Single Stage Stock SpacePlane moon landers MoonBack (MKI - MKII).

pinolallo · September 18, 2012

MoonBack are SpacePlanes that can takeoff from the KSP runaway, land on any Kerbin moons and come back to the home runaway without detach (and waste) anything.

This will provide moon stations of a steady supply service: a very asked feature.

The result are two spaceships: MoonBackMKI (single pilot) and MoonBackMKII (three pilots). You can land on Mun with + 1000 liters of fuel

Both ships has ladders to easy drop kerbins on moon surface.

Fly recommends (both Planes):

a) After takeoff rise the landing gear manually (avoiding the lowering also of the moon landing support)

set the rise course to 40 degrees of climb rate: keep that with little corrections while using SAS.

c) on 13000 (about 240 m/s) meters stage to main engine ( stepping on stage 2)

d) deactivate atmosferic engines efficiency drop to 20% (about 18000 meters)

e) when you reach 50000 meters, align to the orbit mark on artificial horizon and reduce engine throttle to 30%

f) when you will reach 60000 meter reduce engine throttle to 10% stay on orbit mark until you reach an stable orbit. (per above 70.000)

d) now can choose to fly any moon trek, I do manually because mechJeb module is very fuel expensive: catching moons using less than that 10% of throttle will take little more time but will also save a lot of fuel.

[edit: just notice the [0.16] [MAJOR] Fuel consumption is wrong at low throttle so the amazing performaces are because a bug ****!]

The MoonBackMKII can land on moon with more than 1000 liters of fuel if you do softly orbital manouvers.

I uploaded the ships without the mechJeb module to leave them stock safe, but I use that (mainly for assets correction and landing manouvers)

note: During the orbit run the fuel burned will change the balance of the ship, in the first stage below 30000 meter ship need correction to keep nose up, after need correction to keep nose down but on the final stage (returning on Kerbin runaway) the spaceships will fly like a bird.

here some pics:

MoonBack MkI