Tylo landing

[RedDwarfIV]

I'll get straight to the point - how do I land on Tylo, a moon the size of Kerbin, with no atmosphere to slow me down, in a craft carrying eight Kerbals, a Duna lander, with three NERVA engines at my disposal? It is currently in a 200 km orbit, but that can be changed to meet needs.

My intended landing site are Tylo's caves. I don't know where those are, so if anyone could PM me the coordinates, I'd be thankful.

Here's my ship:

[Nibb31]

You need an ISAmap mod to find the locations of anomalies. It's much more satisfying to find them that way than to get them from a forum.

That is one hell of a big lander, and I don't thing you have enough thrust to make a soft landing with all that mass with that much gravity.

[RedDwarfIV]

You need an ISAmap mod to find the locations of anomalies. It's much more satisfying to find them that way than to get them from a forum.

That is one hell of a big lander, and I don't thing you have enough thrust to make a soft landing with all that mass with that much gravity.

I'll get the mod and build a probe.

Oh. Are you sure I don't just need to have a high orbit to start decelleration from? Or do you mean that the sheer weight of the craft will make a careful landing obscenely hard?

[Seanoog]

Well IF you attempt a landing, firstly press F5.

So you have quicksave, to reload from when it all goes wrong.

Tylo is very difficult, the First extra orbiting body that I landed on during experimentals was this beast.

Realistically, the mass of your craft + the NERVA engines, an the amount of time it will take to deacelerate from 2000M/s, you'll likely Litho-Break at 200-500M/s.

My only advice, would be - Light those engines to 100%, an DONT throttle down until, you have stopped.

But give it a try...

[Nibb31]

Well, you have 1800m/s of delta-V to shed and only 60x3 thrust and no atmosphere to help you. Somebody could probably come up with some figures, but I'm guessing that the thrust will not be enough to counter the gravity.

[Markus Reese]

Personally to start with, I don't use imap. For exploring the non atmospheric ones, I just orbit close and pass over the surface and look around. The nucs while nice would take careful planning and probably staged brakings to make a capture. Capture the moon at a high altitude to begin with if you wish to use efficient engines. Lower velocity change needed. And once you have orbit, all the time in the world with high efficiency to decel.

[EndlessWaves]

It's not so much a lack of distance to decelerate but potentially too little thrust to even counter the acceleration by gravity.

3 LVN engines produce 180 thrust and I believe tylo is around about .8G. That means you ship needs to weigh less than 22.5 tons.

Adding up the components on the ship we have 6.75 tons for the LV-Ns, 4.75 tons for the (empty) fuel tanks, 4 tons for the command module, 4 tons for the 5 SAS units, 0.8 tons for the ASAS, 1.4 tons for the adapters and nose cones, 0.4 tons for the RCS thrusters and 0.5 for the struts and winglets.

Total: 22.6 tons, without fuel and without the rover (and without the bits I've missed like ladders).

Unless tylo has significantly lighter gravity then I've heard, your thrust to weight ratio isn't high enough to counter gravity. It's a case of not being able to prevent yourself accelerating rather than having enough distance to slow down.

[RedDwarfIV]

It's not so much a lack of distance to decelerate but potentially too little thrust to even counter the acceleration by gravity.

3 LVN engines produce 180 thrust and I believe tylo is around about .8G. That means you ship needs to weigh less than 22.5 tons.

Adding up the components on the ship we have 6.75 tons for the LV-Ns, 4.75 tons for the (empty) fuel tanks, 4 tons for the command module, 4 tons for the 5 SAS units, 0.8 tons for the ASAS, 1.4 tons for the adapters and nose cones, 0.4 tons for the RCS thrusters and 0.5 for the struts and winglets.

Total: 22.6 tons, without fuel and without the rover (and without the bits I've missed like ladders).

Unless tylo has significantly lighter gravity then I've heard, your thrust to weight ratio isn't high enough to counter gravity. It's a case of not being able to prevent yourself accelerating rather than having enough distance to slow down.

Damn.

I know it's not cricket, but now I've got the thing there, I want to land it. Now I know that it won't do it with what it has, I'll see if I can make any edits to the save file and see if that helps. Thanks for the information.

Also, I now have a single man vessel orbiting it, which I named Tylo Surveyor. It has ISA fitted, but has as of yet found no anomalies. I'll be leaving it running for some time.

[EndlessWaves]

Replacing the nukes with aerospikes may work, if those tanks are full you may have the DeltaV to manage a landing and 750 thrust is sufficient even if the ship weighs closer to 50 tons.

[nhnifong]

You almost have enough thrust. Run the engines full blast all the way down, and at the last minute, try to flip over and crunch down on that nosecone.

[RedDwarfIV]

Replacing the nukes with aerospikes may work, if those tanks are full you may have the DeltaV to manage a landing and 750 thrust is sufficient even if the ship weighs closer to 50 tons.

I can do that by save edit?

Or were you suggesting I restart a mission which took ages to set up [loading Kerbals onto the Personnel Transfer Vehicle is difficult, takes ages, and then you have to rendezvous it with the Tylo Explorer, and then get the Tylo Explorer to Jool, then to Tylo orbit. Plus, if I swapped NERVAs for aerospikes in the VAB, it wouldn't have the efficiency to get to Tylo.

If I do decide to restart the mission, would four NERVAs be enough? Or would it be easier to leave the Explorer where it is and send a lander vehicle with a rover on it that is capable of making a Tylo landing?

[A Fat Pokemon]

I say just try it quicksave and if anything goes wrong, you won't have lost anything. Im pretty sure you would be able to land that

[nhnifong]

Can you re-arrange stages and jettison something useless?

Or fly an impact probe out there and use it to blow up the sas and nosecone? That would net you about 5 tons.

Edited September 28, 2012 by nhnifong

[Tommy99534]

Since you wont be able to land on Tylo, why not got Vall?

[Piotrburz]

Try with mechjeb, it seems to burn retro at the last couple of seconds. That's a huge + for fuel efficiency.

I have a one ship currently orbiting Tylo, no fuel for landing.

[nhnifong]

He's is going to need to land as light as possible. touching down with extra fuel would be counter productive, if not catastrophic. Better burn off most of it before you get to the surface.

[RedDwarfIV]

I can remove the nose cone and SAS in the save file.

That'll be enough? It will still be carrying the rover, plus fuel, and to be honest I don't want to crush the rover - I want to drop it, hover away a little, and then set down.

[EndlessWaves]

I can do that by save edit?

Dunno, I've never tried. It looks like a fairly simple job to replace name = nuclearEngine with name = toroidalAerospike in the persistence file though, the rest seem to be generic part parameters.

If I do decide to restart the mission, would four NERVAs be enough? Or would it be easier to leave the Explorer where it is and send a lander vehicle with a rover on it that is capable of making a Tylo landing?

240 thrust is unlikely to be sufficient either, I'd personally be aiming for 400-500 thrust to land a vessel of that weight at .8g

[RedDwarfIV]

7.85g, but ok.

So, sending a rover lander is looking to be my best bet then.

[palioxis1248]

Well, if you keep burning your TWR increases over time, so if you're lucky you should eventually get light enough to land even with NERVAs, but with nearly empty tanks.

[Nurph]

Ho-lee potatos, Batman, this thread is old.

I suggest you don't go around pulling up year-and-a-half old threads like this unless it's for a really, REALLY good reason; people tend to get angry and annoyed at you.

[Vanamonde]

It was kind of you to offer advice, palioxis1248, but this thread is over 1 year old, and so much of the game has changed that the discussion is no longer relevant.

As for other folks, posting to complain about necros is useless noise on the forum just as much as the necros themselves are. Please simply hit the report button and refrain from adding to the forum clutter.

Thread closed.