[STOCK] Interplanetary lander

[nhnifong]

My best attempt at a vessel designed to depart Kerbin's SOI, travel around the sun, and intercept Kerbin again, parachute/power land on it's surface, and get back into orbit to rendezvous with a return craft waiting in 80 km orbit.

The lander stage is absolutely as light as I can make it, and has an extremely tight fuel budget. You are supposed to use the end of the interplanetary stage to put yourself on a landing trajectory, jettison it, then throw the parachutes, throttle very low and turn on the landing engines, then x them off. when you are near ground, you will be travelling about 20 m/s, use the engines to land at 2 m/s. Try to use less than a 20th of the gas in the first set of tanks for this. What you have left will get you back into an 80 Km equatorial eastward orbit, assuming you jettison the empty tanks when they become empty (it's a so-called asparagus stalk design)

The launcher needs a little work. it can't really get into a parking orbit without eating into stages designed for the interplanetary departure burn.

But I thought I would post this since the lander is good.

It's stock, but I suggest you put a mechjeb on it.

Download

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14567061/boysun-2.craft

Edited September 10, 2012 by nhnifong

[Spartan117]

A question, if I may. You claim stock, but I definitely don't recall seeing that green light on the upper half of the large fuel tank of the lander in the first shot. What is that part?

[Tim_Barrett]

A question, if I may. You claim stock, but I definitely don't recall seeing that green light on the upper half of the large fuel tank of the lander in the first shot. What is that part?

Didn't see that. OP must be a sneaky bugger!

[nhnifong]

The craft file I posted is stock, but in the pic I still had the mechjeb on it.

[Commander Zoom]

Huh, there's a novel approach. I don't think I've ever seen or considered mounting an extendo-ladder "upside down", let alone at an angle like that.

Good job.

[AncientAstronaut]

My honest advice is to lose the SAS modules. Use a single ASAS or a MechJeb. They are just dead weight. How much Delta-V does this have?