most primitive duna lander in science/career mode?

[hobbez]

hi guys.

I recently watched

. I replicated his ship and managed to complete the same journey: land on minmus and return home on the first mission. So I was curious to know just how far can you get using the basic parts provided at the start of career/science mode? Has anybody tried to get to Duna and back on the first launch?

I've gotten to Duna using basic parts plus radial and stack decouplers (no fuel lines, no struts, no big rockets), which i unlocked doing a quick crew and eva report from the launchpad and runways, so technically it was not my first launch.

I don't have the know-how to do it without those decouplers. I'm sure it's possible though.

Any of you rocket scientists wanna give a whack at this?

My friend and I like to do Science mode Duna races (first to plant a flag and return wins), and I want to make him feel really bad about himself...because that's what friends are for!

Edited March 3, 2015 by hobbez

[UmbralRaptor]

well, it's possible to unlock the entire tech tree in science mode in a single launch. Presumably similar techniques could be used for a Duna landing.

[Specialist290]

Looks like this is one for Gameplay Questions. Moving

[Wanderfound]

Just getting there, or there and back? The first is easy, the second is probably doable but trickier.

[hobbez]

i actually managed to land on duna with tier 0 parts (didn't realize they were called that) with ample fuel to get out of Duna's sphere of influence, however i need some more thrust at kerbin's launch if i want to have enough fuel to get back home. I'm working on this now.

[hobbez]

ok guys, i did it!

Here's my ship:

So this took me a few days to figure out.

Umbral, thanks for posting that video, that was very insightful.

I did some more research and found that actually many people landed on Duna and even further with Tier 0 parts. I never saw them because i never did a youtube search for "KSP Tier 0" before.

ANYWAY, i refrained myself from watching them at first, because I wanted to figure out how to build the rocket myself, but it was obvious that i needed to learn the various build techniques to keep this massive hunk of junk stable. I was managing to reach DUNA, but with not enough fuel for the return journey.

So this rocket is comprehensively 1/3

, 1/3

, 1/3

(their names are linked to the respective videos). So a big thanks to those guys for posting their videos which helped me reach the stars...or rather the planets...

I got back home with absolutely 0 fuel left, but I did waste a good 300+ Delta V when landing on Duna trying to find a flatter surface so, in a perfect voyage, you would be coming back with ample fuel to burn.

You'd think that 13 parachutes would safely slow down the ship, but Duna's atmosphere wouldn't let me get it under 8m/s without some rocket power. On Kerbin, however, it will slow down easily under 4m/s...problem is, i had to deploy them manually...oops.

I can't wait to race my friend and embarass his sorry butt!

I'd attach the ship-file, but i can't figure out how to add attachments on this forum.

[Superfluous J]

ok guys, i did it!

Here's my ship:

http://oi59.tinypic.com/2weflo7.jpg

I can't see your pic* but I'm curious, is the ship under 30 parts and 18 tons? Also, how did you repack the chutes with an inexperienced (and I presume a pilot) Kerbal?

Very cool that you found a way to do this. I love these "Do the most with the least" sorts of things.

*I selectively filter out javascript so I don't get tons of bandwidth-throttling ads. Tinypic has THIRTY sites that want to run javascript and I couldn't figure out which of them would show me the pic and which would just chew my limited bandwidth to smithereens.

[tsotha]

Heh heh. It might be under 3000 parts and 1800 tons.

He's not playing career.

[hobbez]

yeah i'm doing science mode. I'm not too intrigued by the career mode, somehow.

420 parts, 1,049 tons.

[Reactordrone]

You'd think that 13 parachutes would safely slow down the ship, but Duna's atmosphere wouldn't let me get it under 8m/s without some rocket power. On Kerbin, however, it will slow down easily under 4m/s...problem is, i had to deploy them manually...oops.

If you ever have to do that again just set the pressure switches on the chutes to deploy at 0.3 atmospheres and you can deploy the chutes at leisure in space or the upper atmosphere and they'll open at about 5000m.

[Superfluous J]

Yikes! 420 parts is a whole lotta ship. I want to try it now, though I hate explosive decoupling.

I did do a "Minmus and back" trip with Tier-1 parts (for the decoupler) in somewhere around 50 parts (probably would have been 90 if I'd used the smaller tier-0 fuel tanks and who knows what explosive decoupling would have added). Looking at the ship now I think I could do a lot better, and try Duna as well

But it'd be Tier 1, not Tier 0.

UPDATE: Well I can get *to* Duna with *only* 71 tier-0 parts. Took quite a few tries to get this guy into orbit.

I don't think I'll try to make the ship that can get back. I just can't do the iterative testing that is required to try over and over and over and over. Tier 1 with decouplers? Sure. Tier 0? No thanks.

So hat off to you, 420 parts beats my not doing it

Edited March 6, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[Superfluous J]

I am simply not able to let this lie.

With some more fiddling I *think* I have a rocket that can get to Duna, land, and return, using all tech-0 parts and coming in at...

60 parts and 111.3 tons. It's a mere 3.9 meters by 4.3 meters wide, but a very tall 46.1 meters on the launch pad. The 5 parts that land on Duna are a mere 4.4 tons.

EDIT: I was overoptimistic. The ship has the dV but I don't have the ability to fly it

Edited March 6, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[hobbez]

I am simply not able to let this lie.

EDIT: I was overoptimistic. The ship has the dV but I don't have the ability to fly it

still wouldn't mind seeing the design.

glad you caught the bug

Would you be able to control it if you put more command pods on it?

EDIT: I just realized, the kerbal smiling face doesn't look like a smiling face at all. : ) =/=

[Superfluous J]

still wouldn't mind seeing the design.

Here's a pic of the ship that made it to Duna but couldn't get back. All it needed was 2-3 more tanks because it can get home with the 5 parts on top with fuel to spare.

And here's one version of what I can't get to orbit. Essentially the same ship with 3 more fuel tanks on the penultimate stage.

Important note: some of those SRBs are ONLY there as decouplers. They have the least amount of fuel in them to fire long enough that the SRB (or LFO engine) above them causes them to explode.

Other important note: The fuel in the top 2 tanks is DISABLED as there are no starting parts that block fuel flow. That's how I got the first ship to Duna: I burned out all my fuel without realizing it.

Would you be able to control it if you put more command pods on it?

I'm at the point where their sheer weight is causing me to have to add more thrust and fuel, which makes the ship less controllable

Edited March 6, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[SRV Ron]

Prior to 0.90 Beta, this minimal ship placed a probe on the surface. (The ship on the left.)

No landing gear but safely down and fully functional.

[cantab]

That's emphatically not starting parts though.

Doing these sort of missions in what's now Science Mode is well-established of course. Doing one in true career, on the other hand...I'm not sure how far you could get. SRBs are heavy so explosive decoupling is much less useful. Without the astronaut complex upgrade either a Mun return is definitely out, and I doubt even a Minmus return is possible, unless in either case you start having ships physically push other ships. For a one-way landing Eve requires the least delta-V of anywhere, I think that or a Duna one-way *might* be possible.

[hobbez]

i haven't tried career mode since the first time, which was when the career patch release came out. I was less experienced then and wasn't too thrilled about it. I played in favor of the more "Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions" flavored science mode (back then, finance took a back seat to science). I'll give career mode another try, now that I'm more experienced. If science mode is 1960's NASA, then career mode is Space X.

[SRV Ron]

i haven't tried career mode since the first time, which was when the career patch release came out. I was less experienced then and wasn't too thrilled about it. I played in favor of the more "Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions" flavored science mode (back then, finance took a back seat to science). I'll give career mode another try, now that I'm more experienced. If science mode is 1960's NASA, then career mode is Space X.

You can give the updated FASA mod a try. It features accurate looking replicas of NASA rockets from the Redstone to planned on paper Nova. Those rocket parts are in the career parts tree.

Set FASA up in its own game with no other parts mods as there is so much loaded in that it can crash KSP upon loading.