Munar landing

[Jack wooster]

Tried to fly there like it was 1999, or Space 1999. I built my own Eagle from C7 part and some others.

Launch

Slowing into Munar orbit

Landing

Safely on the Mun

Lift off

Going home

Boys are home and safe but Eagle One has trouble landing in high gravity even with two VTOL engines.

Probably only cool if you remember the show, but I had fun doing it thanks Havester et al.

[RedDwarfIV]

VA Kestrel, cap[able of powering itself in just one stage, all the way to Mun, and then land with RCS.

I\'m planning to add an Ascent Stage to take the shuttle out of atmosphere, so it will retain more fuel. As of my first successful Munar landing [with fuel to spare], it does not have enough fuel or RCS gas to escape Mun\'s gravity.

[sarkun]

Found a real nice terrain patch today - lots of medium height mountains, not the usual boring plains.

[SmiteZero]

May I suggest: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3985.0

Your stock eagle is nice.

[Jack wooster]

Thanks, doesn\'t surprise me someone else was building an Eagle out there, flying it over the Mun with the 1999 theme playing is great fun.

[Huojin]

Managed it twice so far, but only using the IFE mods. Intrepid SLS rocket is pretty awesome.

[jnoppe]

Did Mun landing a couple of times but i managed to capture one pretty smooth one

[RedDwarfIV]

I do like the SHADO vehicles. Though I have to admit, the Eagle looks better than their spacraft.

Skydiver is just a \'DO WANT\' thing.

[Tim_Barrett]

Found a real nice terrain patch today - lots of medium height mountains, not the usual boring plains.

Picture from orbit? Looks cool!

[sarkun]

Picture from orbit? Looks cool!

Unfortunately didn\'t take one... When I finish work today I might make another expedition there, will post then

[Huojin]

Finally managed it with all stock parts!

The crew of Munar 12 will go down in history...

Munar 1-5 were just huge failures... Wasn\'t until Munar 6 I think that I managed to get near the Mun in a meaningful way, and not until Munar 8 that I nearly landed. 8-11 were failed landings, with the crews of 9, 10 and 11 all stranded on the Mun with no means to return. My engine on my lander/return stage kept breaking off, whether my landing winglets did or not. Munar 12, the first mission with an emergency RCS thruster return system, ended up not needing it, and successfully landed on its winglets and returned safely

[vppkn]

My Mun rocket. All stock parts.

[socket7]

So, I\'ve done a few munar landings now, and wanted to try something different. I always hated how hard it was to land in a particular spot on kerbin after returning from the mun. With a pod you have no real control of where you land.

Enter the flying squirrel.

The flying squirrel is a multi-purpose, reusable, interatmospheric space plane, capable of reaching Kerbostationary orbit with a payload. It can then deploy that payload and return to Kerbal spaceport to make a unpowered glided landing.

With the Addition of a few boosters and struts, The Flying Squirrel is also capable of landing on the mun in a VTOL style, and returning to kerbin.

Upon my return to kerbin I discovered Jeb\'s brother Jeb had apparently demolished KSP\'s landing strip. I actually overshot KSP and had to turn around and fly back to land.

The flying squirrel landed without any complications anyways.

See more of the flying squirrels first successful moon mission here.

http://imgur.com/a/FreZU/embed

I have included the craft file. You will need the current version of Nova punch, and C7\'s pack.

Props to Nova, C7, Sunday Punch (if he\'s out there still) And everyone else who let me make this silly machine.

[Excalibur]

Nicely done Socket7! Think I\'ll have to try that myself!

Anyway here\'s my entry...

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=5588.0

[Iskierka]

No fuel for anything else once closer, but I assume this has to be worth something, right?

Notes: Single-stage, stock unedited, direct ascent w/o correction burns.

[socket7]

did you... put a mun in orbit around the mun?

[DrLucky]

Hi folks, Happy New year!

Not sure if anyone is still having trouble doing stock Munar return missions, but here is my vessel of choice. It\'s very forgiving:

The rocket build is:

* Parachute + Command } Re-entry stage

* Decoupler + Liquid Tank + Vectored Engine } Lander, Ascent and Return stage

* 3 x 3 radial decoupler as legs. They extend a touch below the bell of the engine.

* Decoupler + 3 x Liquid Tank + Vectored Engine } Descent & noodling about stage

* Decoupler + tricoupler + 3x (5 x Liquid Fuel Tank + Vectored Engine) } Core stage - liftoff to Munar insertion

* 6 x (Radial decoupler + 5 Liquid Fuel Tank + Fixed engine) } Boosters

I attach the three core stacks with struts. I attach the six boosters together pairwise, and each to the core.

I put a fuel line from the core to each booster.

All 9 core & booster engines fire at launch. The boosters stage first, then the core, then the descent stage. The radial decoupler \'legs\' stage as one unit *after* the ascent engine. Finally, the re-entry stage and parachute!

It\'s simple to fly: It\'s slow off the pad, but once it burns off a little fuel it gets going. No SAS, RCS or ASAS to mess you up; it relies on the capsule SAS and vectored thrust for steering. (This will make the rocket sluggish to respond to inputs when the engines are off, so start movements early!)

Tip it over around 30km up and put it in a ~150km x 250km orbit. (Really, anything out of the atmosphere works) You\'ll need to drop the boosters around when you leave the atmosphere, but at that point you\'ll have nearly a full tank of fuel in the core.

Go around Kerbin once, and go to the map view. Put the Mun at around 2 o\'clock on the right, and wait til you\'re at 6 o\'clock (roughly one orbit) before doing the Munar transfer. Accelerate prograde until your Apoapsis is about 12500 km. Go back to drifting. The Mun will catch up from behind, and you\'ll find yourself in a hyperbolic trajectory backwards around it. Wait for Periapsis and thrust retrograde until you\'re in orbit. I usually aim for a new periapsis of less than 10 km over one of the dark craters on the sunny side of the Mun. This makes landing easy.

Note that you\'re still on the core first stage at this point, if you\'ve not wasted fuel.

Once I\'m down to the perapsis, I thrust retrograde again to kill my orbital velocity and start descending close to straight down. Some point in this you\'ll run out of fuel and switch to the descent stage. Beware! You now have 1/3 the thrust, so you have to slow gradually Keep the dV under 100m/s when under 10km!

You have oodles of fuel, so keep walking it down, trying to thrust exactly retrograde to kill horizontal velocity.

At this point I usually move my camera to look from the side, and rotate the craft so the cockpit windows are towards me. This makes it control like a plane (\'W\' tips the nose away from me) so I make fewer mistakes. I generally try to fly the ball, though.

Keep slowing, always keep about 20s or more from impact. ie: if you\'re 2000m up, keep V under 100 m/s.

At about 200m, I do a \'pop up\' maneuver: I give myself about 20m/s positive vertical velocity, and then stage the descent engine. Now I just have my pod and lander legs. Note that you\'re typically tossing away a tank and a half of fuel at this point, so feel free to nose around for a good landing site if you like.

You\'ll want to be in precision control mode at this point.

Ease the lander down, always trying to steer into the X to kill horizontal v. When you see shadows, you\'re close. Try to land under 2m/s. The legs are pretty forgiving.

When you\'re done taking photos, prepare to launch. Basically you\'ll take off, ditch the heavy lander legs, and aim straight at the magenta \'X\' that indicates the spaceport. Get up to about 850m/s quickly, and cut the engine and coast. You should have about 1/2 a fuel tank left.

Once you leave the Mun\'s sphere, you\'ll likely be in a hyperbolic trajectory around Kerbin. Wait for periapsis and thrust retrograde until your new periapsis is inside Kerbin\'s atmosphere. I usually go for 45km for a first pass, but anything down to about 35km will work. Above 50km doesn\'t slow you down enough; below 30km and you\'ll land on your first pass.

If you\'re obsessed with landing at the spaceport, a series of deceleration passes will allow you to predict when Kerfrica will be under the periapsis; prior to that pass, at Apoapsis thrust slightly (a tiny bit!) retrograde to drop into the atmo a little more - down to 30km or so. Finesse the approach on the way in. With luck, you\'ll land very close to it! If you\'ve carefully husbanded your fuel for the landing, you\'ll have a few km of cross-range capability to put you on the dot. Stage to your chute and land!

[N3X15]

Baby\'s first landing with NovaPunch rockets, DownUnder boosters and fairings and landing capsule and maybe retro rockets, and stock everything else.

After escaping Kerbin\'s SOI (straight up until out of atmosphere, then hard to 90 on full burn until transfer orbit acheived), I used everyone else\'s advice and slowed down to 0 horizontal speed at about 6k altitude, then began my descent.

At one point Windows 7 decided to bug me about StickyKeys, which you can hear in the video, eliciting panicky keyboard-slapping until it went away. Thanks to that, I added about 60s to my descent. After the second stage was ditched and slammed roughly into the ground (I love the retro rockets just because they smash crap around like an exploding game of interstellar pinball), I managed to land for the first time on the dark side of the Mun without tipping over or exploding any engines.

Then I wasted a bunch of fuel trying to get back on the wrong vector, resulting in a corrective burn, and a bunch of time waiting for the derponauts to get close to the right end of the orbit so I could retro my last teaspoon of fuel and land back on Kerbin. I did manage to land without exploding, though.

[Iskierka]

did you... put a mun in orbit around the mun?

Put it into a direct descent into the moon.

Unfortunately, fuel was very much insufficient.

However moon deployment was successful.