A new way to rescue kerbals?

[Cant think of a username]

You know those contracts that ask you to rescue some random kerbal in orbit? I love those since you get an extra free kerbal. The classic way is to just your ship close to it and then have the kerbal EVA onto your ship. That works fine. But I suck at using the jetpack and i can't control it. Ever since I unlocked the AGU and started with asteroid missions, I had this idea to use the AGU to grab the stranded kerbal's ship and then do a crew transfer. Now 1 (actual) year later, I decided to make the plan work. I was completing one of those grab-an-astroid-and-land-it-on-kerbin contracts. The way I do it is to use the engine of the grabber ship to fire at the asteroid and make it reenter by it self and "land". The grabber ship is still in orbit and I was planning on getting it back to Kerbin when I saw the rescue contract. So used asteroid ship and got it close to the stranded kerbal. Then I pointed the ship in the right way and used the claw to grab the stranded kerbal's ship. Then I tried to do a crew transfer, but then I realized that I didn't carry an extra cockpit, so I launched another rocket, but this one did not carry an extra seat, but a monster heat shield and some extra parachutes. I attracted the the heat shield and parachutes to the first craft using another AGU. then burned retrograde But since I sort of chipped the heat shield into the bottom of the engine, I couldn't stage it. So I ended up reentry with extra parts. After I deployed the parachutes, I tried to jettison the heat shield, but since it chipped into the engine, it didn't move. So I land pretty hard and destroyed the heat shield, but hey, I had the engine and the rescued kerbal.

 

[Vanamonde]

Happy ending! \o/ 

[Cant think of a username]

1 hour ago, Vanamonde said:

Happy ending! \o/ 

Yea true. I sort of wanted to try and land both parts, so I launched a heat shield instead of a extra seat when I could have. It was fun. I had to try a lot of times since the AGU kept missing. Anyone else tried this?

 

[Maverick_aus]

4 hours ago, Cant think of a username said:

You know those contracts that ask you to rescue some random kerbal in orbit? I love those since you get an extra free kerbal. The classic way is to just your ship close to it and then have the kerbal EVA onto your ship. That works fine. But I suck at using the jetpack and i can't control it. Ever since I unlocked the AGU and started with asteroid missions, I had this idea to use the AGU to grab the stranded kerbal's ship and then do a crew transfer. Now 1 (actual) year later, I decided to make the plan work. I was completing one of those grab-an-astroid-and-land-it-on-kerbin contracts. The way I do it is to use the engine of the grabber ship to fire at the asteroid and make it reenter by it self and "land". The grabber ship is still in orbit and I was planning on getting it back to Kerbin when I saw the rescue contract. So used asteroid ship and got it close to the stranded kerbal. Then I pointed the ship in the right way and used the claw to grab the stranded kerbal's ship. Then I tried to do a crew transfer, but then I realized that I didn't carry an extra cockpit, so I launched another rocket, but this one did not carry an extra seat, but a monster heat shield and some extra parachutes. I attracted the the heat shield and parachutes to the first craft using another AGU. then burned retrograde But since I sort of chipped the heat shield into the bottom of the engine, I couldn't stage it. So I ended up reentry with extra parts. After I deployed the parachutes, I tried to jettison the heat shield, but since it chipped into the engine, it didn't move. So I land pretty hard and destroyed the heat shield, but hey, I had the engine and the rescued kerbal.

 

Thanks for the funny story - comedy of errors  So Kerbal. Classic. I’ve done similar for sure. Everyone probably has. 

Love that free astronaut! 
 

ps: never tried it, thought of it tho, then thought nup: kraken bait. Probly safer these days 

Edited June 25, 2020 by Maverick_aus

[Curveball Anders]

As a matter of fact I had 2 contracts up, one to rescue a Kerbal and one to rescue a piece of equipment (it was post reaching the Claw in the science tree).

So I tweaked a craft to:

• Have a robotic core
• Room for one Kerbal (emtpy on launch)
• Claw at the top
• Gyros, Ec, Paras and yada to get it down in one piece.

The key issue in my mission was to grab the gadget/capsule reasonably symmetric so my craft could re-entry without flipping around and trying to use the precious module as a heat shelld.

And it worked

Edit:

Oh, I was using MJ to keep retro during descent since I didn't know what profession the rescue Kerbal was.
But one still need devices and power to keep it retro.

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

Sometimes those rescue missions will spawn Kerbals in mod crew parts with no exits, so I built a little rescue pod that has a klaw (AGU) on the bottom to grab the pod, then transfer the Kerbal over to the pod and drop the whole thing out of orbit before dumping the old crew pod and klaw and re-entering with just the rescue pod. Literally every part comes from a mod (Luciole for the rescue pod parts, very neat 0.625m stuff, and Restock+ for the half-sized AGU Jr) but it comes in at under half a ton and has surprisingly good delta-V.