[In Progress] Mun or Bust!

[OrbitusII]

Now that 0.20 is out, I've decided to go to Mun with a manned mission again! Mishaps abound in this tale of SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Developing the Equipment

First off, I need a reliable ship to land on Mun and deploy the rover I built for the mission.

This is just a quick picture from my landing tests on Kerbin... Not entirely successful... Fortunately this was early in my testing of the design, all I needed was some practice with the actual landing procedure. (I have no Mechjeb or anything, the only plugins I have are the Subassembly Loader and Hyperedit; Hyperedit is only for simulations, mind you)

This design seemed stable enough, so I switched out the probe cores (which I got the the same mass as the command pods to be used) for the actual crew pods.

Next was the rover.

A fairly simple design, but nonetheless effective. It turns on a dime and has a low center of mass, so it'll be perfect for the mission. I did some simulations to see how it would handle on Mun, but Jeb crashed the VR rover, so we won't know until the final crew gets it deployed.

The launcher and trans-Munar parts required a little tweaking of the lander design (specifically adding fairings and some RCS blocks) but the design is primarily the same.

Finally came the crew. Since I don't have much of a choice without Crew Manifest, it was random. The game tried to give me Ellan and two other wimps, so I said "No!" and loaded a new ship.

These three seemed much more promising, despite Hanbert's low level of intellect, so I stuck with them as the final crew. The original three are now test pilots and administrators (a lot's happened since 0.18) so they won't be joining us on this mission.

The Actual Mission

The time had come to launch the rocket only known as "Mun Lander" (suggestions please!). The crew was ready, flight computers were started up and checked out, all that needed to finish was the countdown.

The numbers hit zero, and the rocket took off. Slowly, steadily its altitude and speed climbed to about 100 m/s, and then BOOM!

In the chaos, the parachute was cut by accident, so Duddorf popped out and repacked it, then Hanbert deployed it again, this time without cutting it.

The aftermath:

Fortunately the team survived, as did the rover. It might be a little beat-up, but this at least worked as a drop-test for it. ~500 meters and surviving is good... for a rover.

As it turns out, the bottom center fuel tank on the launcher underwent too much stress for its pitiful structure, so it buckled and caused a chain reaction of explosions. The design team is taking this into account as they elimate that point of failure; these are the last engineers on Kerbin that haven't been fired by Puffin Technologies, so they have to get it right or else this space program will end! (ok, so not really, it's only the third batch of engineers)

–––––To Be Continued–––––

[Enthalpy]

Someone should make a fuel tank with the "Mün or bust" texture from the rocket in the main menu.

[OrbitusII]

Holy Necro, batman! That would be a really cool suggestion, unfortunately this thread is far too old to be useful. Contacting a mod for a thread lock.

[vexx32]

Closed by OP's request.