0.16 A Munar rescue misson

[Ghery88]

So this will be a truly Kerbal story of faulty engineering, incompetnet mission control, bugs and naive bravery, even without Jeb being involved!

A friend of mine pops by occasionally and takes over KSP for a while. He\'s a decent rookie like myself, but he\'d cut some corners thanks to my experience and prone to insanity. That resulted the Massive Attack II type of rocket. While it\'s fun for me to watch this, poor Kerbals suffer from the deputy director of KSC a great deal. But to cut the intro short(er) here\'s the deal:

- He launhced the MA II, and managed to litter his trail with debris

- He got into a highly inclined (almost polar) Munar orbit and failed to land safely - pod stranded

- Sent one poor Kerbal to EVA - KIA

- Two Kerbals left in the pod for weeks

A few days later outside of the Kerbal universe their original director decided to attempt the seemingly impossible: rescue the rest of the ill fated crew. So I had to design a craft for that from scratch. Specifics were:

- Stock parts only (as I haven\'t got any mods, hehe)

- Ensure manuverability for precision landing

- Lightweight, 3 person craft

- Minimze orbital debris

- NO SAVES USED

It took about three test launches and crews to get it fairly right. (Sadly that also meant Jeb waiting for his turn of coming out of the cloning facility.) But I eventually prepared the Munar 2, made mostly from 0.16 parts. Scott Kerman was a bit reluctant to go, as he had explosive experiences with the Massive Attack series, but he was chosen exactly for this.

Ascent was a bit tricky as with gaining altitude the Munar 2 lost stability for some reason and it was really hard to stabilize things without wasting RCS. Similar to Scott Manley\'s experience. In the end I managed to get rid of the last lifting stage (with more than half of a large tank of fuel left) at the cost of all three tanks of RCS fuel and quite a bit of the TMI stage fuel reserves. Poor prospects for my rescue mission.

So I had to exploit the fuel bug, if I wanted to carry on. I did, shame on me. But after bad luck, came a bit of good as well. My approach to the Mun was fairly inclined, so I needed less fuel to get into the proper orbit. Thanks to the bug exploit (again, shame on me), I still had the TMI stage to do this. I got a 44x53 km orbit seemingly along the correct plane. But before that the TMI stage ran out of fuel, so it broke my zero debris left behind rule.

Another fun fact, that the landing site was on the dark side of the Mun, but as I had a functioning command pod there I knew that the altimiter cheats approx. 500 meters and the area is quite flat. Scott then preformed my second succsessful Munar landing with a faulty craft, without any RCS. Of course I botched it and the craft fell over, but I managed to get it straight up on the second try with the landing legs. It was huge succsess considering Scott landed in 11 kms from the stranded pod.

Then came the EVAs from the MA II pod to the Munar 2. The guys preformed well apart from ragdolling a bit on the surface and had plenty of RCS fuel left when they arrived. Then again they met some faulty engineering again, as some idiot forgot to put enough ladder on the side... But they used their mastery of RCS and got safely on board anyway.

Then Scott fired the engines, headed to 270 degrees and preformed a textbook Mun escape to Kerbin aerobraking orbit. The return was safe and sound, max G didn\'t even exceed 3 and the guys landed in a nice forest.

YAY! 8)

P.s. 1 screenshots underway

P.s. 2 Can you tell me what\'s with the parchute textures? My guess it\'s because I changed the UnityGraphicsQuality_h1669003810 value from 0 to 3 in order to get back shadows.

[Ghery88]

Screenshots cont.

[Ghery88]

Last bunch.

[ccrraazzyyman]

Well done. A great read and a great rescue.

[squidflakes]

I\'ve got some brave Kerbalnauts stuck in a pretty regular solar orbit and I\'d thought about rescuing them. How do you launch the capsule with fewer than 3 crew?

[Ghery88]

Thanks, this is my greatest achievement so far.

I\'ve got some brave Kerbalnauts stuck in a pretty regular solar orbit and I\'d thought about rescuing them. How do you launch the capsule with fewer than 3 crew?

Really simple, just send the surplus Kerbals on EVA on the launchpad and end their flights if they survive that.