RSS Moon Landing using stock parts

[Nefrums]

I made a small 100t ship that took one kerbal to the moon

 

 

[maccollo]

@Nefrums
Nice! How much did the craft cost?

[Nefrums]

About 130k.  Not really cost optimized.  The first stage with the 19 Panthers can be done a lot cheaper with 7 kickback solid boosters, it would cost just over 100k but have a mass of ~240t.

 

 

[Nefrums]

I made a 335t rocket for jeb/bills level.

Got almost 3% payload fraction to LEO from this one.

 

Edited January 19, 2016 by Nefrums

[KerbonautInTraining]

@Nefrums

Same goal achieved with a rocket 71x smaller than mine. The LV I used could put your entire stack into orbit with fuel to spare...

I give up at efficient rocket design. [flips desk]

[parzr]

Fun challenge. Nefrums kinda blows everything out of the water with efficiency, but fun none the less.

http://imgur.com/a/f1Cr7

If payload fraction is anything, my asparagus got me 2.12%

Edited January 22, 2016 by parzr

[Nefrums]

Thanks!

The trick is making the ship in orbit as small as possible.  Using air breathing engines as the first stage also cuts the ship weight in half.  The first stage I used had 57 Panthers, and they needed only 6 mk1 liquid fuel tanks.  The first stage is only 25% of the mass and takes the rocket to 800m/s at 20km atetude

Then I light up all chemical engines in the LV at once, So no mass in wasted on engines not running.

Edit:  It might be worth investigating if Whiplashes give better performance than Panthers.   It would add about 34t for the same stationary thrust, but a higher speed at the end of the first stage at 20km would be possible. (probably around 1200m/s) So later stages could potentiality be made smaller witch might make up for the heavier Whiplashes engines.

 

 

Edited January 20, 2016 by Nefrums

[Dr.K Kerbal]

On 16 January 2016 at 2:24 PM, maccollo said:

Designed two rockets for this challenge. One for level one and one for Jebadiah level. Will try to fly them tomorrow.

This was the video I was talking about. When he does his burn to the man, you can see he goes 10000 metres per second witch was how fast he went. Also, maccollo, I love your SLS Launch video!

[KerbonautInTraining]

10 hours ago, Dr.K Kerbal said:

This was the video I was talking about. When he does his burn to the man, you can see he goes 10000 metres per second witch was how fast he went. Also, maccollo, I love your SLS Launch video!

The launch to orbit is where 7800 m/s of that velocity comes from. The burn to take you from orbit to the Moon is "only" 3200 m/s.

[Dr.K Kerbal]

Yeah. 3200 meters per secondis how long his burn is.

[Mesklin]

Jeb's level Moon round-trip (big thanks to maccollo, he is showing a lot of small useful tricks in his videos):

• classical chemical rocket (1390t on launchpad, 3 stages, 1.9% of payload fraction)
• direct landing to Moon powered by one LV-N engine (Moon ship has ~27t after detaching from rocket)
• no space debris, but after all on Earth orbit we are having nuclear tug for feature flights

 

[quasarrgames]

New idea: Valentina/Ogadnostahp mode: three kerbals to the Moon and back, without command seats, or any engine that requires 300 science or more to unlock (aka no nervs, dawns, or vectors), and with a rocket smaller than the Saturn V

I've been trying my hardest to do it. Still 1.3km/s short...