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Poll: Kerbal Space Program's Mun Landers

AncientAstronaut
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Can you land on the Mun and Return successfully?  

8 members have voted

  1. 1. Can you land on the Mun and Return successfully?

    • Yes. I will post a picture as proof.
      531
    • No. I am still learning!
      71

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Vat

Vat

Posted
Posted

Pretty sure I got some of these guys home, although not in the vessel pictured (that's the first habitat, Mun Base Alpha). I will confess the reason there are eight guys is because I managed to crashland the first 'shuttle' to change crews over, but the capsule survived.

74ls.png

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Brotoro

Brotoro

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Posted

A Second Addendum to my Soviet-style Münar landing mission:

I didn't much like the look of my first Soviet LK lander, so I made a new one. The difficult design aspect of the LK is that it must use the same engine for liftoff that it uses for landing, and it must leave an intact undercarriage on the lunar surface after liftoff. My original design used a small decoupler mounted sideways to a cubic octagonal strut as the separation point, since I wanted to have the centerline of the LK clear to mount the engine. But, after I went with an "engine" that consisted of "two combustion chambers" (so that I could accommodate a contingency engine, as the real LK had), I no longer need to keep the centerline clear. My new design uses two 24-7 engines as the primary engine, and two more 24-7 engines as the contingency engine (not normally used). These engines are tilted inward one click (to make up for the built-in outward tilt of these engines), and rotated around to clip into the fuel tank (which the VAB allows you to do with no cheats turned on). It did feel a little 'cheaty' to me, so I did not bury the engines deep into the tank, but had them sticking out as far as possible. Then the rest of the undercarriage structure is built primarily out of cubic octagonal struts, and it is much more compact and looks much closer to the original USSR design.

AxSfODa.jpg

The new design also uses a smaller fuel tank. I designed my original to basically be able to descend and ascend from münar orbit unaided, and I treated the descent help of the Block D stage as an extra (but unnecessary) step required for the re-creation of the L3 mission. But the fun of the Soviet style landing is using the Block D properly as a "crasher stage" to save fuel in the LK. So with the new version of my LK, I use the Block D (which has to be large enough to have already slowed the LK and LOK return ship into lunar orbit) to bring the LK down to under 1000 meters and a few dozen meters per second. Then I drop the Block D and use a relatively small amount of fuel in the LK to finish the landing.

e7HDQWw.jpg

Q8CcYI8.jpg

Perhaps not the landing technique you'd want to use when bringing a lander into an area where you already have a moon base, but it's fun to do as a change of pace. Below you can see the LK landing a relatively short distance from where the Block D crashed, although there is nothing left of it. Maybe I should include a few parts on it that have high impact tolerance so that there would be cool wreckage to view.

oDjZPYU.jpg

PVp2dfx.jpg

Below, the same engine used to land the LK is used for the ascent to münar orbit, with fuel to spare.

s3kB2Vo.jpg

I did run into something unexpected during the tests: I was under the impression that if you separated a stage from your ship that had liquid engines firing, the liquid engines on the separated part would stop firing...IF the separated part had its own probe core. This sort of behavior happened to me back in version 0.18 when I was first landing rovers using a "sky crane" maneuver. If I had no probe core on the sky crane, its engines would continue to burn after separation; but when I added a probe core to the sky crane, its engines would shut off upon separation. Has this behavior been changed? Apparently...since I have to be careful to cut the thrust before separating the Block D, or it will head off still burning.

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magnemoe

magnemoe

Posted
Posted (edited)

One of mine, just love the mini lander

SEAfeXt.png

Mun has gotten more focus after 0.20 because all the craters who make rovers more fun, only damage so far is the back seats and solar panels.

FVC9G1K.png

Minmus is pretty much an mining company town now.

Edited by magnemoe
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  • 3 weeks later...
Space Ace

Space Ace

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Posted

Heh somehow I missed the release of 0.22 but I guess I'm not that late to the party. It has been great fun so far reinventing space travel and trying to cope with limited parts :D

Even if you have a a bit experience, building a rocket without decouplers, without SAS, without winglets or RCS is tricky but very entertaining. Getting into orbit the first time was almost as rewarding as the very first time I did... and so was the landing on the mun!

Praise Quicksave/load as I don't want to use any crutches like Mechjeb's automated lander, but I made it... a little less conventional maybe ahem but those guys paying for the parts don't need to know...

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The keen observer might also notice a little odity on the mission summary screen. I landed in the east crater near the arch. But halfway from the crater to the arch I could collect samples from the Mun's polar region... maybe a large impact scattered them there. (still probably a bug)

Bonus: Trip to Minmus :cool:

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Mr_Brain

Mr_Brain

Posted
Posted

Yes, I can. On this picture, I rescue Jeb after accidentally having landed him on the Mün (at first, I just wanted to get some science from high Kerbin orbit, but then I saw that I had enough fuel to go to the Mün, but the engine broke when I landed).

screenshot242.png

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Godot

Godot

Posted
Posted (edited)

Not really something complicated ... we´re talking about Mun, after all

KhI28WD.jpg

That´s my current Mun lander (+ return module) for career mode that returns samples from 3 Science jr. + 3 Goo canisters (and 3 of all other instruments) to Kerbin

(I´m playing with the house rule, that only a single transmission (per Biome) and a single result return per manned mission per science station is allowed ... so yes, in my game it makes sense to have multiple science stations)

Edited by Godot
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