Lander rescue thread

[nhnifong]

Post any way you can think of to rescue all or part of a stranded lander.

This is about rescuing the ship. We already know how to rescue the kerbals.

The lander might be broken, tipped over, or low on fuel. please note what kind of scenarios your idea is applicable to, and what planets it might work on.

I'll start with a few ideas

1. Balance the lander on top of a more powerful rocket, and dock it. then fire the whole thing into orbit.

2. catapult off of a kerbal who has wedged his helmet under the rocket to harness mystical 1/d forces.

3. clip into the terrain, and try and get it to fire you upwards in a similar fashion.

4. propel yourself along the ground and when you explode, hope that your pod survives and is travelling at escape velocity.

5. drive an upside-down rocket under the lander and fire it upward with the exhaust.

<- I get to use this because I can spell tongue

[Railsmith]

Kick the lander up into a suborbital trajectory that intersects with an orbiting craft, and hope the impact doesn't destroy both craft.

[SunJumper]

I've seen someone build a craft that lands on the mun and picks a command module off the surface... It wasn't that big a craft, too...

[Richy teh space man]

Get a ship with some kind of claw on it to pull it into orbit

[Aardvark]

What I've done, for Minimus at least, is mount two sets of landing legs on my lander -- one at the usual place, and then one just below the capsule. I extend the lower set for landing. If I tip over, I retract that set, then extend the upper set. This gives me about a 20 degree angle, which is enough to take off safely with.

[nhnifong]

So of off topic, but if multiple kerbals can ragdoll at once, you could stack them in a sort of gravity fed kerbal clip and make a fully-automatic kerbal mass driver that would shoot them off of the surface of say, minimus, using rocket exaust.

[Vanamonde]

Since there's already plenty of wreckage to be had on Kerbin, why would you go to all the trouble of importing more?

[nhnifong]

Actually, I just have a few kethane miners which cannot get off of various planets and moons. I'd love to get them into orbit to refuel my other ships.

[opticalshadow]

you can use lander legs to make a claw, or use the claw mod to add one. damned robotics adds enough parts to make custom claw types.

the dockign mods are usful for this, though they need to have been built with the docking parts. vanillia your best bet is to make a claw with lander legs, abnd try to get it back into orbit. theres a video on youtube somewhere where a guy broke his engine off on the Mun, so he built a claw ship out of legs, flew to the mun, "docked" the other ship, then took off and landed safely at KSC.