This KSP Planet Got Wiped Out by a Supernova

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Yo, it's Bo. Welcome back to KSP.

[00:00:02]Previously on my interstellar series, Kerbal Star Frontiers, we mounted an expedition to a pulsar system called Anubis and the planet Sobeck that orbits around it. It had this really cool chasm lake that we landed in and checked out the crazy environment on a pulsar planet like this. And today we're picking up right where we left off in orbit above Sobec to continue our exploration of the planets in the Anubis system. Today we're going to a planet called Ank, which is the furthest planet in the system. And from our preliminary observations, seems to be a planet that was completely glassed over by the supernova explosion that created the pulsar Anubis itself. So, Sobeck, the planet that we're leaving right now, is actually a second generation planet that was formed from the debris of destroyed planets from that same explosion. And the planet Enk, our destination for today, is a surviving planet that was not completely destroyed, but completely wiped out from the explosion. And that's going to be really interesting to investigate. But right now, we're leaving the sphere of influence of Sobeck. You can see a very thin debris disc around it forming almost ring-like structures, like a very faint ring of Saturn or something like that. And now that we've escaped the sphere of influence, we've set up an inclination matching maneuver to match the inclination of the orbit of Enk. And then that'll make it much easier to extend our our Appoapsis up to intersect its orbit and get those close encounter nodes right on top of each other to get our encounter. So, we've got that set up. We're going to warp ahead till our maneuver and ignite that burn, which is just over 2,000 m/s of delta V. This craft runs on a fusion engine from the Sterling Systems mod. And uh the craft itself had like four or 5 million delta V uh when we started out. And right now we have we just have about half of our fuel left. So we have plenty of fuel to work with, but we need most of that for the return trip home. But we've got our encounter with Ank and a flyby set up.

[00:02:17]So we'll warp ahead till we've entered its sphere of influence and it should be within sight shortly.

[00:02:26]So from orbit it appears completely sterile without any detectable atmosphere and its surface has uh appeared to have been grounded into regalith or even glassed over across some expansive mares. not that dissimilar to our own moon, except these seas are highly reflective. They're not real seas, but they look like that.

[00:02:50]That's why they call them mares on our own moon. Those are like the dark spots.

[00:02:55]That's kind of cool space trivia. But here we are circularized in orbit above Ank. And yeah, like I was saying, the geography here is is uh delineated by these highly reflective glass over plains and mountainous regions, but there are remains of river valleys on this planet that have really intrigued our Kerbal. So, we're going to head out to the largest of these ancient river deltas to investigate the remains of this once habitable world. So, we've got to get this ship ready to go. This is our same nuclear saltwater space plane.

[00:03:30]We're aiming to land right about there.

[00:03:32]And we've modified our trajectory to impact the surface, right next to an interesting anomaly that we were able to detect from the surface. It appears to be an artificial structure at the mouth of the largest river delta. It might be a bridge or a dam of some sort, a surviving relic of a long dead extraterrestrial species. And this is crazy. This isn't the first time we found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in our interstellar series, but we have to land and investigate further. It's kind of a rough landing, but the gravity on this planet is pretty low, and we can afford to have some rougher landings than usual. Looking out across the expanse of this ancient riverbed, we can see crystals and what appears to be petrified or frozen trees or skeletons of ancient plant life. Uh yeah, this is pretty creepy, but it looks as if the entire plane was wiped out all at once in a rapid fashion, probably by the supernova that created the Anubis pulsar that the entire system orbits around.

[00:04:45]So, a supernova explosion is an extreme stellar event from a collapsing, dying massive star creating pulsars and neutron stars. Yeah, they're extremely deadly. Most likely most systems don't survive these explosions, but we have actually discovered multiple exoplanets around pulsars in real life. And so these planets are an interesting look into what these strange worlds might be like in Kerbal Space Program. So we've headed up to one of the large frozen petrified trees. No doubt was killed by the instant loss of the atmosphere frozen in the vacuum. But we can also see some extremely strange formations that must be bones. So it looks like there were ancient alien fauna, maybe megapauna even. This looks like a very large animal that were killed in the explosion as well. And just the size of these bones is pretty nerve-wracking.

[00:05:42]But we do have to see how many Kerbals could fit inside the belly of this thing. Maybe this thing was an ancient predator that ate, you know, aliens like like us own Kerbals, but maybe they were domesticated by the previous ancient extraterrestrial civilization that left its mark on this ancient river valley.

[00:06:02]So, that was a pretty crazy discovery.

[00:06:04]We got a fair amount of samples from the bones and petrified trees that we're going to have to bring back to Kurban to analyze further. We don't have the right science equipment here on our surface expedition, but we're going to investigate the mega structure as well.

[00:06:20]So, we're back on our space plane and we're going to go on a short hop over to the base of the dam or bridge that spans this riverbed and go on EVA to the top with our mono propellant jetpacks to investigate further. So, we're going to come down for a landing. Hopefully, this one's softer than the one before.

[00:06:42]But it's kind of hard to control pro.

[00:06:44]Oh, looks like Yeah. Uh, you know, not not a great landing. But any any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

[00:06:55]You guys will have to comment down below what you think this mega structure is. I kind of think it looks more like a bridge than a dam because it looks like the water level or liquid level of this river would be much lower than the dam extends. But it would be crazy to imagine giant waterfalls coming out of these holes in the dam or bridge here.

[00:07:16]Yeah, that would be a crazy sight. And you know, this this this planet's not even that big relatively like the gravity is a lot lower. So maybe this planet was once more massive and it was kind of stripped away and the soil levels or regalith like the land levels of the uh the surroundings were degraded to some degree. Or maybe this was a moon that survived around a gas giant that was that wasn't dense enough to survive.

[00:07:44]The explosion entirely. Anyway, this is a giant mystery of a world and the view from the top of the mega structure is like a liinal space almost in space.

[00:07:57]Speaking of that, yo, I'm going to see the back rooms tomorrow. I'm super stoked about that. Um, yeah. Yeah, I don't usually do tangents, but I'm stoked for this movie. I haven't been stoked as stoked for a movie since like Tron Legacy in 2010.

[00:08:14]So, that's going to be cool. Tomorrow, we're going to take a nose dive off the edge of this megalithic structure for some epic space jumping. You know, a long and treasured Kerbal tradition that we can always pull away from with our trusty Evva jetpacks. And here we are back safe and sound. We'll get back in the space plane and get ready to rendevous with the mother ship back in orbit. So, we'll wait for it to pass overhead and we can set it as our target and use that target node on our nav ball as a guide in our ascent to align orbits. So, we're going to quickly shoot on out of this ancient river delta, leaving this relic of an ancient civilization behind for other space programs to discover. And we've matched our appoapsis with the mother ship.

[00:09:06]We're going to warp ahead, circularize into orbit, and do our standard docking procedure, which is to align our inclinations with an inclination matching burn. And then we'll get those uh close flyby maneuvers uh nodes right on top of each other and then wait till our flyby. Then we'll cancel out all of our relative speed and burn towards the target and rinse and repeat until we've rendevued safe and sound. And we'll open up our docking port and dock back together to complete our rendevous. And now that we're back together with the mother ship, we can begin our plans to escape the sphere of influence of Anubis, back into deep space around the pulsar where we're going to try to drop off this dead weight of the space plane.

[00:09:57]We don't need it anymore. So, we're going to get all of our Kerbals out and back into the main ship. We're going to put this thing on a really low parapsis close to the pulsar. See how close we can get it and we're going to leave it behind. And so we've undocked it. That thing's going to fall way down close to the pulsar for some extra science readouts that we're going to be uh observing. But the main mother ship, we're going to zoom back into the Kerbball system here. We're going to set Kurban as our target and begin our interstellar journey back to the Kerbal system. So, Kurban at this point is about five Kerbal lighty years away and we have about a million meters/s of delta V to spend on our acceleration to our cruising speed back home. And it's going to take us about 40 to 50 years to get back to Kerbal. And so once we've reached our cruising speed or spent that remainder of our fuel that we've allotted for the acceleration out of Anubis, we can shut off that main engine and coast all the way to our destination. That's kind of how I do it for interstellar transfers like this.

[00:11:11]And we'll go ahead and check out what's going on with the space plane that we left in a low parapsis around Anubis.

[00:11:18]Wish I had dropped it a bit lower, but you can see just clouds of material just radiating off of this rapidly rotating neutron star and those plumes of X-ray and gamma radiation coming off of the pulsar. Pulsars are such extreme stellar objects. It's crazy that there's some in KSP to explore. Right now, we're freezing our Kerbals in these cryogenic hibernation pods that are provided by the mod Deep Freeze. We've got them all frozen up so they don't have to spend the next four or five decades in space doing nothing, which is always handy. No amount of snacks can really get rid of the boredom of a trip like that. And we're going to make a course correction on our way back to Kurban. You can never really get these interstellar uh flybys completely right. So you usually have to do a fairly large course correction burn to get your perryapsis or flyby close to the planet that you're aiming for, which in this case is Kurban. And we've set up that course correction burn, which is about 10,000 m/ second of delta V. But with the 1.5 million that we have remaining, that's pretty safe margin for us. So, we're going to shut off that engine and continue our coasting cruise back to the curveball system. We've already been in space for 40 years on this second leg. We're probably pushing like 80 years for our total mission duration as we approach the curbball system.

[00:12:52]We're almost crossing the orbit of Elu, our Pluto analog, where we can start up our engines again and continue our deceleration to capture into the system itself.

[00:13:09]Once we've gotten our cruising speed to about 100,000 meters per second, we can coach the rest of the way to our curbball parapsis where we can continue our capture burn to circularize at and around the Kurban parapsis. You know, that general area of space. And now that we've done that, it'll be easier to match our inclinations and get those flyby nodes right on top of each other for that intercept. And we've got our capture or our flyby of the Kurban system. We're going to do another course correction maneuver to tweak that flyby of Kurban so that we can get on a nice trajectory back home or we'll have to do another de acceleration to capture around the planet. So, we'll wait about a year till we've crossed into its path and we can go ahead and unfreeze our Kerbals from their five decade slumber in deep space. Hopefully, that didn't give them too much of a headache.

[00:14:15]Hopefully, we pack Tylenol on board. And we're just coasting down to our parapsis and where we can ignite those engines once again to capture around our home planet, bringing our total mission duration to about 107 years in space.

[00:14:33]Yeah. So, this ISV, while very capable, isn't much of a fast ship, but it's uh pretty reliable, which is pretty cool.

[00:14:42]And now that we're in orbit above Kurban, we sent out a crew capsule to rendevous in orbit for our crew to disembark the ISV into this crew capsule, which will be able to reenter the atmosphere safely. So, we're going to push away from the ISV using our monor propellant engines and put ourselves on a trajectory to clip into the atmosphere of Kurban, which will begin to rapidly decelerate our crew capsule on a fiery re-entry down to the surface. But it's okay. We packed heat shields this time. You always got to remember to do that in Kerbal Space Program. And those awesome Firefly re-entry effects from the mod Firefly always makes this a much appreciated fireworks show for our safe return after our deep space exploration to a pulsar system, which is a pretty cool achievement. Our second interstellar series complete, even though this one was fairly short. There's only like three planets in the Anubis system and the one that I didn't go to has like insane gravity. So, I don't know how I was going to land on that. But, we explored the other two, which turned out to be really interesting in their own rights. Probably the most interesting planets in the system. And so, we've got our parachutes open and we're floating down to make our splash down in Kurban's oceans where they'll pick us up in a couple hours. So, yeah, that's mission complete for today, guys. If you like this video, make sure to leave a like, comment, and subscribe for more KSB content like this. And I'll see you guys next time.