DrLucky

Ah, that makes much more sense. I was thinking, "I didn't do a very good job this flight, and I still had oodles of fuel; not sure why this was a problem." Also: Challenge Accepted.

Great ship. As to re-orbiting - I built a modified version of this lander, and I was able to land on Duna, re-orbit, return home, and land within 13km of KSC. So yes, it's possible. My modification - well, to be honest, I rebuilt it from scratch, but used your layout - was to remove a few bits (wheels, etc.), stretch the outrigger tanks to 4 tanks each, and add a further detachable 3 tanks on each outrigger, feeding into the outriggers. I also tucked a half-tank of fuel above each Nerva, so it has a little delta-V after the final staging event. My core stage was capable of tossing this contraption out of Kerbin's atmo at about 1.4 km/s - I made up the rest of orbital V with the first tank or so of fuel on the Nervas. After that, and with some patience, I was able to reach Duna aerobraking only somewhat into the outriggers fuel supply. Because the landing, using the chutes, requires only a little fuel, I wound up on Duna's surface with more than 7.5 tanks of fuel left. I was able to launch easily to orbit using that, and once I'd dropped the non-Nerva engines and struts, I was able to do another transfer orbit back down to Kerbin, and then aerobrake to a landing there. I really didn't need the extra half-tanks at all, but I used them to land a little closer to KSC. I was not terribly efficient in either my launch or maneuvers. That lander, with a beefed-up launcher and another set of travel tanks is perfectly capable of a round-trip to Duna. I bet Eve is harder - I've landed there once in a different craft, and the atmo is much much thicker, and the gravity higher. Probably a LOT harde to escape. Some pics:

I just wanted to say that I think the way the kerbals handle on EVA is jaw-droppingly good. Yeah, I\'m sure there are rough edges to polish (please grab the ladder when exiting, Jeb?), but I\'ve played any number of mainstream games where navigating a level in third person feels clunky and awkward in the release version, and you really nailed it first go. The things that impress me most are: * you can find and navigate ladders on physical objects that are dynamically moving around a scene. I\'ve played games where I can\'t get on a ladder that\'s designed into a fixed level, for heaven\'s sakes. I actually chased a rolling plane down the runway and got back in. * you can transition from climbing to jumping to RCS to flopping to walking seamlessly * the low-G gait on minmus just slew me. That he waits for his foot to hit the ground before he jumps. Can\'t wait to see what high-G looks like. The devil is in the details, and well done getting so many of the details right. DrLucky

My first EVA on Minmus, much like Awaras: After a quick play around with what I could get, altitude-wise, I refreshed fuel in the pod and did this: I call it 'I can see my house from here' -- a 14.7km x 15.0 km orbit. And guess what? He stuck the landing. I wound up almost 4km from the lander, so I put a heavy object on \'W\' and waited more than an hour to get him back to the pod. The lack of a navball in orbit is somewhat disconcerting. But I just thought, 'What Would Jeb Do?' and carried on by eyeball. I bet if you shot for a very low (~8 km) orbit, you\'d have oodles of fuel left. I think the mesas on Minmus approach 5km, so much lower might be infeasible. DrLucky

So I went ahead and built the \'Krammer\' - the Jammer variant for Mun landings. As I planned, I removed the RCS tank and shortened the length of the plane. I also went back to one centre turbojet with two fuel tanks to lighten things further. After rebalancing and testing the plane, I built it in the VAB and added a booster under each of the outboard hulls. These sport landing legs for the Munar part of the mission, and provide thrust for the return trip. Two more small boosters (LV-909 & 2 LFTs each) provide thrust for the Trans-Munar Injection burn and for descent thrust to the Mun\'s surface. The result is a much cleaner look, and a lot more delta-v. The wider stance helped - even with the bigger footprint I snapped off one leg at landing. In this shot, you can see the remnants of the descent boosters which I ditched moments before landing: Ascending back toward Kerbin: The return flight was nominal and it was a simple matter to re-enter, descend and fly to KSC for a landing. DrLucky (Edit: attached the craft file)

Thanks! I think I\'m going to tweak it a bit to clean up the boosters / first stage - those are underpowered for the weight. I\'m also going to take another look at the plane itself - I built it with an RCS fuel tank since I thought that might be required for landing, but I wound up with no RCS thrusters, so that\'s 0.9t of dead mass in the topmost stage. However I can\'t just yank it because the plane will likely become unflyable without it I\'ve found aircraft are finicky that way. I eventually want this thing to be Mun-capable, but for that it needs significantly better delta-V (although it has delta-V to spare for Minmus), and a much wider footprint for the landing. Minmus has those lovely flat mares to land on, but the Mun nearly guarantees a sloped landing field, which would be a big toppling risk for the Jammer. Of course in an ideal world I\'d be able to land the thing on its wheels under RCS or something, but I find it hard to control since you\'re effectively landing it on its side, and the RCS thrusters seem to have a mind of their own on planes. Onward! DrLucky

Hi folks, Long time, no post! With 15.2 out, I took a shot at constructing a stock spaceplane capable of runway landing from a Minmus surface mission. No funny business here; it\'s a stock craft built entirely in the VAB (though I did my spaceplane testing in the Spaceplane Hangar, of course.) I went with a two-engine plane to permit central attachment of the launch vehicle. The Minmus landing is accomplished using the trans-lunar stages attached above-and-below the plane fuselage. It lands on its \'tail\' for that part of the mission. The first stage / booster-fest combo is inelegant but does the job. Careful staging the last set of SRBs... they tend to detonate the second set of SRBs if you light em up instantly. There was oodles of fuel left, so I used the cross-range capability the fuel provided to pass near the KSC, and then flew the plane back to a runway landing. Sadly I erred on the side of caution and let the vehicle run off the side of the runway rather than use the brakes, so it wasn\'t a *perfect* mission, but the plane is perfectly reasonable at taking off again, and with 4 x 150-unit tanks (the centre fuselage is empty) and 2 engines it\'s effectively a trans-continental airliner. The plane is responsive except at high AOA, where the canards tend to weather-gauge you. Don\'t flare too hard on final! Here\'s my gallery: http://imgur.com/a/WyyQR#0 Sorry about the lack of early-mission pics, but this was the first real test flight and I had no idea it would work as well as it did. Oh - I\'ll attach the craft file as I flew it, but you\'ll need to adjust the staging - move the decouplers from Stage 1 up to Stage 0 or you\'ll lose the landing stage as soon as you light it (luckily I noticed that before I staged to it!) DrLucky

For what it\'s worth, the \'seas\' on Minmus are solid. I landed on one with great trepidation. The highlands seem to be about +2000m or so immediately around the seas, so there\'s a lot of relief. The return flight was uneventful. I had beefed up my lander for the longer return, but as someone pointed out, it actually takes less energy to return from the surface of Minmus than the surface of Mun.

If your rocket is built as described, you *are* using the VTOLs. They\'re similar to other liquid-fueled engines. They activate with their stage and thrust proportionally to the throttle. So you\'ve got one \'up\' engine and a couple of \'sideways\' engines. That\'s going to be tough to fly. DrLucky

Ah, ok, thanks! That info will save me a lot of time experimenting. Until then, everything gets an RCS. Should be doable with the weight savings from not including SAS. Actually, they\'re small, skip the engine and fuel, too. And thanks for the fun toys and all the work. It\'s appreciated.

Hey, I\'m back again. Thanks for the advice about the invisible connector; I\'ve since managed to orbit a few nice stations! I\'m on to troubleshooting a different part of this set: The BACE Unmanned Control Unit. The UCU allows you to select and control what would otherwise be discarded parts of your ship. I\'ve been experimenting with lofting a constellation of satellites using Probodobodyne. I\'ve been having some control issues with them, and after some fruitless experimentation, I thought I\'d appeal to the hive-mind. Here\'s what I\'m doing: Each unit consists of a UCU, a Probo SAS, a Probo Fuel Tank, and a tiny Probo engine. A few cosmetic parts were added. They get deployed one at a time, and all the parts are staged before they\'re separated. That is, I could use the engines prior to staging if needed to alter orbit slightly. After separation, I go to the tracking station and select a satellite. After I take control of it (this works, yay!), there are a few issues. The throttle works fine, and I can toggle SAS to stop a tumble, but I\'m unable to use the SAS to point the ship with WASD. From other experiments, RCS works ok. Originally, I thought that it was the absence of an SAS unit that prevented control, but that doesn\'t seem to be it. Any tips on making the probes steerable other than RCS, which is pretty heavy for what I\'m doing? Another problem, which I think stems from how KSP handles stages, is that if I cut loose a stage with unactivated equipment, it all gets collapsed to a single stage in the resulting vessel. I was wondering if a plugin would be capable of recording and recreating the stage info in the separated vessel? Mind you, Harv will likely have to deal with this when he tackles undocking, anyway, so perhaps it\'s premature to ask. Thanks!

Going to de-lurk for a moment here to ask - what is the source of the cubic 6-port adapter that I see at the core of these various space stations, etc? The one with crew tunnels often stuck to it? Thanks!

FTFY. But the diving bell thing is right on the mark. Speaking of the oncoming multiplicity of fuel types, what with plugins and all, has anyone given thought to establishing some standard tables of Isp and how it ought to vary with engine size and sophistication? I haven\'t heard discussion of the sophistication angle, but it might make sense with the whole \'price\' thing to establish that a early model kerosene engine would have efficiency X whereas a second generation one would have Y.. it would give us something to stand on when mods/plugins have a tech tree behind them and we need early or late tech. Silisko\'s ion thruster got me thinking in this direction, and I suspect more fuels are coming.

Nice. My experience with Mun landing was like your first: I\'m sure I was less than efficient. I set it down very gently, but the uneven terrain tipped it over after it slid a bit, and that popped off the capsule.

Okay, I modded Sarfoggy Larpinz for the goal of Munar interment: Removed all but 3 ASAS (yeah, only need one but I was having trouble finding a good spot to mount just one. Remove all but 3 SAS. Both of these units are on a mid-stage that gets dropped before orbit. Removed the stack decoupler under the capsule - landing on Kerbin would be thrust-assisted parachute with lander. Cut RCS back to 4 units and added RCS tank Removed the stack of 3 central SRB/LFE stages and replaced with a set of 3 4-LFT 1-Vectored LFE that burn for most of the orbit to provide steering once the fins fall off. That\'s most of it. Results? You judge: ..2..1..Liftoff! Of the mighty Sarfoggy Lipinz II, on a journey of exploration and likely lithobraking to the Mun! Here you can see the LF core stack peeking out amidst the SRB glare: A couple of stages later, nearing orbit: Somewhere around here I think I lit an SRB before staging the LFT stack. There was a bit of a boom. Be nice to use that wasted deltaV; have to fix it. Fast forward to the Mun. Coming in for landing on the engine; trying not to break it off. Flawless victory: Now use the RCS to pop the nose up and take off again... At this point I\'m down to vapours in the RCS and main LFT. We\'re not leaving Mun orbit again. Can you hear me Major Jeb? So, moral of the story is that if I fix the deltaV I suspect I\'m wasting by exploding the LFTs and not getting most of the burn from 3 SRBs, it might be Munar return. Anyway, craft file attached!

Nope, can\'t land the Larpinz capsule intact on the Mun. I\'m about 400 m/s short in the delta-v budget, and that\'s not an amount I can find by flying better. The main culprit is the lander itself: It has a chute, stack separator, ASAS, SAS and eight RCS thrusters, all of which serve no purpose; that\'s 3.1t of the fully loaded 8t or so of the lander. Lose the dead weight right at the top, and/or add an RCS fuel tank, and it can happen. But as-is, nope. I\'m leaving aside the whole 'Upper Stages Are SRBs' thing, since I assume that\'s sort of the point of the exercise. But there\'s a whole new set of Sarfoggy craters on the nearside of the Mun, all of them created by Larpinz landers hitting between 350 and 450 m/s.

Ok, the Tingestya can definitely do it; it\'s got some shortcomings, but it can do it (Return, even) I did a touch-and-go on the Mun, but that was expected; engines make terrible lander legs and always seem to snap off. I left again before I could fall over, though if I\'d wanted to stay I could have used the smaller piece and RCS to lay it down. Kerbin reentry was uneventful, right up until I noticed the lack of a chute. Then it got exciting. I bobbled the final because I got distracted, but you can see from my final state that there\'s oodles of fuel. I have to say, though, that I had the distinct feeling that I was smuggling SAS units to the Mun. There\'s to rational reason to have them there; it\'s like if South African Airlines started flying international routes with lion-pelt covered planes: you might suspect ulterior motives. Oh, also, I did the sloppiest TLI burn I\'ve done in months. Still got there, but the MET is very high, you\'ll note. Not the fault of the Sarfoggy at all, just me. Pics follow: Ascent: Big messy stage separation: Munward ho: Coming in for a landing. Lots of fuel. LOTS of SAS. Getting awkward. Time to go. Go past the second star to the right and straight on \'til morning. There\'s NO CHUTE?! JJEEEEEEEEEBBBBBBB......<transmission ends>

Here\'s the beast. Enjoy. By \'put it on the Mun\' you mean have an intact capsule there as a result of a successful launch? Or do you mean 'Put the whole thing there'? Because my poor sad computer gets about 2 frames a minute when I put 48 more rockets under the Tingestya. Anyway, I\'ll give it a shot. I think the Ting can do it.

So I did a Mun return using a modified Sarfoggy. I tried to keep in the spirit of it, but make it more effective. I removed all the SAS units; they\'re not needed. I added another RCS fuel tank to the top stage, because RCS is fun. I added 2 LFTs and a winglet to the sides of the second-last stage, to act as lander legs. In retrospect, these needed struts (see pictures). I swapped the three centre engines for the vectored versions to give a little control at low speeds. I added a chute. It looked like this launching... ..and like this landing on the Mun. You can clearly see the added tanks & fins in this shot. Not a 10.0, to be sure, but I stuck the landing: Gunning the RCS and some fast throttle action got me away: One of my aerobraking passes: From rocket to unlimited-class motorboat: Next up: trying to put the entire original on the Mun.

So long as you don\'t expect to have as many attached LFEs after the landing, I\'m game. Those things are brittle, brittle, brittle.

You know what? I only found out -- today -- that you can snap LTFs onto other LFTs. I did not know that. I was looking at your design and saying... 'how?' Anyway, given how many ships I\'ve designed, I feel a little dumb, but soldiering on. So yeah, there are efficiencies to be had. The SRB thing is a fudge. I find with my big designs, the initial acceleration and push through the first 3000m or so of air is a big waste, so sometimes I strap on a few SRBs to kick it in the pants. I don\'t really want them long-term, just enough to get going. They\'re all gone before the first minute, and you frankly can\'t match their thrust-to-mass ratio. Especially if you\'re just discarding them.

I blew about 1/8 tank just over Kerfrica in a vain attempt to land closer to the KSC, so I had *oodles* of fuel. I just normally start all my designs with 'Chute Capsule Stack Decoupler' so I\'ve no experience in powered (Kerbin) landings. Obviously I\'ve done the Mun thing a bit. You know, I wonder if the chute is needed at all... perhaps a combination of shuttle-esque space-planing combined with 1/8 tank would do it! But that\'s why I decided to start looking at the stock ships - broaden my horizons a bit. My craft mostly look like this: Or this: (To be fair, this was an exercise in landing a massive thing on the Mun)

Just tried a bunch more suborbital flights to practice landings. A second chute wasn\'t enough; a third was, but obviously by then we\'re not getting that mass to the Mun and back. I tried replicating my 3 kps re-entry profile with an up-and-down, and I was able to shatter the craft by low-opening the chute at about 10km. As a bonus, the crew is now a delicious nutrient paste (28G shock) , but they survived the water impact at about 15m/s. Finally, I tried the simple ruse of leaving 1 pixel of fuel in the tank and gunning the engine about 2 seconds before impact; to my surprise, I went up (and lost the chute) but I was able to bobble into a landing which stripped off the gear but was survivable. So, yeah, it works! Just keep a little fuel back for the impact. EDIT: Yeah, what you said

Hey there, Just back from giving the Little Sipper a shot at the moon myself. My usual designs don\'t use any kind of SAS, so I\'m accustomed to hand flying it. The sipper was a dream to get to orbit, trans-lunar, and to land. I think I had about 3/4 of a tank left on the surface. Lunar ascent was easy, and I managed to hit Kerbin squarely with my liftoff burn. Tweaked the trajectory a little with my remaining fuel, and timed my arrival just about right to land in the sea off the KSC. (I figured a sea landing would be best given the weight of the re-entry stack). I deployed the parachute as high as I could to try and lose some mass with opening shock, but it sadly held together. My V was just over 22 m/s when I impacted, which unfortunately led to the demise of the crew. That was a pretty steady speed, too; I don\'t think it would have gone below 20 m/s in any case. EDIT: Keeping a little fuel back to slow the descent at impact works wonders, and there\'s certainly plenty of fuel for that. So: 5 stars! Any tips on the re-entry? That has to be the most risky aspect of the whole mission. I can\'t see how to make the crew survive consistently. So it either needs a second chute (and the attendant mass) or a different design altogether, or I need to make crew survival not a criterion for mission success. I was randomly pressing F1 throughout the flight; some screenies attached: First shot worth posting is the result of my TLI burn - I\'m getting better at getting direct hits like this. Not sure if I save any gas, but it sure is satisfying. Here I am on the surface - the landing site was very near the terminator so the ship\'s shadow is sorta funny. Note the 3/4 tank of gas: the design has plenty of margin at this point. I like these shots of the takeoff. From sites near the terminator my takeoff trajectory is very flat. Here\'s the trajectory. I get this from a single takeoff burn to about 1250m/s And here\'s the result - the impact zone is fairly northern hemisphere, but at 9,000 km range a little touch of cross-correction fixes that. Coming in over Kerfrica. Night-time landing unavoidable unless I want to run the mission clock for half a month. About to pull the chute. Note the KSC in the background. 3 kps and I didn\'t break anything off. Tell Kodger to unscrew a few bolts, will you? And the pre-explosion shot. Just a bit too hot to survive. Thanks for the interesting design!

Hi folks, Happy New year! Not sure if anyone is still having trouble doing stock Munar return missions, but here is my vessel of choice. It\'s very forgiving: The rocket build is: * Parachute + Command } Re-entry stage * Decoupler + Liquid Tank + Vectored Engine } Lander, Ascent and Return stage * 3 x 3 radial decoupler as legs. They extend a touch below the bell of the engine. * Decoupler + 3 x Liquid Tank + Vectored Engine } Descent & noodling about stage * Decoupler + tricoupler + 3x (5 x Liquid Fuel Tank + Vectored Engine) } Core stage - liftoff to Munar insertion * 6 x (Radial decoupler + 5 Liquid Fuel Tank + Fixed engine) } Boosters I attach the three core stacks with struts. I attach the six boosters together pairwise, and each to the core. I put a fuel line from the core to each booster. All 9 core & booster engines fire at launch. The boosters stage first, then the core, then the descent stage. The radial decoupler \'legs\' stage as one unit *after* the ascent engine. Finally, the re-entry stage and parachute! It\'s simple to fly: It\'s slow off the pad, but once it burns off a little fuel it gets going. No SAS, RCS or ASAS to mess you up; it relies on the capsule SAS and vectored thrust for steering. (This will make the rocket sluggish to respond to inputs when the engines are off, so start movements early!) Tip it over around 30km up and put it in a ~150km x 250km orbit. (Really, anything out of the atmosphere works) You\'ll need to drop the boosters around when you leave the atmosphere, but at that point you\'ll have nearly a full tank of fuel in the core. Go around Kerbin once, and go to the map view. Put the Mun at around 2 o\'clock on the right, and wait til you\'re at 6 o\'clock (roughly one orbit) before doing the Munar transfer. Accelerate prograde until your Apoapsis is about 12500 km. Go back to drifting. The Mun will catch up from behind, and you\'ll find yourself in a hyperbolic trajectory backwards around it. Wait for Periapsis and thrust retrograde until you\'re in orbit. I usually aim for a new periapsis of less than 10 km over one of the dark craters on the sunny side of the Mun. This makes landing easy. Note that you\'re still on the core first stage at this point, if you\'ve not wasted fuel. Once I\'m down to the perapsis, I thrust retrograde again to kill my orbital velocity and start descending close to straight down. Some point in this you\'ll run out of fuel and switch to the descent stage. Beware! You now have 1/3 the thrust, so you have to slow gradually Keep the dV under 100m/s when under 10km! You have oodles of fuel, so keep walking it down, trying to thrust exactly retrograde to kill horizontal velocity. At this point I usually move my camera to look from the side, and rotate the craft so the cockpit windows are towards me. This makes it control like a plane (\'W\' tips the nose away from me) so I make fewer mistakes. I generally try to fly the ball, though. Keep slowing, always keep about 20s or more from impact. ie: if you\'re 2000m up, keep V under 100 m/s. At about 200m, I do a \'pop up\' maneuver: I give myself about 20m/s positive vertical velocity, and then stage the descent engine. Now I just have my pod and lander legs. Note that you\'re typically tossing away a tank and a half of fuel at this point, so feel free to nose around for a good landing site if you like. You\'ll want to be in precision control mode at this point. Ease the lander down, always trying to steer into the X to kill horizontal v. When you see shadows, you\'re close. Try to land under 2m/s. The legs are pretty forgiving. When you\'re done taking photos, prepare to launch. Basically you\'ll take off, ditch the heavy lander legs, and aim straight at the magenta \'X\' that indicates the spaceport. Get up to about 850m/s quickly, and cut the engine and coast. You should have about 1/2 a fuel tank left. Once you leave the Mun\'s sphere, you\'ll likely be in a hyperbolic trajectory around Kerbin. Wait for periapsis and thrust retrograde until your new periapsis is inside Kerbin\'s atmosphere. I usually go for 45km for a first pass, but anything down to about 35km will work. Above 50km doesn\'t slow you down enough; below 30km and you\'ll land on your first pass. If you\'re obsessed with landing at the spaceport, a series of deceleration passes will allow you to predict when Kerfrica will be under the periapsis; prior to that pass, at Apoapsis thrust slightly (a tiny bit!) retrograde to drop into the atmo a little more - down to 30km or so. Finesse the approach on the way in. With luck, you\'ll land very close to it! If you\'ve carefully husbanded your fuel for the landing, you\'ll have a few km of cross-range capability to put you on the dot. Stage to your chute and land!