How Do I Put A Rover On The Mun?

[The Jedi Master]

What the title says. I try and try, and it never works. It can be unmanned, but manned would be better. It would also be nice to know if my current plan is a good idea: land vertically, then tilt over to land the wheels. Thanks in advance!

[ThatBum]

Try doing it Curiosity style with a skycrane, that seems to be the popular way to do it.

Here's one of mine:

The orange radial engines provide reverse thrust to slow the rover once it's already vertical from the cruise stage (not pictured) killing horizontal velocity. Once the heatshield is discarded and the rover touches down, the decouplers separate and the sepratrons fire, shooting the skycrane off to crash somewhere.

When designing your skycrane, be sure to test it on the launchpad first, to be sure it can come to a hover. If it lists to once side, there's a weight balance problem. Also remember that the Mun has 1/6 Kerbin gravity, so you don't need as much power to decelerate there as on Kerbin.

You could also try CP Airbags to land Spirit/Opportunity style.

Edited April 26, 2013 by ThatBum

[coops421]

you have to build a kind of frame with some rockets on it, you could build a rover that could detach from the top half of a rocket with its own rocket power.

[SGT_RIZZO300]

I agree that you definately need to use a skycrane setup for landing but is there any other problems you are having? What is going wrong (ie touching the ground and blowing up or just ending up fliped over) Also you said you want it to be manned so that means it will be big and therefore a bit more chalanging. Once you get a working design I would practice landing unmanned rovers a few times until you get used to it before droping anything big down. Oh and a screenshot of the rover you are trying to land would help.

[Mastodon]

how I did it:

[ThatBum]

If it's manned you'd have a hard time getting them back to Kerbin with just the rover. I guess you could land a return vehicle along with the rover, and either leave the rover there when you leave (similar to the later Apollo missions), or pick the rover up with a docking node or Kerbal Attachment System.

[CalculusWarrior]

Landing vertically is a bit risky: you might tilt the other way, or break your wheels

This is my rover, I encased it in an 'aerodynamic' shell for reentry:

I then decouple the heat shield, and deploy the parachute.

After that, it's a simple matter of slowing down with the rockets next to the ground and deploying the rover.

I originally tried out the Kerbal Attachment System, which adds a rope and winch. That's why I included the MechJeb module for the Translatron. However, I found that KAS is still bugged, and unwinding the winch causes the skycrane to experience random forces and flip out randomly. Hence, I switched back to a decoupler.

This type of landing mechanism should work well on the Mun, though you may want to swap out the parachute for extra fuel, as there's no atmosphere. However, the Mun's low gravity should make landing it easier.

[Vanamonde]

This is how I do it.

Carrying them in pairs means the rocket has to be twice as big, but entirely eliminates the headaches of trying to balance an asymmetrical rover design.

[The Jedi Master]

Oh and a screenshot of the rover you are trying to land would help.

I aim to please:

[ThatBum]

Try putting a docking port in the middle and putting the crane on that. Then you could possibly reuse the crane by docking it to something else. It looks like it will be hard to balance though.

Edit: Oh I see what you're trying to do, with the engine and lander legs in the back. I guess that works too, and if you have enough fuel left you could get back to Kerbin, but that's an older way to do it and is hard to get it totally vertical, else you might land on your back and be stuck.

[SGT_RIZZO300]

If you shift those middle RCS forward or back and put a radial attachment node in the exact top center you could put a fuel tank on top with 4 I-beams with small fuel tanks and engines on them. For the launch vehicle you will more likely than not have to use panels to build a platform under it and put your rocket directly under center of mass.

Edited April 27, 2013 by SGT_RIZZO300

[StabLie]

I used a prototype version of this (I just removed some useless crap). It will get you to the Mun, but you have to conserve fuel so you probably won't be able to get much further.