alternatives to landing gears and struts

[steuben]

I'm working to design some of my larger craft. But, I need to reconsider how I approach the landing support both the gears and struts. Projections indicate that the middle of my craft will sag a bit.  I could strut it a bit more for support, but I'm in the high part count range as it stands. Landing struts in the middle will clipping through things can be problematic. Landing gears on Minmus look a little bit off, plus it doesn't need to go anywhere but "up and down".

I'm designing in the 2 kt range for Minmus, and trying to avoid hulls and bells landing supports.

[bewing]

I've seen a number of solutions. The cleverest one I saw was to use the service bays. If you rotate them sideways and open the doors, the doors act as landing legs. Some of the modular wings have nice high impact ratings, are a nice length, and weigh less than a girder.

[mk1980]

girder segments and structural pylons make for decent "static" landing gear. if you have no plans to fly through an atmosphere with the craft, you don't really need retractable landing legs.

also, the spaceplane fuel tanks (mk3) have pretty good crash tolerance, so you might get away with no dedicated landing gear at all - just some mk3 tanks at the bottom

 

EDIT: uploaded 2 screenshots. both the structural pylons (1st image) and the girder segments (2nd image) have much better crash tolerance than retractable gears. and the plyons look pretty nice, too. the  girders look crude, but for an industrial mining ship that look might be quite fitting actually

 

 

Edited May 6, 2016 by mk1980

[Geschosskopf]

I've used just about every structural part that has a high impact tolerance for landing gear at one time or another for heavy ships.  Basically, any parts that survive spectacular crashes on a regular basis will work.  There are some pros and cons to doing this, however.

Pros:

• Unbreakable (although they can be totally destroyed)
• Immune to all the 1.1.x leg-related glitches and problems (but have some of their own--see below)
• Need fewer girder "legs" than actual lander legs for the same weight of base
• Less prone to bouncing off the ground on physics load than actual lander legs, but it still does happen a bit

Cons

• Non-retractable so produce gobs of drag during ascent
• Look ugly as sin
• No suspension flex so sometimes 1 or more legs will be in the air if you land on uneven ground, which can overload the legs that are on the ground
• Don't "stick" to the ground as well as actual lander legs so landers/bases tend to slide down moderate slopes where regular landers would stick no problem.  Of course, in 1.1.x, actual lander legs tend to slide on slopes, too so taters totters.
• Really needs KJR to keep the joints from wobbling, but even so they wobble on uneven ground.  This often results in the lander/base slowly "walking" down nearly imperceptible slopes.

[Warzouz]

When using fixed parts instead of landing gear, I would suggest using 3 or 6 symmetry and not 4.

I remember seeing someone using multiple cubic orthogonal struts? They are 7m/s resistant and very light (1kg)