How to get a 3 maned pod to another planet?

[lolmama]

(Question is at the bottom)

The 0.17 update has been out for a couple days and i was lucky enough to be on the computer when it came out (literally only a couple hours after launch)

So i got a head start on exploring the new planets and messing around with the IVA stuff and its great.

I didn't do much in KSP that night ( i only played for a couple minutes)

but in the morning i started to explore.

I saw on Youtube that people like Scott Manley had already sent craft to the planets and i was eager to join that club

so i put together a rocket and did some testing to adjust to the new handling of the parts and within an hour i was ready to go

My first attempts where to go to Eve but because i kept missing i just decided to go to Duna.

After getting to Duna i went for Eve and i got there in one go ( but with hardly hardly any fuel so i ditched the engine)

TIP: You can just use a parachute to land on Eve because the atmosphere is no thick.

After Eve i went back to Duna Because its quite easy and landed on its moon IKE

Every time you go to Duna you will almost always intercept IKE at least once, because its so big.

Finally, My question...

How do you get a 3 maned pod to other planets?

Because when i try i need to make the lander bigger

and making it bigger requires more power

and more power requires more fuel and more fuel is more weight that i cant get into orbit.

[Tubal]

I made this one, and it's capable of reaching at least Eve with plenty of fuel to spare for the nuclear engines:

I had staged it improperly first, so I don't have any pictures of it landed, but it should be able to touch down with the parachutes on the side mounted fuel tanks, with the help of the engines probably. I doubt it can lift off again though...

It did land with just the capsule and it's parachute though.

The lander itself isn't terribly optimized, but it is versatile.

I use MechJeb to aim, since just eyeballing an interplanetary trip is a little too high level for me.

[lolmama]

Thanks for the help but i need a bit more guidance than that

Can some one tell me how to stack the fuel tanks or a design that is very reliable?

[Xenotheos]

Use Asparagus-Stalk to get efficiency from your design, feeding fuel lines inwards to ditch outer tanks/dead weight. Try to have most of your rockets able to fire from liftoff so they aren't deadweight until later stages when they become unobstructed. Nuclear engines are great once you get into the upper atmosphere and in vacuum so use them for interplanetary transfers. I find using turbo jet engines on outer stages are good for fuel conservation, they need a little wind up time so stability enhancers are needed to hold up the rocket till they have a couple seconds to fire up. The large rockomax "mainsail" is inefficient so I try to minimize use of them and instead put on a tricoupler with three LV-T30's instead. These 3 man's require a fair amount of thrust in my experience, and I probably overdo the struts, so I use mechjeb for ascending as it's a slideshow.

This isn't the best of designs but I've been able to reach a low duna orbit with ~2.5 rockomax x200-32 (big ones) left of fuel.

It's probably a bit much, but I prefer overdoing it to underdoing it. Around 900t before launch, gets 220.9t into a 125km orbit with 2952L of fuel for the each of the outer stacks with 3 aerospike rockets each.

[lolmama]

Thanks but i don't think my system will be able to run that with good fps

[untitled]

Here's the beast that I used, christened "Columbus" after Christopher Columbus. It is composed of 340 parts.

It may not be clear form the image, but it uses the "Onion Peel Design", where the outer tanks feed to the inner tanks.

Edited September 25, 2012 by untitled

[Tubal]

Thanks but i don't think my system will be able to run that with good fps

I often launch rockets with <1 fps framerate with MechJeb. You can get a few more frames from opening up the map when launching, but of course that only works with MechJeb since you don't see what's happening.

Actually MechJeb is pretty much the reason I can even play the game

[EndlessWaves]

Finally, My question...

How do you get a 3 maned pod to other planets?

Because when i try i need to make the lander bigger

and making it bigger requires more power

and more power requires more fuel and more fuel is more weight that i cant get into orbit.

A craft's efficiency (and thus range) is determined by the proportion of dead weight to useful weight. Add more dead weight and you'll need to scale up the craft to provide comparable efficiency. There's no getting away from it and the only other alternative is to try and trim useless weight from elsewhere.

Having said that, many craft have a lot of excess weight and extra fuel tanks/rockets that are of marginal use. You don't need much to get a 3 man capsule to the planets - especially going one way.

[EndlessWaves]

A minimal 3 man one way craft would be something like this:

Ascent to orbit is very marginal, I did a mechjeb ascent and it left me with just 24m/s DV in the main tanks. (good luck rather than good planning) but it gets you to orbit with almost 4000m/s DeltaV split between two stages so you can go anywhere and the lander engine has a Kerbin TWR of 2.55 so you should be able to land on many things too.

If you haven't flown jet propelled rockets before it may take a couple of launched to get the timing right.

Launch Protocol:

1. Fire the jets and give them a few seconds to spin up before you hit the next stage button to release the clamps.

2. Fire the rockets when your speed starts to slow down or when you begin your gravity turn (I did it at 10km when mechjeb turned)

3. Release the jets when their efficiency drops low enough that they're a burden rather than extra thrust (I did it when they got to 0.10 efficiency but you could probably do it a bit earlier)

It's not an Eve return mission, but it does show that you don't need something the size of a city to take three kerbals across the gulf.

[ATTACH]33571[/ATTACH] (Stock parts only)

p.s. Kerbal Engineer Redux is a very handy mod to see how different things impact your range (DeltaV).