Space Probes are Beautiful

Pluto 4 in orbit over Duna

This could be considered a follow-up to a post I made earlier, for those of you who remember the Pluto program. I was recently bitten by the space probe bug once again when I saw a comment questioning the use of probes when manned missions were by all means superior.

Voyager

Perhaps the most famous space probe out there, Voyager captures my fascination with probes and why I continue building them in KSP. Probes are our explorers, explorers that come in many shapes and sizes, they almost never come home, and they pioneer the paths that humans will one day take. They are strangely beautiful, trekking into the unknown to make it known, mechanical boxes in stark contrast to the natural spheres they orbit. The following pictures are some of my favorite real life designs based purely on Aesthetics, all from NASA's Explorer program (famous for the launch of the first successful US satellite) which continues to this day.

Explorer 6

Notable for transmitting the first pictures of earth from orbit, the image description calls the solar-panel look-alikes "paddles" and reminds me of some sort of alien invader craft.

Solrad 8

Launched in 1960 and made to monitor solar radiation. I like the incorporation of the solar panels into the body of the craft.

WISE

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, launched in 2009, it discovered tens of thousands of asteroids and star clusters. A cylindrical design, it was also the solar panels that earned it a place on this list.

CHIPSat

The first of NASA's University-class explorers, I really like the angular structure, although it makes it significantly harder to replicate in KSP.

NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array)

Launched in June 2012, this one really caught my eye, so I decided to try and replicate it in game to the best of my ability.

Construction

Couple things to note. First, offset engine to make up for the slight asymmetry. Unfortunately the Ant (which is the closest engine I could find based on the image) lacks gimbaling so I centered it as close as possible to the center of mass. Second, the lack of any angular fuel tanks annoys me, and I had to use the very round Oscar tanks, though I clipped them together to try and hide it. Squad (or any modders out there for that matter), I want angular fuel tanks to make my probes look cooler.

On launchpad

The craft was christened Pluto 6 as a revival of the Pluto program. Another pleasing pro of probes is the tendency for them to be light which makes them much easier to launch and orbit.

Orbit achieved

Since the image didn't show the top of the probe, I decided to use that as an excuse to put a bat pack and coms device on top.

My attempt at replicating the NuSTAR image

The craft is also significantly shorter than that of the image, mostly to save weight and keep it stable.

Beauty shot

Aside from the experience in asymmetric designs, the craft itself serves no real purpose and is purely aesthetic (at least not in this save).

Another Beauty Shot

That said I think it is great to make spacecraft that are visually pleasing, and its one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of manned missions as just about all of my craft end up being cylinders, and after a while I get tired of building and flying cylinders. With probes I feel that I can be a bit more expressive in my designs.

Final Beauty shot

As I mentioned earlier though, I would love greater access to a variety of more parts. Right now, every fuel tank and most command modules (excluding the probe bodies) is cylindrical, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (especially since most rockets are cylinders in some form and it does make sense in that context), it also means that there is a lot less variety in the shapes of craft we see and make.

Beyond

Not a radical design by any means, I'm just going to use this image to conclude the album. From what I gather (note: I have not read any of the recent dev-notes, I gathered this from the comments and wiki) 1.1 will hopefully bring a revival to the unmanned aspect of the game with the addition of relay networks which will supposedly increase the possible amount of science gained from probes. Any more info on the implementation of this system would be welcome.

Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry for any errors in advance as this was slapped together rather quickly.