SSTO ROCKET Kethane Mining Lander

[Immashift]

Requirements for the .craft: Mechjeb, Lazor System, DSM Pack, Kethane Pack, HOME Pack.

I'm a fan of all-in-ones. I'm an even bigger fan of touring the solar system a moon or planet at a time with one single ship, rather than play hot potato with five different vessels coming in for an aerobrake or something one after another.

Because of this, my designs are usually overdone Most of them have everything but the kitchen sink, and pack waaaaaaaaaaaay too much fuel for half the stuff I intend to do with them, which is something I guess I should work on eliminating

Anyway, I present this: My massive, 209 ton Kethane lander, capable of reaching a 100x100-ish Kerbin orbit in a SINGLE STAGE. No boosters or droptanks or EVA pushing (lol) required:

This thing has a silly amount of fuel, but is surprisingly easy to maneuver and control. Even landing it is simple with or without parachutes. It has 4 Drogue chutes, plus the large 3m HOME chute for most of its braking, but I have not yet landed it without a powered assist, I'm really just using the chutes to conserve fuel. Note: I added ladders into the craft file that do not appear on the image. Also, every fuel tank is absolutely necessary to make it hit orbit. The HOME tank at the top was added as it kept failing to circularize, and I didn't want somthing else on the bottom making this thing even more offset from its landing legs.

Now the fun part - Getting to orbit. Honestly, I had trouble getting it stable without a mechjeb assisted ascent. The reason for this is I'm still fairly noobish at fine maneuvers, and the cookie-cutter 10km pivot into a gravity turn isn't efficient enough for this craft. In the end, telling mechjeb to put it into a 75KM (YES, 75KM, hold the questions for a sec!) orbit is the way to go.

BUT WAIT! Shift! You said it would hit 100x100!

Yes, yes I did, and it will. The thing is, your fuel will peter out during the last seconds of your circularization burn at your 75km Apoapsis. The trick then, is to use RCS (yup) to translate to as high a periapsis as you can before it becomes inefficient. Then, coast through till you get to your new apoapsis (through RCS, I was able to raise my periapsis from 40-something km up to a new apoapsis of 80-something km) and burn with RCS again till you have a new apoapsis of 100km. Coast around again and circularize there, and you're good.

VIDEO! (don't worry it's time-accelerated to counteract boredom):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtKdtaw4RhM

That's honestly the most efficient, and the ONLY way I was able to get it into a stable orbit. I actually ran completely out of RCS at 100x86km, but that was due to me leaving RCS on with SAS at 4x Phys-warp. Yeah.

The whole point of this is to stick it up to orbit to refuel and plug an interplanetary stage onto it like this one:

Then you can take it wherever and land/take off again at will after chugging some kethane to fill the tanks.

It has docking ports on both the top and bottom so you can Lego it to whatever ship you want and ferry it anywhere. The fuel routing uses the outer tanks first, then the center stack. HOWEVER, when you mine kethane, you don't need to micromanage fuel transfers. The fuel lines are set up so that the converter pipes into every tank with no fiddling needed. Just turn it on and there you go.

ACTION GROUPS:

1: Toggles solars.

2: Toggles ladders.

3: Toggles drills

4: Toggles gimbals of all engines.

I have successfully landed this both on the Mun, and a de-orbit on Kerbin, and it was surprisingly non-tippy and easy to control coming down.

I'm looking to make a smaller (1.25m) version of this that doesn't have as much extra weight on it, and maybe without the kethane rig either.

If anyone has improvement suggestions, or a better version of the same thing, or other multi-purpose landers I'd be happy to see them, as landers are one of the harder things for me to create, especially since I like my reusable craft. Go easy on me, my first actual craft contribution.

Finally, the craft file: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2gU8i82Ok0VdnE3MU1VNVJkTUE/edit?pli=1

Edited May 28, 2013 by Immashift