An Ultra-Small RO piloted Moon Landing

[PLAD]

I've been trying to find the lightest possible Moon landing-and-return mission in RO.  In real history there have almost always been at least 2  pilots on a Moon mission for safety reasons, but in the Kerbal spirit I'm flying just one lunatic  brave pilot. It helps me to fairly compare the mass requirements among different designs, I'm using a standardized MK I pod for the re-entry so all missions are designed around that. So far here are my lightest weights at launch:

Lunar direct (entire vessel lands on Moon ) : 395 tons, 31 tons in LEO
LOR (separate lander and Earth return vehicle) : 295 tons, 24 tons in LEO
LOR, open lander (see below)   : 215 tons, 17.5 tons in LEO
For comparison the Apollo -Saturn 5 was about 2900 tons at launch, and the Soviet N-1 about 2750.
Below are the highlights of the 215-ton mission.

You might think that the open one-seat lander is insanely dangerous. You'd be right. That didn't stop it from being actually considered though. Heck, mine is heavier than the Langley Lightest design, though that was to use H2/O2 and I don't know how they planned to deal with boiloff with those little tanks. Didn't they play KSP in 1961?
 I use all RO dependencies and all the difficulty recommendations except Remote Tech and saturatable reaction wheels, but I don't use reaction wheels anymore. I only use the RO configs for all parts with two exceptions:
1) Lunar returns inevitably explode when hitting Earths atmosphere from the heat getting around the heat shield and destroying the occluded pod and its parts. I therefore turn off heat damage with the F12 menu. To play it fair I make the heat shield weigh 15% of the total weight it is decelerating, just like the Apollo heat shield did. As long as deceleration stays below 10 G's I call it a successful re-entry.
2) The solar panels got nerfed a couple of versions ago, my favorite panel went from level 3 energy per m^2 to level 2. I buffed it back to level 3.
The great thing about my lightest missions is that the mass to LEO is less than 24 tons, so these missions could be put on existing rocket designs. I'm going to grab Necrobones' superb Real Space Boosters and try that next.

   That little lander is a blast to fly. It amuses me that the ascent stage looks like some ultra-light Munar landers in stock KSP, but the basic design would work in the real world too. Six words I like to say in KSP: "It works in NASA's space program". (Sorry Mr. Munroe)

 

Edited March 22, 2016 by PLAD

[Mister Dilsby]

Not just a really interesting and difficult mission, but a very insightful study of engineering puts and takes as well.  Now that's rocket science. Great job!

[Wallygator]

A great idea!!!

But a small footnote: it's not in the "kerbal spirit", it's in the "Soviet spirit"!

is is RO after all...

[PLAD]

Thanks!

    The Soviet LK lander had some pretty bold mission parameters, not the least of which was putting a lone astronaut on the Moon. Its c.g. had to be within 30mm of the thrust axis or it wouldn't be stable...and the astronaut had to spacewalk to and from it to the Earth Return Stage. And they actually made three Earth-orbit test flights of it. At least the lander docked to the ERS before the spacewalk, with the small open lander designs you would have to jump across open space to get back to the ERS.  Both sides came up with some even more extreme designs in the early '60s, before the Outer Space Treaty was signed and they no longer had to worry that the first nation to put a man on the Moon would claim the Moon as theirs. I recall there was an early plan by the US to land a lone astronaut on the Moon before they had a way to get him back! They would finished development and construction of a return vehicle while he was waiting on the Moon for about a year, kept alive with resupply missions. Darn, I just looked for a reference to that plan and didn't find one, does anyone remember its name?

Edit: found a nice secondary source here. I don't think I can find the December 1962 Aerospace Engineering article online though.

   Of course, that is a mission most of us (me included) have done early in our Kerbal careers, without exactly meaning to.

Edited March 24, 2016 by PLAD