Apotheosist

I believe any ship that is capable of a double mun return trip could go to Mars and back. Attached is one of designs to make as small a rocket capable of this. And it worked, my first mars mission will probably use a similar ship design. The second return ship uses just 3 tanks, and used landing legs for separation, which is no longer possible in .15. Need to modify a little.

I have been trying to acheive the smallest possible Mun return craft. Now I\'m working on the smallest possible double Mun return craft. I would be interested to see how others would try to go about this engineering (and piloting) problem. I have seen that some people have accomplished a double mun return on other challenges. The ships I saw were quite big. So that\'s the challenge, make them smaller. And by small, I mean low mass.

Improved it to 7 parts. Hmm. I wonder if it\'s possible with 6.

Wow, why you guys have so much unecessary on your rockets ??? I did it with 8 parts. This was my second Minmus landing. I think it can be done with less than 8. Tank and engine blew up, as they so often do with me > But the kerbals survived, which is what counts.

Rmember, one must always be moved to the bottom of the list if they skip their turn, to keep things fair.

A good rocket for geting to mars could be one that was designed to get to the Mun and back twice. A few people have made such rockets. I have made one, using 27 tanks of fuel (all stock). The first return stage to kerbin has two parachutes, that could be used to assist in slowing down the craft in the Martian atmosphere. The second Mun return stage should then have enough fuel to return to Kerbin. This is, of course, assuming that the delta-v needed to get to or from Mars is not greater than the delta-v needed to fly to and land on the moon, and return and land back on kerbin again. (I personally think it would be plenty)

While I remember, I\'m using this ship as the second ship on my 'lightest possible double mun return rocket'. So far I\'ve done it on 27 tanks. 24 to carry The Bare Minimun to the mun and back, then I seperate last few tanks on kerbin and fly to the mun and back again with 3 tanks of The Bare Minimun. I was thinking about creating a challenge to build the lightest double mun return rocket. The key to success with this challenge would be to have as light as possible a mun return ship to start with, which was partly the reason I was inspired to design The Bare Minumun. May post something about this rocket sometime.

I\'m sure it can be done. Gonna try it now. Doubt I will succeed, but I\'m sure I will learn a lot.

I landed my second lander. At Jeb\'s crack, right between Apollo-02 and Radio Telescope Unit One, I hope it isn\'t too close. It\'s tiny :/ I\'ve been only flying super small craft recently, so I was most comfortable with something this size. Add me on the list for another flight please.

You know what, I was just thinking to myself earlier, it would be awesome if Kosmo-not made a video tutorial using The Bare Minimun. I was thinking of asking you about it. You are most welcome to make a video of flying it Just remember to include the name of the rocket and credit It\'s maker (Me ) It would be so cool to be able to show my rocket on youtube to my friends .

Bravo Kosmo-not! I do find it quite easy, and a pleasure to fly, even though it is small. As I said, it does have plenty of delta-v, 8177. Which is like 700 more delta-v than the koalemos II. And I find the engine very suitable for landing on. By the time you reach the mun, you don\'t have much fuel mass left, and so it can actually take quite a beating. I\'ve even had succsesful mun landings with landing velocities in the region of 4 m/s. I believe the fact that it\'s a gimballing engine might help a little, too. The nozzle kinda acts as a shock absorber methinks, and it makes for a wonderful launch platform. I\'ve always been too nervous landing back on kerbin. Gravity is so much stronger there, so I fear about hovering for too long. I need more practice. Well done for that!

I\'d like to submit my minimum mun return craft, http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=11407.0 I do belive it belongs in the micro munar craft section ;P . I would be grateful if you could put a note displaying the number of tanks (3 tanks). Thanks ;D EDIT: This ship sadly no longer works in 0.15 :\'( but is still good for the other versions.

Thank you very much both for the kind words I\'m quite pleased.

A mun return is possible with 3 tanks, so long as you\'re comfortable with doing a propulsive (and often explosive) landing back on kerbin. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=11407.0

This is the smallest rocket I have been able to get to the mun and back with. 3 tanks. It literally is bare. No parachute, no landing legs. A propulsive landing is necessary to land back on kerbin without killing the crew. It uses landing legs for stage separation. When the stage 0 tanks run out of fuel, cut the engines, spin the whole craft around to generate centrifugal forces, and when you think it\'s enough, press G to deploy the legs, and they will push the tanks away from the middle tank. Thanks to sjwt for pioneering seperation using landing legs and also thanks to r4m0n for further developing super light weight mun rockets over at http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9729.0 The decoupling will spin the rocket a little off course, you just have to re-align and continue your burn to orbit. I believe a return trip may still be possible with a parachute, using an efficient direct descent approach, according to my delta-v calculations. However, the thrust to weight at liftoff is already below optimal, and adding the extra little bit of weight would make it worse and you\'d lose more delta-v to gravity drag. Without parachute it has 8177m/s delta-v, with parachute 7291m/s. I like to compare my munar craft to Kosmo-not\'s Koalemos II, which has about 7429 delta-v, since I mostly follow the method described in his tutorial. Edit: Forgot to mention that upon returning to kerbin, my engine and tank blew up, which is why they\'re not there. They absorbed some of the impact.

A PM is useful as it lets you know it\'s your go without expecting you to keep watching for new posts. A PM and a public post is the best way, as I\'m sure Seanoog has been doing.

This looks brilliant. I need it for super efficient mun designs. I downloaded, tried unzipping it, but it said it was broken or something. Please fix it, whatever\'s wrong with it. Pwetty please. I neeed it.

I have been playing around with super lightweight mun return craft recently, (thanks to Kosmo-not\'s excellent video tutorial I now consider myself a professional) I reduced the weight of kosmo-not\'s design, to 5 tanks, 5 small engines, 4 radial decouplers, fuel lines. I also removed the landing gear. I succesfully landed on the mun, and returned. Then I thought to myself. Who need\'s a parachute? So I took it off, did another mun trip, and landed back on kerbin with 3 perfectly healthy Kerbals. You can do a propulsive landing. The amount of fuel you save from not having 0.3 extra parachute mass is more than enough to allow complete propulsive landing. It is more difficult, yes, but the tank and engine can act as an impact absorber by being crushed below the crew capsule if you\'re going too fast . So I challenge you all, Y u no use no parachute?

That is a very nice LZ. I noticed that myself, and considered we could set up base there. I even came up with a name for it. Jeb\'s Crack Lol I tried landing there, with limited success, but with a bit more trial and error should be fine. Oh, and the name for it. Kinda got inspired by a video on youtube called \'Jeb Corliss 'grinding the crack'\' It is truly an awesome video. You must watch it. No exceptions. Just go find and watch it. The guy is called Jeb. He\'s just as mad as the KSP Jeb.

This is simply brilliant. Just what I\'ve wanted for a while The most useful improvement for me, and I believe the most important thing to add, would be to include delta-v, as previously discussed.

Where you get that Engineer plugin thingy? I need it so much!

Superb video and tutorial! You would benefit the KSP community hugely by continuing with more tutorials. I personally have recently been researching into the physics of the game. I finally know how to calculate delta-v. Although I don\'t fully know how to integrate. I\'ll be studying that next at school. For now I use an online dV calculator to do that bit. I did manage to work out the exhaust velocity of the stock engines. They are all the same at 5681.82m/s. I\'m also trying to find the thrust and exhaust velocity of RCS, to see which is most efficient. I was thinking it would be useful to know approximately how much delta-v is needed to get to certain places in ksp. I was, in fact going to use your craft, knowing you fly it efficiently, and work out the approximate minimum delta-v needed to get into orbit, to the mun, and so forth. A delta-v map for the kerbol system would be handy. Perhaps you could make a tutorial about change in velcoity calculations, and how one can use this to design craft. I know this would certainly help me a lot. Or you could just tell me. But then there wouldn\'t be a very well made video tutorial for everyone else to learn from

I was just practicing with the lander I was going to land next for the stock base, and instead of touching down on the surface of the mun, it just sank right through it. Can anyone help? Anyone know why this happens? I had another craft landed on the surface just fine. I have a theory that it may be because I built my lander in an older version of ksp and it was not able to land on the munar surface of the 14.4 update. Some pictures are attached.

That is a truly beautiful lander, khyron Regarding the site for Bravo landing zone, I strongly suggest It be near one of them munoliths some people have discovered. It would just be so cool to have one in the center of all our landers Would also give kind of a reason for the Kerbals setting up base there, namely to figure out where the hell this thing came from and who put it there. In the longer term, we could set up our next bases around the other munoliths. In case no one knows what I\'m talking about, you can read it here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9585.0

Couple ticks you say? S:| Not sure my morals like that. Surely if you\'re moving down, you gotta move all the way to the bottom, otherwise it won\'t be fair on the person you just butted in front of. I was just thinking about this recently. I believe we need to sort out a proper and fair procedure for this kind of thing.