TRF9 Update

Hello everyone. Over the past few months, since the public beta was released, there has been lots of work on the TRF9 (True Reuse Falcon 9). Additionally, there have also been many times that the project was almost finished and ready to be published. Something would always come up and cause weeks of delay.

There have been lots of changes between the code and build. After multiple experiments, it became apparent that the current build was not easily reusable. Essentially, the entire vehicle was rebuilt. It brought improvements to the build accuracy and vehicle integration for reflight. Some of the most notable changes are the landing legs, grid fins, and the stage separation mechanism.

The following are some visualizations of these hardware changes.

Stage Separation Gif (Click)

Comparison

• The left side shows the 3 new variants, each to serve a range of players and the performance their device can handle. The version on the far right is the beta that was released to the public in March. From this point on, that version will be referred to as the “Public Beta”

From the code aspect, there has been a lot of work there as well. The main changes here is an upgrade to the user UI when choosing your desired orbit, a more realistic return trajectory giving the ability for the renowned “dogleg maneuver” a Falcon 9 first stage performs when landing.

New User Interface (Click)

RTLS Trajectory

One of the main additions to this version was supposedly the droneship landings. Well, those ended up not going to plan. After the script was updated to support them, a bug with SimpleRockets 2 prevented the droneship from being used. Once the booster gets within the physics range of the ship, it would start sinking. This was an old bug that was believed to have been fixed, apparently not. Until such a time as it is fixed, droneship landings are not going to be useable. The code is there, but unusable at this time. In the meantime, here is a clip from an earlier test that was working.

Droneship Landing (Click)

Private testing for V1.0 is beginning with a select few in my discord server. The current target date for the public release of V1.0 is August 17th. Due to the pushed-up date, the recovery hardware will not be as user-friendly as I intended and will be released at a later date.

I would like to thank everyone who has helped with this project at one point or another. Them being pabloplataa, Patelsh23, 1nsanity, gopherguts2, plane918273645.

Here are some images from the past few months: