I need a rocket design that will get me to the moon and back!

[Buddhafist]

I apparently messed up my first post, so I will nutshell this.

I have three kerbal stranded on the Mun.

I have a great rocket, capable of putting me in orbit around Kerbin and getting me to the Mun.

I have an assumedly overly bulky lander which may be my problem?

My problem is that I just don't have the fuel to land on the moon, rescue my little buddies, and then get home.. As it stands, I have three landers trapped on the moon without fuel, and every single time I have tried to adjust my rocket to solve the problem, it becomes unstable and is no good..

I would really appreciate a rocket design that can get me to the Mun and back.. Even better, I would really appreciate a rocket design that will get me further.

I currently have the whole 45 line of the science tree researched. I also have Fuel and Electronics in the 90 line.

Any help you can give would really be appreciated.. I feel like Iv hit a kerbin wall.

[Semtex89]

I replied to your other (messed up?) post;

First a stupid question: you are using stages for getting into orbit, right?

Put on a couple of detachable fuel tanks on the sides of your lander. Use their fuel to land safely, and then leave them at the Mun and use the fuel in the core tank to burn back into orbit and back to Kerbin.

That should solve the fuel problem, though the extra tanks really shouldn't be necessary just for going to the Mun. This design should get you to Minmus and back.

How are your landers built? Bulky is generally impractical. If they are unstable, try using the 'center of mass' and 'center of thrust' interface when building your rocket. The center of thrust should be directly underneath the center of mass.

[brooklyn666]

I also replied to your first post (not sure what you mean when you say you messed up), but I'll copy it here:

Can you show us some pictures of your crafts and maybe your trajectories so we can tailor our advice? It's possible your rockets might be up to the task, but your maneuvers are inefficient, or your whole craft may need some adjusting.

[Vanamonde]

Here's a rocket made for newbies to practice with. It's over-built for moon missions to give a new pilot some margin for error, so some players have flown it to Duna and landed there.

[SRV Ron]

This demo mode rocket made Mun landing and back. You can build something similar in the Career Mode once you have fuel lines. In addition, you already have the better Rocomax boosters.

While this probe design was for a one way trip to Jool, the lander from the demo would easily work on this career designed ship.

Play with different designs, don't over build, and take it one step at a time by landing on Minmus first, then Mun.

[Streetwind]

If I learned one thing, then it is that piloting can make or break a design. I read up on physics on wikipedia instead of browsing KSP gameplay guides, and I found some things in that that blew my mind as I was able to replicate the effect exactly ingame.

For example, you can reliably run almost any lander out of fuel trying to land on the Mun if you simply do it wrong enough. The basic gist is, your engines should be on as rarely as possible - and if they are, they should be on full throttle. Every moment your engines aren't on full throttle, you're wasting fuel. That is because you need a certain percentage of your engine power just to cancel out "gravity drag", leaving the rest to do actual deceleration work. And if you throttle your engines down enough, then all you are doing is maintaining your status quo while not actually doing anything useful, while fuel is still being consumed. Maintaining the status quo is the worst possible thing you can do.

In a practical example, I took a lander to the Mun and, after the initial intercept burn, left my engines on just a little bit, really low, enough to slowly float gently down to the surface. They took almost no fuel, and I was never in any danger of crash landing - until I ran out of fuel before even making it down to the surface simply because it took me so long.

Then I took the exact same lander (loaded from a quicksave), and just let it freefall straight down to the Mun as fast as it wanted to go after intercepting. Once or twice, I did short, hard burns at full throttle to decelerate a bit and get a feel for how much height I would lose while canceling out a certain velocity, but even then, the less of that you do the better. Afterwards, I let it freefall again for a while. The landing made me a bit nervous, braking down from 400 m/s only a few thousand meters before touchdown, but then I afforded myself the luxury of floating the last 30-50 meters on low engine power. I landed, did my EVA, boarded again, hopped the lander a kilometer or two to a neighboring biome, landed again, did a second EVA, boarded again, launched back up from the Mun, escaped to Kerbin, decelerated to aerobraking height and decoupled the final fuel tank still half full before re-entering.

That's the difference between how you do your landings. It is perfectly possible to do so badly that even a completely overprovisioned design fails to go half the way, just because a law of physics you didn't know or remember at the time eats all your fuel like an insidious little gremlin hiding in your tank. Now obviously this is an extreme example, which I engineered to visualize the difference to myself, but the point is: piloting skill ultimately equals delta-v. It applies to knowing how to launch while minimizing the sum of aerodynamic drag and gravity drag, knowing how to get the orbit you want through cheap mid-flight course corrections instead of expensive inclination tilts, knowing how (and when!) to try for an intercept, knowing how to land without burning more fuel than necessary... every single thing has room for error.

Because of this, I used to have severe troubles building rockets that got anything useful at all into orbit. I solved this problem not by building better rockets, but by learning how to fly them.

Oh, and another trick: go for Minmus first. Costs you maybe 5%-10% extra delta-v to intercept, while costing way, way less to land on and launch from. And in 0.23, it now has biomes as well for juicy science.

Edited January 6, 2014 by Streetwind

[Buddhafist]

Then I took the exact same lander (loaded from a quicksave), and just let it freefall straight down to the Mun as fast as it wanted to go after intercepting. Once or twice, I did short, hard burns at full throttle to decelerate a bit and get a feel for how much height I would lose while canceling out a certain velocity, but even then, the less of that you do the better. Afterwards, I let it freefall again for a while. The landing made me a bit nervous, braking down from 400 m/s only a few thousand meters before touchdown, but then I afforded myself the luxury of floating the last 30-50 meters on low engine power. I landed, did my EVA, boarded again, hopped the lander a kilometer or two to a neighboring biome, landed again, did a second EVA, boarded again, launched back up from the Mun, escaped to Kerbin, decelerated to aerobraking height and decoupled the final fuel tank still half full before re-entering.

This is exactly what I have been doing, minus the flawless perfect landing. I failed to land 37 times before I got the hang of it, but finally decided that was my best bet to save fuel.

The problem has been that takes up nearly all my fuel. This is for two reasons I think. First, my entry orbit is super steep. Or rather, horizontal once I reach the surface. I spend a lot of time just decelerating. This is turn causes me to have to keep raising my alt to give more time to break. Also, this technique changes up my landing point, which has to be compensated for once I finally get it under control. Since it is a rescue mission, I need to land in a specific location.

Also, I have all my screenshots, but how do I upload them...

I feel like a newb... Once upon a time I ran my own forum with 2000+ members and today in these new formats Im just like "what are all these buttons!?" lol

Do I just use photobucket still? I assume that with that whole panel of buttons there is a quick upload from option?

As soon as I know how to upload them, I will show you my designs and landers.

Like I said, Iv really only played maybe 10 hours, and thats stretching it..

[Vanamonde]

For pics, just include a link in your posts.

[Streetwind]

Well, I would offer you my latest Munraker VII rocket that carries a really good lander, but I fear that as a one-seater it's not what you need right now... =/

[SRV Ron]

For pics, just include a link in your posts.

Upload your pictures to a hosting site such as Imgur. Select a photo from there, copy the appropriate posting code, and paste in your post.