Kolyma's Shadow: An Alternate Space Race
- Thread starter nixonshead
- Start date
Looked over the specs, and I was about to note on just how small that Orbital Module is on the Zarya-BM Series, but then there's the fact that this is only supposed to take a crew of two, and wouldn't need to be as large (and heavy) as the Orbital Module of OTL's Soyuz. Of course, with Orel being operated by them as well, that's two separate manned programmes running parallel, which must make for quite the resource drain.
And did I just read it right? Fully Reusable Space Shuttle? Why do I get the feeling it won't live up to its promises?
another great chapter , Congress should just alt the Dino , and focus on the Columbia . Cant hardly wait for the next chapters .
I built the Zarya in KSP using a few (a bunch of) mods. The second album is in 6.4x Kerbol.
http://imgur.com/a/s79Qd
http://imgur.com/a/UYYKh
http://imgur.com/a/s79Qd
http://imgur.com/a/UYYKh
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Bahamut-255 said:
Indeed, 4 stages it is. Without that 4th stage Proton is limited to under 4 tonnes to TLI, which just isn’t going to cut it.
Jape said:Bahamut-255 said:And did I just read it right? Fully Reusable Space Shuttle? Why do I get the feeling it won't live up to its promises?
Glad you’re enjoying it Jape!
On the shuttle, keep in mind that they already have considerable operational experience (good and bad) with a reusable spaceplane. That will influence the direction of their studies, and will certainly lead to different choices compared to OTL.
Bahamut-255 said:
Indeed, Zarya-BM’s orbital module masses about 400kg less than that of OTL’s Soyuz-7K-T.
Michel Van said:
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!
Astronomo2010 said:
Well, for many in Congress Dynasoar is actually far more useful than Columbia, in terms of providing some useful military capability (though not as much as the Air Force initially hoped).
Kirk Kerman said:
Wow!
Those are amazing! Great to see Kerbel Gagarin making his first trip into space! Have you thought about putting those images on the Air and Space Photos from Alternate Worlds thread?Just a minor note though, only the Zarya-A is launched on the R-6A “Luna” (R-6 plus Blok-V kerolox upper stage). Zarya-B and BM are too heavy, using instead Mishin’s all-kerolox M-1 “Zarya” rocket. Stats for the M-1 are on the Wiki, but I never got around to modelling it, so the appearance is still up for grabs! (In my mind it has an N-1 style conical first stage, but that might not be practical…)
Incidentally, as you may know, there’s a Kerbel mod ongoing for Eyes Turned Skyward, for which I’ve been making my Blender models available on a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
Thanks for making your first post here!
Wow!
Just a minor note though, only the Zarya-A is launched on the R-6A “Luna” (R-6 plus Blok-V kerolox upper stage). Zarya-B and BM are too heavy, using instead Mishin’s all-kerolox M-1 “Zarya” rocket. Stats for the M-1 are on the Wiki, but I never got around to modelling it, so the appearance is still up for grabs! (In my mind it has an N-1 style conical first stage, but that might not be practical…)
Incidentally, as you may know, there’s a Kerbel mod ongoing for Eyes Turned Skyward, for which I’ve been making my Blender models available on a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
Thanks for making your first post here!
Thanks! So you mean that if I can model that M-1 in time, I can alter the course of this thread, in some small way? Cool! And sure, I'll post those albums there.
I think it's cool nixonshead visualized the M-1 as a sort of miniature N-1. Are you familiar with that? There's another thread on this site called Red Star (which I hope revives or is restarted--don't post to it, this site has vague but draconian rules against reviving old threads--PM the author SpaceGeek if you want to see it continue as I do) based on the premise of the Soviet program pulling ahead of OTL, largely due to an effort to make a somewhat down-engined hence down-payloaded N-1 enable a two-launch Soviet lunar landing--just beating out Apollo 11. On that thread there is a lot of discussion of the N-1 (and a downsized derivative, the N-11).
The conical lower stages are due to adopting spherical tanks for liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel; the former is larger and so stacking the two tanks on top of each other and fairing over the gap creates the remarkable pyramid effect, which for my taste looks quintessentially "Soviet," as much as the flared booster stages of OTL Korolev's R-7 that is essentially the same rocket still launching Soyuz, or the bulgy tanks of the first stage of Proton.
I looked into the mass economy of having two spherical tanks like that instead of trying to fit them in a uniform cylinder, and despite the obvious waste of internal space, the masses of the tanks themselves seem quite competitive with cylindrical ones of the same volumes. (I was thinking of pressure-fed rockets, so the tanks would have to be rather heavy, which may skew the comparison unfairly for low-pressure tanks. However the LOX of course is cryogenic, so it helps to keep it in a tank of minimum surface area, and of course the air gap between the tanks also helps in that respect). The question is, how much extra mass is needed to fair over the gap for aerodynamics, and to carry thrust force effectively through the structure to the stages above; I'd think the tanks themselves, being domes, might also serve as part of the thrust structure and then the outer fairing could take up the slack pretty efficiently.
I suppose the conical lower stages create rather more air drag than a slimmer type would, but that's mainly a problem in the first stage of launch, up to Q-Max. Just when Q-Max would occur is not only a problem of its acceleration but also of its shape, so it's tricky.
OTL N-1 was Sergei Korolev's answer to the Saturn V; even as he envisioned it despite massing more on the pad its payload to orbit would be less; it's kerolox engines all the way, though the ISPs quoted for the engines are consistently higher than the American F-1 engine--those Soviet engines were of course far smaller than the F-1 so the design needed lots of them in the first stage. Consensus is that the OTL design required far too many, and also the plumbing to connect them to propellant supplies was problematic. The Red Star ATL deletes the central cluster which would have had the worst plumbing issues, retaining the full outer ring.
The relevancy here is that Mishin, who was Korolev's lieutenant OTL, sort of stands in for Korolev's vision, and therefore the notion he would tend to design things like his OTL mentor is appealing. The M-1, being a much smaller rocket, should be far less problematic, but if you find that a cluster of six or so smaller engines (say, the same engines as the one for the second stage) works out--the flared form of the two-tank stack pretty much invites such an arrangement.
So if the idea of making the first, and possibly second, stage of Mishin's M-1 of this timeline structured along those lines, a spherical oxygen tank below a fuel tank that would be spherical on the first stage and possibly some variant on the second (one can obviously more easily kludge around with a non-cryogenic tank), each fitted out with engines that I think the wiki already describes (though it could be that the number of engines is unspecified) then it will be thrilling to see the M-1 visualized along those lines. You'd have to check the masses very carefully of course, in case I'm way off base about the mass economy.
OTL the N-1 was developed rather sporadically, but the advanced ker-lox engines with their high ISP were developed (not tested enough to be sure) and indeed were mothballed when the program failed (they were supposed to be destroyed, but someone apparently failed to get the word, perhaps going selectively deaf at just the right moment
) and later purchased by Americans for I forget which rocket, I believe the later Atlas upgrades. I suppose that stock is used up by now but the Russians have resumed making more. The OTL version stuck stubbornly to the single-launch mission plan Korolev envisioned (under Mishin's guidance after the Chief Designer's OTL death on an operating table) thus retaining all the engines, and forcing rather desperate measures to maximize payload (such as chilling the kerosene fuel down to within a couple degrees of congealing, to minimize its volume and thus maximize the mass that could be loaded into the tanks); had they ever managed a successful launch I fear they'd have found the payload too skimpy for a safe Lunar landing mission. (In Red Star, deleting the central cluster of engines results in lowered payloads, but such that two launches put quite ample masses in orbit for a workable mission). The N-11 derivative was considered but shelved OTL, developed in Red Star--it is essentially the N-1 minus its first stage, and is roughly to N-1 as Saturn 1B was to Saturn V. Its design might be quite suggestive for an ATL M-1. Hopefully none of these have any of the extreme mass saving measures that probably doomed N-1 OTL, none of that nonsense about chilled kerosene. One thought I had about the N-1 when following Red Star was the wacky notion that those conical lower stages look a bit like a Mercury capsule, and that the designers might consider trying to recover and reuse the lower stages if they can aerobrake down to modest airspeeds and then use reserve fuel and a portion of their many rockets to manage a soft landing on the steppes. It probably is impractical for the second stage, but the first stage from just about any Soviet launch would come down, in whatever condition, on Soviet soil--then it is a matter of figuring out how to haul the dang thing back to the launch site.
(I vote airship, something I've seriously mentioned here in this thread already, but I fear the USSR of this TL is already too paralyzed to do it now.) M-1 first stages might be light enough to be hauled by a big Soviet helicopter though, at least to the nearest railhead, though I suspect too bulky to be hauled on a train--Proton's tubular diameters were designed for rail transport, which suggests the maximum practical dimensions for that transport mode. Perhaps the helicopter can haul it all the way back, or a special airplane be made it can be loaded onto?I just kludged up a simple diagram to illustrate what I think the two-sphere conical stage would look like in cross section, assuming that if the mass of LOX to kerosene would be 4:1, and the density of the two would be 1.2 and 0.8 respectively, then the volumes would be 8:3 so if the radius of the LOX tank is 2, the radius of the kerosene tank would be 3^(1/3) or 1.422 and we'd get something like the picture I hope to upload--OK, that worked. The line connecting the tangents of the circles, which corresponds to the fairing cone, is just under 9.17 degrees away from the center line; you can see the top of the kerosene tank is just under seven units from the base and the base flares out to 2.4 units radius if the LOX tank is 2, so overall the stage height is just under 1.5 times its base diameter--a bit more if we cut off the cone at the tangent to the LOX tank and run an insulation fairing straight down. I'd think we might get some use out of the base flare though, to install engines in.
Come to think of it, a tricky bit is getting all the propellant to the engines; we have to tap off the tanks on the bottom which means we'd want the engines below the zero height line on the left of the picture, or else we'd have to pump LOX "up" a bit against the thrust. The kerosene presumably routes from a tap off the bottom of its tank out radially in several fuel lines that run around the curve of the upper LOX tank then around it to feed each engine. We could run lines through the LOX sphere but they'd warm the LOX (not a terrible thing, we need to maintain tank pressure and heating the LOX to boil some of it is one way to do it) and the LOX might freeze the fuel.
Then again, I oversimplified the density relationships and underestimated the mass ratio of kerosene to oxidant a bit, since rocket engines tend to burn a bit fuel-rich--substantially so for hydrogen-LOX, only a bit for Ker-LOX--this would make the fuel tank a bit bigger and lower the cone angle further; we might then expand the LOX tank a bit to accommodate one single standpipe to feed fuel to a central distribution node next to the oxygen one and run fuel lines next to the oxidant lines out to engines ringing the center, or just feed a central engine directly. The standpipe would need a vacuum for insulation between the actual fuel pipe and the LOX, so it would be a pipe within a pipe.
(I checked--it looks like while I overestimated LOX density--it's 1.141, not 1.2--if I assume 5 percent excess kerosene mass, or 48 to 12.6, the errors cancel and the volume ratio is indeed quite close to 8:3)
I'm going to post this now and come back with some figures and another diagram for the M-1 itself.
You're thinking of the NK-33, which were/are in use on the Orbital Antares and the Soyuz 2-1v. Turns out that almost 50 years in storage weren't kind to them, and the Antares ones have had a rather nasty habit of exploding on test stands and in-flight. They're both switching post-haste to alternate engines, variants of the RD-190. It seems the time of the NK-33 just never was to be...OTL the N-1 was developed rather sporadically, but the advanced ker-lox engines with their high ISP were developed (not tested enough to be sure) and indeed were mothballed when the program failed (they were supposed to be destroyed, but someone apparently failed to get the word, perhaps going selectively deaf at just the right moment
Anyway, as far as a conical first stage, I get a LOX tank radius of 3.68m for the 344,000 kg capacity of the M-1 first stage, with the kero tank being only 2.64m in radius--close to the same relative sizes you came up with. The problem? Transporting anything by rail in the USSR over 4.15m is essentially impossible, which is why Proton and so many Russian LVs and payloads adhere to that seemingly-arbitrary number (it turns up in TKS and DOS and others). Transporting a 7.3m first stage or even a tank is way outside that, which means either investing in an alternate transport method (such as airplane, as Buran eventually did, which is costly) or building the first stage on-site at the launch facility (complex, and duplicates production still more). I kind of suspect a Zenit-type 4m core or a Proton-like cluster of tanks would be favored over the more complex engineering and construction of a conical stage, even though the shape has a unique flavor to it.
Darn your hard-headed-realism anyway!
The solution to that is airships of course, but I've already written them off in Shelepin's USSR.
Or anything fun or cool. OTL they made this godawful thing which could indeed lift a payload of 40 tons, adequate for a 36+ ton M-1 first stage. I don't know about lifting it as a sling load though, and the cabin at "28.15×4.4×4.4 m (92.4×14.4×14.4 ft)" clearly could not hold it.
If you wanted to point out this helicopter pretty much dropped out of sight and out of mind, and was never put into production, I could hardly argue with you.
I also am not sure how useful a 500 km range over the distances of the steppes where a first stage would fall, or the ranges between the best factories and the launch site, would be. Presumably it can set the load down and then land and refuel, then pick it up again. Here's the Halo, as NATO called it (NATO called the Mil V-12 "Homer," which nowadays summons up images of Homer Simpson slapping his head and going "D'Oh!"). Halo has apparently once lifted a 25 ton payload, a mammoth frozen in a block of ice. Still a less challenging payload than a 36 ton sling load rocket stage spanning over 8 meters in diameter, and taller than that.
If the Soviets really wanted a helicopter that could lift a 36 ton, 8 meter by 13+ load, I suppose they could make it fly; given that Halo is as big as they or anyone else has managed to actually put into regular use, I have to agree it wouldn't be very cost-effective. (And I might doubt Shelepin's regime could manage to get around to doing it at all).
I still think getting some aerostatics on the job would be a very smart thing to do; but the USSR has no track record of effective experience with LTA since Umberto Nobile left after his contract with Aeroflot in the '30s, and while I'd urge Space Geek to retrofit some follow-up into Red Star timeline, Nixonshead gives me no warrant to think it could have happened here.
In view of the hauling problem, having the factory on site is not such an Un-Soviet way of doing things.
But yes, clearly if they could take a cue from Chelomei and just make units that can fit on a Soviet rail car, that would facilitate operations considerably.
I'm just playing off the author's wishes here. Since they happen to fit my own little enthusiasms in this case.
I went ahead and looked at how the second stage might fit given it too has the same basic design; I found that using the wiki numbers for its mass that assuming the oxygen tank being spherical is sacrosanct, and allowing an arbitrary amount of space for an engine and some separation between the stages, that the tangent line connecting the second stage oxy tank (about 2.3 meters in radius) leads to a smaller cone angle, a bit under 7 degrees--and don't think I allowed for enough separation for engine installation and a bit of space between the nozzle and the lower stage fuel tank. (Note to Kirk Kerman--you may be way more familiar with Soviet design quirks than I am--but if not, note that they liked to light their upper stages while the lower was not quite finished burning, thus dismissing any need for ullage motors, but this meant they had an open gridwork support structure for the next stage, meaning aerodynamic costs and of course losing a bit of the lower stage push; clearly we can't have the upper stage engine nozzle sitting right on top of the lower stage top tank then). The smaller cone angle leaves the fuel tanks sitting isolated from the fairing cone, which bothers me. Since you've just about proven the conical N-1 type of structure is impossible (were it not for the gnawing fact that it existed OTL, albeit not successfully) I'm almost but not quite discouraged from posting the second diagram that shows both stages, arbitrary though it is.
To get M-1 dimensions, multiply the grid shown by 1.9247.
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Mil Was working a even bigger monster Helicopter the MI-32
on Red Star
we working on it
but for the moment SpaceGeek busy on High School
and i renovating my kitchen after water damage
on Red Star
we working on it
but for the moment SpaceGeek busy on High School
and i renovating my kitchen after water damage
Hi guys,
Sorry, just a couple of clarifications on the M-1. First up I spotted an error in the Wiki, which showed the 2nd stage (Blok-G) VM-202 engine having a thrust of 50kN. In fact this should be 1100kN! I've corrected this.
Also noted on the Wiki (which I must admit I'd forgotten) is that the "1st Stage" was originally intended to consist of 3 identical cores strapped together (Blok-A, B and V), each with 2x VM-12 engines. I did this to allow stages of reasonable length whilst keeping a maximum 4.15m diameter (imagine Soyuz/R-7 with 3 boosters and no central core). However, this isn't mentioned in the posts, and I'm not sure now if it was still needed (sorry, my notes got a little confusing!), as a quick check now shows the 1st stage being a cylinder 25m long at a 4.5m diameter, which isn't unreasonable. Monolithic would certainly be simpler for staging, so I could go either way.
Sorry for the confusion!
Incidentally, the potential conical shape of M-1 (and quite possibly the OTL R-7 boosters and N-1) would be inspiration from Helmut Groettrup's rocket designs in the 1950s, e.g. the G-4.
Sorry, just a couple of clarifications on the M-1. First up I spotted an error in the Wiki, which showed the 2nd stage (Blok-G) VM-202 engine having a thrust of 50kN. In fact this should be 1100kN!
I've corrected this.Also noted on the Wiki (which I must admit I'd forgotten) is that the "1st Stage" was originally intended to consist of 3 identical cores strapped together (Blok-A, B and V), each with 2x VM-12 engines. I did this to allow stages of reasonable length whilst keeping a maximum 4.15m diameter (imagine Soyuz/R-7 with 3 boosters and no central core). However, this isn't mentioned in the posts, and I'm not sure now if it was still needed (sorry, my notes got a little confusing!), as a quick check now shows the 1st stage being a cylinder 25m long at a 4.5m diameter, which isn't unreasonable. Monolithic would certainly be simpler for staging, so I could go either way.
Sorry for the confusion!
Incidentally, the potential conical shape of M-1 (and quite possibly the OTL R-7 boosters and N-1) would be inspiration from Helmut Groettrup's rocket designs in the 1950s, e.g. the G-4.
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How does the M-1 control it's flight? Do the engines gimbal or are there verniers?
Also, since i'm building Zarya to a scale where the reentry module is 1.25 meters wide, would the upper stage be 2.5 meters or 1.875 meters?
EDIT: my current plan is to have the upper stage be 1.875, with the second stage being a 1.875-2.5m cone, and the first stage being 2.5-3.75m
Also, since i'm building Zarya to a scale where the reentry module is 1.25 meters wide, would the upper stage be 2.5 meters or 1.875 meters?
EDIT: my current plan is to have the upper stage be 1.875, with the second stage being a 1.875-2.5m cone, and the first stage being 2.5-3.75m
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The first post to mention Zarya mentioned a 2 meter diameter for the capsule as I was recently reminded here. OTL Soyuz is 2.17 meters; the extra 17 centimeters does not sound dramatic but assuming the capsules are the same proportions, represents a 25 percent increase in volume. That is, Zarya would have 80 percent the cubic inside its skin--maybe less habitable volume if the shell thickness is the same or greater as seems not unlikely. Also some pictures seemed to show a somewhat shorter-looking capsule, so the height might not be in proportion and the space inside more like the 66 percent that accounts for it being a strictly 2-cosmonaut vehicle only. I hope it is not much shorter in proportion because the linear dimensions inside will be tight enough; Soyuz return capsules are not famous for their spaciousness!
I'd have to review whether any mission has ever had two cosmonauts and no form of orbital module, counting that bizarre cylindrical fabric/cage airlock as one of those, sort of. Anyway they had an unsatisfactory experience with that thing (although it clearly would have been superior to the much smaller thing the first OTL Soviet spacewalker, IIRC Leonov, used to exit (and almost fail to) reenter his Voshkhod. I think the airlock is meant to be the same design but bigger.I noticed your Kerbal models had a hatch on top of the reentry capsules, this would only be for missions where there were modules of some kind attached on the top.
I figure if someone made a mini-Zarya for just one person then the volume would be halved when the diameter was reduced to 1.6 meters, so 1.25 meters would probably be downright claustrophobic! I think I can visualize sitting not too terribly uncomfortably in within a meter-diameter sphere, especially if I were weightless, but it seems a lot to ask of a cosmonaut! There's a reason Mercury missions were never very long, whereas Voshkhod was a horrible kludge of an idea.
Looking at my little sketch of 2 stages of the spherical-tank rockets, I think there is just barely room for a third stage on the same lines before the cone constricts to 2 meters diameter; in reality if the sphere-tank format had been the model for M-1, I suppose the third stage would go over to cylindrical tanks and straight sides.
I was wondering about that, a lot. The Blok-G engine seemed downright superior to the D-Blok and almost precisely the same thrust so I wondered why carry over the old engine at all?Hi guys,
Sorry, just a couple of clarifications on the M-1. First up I spotted an error in the Wiki, which showed the 2nd stage (Blok-G) VM-202 engine having a thrust of 50kN. In fact this should be 1100kN!
That the first stage would mass something like 4.6 times the second but use 12 times the thrust also seemed odd; now we see it much closer to being in proportion--still high, but you need extra thrust for initial launch, what with atmospheric drag, impediment of thrust, and the basic task of getting the whole stack moving briskly. I gather Soviet designers tended to favor using a whole lot of thrust for initial boost, leading to pretty high G's at lower stage burnouts, and chalked it up to that.
Making a triplet of 3 Semyorka-style booster stages does seem kind of goofy; either we'd have three cylinders yoked together with an awkward gap running up the center, or they'd have a triangular inner portion of their circumferences allowing fluids to use that inner volume (which is not large, we could easily sacrifice it to keep the units cylindrical, as it would be full of essentially massless air--it isn't massless but it would not mass much and would presumably be vacated as the rocket rises). Then, we'd wonder, why have that triple partition in the middle at all, that's just useless mass separating identical components. Three seems awkward; it doesn't give any great options in an engine-out situation for instance.
I was wondering if you'd simply want to gang the three around the second stage so all four units have their bottoms on the ground--but then I saw that if the central, second stage had the same diameter as the outer ones it would wind up being only 2/3 as long!
Not to worry, I thought, the third stage will fill in the gap--nope, not even close. Clearly to do this the central stage would have to have a smaller diameter, which works I guess for three outer stages, and might for four, and perhaps five, but not six. It is a very odd layout regardless. I of course wondered why not just make the second stage identical to the three outer boosters, except it has a single upper-atmosphere/vacuum optimized engine instead of two lower-atmosphere ones. But a quick visit to Silverbird calculator showed the error of that--the payload to 250 km from Baikonur (aka Tyurtam) was drastically lower with the bigger central stage.So we are left with arranging the three boosters on the ground by themselves, and putting the second stage where it belongs up higher. Since the boosters are presumably three rather than integrated into one stage because they are at maximum diameter (and maybe length) for Soviet rail transport, I don't see why not make the upper stage the same diameter for uniformity of tooling.
The straightforward way to arrange three booster stages is to run them in a line; this would make the rocket look pretty American unfortunately.
Grouping them in a triangle would be possible and cool-looking I guess. We might then just as well upgrade to four in a square (the only way to do four I guess)--five in a pentagon or alternatively in a cross. Six in a hexagon would leave a hole through which a standard diameter stage would slip right down into unless we filled it with a seventh booster. I looked at that; that is 7 of your boosters instead of 3, with another stage just like them on top of the central booster (with two of the upper atmosphere engines instead of lower atmo versions, but the vacuum ISPs given are the same and presumably the weights are similar--I guess the high altitude version might be heavier due to a longer nozzle, but not by a lot I suppose) and finally the second stage you have on the Wiki as a third stage. Silverbird estimates some 28 tons to that standard 250 km, 55 degree inclination orbit. I caution I didn't use any weights for fairings, and I suppose the central booster stage needs some reinforcement, and maybe the two uppers do too since the payload is triple or more the given M-1 Zarya load to standard. Also for the stage masses as given for M-1 Silverbird gives 10 tons (without the "Signal" third stage, which appears to be the same exact stage Mishin added to the R-6 to launch the first series of one-cosmonaut Zaryas) not the 8 you cautiously give. Reducing the 28 ton estimate proportionally brings it down to just 22.4 tons.
Still, such a modular system clearly can overlap Minerva turf and surpass the Proton. Possibly by optimizing the sizes of the two upper stages better, the optimized payload can be more than 23 tons, perhaps even surpass the Silverbird estimate and reach 30 tons. At the other end of the scale I figured, not too surprisingly, that a single one of your M-1 boosters, topped by a second stage just 1/3 the mass of your given second stage, would put some 3 tons in orbit. So on a somewhat smaller scale, the three-booster model of M-1 suggests that Mishin's rockets can offer the sort of flexibility Minerva does the Americans, with various mixes of boosters--1, 3, 4, 5, and 7, and trimming upper stages of standard diameter to optimize toward various goals.
That would not enable a Lunar mission more ambitious than a flyby in a single launch of course.
Mark Wade says that the G-4 "inspired" both the Semyorka and N-1, but in the latter case I don't see how, except that perhaps the Soviets got used to the conical idea. A specific stroke of genius Wade attributes to Gröttrup is the matter of moving the oxygen tank up to the top of the stage to get it away from the engines and other infrastructure at the bottom, which apparently suffered from being chilled by the LOX. Especially given the conical structure (which has no apparent reason in the G-4 except one might guess aerodynamics) that means the greater volume of propellant, and the one that needs insulation, is being squeezed into the narrower part of the enclosure, raising the surface area to be insulated (or alternatively the rate of heating hence boil-off of the LOX, and putting the frost zone it creates higher up where chunks of ice falling off can do more damage a la STS Columbia. I'm not saying the man was stupid; presumably benefits offset these obvious costs.
But I checked a description of the N-1 and indeed as common sense indicated, the oxygen tank, being the larger one, is on the bottom, undoing the concept of Gröttrup's that Wade highlights as crucial and one would infer, "inspirational." With spherical tanks it has to be that way.
Well, one could imagine the lowest stage reversing it, making the cone taper with its projected point on the bottom instead of the top, then if the upper stages are LOX-down, the whole rocket would be more of a spindle shape, which I think might make for improved supersonic aerodynamics, approximating a Sears-Haack Body. Sort of! Putting the first stage booster LOX tank on the top would define the maximum radius of the body, and since the second stage is necessarily lower in mass (by far, typically) its spherical oxy tank, which is the next "checkpoint" in the radius, will be significantly lower in radius, meaning to fit neatly in a proper S-H body it would have to be a certain distance up from the "equator" of the first stage LOX tank. Maybe this works out OK because the radius of that big tank will account for some of the upper half of the S-H body, then a gap for the upper stage engine(s) and clearance, then the radius of the second stage LOX tank...it might work out OK or we might even have the upper half of the body being stretched longer than optimal rather than too short as I first feared. The taper by then ought to fit the second stage fuel tank pretty well I guess, and if not we can fudge it one way or the other.
The upper stack beyond the second stage seems not too likely to fit neatly in the S-H envelope though; I would guess at some point you'd want to stop tapering and go with a uniform cylinder from there up, or anyway slow or suspend the taper for a while. So you'd still get extra shock waves, maybe overall worse than a simple cylinder would have given.
So inverting the first stage to conform with Gröttrup's notion would only seem advisable if the shock effects we avoid on the bottom offset the extra ones we probably get up top; since the top is going to bear the brunt of the impact of shock waves, I'd suspect not. Note how this notion also puts the second stage engines and so forth between two LOX tanks! Although there would be a good gap between them.
Raising the LOX tank a la Gröttrup also defies thermodynamics a bit in that you're putting the coldest thing up high, where the chilled air from it flows down and chills everything below while bringing in fresh warm air to continue boiling the LOX; putting it down low seems sensible--also it's dense stuff while kerosene is less so, so in terms of stacking masses putting the LOX below the fuel seems to make more sense too.
So anyway, given that Korolev OTL and perhaps Mishin here defies the single greatest accomplishment of Gröttrup that Wade cites, it seems like a stretch to say that the G-4 inspires the N-1 at all. Except maybe in the limited sense that conical rockets seemed less outlandish to Soviet designers familiar with Gröttrup's work than they would to Americans.
But of course, the American general public, as opposed to professional rocket engineers, were exposed to ideas of how rockets should look in the "Collier Space Program" and Disney's related efforts to popularize Von Braun's vision, and those vintage 1950s illustrations typically did show big-bottomed conical, half-spindle in fact, giant rockets with spaceplanes on top, more like the N-1 than the Saturn V!
Oh well, whatever the antecedents might be, the question now is which of these approaches (or a third) is most sensible for Mishin to have pushed through in the mid-60s. If you, the author nixonshead, like the Gothic look of the N-1, you are not alone! OTOH your onboard tech advisor with actual academic certification in rocket history and/or design (I believe e of pi has an actual rocket design degree, but I can well believe Workable Goblin does too, or anyway has a whole lot of serious academic technical history under his belt I can only envy) points out the drawbacks, technically. You probably aren't planning to have Mishin succeed in any scheme to make the first stages recoverable and reusable (if this were possible the transportation hurdles would presumably be well overcome--it's going to take some combination of airship or helicopter to go get spend stages from the steppes for sure) so there goes one of the possible advantages of the big-bottomed arrangement.
The modular scheme is probably a bit less mass-efficient, but I've suggested how Mishin might be able to sell it as the basis of a Soviet answer to Minerva, enabling a range of launch options with common hardware. If the modules are sized to fit on the railways then the logistics of producing them are largely solved.
Vice versa--if you settle on the tapered stages with spherical tanks, and we dismiss all notions of Soviet airship cargo haulers, which is only sensible given the limited deviation of this TL from ours--you are then pretty much stuck with the idea that the big stages are being produced right there at Tyuratam. Which is perfectly well in line with how the Soviets tended to do things; I think that is indeed how they made the N-1 OTL after all.
That would imply that it would be very difficult to launch an M series rocket from any other site than Tyuratam.
For the size thing, you misunderstand: I'm building this rescaled to kerbal size. I'm quite aware that for real cosmonats, a 1.25m wide capsule would be pitiful.
With regards to the hatch, I'm using the Soyuz pod from the Tantares mod, and unfortunately all crew parts in KSP must have a hatch or else it would be impossible to get the Kerbals out, as the transfer mechanic requires clicking on the hatch to bring up the crew menu.
Not much time, so just a quick response.
Actually, if its monolithic I'm tempted to say variable thrust through the main engines, controlled by a mini-KORD type system. Should be simpler to execute with far fewer engines than N-1. That or verniers.
My notes had both stages at 4.15m. As e of pi noted, that's a limit imposed by the Soviet rail network. But if you come up with something elegant and workable at a smaller diameter (scaled to Kerbel-size, of course) feel free to propose it. On M-1 Zarya rides inside a protective shroud with an escape tower. On R-6A, the cosmonaut relies on an ejection seat. My intention was to have Zarya's nose exposed on R-6A launches, giving the hatch a clear path to blow out of the way in an emergency, but you could also go with a fairing with a hole, as per Vostok.
Actually, if its monolithic I'm tempted to say variable thrust through the main engines, controlled by a mini-KORD type system. Should be simpler to execute with far fewer engines than N-1. That or verniers.
My notes had both stages at 4.15m. As e of pi noted, that's a limit imposed by the Soviet rail network. But if you come up with something elegant and workable at a smaller diameter (scaled to Kerbel-size, of course) feel free to propose it. On M-1 Zarya rides inside a protective shroud with an escape tower. On R-6A, the cosmonaut relies on an ejection seat. My intention was to have Zarya's nose exposed on R-6A launches, giving the hatch a clear path to blow out of the way in an emergency, but you could also go with a fairing with a hole, as per Vostok.
By both stages, do you mean the second and third stages, or the first and second stages?
M-1 Zarya has just two stages. (Though as discussed, the "First Stage" could be split into 3 cores. Here I'm using the Western definition of "Stage" rather than the Russian).
M-1 bis Signal adds a third stage, but isn't used for manned flights. Don't think I have notes on the diameter of the 3rd stage, but I expect it to be pretty small.
Well, I already made the M-1 bis third stage at 1.875m for my R-6A, so I think the idea of a 1.875-2.5m second stage and a 2.5-3.75 first stage would still be good.