Skorpychan

Smashed to a paste on Eve due to his own laziness. Bill and Jeb managed to land. Or, at least, 'land'. They ended up in the ocean, a little ways from land. Jeb got out and swam. Bill? Bill was lazy. Bill decided to use the lander's rocket to lift up and hover over to land. Bill forgot how high the gravity was, cut the engine to trim his ascent, and plummeted back down suddenly into the remains of the rover to a tragic death. There's Jeb looking out over the wreckage.

Well, a reusable launch vehicle with a cargo bay, at least.

This looks like a job for a space shuttle. You need it to be kerbed, so it doesn't have range limitations. And you need it to be mostly reusable, so it saves funds that need to be spent on fun missions. So, you just send up a large craft, and pootle around the Kerbin system releasing minisats. All you need in them is a little docking port, an antenna, a solar panel, batteries, and some science parts anyway, so you can pile them into a cargo bay in bulk. Maybe even design a satellite retrieval craft; just a control seat, some thrusters, and a tiny docking port for extracting satellites from cargo bays.

Oh, that's brilliant. I've got to try that. Possibly along with building it a rover so it can be self-propelled.

IIRC, they did. Aside from 'get out and push it upright again', or 'improvise a crane from the legs', there were plans for dismantling the ascent and descent stages to make a bare-bones framework with engines and fuel tanks that they could simply ride up into lunar orbit. Both one-man and two-man versions. Which definitely sounds like something from KSP. But I think I'll just include self-righting mechanisms for my rockets in future.

Reaction wheels are wonderful for this. I was on the Mun last time this happened. I ended up retracting the landing gear and using the reaction wheels to wiggle the lander around to point the engine downhill, then tipped it up onto the engine nozzle before extending the gear. That just made it roll over again, and down the hill until I hit the bottom. Then I had to sort of prop it against the side of the hill, rotate it to point the nose upwards, and use the engine to push me along and up the hill at low thrust until I could use thrust vectoring to tip upright and stay there long enough to settle on the legs. I'm really considering belly-lander designs for future use. Especially because they'll be compatible with wheeled landing gear in case I mess up the horizontal velocity.

Add some dihedral, perhaps, or some more vertical surfaces.

Just stick an SRB on the back.

Looks like a way to save weight on decouplers, or another use for heatshields.

So, Eve's atmosphere? Maybe a Joolian zeppelin is a possibility. The Kermanberg? The Graf Kerbalin? The K101?

Parachutes and some height. Water's pretty much as hard as the ground.

Thrust vectoring, and gentle control adjustments. Drag eats efficiency, and thrust vectoring works well. That, and more TWR. Driftiness sometimes goes away if you can just accelerate a little.

The Mun is a little high-gravity to be viable for flying fuel up from. It's right up at the upper limit for viablity. On actual planets, you'll probably only be mining if you want to make your ascent fuel on the spot. Retrieving fuel should be done from smaller muns. You can also refine fuel from asteroids. They deplete, but they can carry a LOT of fuel, and get lighter as you extract it. As long as you have an ISRU setup, they're like big fuel tanks.

Vertical momentum means a higher AP, which means more efficient raising of the PE to circularise. Otherwise, the higher you are, the better the LV-N works because ISP.

That's the EASY method. I've got an ambition of a system that snags old fuel tanks, decouplers, stages, and the like, grabs them with a Klaw, and punts them into more desirable orbits or into the atmosphere.

Don't send anything to Eve's surface if you want it back. It's nigh-impossible to ascend from there with any meaningful payload.

Mass distribution dictates they should be near the top, though. They're relatively light, and shouldn't be forcing CoM upwards by displacing heavier parts up the rocket.

Turn early, and turn slowly. Use thrust vectoring rather than active aerodynamics, and things should work well. Basically, just turn a few notches over once you're clear of the pad, then a little more and a little more as you rise. Once the atmosphere thins out, you can turn more and lose less dV to drag. Once you've got an AP above the atmosphere, kill the throttle and coast up. Then you tip over to a proper 90 degrees and go full throttle to circularise. Or use the thrust vectoring to steer for that if your reaction wheels can't keep up.

Bigger horizontal stabilisers, or a longer tail. Maybe add some canards at the front?

BOTH docking ports have to be outwards. The 'out' sides are what dock together. They need to kiss. Also, make sure you're attaching them docked, and not simply attached to the node inside.

Without refuelling AT ALL? Hideously heavy. And you'll be dropping empty fuel tanks all the time. Or, alternatively, just pick out a big enough asteroid, and hook onto it as a gigantic fuel tank. Refine as you go, and you won't need more than a few thousand deltaV worth of tanks at any time.

Useless? USELESS? NOTHING is useless. Stick one front and one rear, and you can dock rovers together into a train.

I can confirm that this actually works. I had to learn it a while ago after forgetting to add RCS fuel to a tanker. (Yes, I was too lazy to restart the mission with a properly-designed tanker.) (And yes, I managed to dock with just main engine burns.)

Can I request one with a munscape featuring a tipped-over lander, silhouetted against the sky? Black munscape and lander, orange sky. I tip over so many landers trying to save fuel by not cancelling all the horizontal velocity. So many that I'm just considering adding wheels instead.

Mindful of it, I'm trying to design lifters that don't drop tanks and engines in LKO. Otherwise, I'm going to use a craft with a Klaw, an engine, and not a lot else to try and deorbit some of it. Either ions or just an Lv-909.