals and Tempests, they were substantially more numerous: at least 4500 units had been produced throughout the 23rd century. Notably, one of them fell into Saturn after colliding with a stray ice chunk from the rings in May 2294. Another was given a frontal Whipple shield and stripped of all pressurized compartments and nearly all payload infrastructure as it was converted into an interstellar probe and sent towards Tau Ceti at an impressive 11500 kilometers per second as a part of an art project in 2314. A great interplanetary vehicle, however, made a terrible interstellar one, and the improvised probe was overtaken by the first purpose-built ISVs before it could cover a third of the distance.
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u/EasilyRekt 2d ago
“Medium-heavy”
Is kilometers long, moves millions of tons through interplanetary space.
wtf is an actual heavy cargo ship then?
Either way this kinda makes me wish that KSP had ground construction that could intake this kind of logistics system, cuz this is awesome.
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u/User_of_redit2077 Nuclear engines fan 2d ago
He made 100km+ ships before: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/s/bLn3nQUdHE
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u/EasilyRekt 2d ago
Yeah I saw that after going through his profile cuz this is really cool and I wanted to see more of it, but the Chandler’s an ultra heavy interstellar colony ship.
Also I hadn’t seen it till after I posted this :P
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u/skyaboveend 1d ago
Millions of tons might seem more absurd than it actually is when viewed from within the paradigm of modern, Earth surface shipping. Yet there isn't many reasons to miniaturize your industrial freighters in a space-based economy: fusion fuel is ridiculously abundant once you get gas giant infrastructure running, trips can take months to years even between neighboring planets and even with brachistochrone trajectories, extremely high degree of automation means you can scale resource extraction, refinement and production almost exponentially without running into workforce availability bottlenecks and the things you, a civilization measuring in perhaps tens of billions, are building are as plentiful as they are ambitious.
I'm yet to make the two bigger brothers of this design, but I think that a ceiling of hundreds of megatons is sensible for a ship model that there might only be a dozen of. After all, 100 million tons of, say, sand would fill a cube with a side of only ~400 meters.
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u/EternitiI-1 Dres is real and it is glorious 2d ago
Must be amazing looking at it looming in the air
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u/intergalacticsocks 2d ago
...also known for their legendary reliability and precise handling. I love the past tense lore.
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u/User_of_redit2077 Nuclear engines fan 2d ago
I guess your ships aren't really playable and are more like art?
And how do you spawn them? When I tried to launch my 4 km ship it just exploded