Mun Lander

[jammyman21]

I'm trying to make an early lander designed for muner operations

whats the best way of doing this... im thinking to do an Apollo style lander

Cheers

[Artheus]

Apollo with 1 person to land would be the best way to do it, yeah. I can't really tell from experience, as my early designs needed cheats to get anywhere but death, my first legit munar steps happened when I got good 2.5m parts. It is very possible to do with 1m parts however. A lander could consist of a 180l tank+terrier and the mercury capsule with science in between. Put a Docking port above it and you're ready to go.

[KerikBalm]

this will get moved to gameplay pretty soon, but...

mun landers are pretty easy...

ok, seriously ( that lander is from the 0.13 version of the game, before docking ports)... something like this works fine:

 

That is a materials bay below the cabin, not a fuel tank. Under the mat bay is a terrier, fed by the two side tanks by fuel lines.

It has *plenty* of dV like that, and should also work on moho, or any body in KSP without an atmosphere except tylo

Edited July 18, 2016 by KerikBalm

[bewing]

Heh. Well, you can do it much much more simply than that. So it depends on your definition of "best". Part of the question becomes whether you have upgraded your Astronaut Complex to Tier 2 or not, so that you can do EVAs.

With a Tier 1 launchpad and Tier 1 VAB, going to the Mun is quite hard. It is much easier to get to Minmus with just Tier 1 buildings. The 30 part / 18 ton limits are painfully restrictive.

With a Tier 2 launchpad (140 ton limit) it's very very easy to get to the Mun, if you just do a no-frills mission. A Skipper with a few Rockomax fuel tanks and a couple Kickbacks will put a 12 tonne upper stage into LKO. And all it really takes to get to the Mun and back after that is a command pod, 5 tonne fuel tank, terrier, reaction wheel, parachutes, solar panels, and some kind of landing legs.

But if you can just get your ship back to LKO, you can transfer the crew via EVA to some kind of ship that's designed to reenter Kerbin's atmosphere in comfort.

(I personally prefer to wait until I have nuke engines to land on the Mun. I go to Minmus first with my terrier engine -- which is what buys me the nuke engines.)

 

[KerikBalm]

meh, I used to use LV-Ns on Mun, but they aren't needed, and I don't like them for RP reasons (like a kerbal climbing down a ladder right next to the LV-N that was just firing full thrust during landing!).

Its true that appollo style oftne isn't really needed for just a single visit. It takes so little to get back to kerbin from mun orbit that you may wonder why one should bother with the hassle of docking and the mass of the docking ports and rcs needed for docking. If you don't have the dV to get back, you've got a pretty small margin just for mun landings (like if you want to visit a location away from Mun's equator). Apollo style really shines for much higher dV requirements (like eve or tylo), or for single stage biome hoppers where you can refuel them... like the one in my picture.

...

although you dont actually need to dock... you can just take the science from your lander and EVA over to the next vessel... but anyway you've doubled up on crew comparments which a single stage return vehicle wouldn't have to deal with. An extra comman pod/cabin masses over 0.5 tons of fuel, which is probably all you should need to get back to kerbin from mun orbit if you built small enough

[Scarecrow]

Mun landers can be simple single stage affairs, with the entire vehicle designed to land on the Mun and then return to Kerbin, through single stage landers where the entire vehicle returns to Mun orbit only where the crew then transfer to a Command vehicle for return to Kerbin, to 2-stage landers that mimic the Apollo way of doing things.

These are some of the simple designs I have used for missions to the Mun.

On the left is a single stage lander that carries two rovers.  Next to it is a stock 2-stage lander.  The middle craft uses the Alcor modified lander can, but is just a single stage lander.  The 2 craft on the right are variations on a theme of a craft that is designed to go all the way back to Kerbin.

I think the entire launch vehicle for the lander on the right only consists of 44 parts, so you don't need to do anything complicated to get to Mun and back.

Edited July 18, 2016 by Scarecrow

[radonek]

 

[Chaos_Klaus]

You really don't need anything fancy to land on the Mun. You don't need to go Apollo style at all. Just use a regular MK1 pod with an T400 tank and a Terrier engine. It will easily have enough fuel to do the descent to the mun and the return to Kerbin all in this one stage. Build a two stage launcher that can put this on a transmunar trajectory and you are fine.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

I'll add my contribution the the idea pool here: The Duplex Pattern Lander.

This is the design I've been using in my current Career game and it has 5 Mun landings, and 2 Minmus landings under its belt so far. You de-orbit and land the whole thing, then grab up all the science in EVA, bring it to the command pod, and that 1/2 takes off and returns to Kerbin. The other 1/2 stays and acts as an improvised "Probe" which can do a few reusable science experiments and transmit back for those "Transmit science data from Mun/Minmus" contracts.

Like everything I design, it's total overkill and has enough Dv to practically get from Kerbin to the Mun all by itself. The return stage however is based on much narrower margins and usually scrapes into Kerbins atmosphere with barely a few seconds of thrust left.

[Tyko]

A couple of things...first it's a lot easier with some way to calculate DeltaV. Either learn to do it by hand or install Kerbal Engineer Redux or MechJeb. Second, get a good reference on DeltaV requirements this link is to my favorite, but there a number of them.

With that, you can decide on a number of different launch options just like NASA did. I settled on 3 stages because it's easy, repeatable and relatively efficient even including a DV "cushion" in each stage.

• Launch Stage ~3600 DV  - gets me to 75Km circular orbit above Kerbin
• Transfer / Insertion Stage ~1400 DV  - transfers my lander to Mun/Minmus and performs the braking maneuver into low lunar orbit
• Lander / Return Stage ~2500 DV - lands, reorbits Mun/Minmus, transfers to LKO and re-enters Kerbin atmosphere.

I chose this because it doesn't require orbital rendezvous/docking and I hadn't mastered that yet. If you're proficient at those skills you can upgrade your transfer stage for travel in both directions and make a smaller, lighter lander. That said, my formula above is really straightforward if you're still learning and want to get a few missions under your belt.

 

Edited July 19, 2016 by tjt

[jpinard]

On 7/18/2016 at 5:39 PM, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I'll add my contribution the the idea pool here: The Duplex Pattern Lander.

This is the design I've been using in my current Career game and it has 5 Mun landings, and 2 Minmus landings under its belt so far. You de-orbit and land the whole thing, then grab up all the science in EVA, bring it to the command pod, and that 1/2 takes off and returns to Kerbin. The other 1/2 stays and acts as an improvised "Probe" which can do a few reusable science experiments and transmit back for those "Transmit science data from Mun/Minmus" contracts.

Like everything I design, it's total overkill and has enough Dv to practically get from Kerbin to the Mun all by itself. The return stage however is based on much narrower margins and usually scrapes into Kerbins atmosphere with barely a few seconds of thrust left.

A few questions.  Are you sending up a pilot or a scientist to control that?  I don't see a comm device on it.  Which one are you using?  Also, do you have a relay satellite over the Mun?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

1 hour ago, jpinard said:

A few questions.  Are you sending up a pilot or a scientist to control that?  I don't see a comm device on it.  Which one are you using?  Also, do you have a relay satellite over the Mun?

Yes, it had a pilot of course.

If you look close you can just barely make out the comms dish folded up on the yellow monoprop tank, just behind the Command Pod. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Communotron_DTS-M1

At the time or currently? I think I had one or two at the time (Keep in mind this was three years ago lol), now I have a whole network around the Mun. (My now standard setup of one powerful "mother" relay in high polar orbit accompanied by 3 weaker equatorial "child" relays in a loose triangle.)

Edited July 4, 2019 by Rocket In My Pocket

[jpinard]

6 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

At the time or currently? I think I had one or two at the time (Keep in mind this was three years ago lol), now I have a whole network around the Mun. (My now standard setup of one powerful "mother" relay in high polar orbit accompanied by 3 weaker equatorial "child" relays in a loose triangle.)

Cool idea!  So when you have weak or strong relay.  Are you putting on more dishes, or better dishes for the strong relay?  Someone mentioned putting 6 comm dishes on one satellite and I wasn't sure if that multiplied their power?

[Rocket In My Pocket]

14 hours ago, jpinard said:

Cool idea!  So when you have weak or strong relay.  Are you putting on more dishes, or better dishes for the strong relay?  Someone mentioned putting 6 comm dishes on one satellite and I wasn't sure if that multiplied their power?

Thanks! Either/or. Depends on what you have unlocked/what you can fit on the design.

Stacking more of the same dish will increase the power (check the specific antenna to make sure it says "combinable"), but there are diminishing returns. (Ie. every additional dish helps less.) As a rule of thumb, it takes 4 more of the same antenna to double the power of the first.

Here's some screenshots of an example; the child sats are carried by the mother sat into position first, then the mother sat moves to high polar orbit.

Spoiler

In VAB:

Dumping child sats:

Mother Sat empty:

Child sat:

Network overview (Ignore the two smaller orbits on the inside, those are the older early game relays I was talking about):

 

 

Edited July 5, 2019 by Rocket In My Pocket

[xuongmaydosi]

On 7/18/2016 at 5:41 PM, jammyman21 said:

I'm trying to make an early lander designed for muner operations

whats the best way of doing this... im thinking to do an Apollo style lander

Cheers

Moon have not atmosphere. You can landing easy with Com pod 1 person and Early gear! 

Edited July 6, 2019 by xuongmaydosi

[Rocket In My Pocket]

7 hours ago, xuongmaydosi said:

Moon have not atmosphere. You can landing easy with Com pod 1 person and Early gear! 

Good on you for providing an answer, but I think he may have figured it out in the 3 years since he posted. 

Edited July 6, 2019 by Rocket In My Pocket

[jpinard]

On 7/18/2016 at 9:32 AM, radonek said:

 

Does that have enough fuel to hop around in different places of the moon in one trip?