ISRF Tylo Lander

[Mr. Peabody]

I've been interested in this for a while. How does one go about building a Tylo lander using ISRF that loses as few parts as possible? Any tips are welcome. On a slightly different subject, Hyper-edit has not updated to 1.4 , so how would i go about testing the lander short of actually flying it there for the test? Thanks in advance.

[nascarlaser1]

37 minutes ago, The Dunatian said:

I've been interested in this for a while. How does one go about building a Tylo lander using ISRF that loses as few parts as possible? Any tips are welcome. On a slightly different subject, Hyper-edit has not updated to 1.4 , so how would i go about testing the lander short of actually flying it there for the test? Thanks in advance.

I don't know for certain, but I believe that the Stock cheat menu now includes a basic form of hyperedit for the purpose that your looking for .

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, The Dunatian said:

On a slightly different subject, Hyper-edit has not updated to 1.4 , so how would i go about testing the lander short of actually flying it there for the test? Thanks in advance.

There's a beta available for 1.4.1, download it and give it whirl!

[Human Person]

You could have 2 IRSU ships, the Tylo lander that lands on tylo, mines and getrs back to orbit and a second lander that mines let's say on Vall, flies to Tylo orbit and refueles the tylo lander so it can land again.

as for testing: mission builder allows you to place custom launchpads wherever you want.

edit: I once build a Vall mining rig consisting of 2 parts: the lander/miner and a large tug. They land on Vall attached together, and fly to vall orbit together. There they seperate, the tug still fully fueled. It can then deliver a considerable amount of fuel to anywhere in the Jool system and get back to Vall.

 

 

Edited March 20, 2018 by Human Person

[-Velocity-]

Back before they nerfed ISP on the stock engines (what was that... 0.23?) you could quite easily make a lander that could land and take off of Tylo all without discarding a single part.  Basically, your lander had to be almost entirely fuel tanks and high TWR, high ISP engines. Heck, you could even put it on wheels and make it a rover, since wheels didn't weigh much more than landing legs.  You just had to be a low orbit when you released it from your mothership, and it could only fly back up to a low orbit.

I doubt that's possible anymore, you're probably hard-pressed to exceed 5000 dV now without having to drop stages, and you need like 5500 m/s to give yourself a safety margin while landing and taking off.

That said, with ISRU, making a fully reusable Tylo lander/rover that discards no components at all should be easy (relatively speaking).  Technically, you probably only need 2700 m/s dV, but to be safe you could shoot for 3500 m/s.  You'd have a large margin for error.  Your starting TWR should probably exceed 2, but not be more than 3.  The more dV you have, the lower the TWR you can get away with, obviously.  My old single stage Tylo landers had a starting TWR of like 1.5, but that was OK, because that starting TWR was not used fighting gravity.  The TWR on those craft would climb to well over 2 during the latter parts of the  landing burn, when you actually start wasting delta V on gravity (the more TWR you have, the less time you spend wasting delta-V cancelling out the constant pull of gravity).  With ISRU, your starting TWR is equal to your takeoff TWR, so you better make it pretty high or you'll waste too much fuel just fighting gravity.

Also, you have to land these things using something that approximates a "suicide burn".  Ideally, you burn retrograde at 100% thrust until you touch down.  In practice, you just get as close as you can to an ideal suicide burn (unless Mechjeb or some other mod has a suicide burn calculator, in which case you can probably get very close to a perfect suicide burn... the math is pretty simple).  But if you're one of these people who kills their orbital velocity to zero and then drops to the ground from like 100 km'... you better start learning how to land properly   

Edited March 21, 2018 by -Velocity-