Eve Lander

[A35K]

I am planning a manned mission to Eve, but I'm not sure if it will make it off. MechJeb says it has an atmospheric Dv of 11000m/s, and 12000m/s in vacuum. All stages have TWR more than 1 on Eve. Will it make it from sea level? (This is my .23 save, so old aero).

Also, are there better ways of making landing gear for heavy craft? This one is around 900 tonnes, I made a droppable landing gear using decouplers with structural fuselage (mk1), but it wobbles even with struts, and sometimes it goes too low and a Mainsail hits the ground and drops off.

Edit: I tested it on Kerbin, and it can get to orbit, de-orbit, land with parachutes, then get into orbit again without refueling, with 1000m/s dv left. Is that good enough?

Image:

http://imgur.com/fDTYV7m

(The large conical things are just fuel tanks from stretchy tanks mod)

Edited June 1, 2015 by A35K

[Ferdoni]

First of all, welcome to the forum!

On the delta V: I honestly can't say because there have been a lot of changes in 1.0, the only way to find out is to rebuild the craft and then check the delta V with MechJeb.

Can you post the images? Than we could say something more about your design

[A35K]

Thanks!

I tried posting the image but it didn't seem to work?

[merlinux]

Also, are there better ways of making landing gear for heavy craft? This one is around 900 tonnes, I made a droppable landing gear using decouplers with structural fuselage (mk1), but it wobbles even with struts, and sometimes it goes too low and a Mainsail hits the ground and drops off. Image below:

I cannot see your pic, but what you are missing is suspension. Merely using structural parts as legs would only work if you can control your speed to a very low number at touchdown. You could tweak your design with more chutes and more space between the mainsail and the ground, but IMOH you are better off using a mod here. There are a few mods which add what you want (MRS, Karbonite, NFT comes to mind) but the MRS leg is probably the best in the offering and it has 6000+ rating for suspension.

[MarvinKitFox]

Congrats on your great endeavour!

Will you make it?

250-1 odd are "no", at least with your first design.

Do yourself a favor, set up a sandbox with hyperedit, and test,test,Test your designs on eve before you actually *fly* there in a real mission.

Eve is a very evil place to rocketeers.

Landing gear:

Personally i like the design of Long structural angled down, with short structural 90degrees to it, curved in. This, with a strut, will take almost any landing shock.

Heavy, though.

Something like this, seen here in a much simpler KSC explorer form.

http://i.imgur.com/BF61Cit.png

[n0xiety]

you don't need landing struts at all. I landed a 900t craft and it only had 4 landing struts to take the first hit. After that the suspension just gets crushed under the weight and allows the mamooth and rhino engines to survive the first hit. If you want the struts to keep your ship over the ground on EVE without bending, you would need more than 300 struts for the job for a 900t craft.

[Snark]

The other thing to be careful about is the structural integrity of the ship itself. With really big ships touching down on Eve, often the problem is not the landing gear failing, but rather the ship comes apart like a pile of jackstraws (radially attached tanks come loose from the center, engines sliding off their tanks, etc.) Whether any given ship would do this or not, the key is testing, testing, testing.

Girders as landing gear can take the impact, but transmit a lot of shock to the ship.

The "Mammoth" engine has an unusually high impact tolerance (20 m/s), as well as having (relatively) good Isp in atmosphere; it's possible to land directly on the engine (using it as landing gear, in effect), but this can be risky if the ground's not very level-- you can get the mass of the ship sliding sideways off the engine and snap it off its fuel tank.

[A35K]

Thanks for the landing gear suggestion, it works much better now!