One Final Mission (in Demo)

[Wachman]

So I bought the full game, and while it was downloading I decided to do one last mission in the demo, a Mun landing with a "rover". Now the demo doesn't come with wheels or any way to control a ship except in the 1 man capsule, so I had to try something creative. So I decided to do more of a skimmer/hopper "rover". I threw some RCS tanks under a capsule, added some legs and a SAS control and was ready to roll.

Except now I had to figure out how to get it there. My first thought was to add it to the side of my "standard" small Mun lander. Unfortunately RCS tanks don't attach to radial decouplers. So I had to put it inline on the ship. So I added it under what is normally my small lander. Added four fuel tanks to act as landing legs. Added engines and landing gear, braced the tanks and crossed my fingers. After some testing on the launch pad, reconfigured the "rover" so it didn't interfere with the tanks of the main ship tested again, liked the results and went to step 2, build something to get it to the Mun.

After repeated handling problems with a large asparagus launcher, I settled on a kinda hybrid asparagus. With stacked tanks in a hexagonal arrangement. It flew, it did the job, but didn't control well. (it was later discovered that I had left off a SAS module from the main ship. It also should have had it's own RCS system.)

Ready to launch.

And we're on our way. Here you can see the "Rover" tucked in the middle of those tanks.

And in case you ever wondered what it says on the bottom of a monopropellent tank (No, the image is not flipped)

Kinda expalins alot. (I love these small details. If I hadn't built this ship this way I probably would never have known)

We did finally land:

Dropped the "rover" and relaunched to move the ship off the "rover" Unfortunetly without a SAS, or RCS the ship was incredibly unstable. It was very top heavy as the center return ship still had a full tank. In hindsight I should slapped some legs on it and jettisoned the outer tank legs after the "rover" was dropped.

And our bad luck continues. With out a way to test the "rover", too late it was discovered to be unstable. It needed more and differently placed RCS nozzles. I also would have raised the attachment point of the landing legs to lower the center of mass of the "rover"

After all that (and a couple of tries) I got the return ship off the Mun and returned to Kerbal. It's with a sad eye that we now close down the KSP (demo). But also with a joyful heart we open KSP, the full game.

(Question, how do I insert pictures so they're not so small on the page?)