Manned Mission To Dunna

[Redbeard88]

Hi,

This is my first post here and my first in any forum for a while. Steam tells me I have been playing KSP for 50+ hours (all of which in Career with different save files), but I've not yet explored outside of Kerbins SOI. For my next mission I want to travel to Duna. I haven't tried docking in the game yet, but am more than happy to give it ago.

My question to you all is: What is your prefered manned Duna ship build? Hopefully a few different designs will be posted below, so I can try out different stuff.

(Also on a side note, a Mun/Minmus base sounds awesome, how do I even go about creating one??)

Cheers for any suggestions,

Scott

[Snark]

With a properly planned launch window (http://ksp.olex.biz is a handy tool for that), it actually doesn't take much more dV to go to Duna than it does to the Mun, or higher tech. So you have a lot of options.

Simplest is probably to make a slightly beefier Mun lander, with a couple of radial parachutes added. May be worth parking your return stage in Duna orbit, so that the lander can be lighter.

[Zephram Kerman]

Welcome to the KSP community!

In addition to Snark's good advice, I'll add that Duna's thin atmosphere means it takes too many parachutes. But one or two chutes augmented by a few seconds of rocket thrust works very well. If you like designing planes, giving your lander some kind of lift will help you control the landing site. Bring a scientist so that you can reuse one of each science experiment. Rovers work well on Duna, so try to land at an intersection of three biomes.