Largest Stock Mun Lander

[Letum]

The challenge:

Land the largest rocket you can on the mun using stock parts.

Rules:

- Stock parts only

- Rocket must land without damage with enough fuel to escape mun in whole or in part

- At least one screenshot

- Size is measured in the weight of parts

High Scores:

1st- Letum

2st- chickenplucker

3nd- MafiaMoe

- none

- none

Example:

Here is my smallish example.

21.24 tonns

[Damonjay]

can you include Nova Stock

[Letum]

can you include Nova Stock

Not for this challenge. Sorry.

[bloodydollar]

Can we use the lander legs or pegs from Assorted Hardware?

[Jarnis]

I would suggest perhaps waiting until we get official lander parts (notably, legs) as any landing that uses liquid engines or wings attached to radial decouplers as 'landing legs' are bit of a crapshoot due to the fragility of it all. Adding considerably more mass to the equation is... scary.

I mean I can get, using stock parts and a very fast PC, quite a lot of mass to trans-munar trajectory and, by proxy, would have plenty of fuel to perform a landing. The problem is keeping it all together at touchdown...

Well, I\'ll look at this tonight if X4 pops up... initial goal: Pod, SAS and at least 12 LFT/SRB tanks (some empty) + 3x LFE + assorted RCS hardware and struts/'landing wings' softly on the moon. I hope I find a flat spot

[Letum]

Can we use the lander legs or pegs from Assorted Hardware?

That\'s too easy.

[quantumkid]

Is there a pack or update needed beyond 0.11 to get the Mun ingame?

[Omnivore]

Cool challenge, only problem is... well with the 0.12xX builds, the underlying engine kinda limits you. I put a payload massing 98 tons (not counting spent fuel) into a barely stable Kerbin orbit with only stock but it brought my computer to its knees (one core on a 2.7Ghz E5400 Pentium running 100%). I was getting 1 second game time for every 14 seconds real time at one point. I think that implies that you\'ll be *very* hard pressed to put more than 30 tons or so on the Munar surface.

I\'m going to have to try a 25 tonner just to see

[chickenplucker]

Is there a pack or update needed beyond 0.11 to get the Mun ingame?

Go to the download page, scroll down to the bottom until you see experimental release versions and download for windows or mac, then you can go smash into the Mun.

[Letum]

Cool challenge, only problem is... well with the 0.12xX builds, the underlying engine kinda limits you.

limits challanges

[Omnivore]

Just had a weird experience, touched down at less than 2 m/s with less than 3 m/s horizontal velocity and....

[Letum]

I usually go for less than 0.3m/s horizontal and less than 2 vertical.

I\'m not surprised you went boom.

Use more RCS.

[Omnivore]

Eh, had plenty of RCS installed but wrestling with stutter and ASAS during the takeoff run ate up all my RCS fuel. My comp is just too weak to handle the required rocket with the current game engine. Heh, and just realized that, unless you counted my empty SRBs at full mass, the lander I was using would mass less than the one you used, lol. I might try this again once 1.3 comes out.

[MafiaMoe]

My goal was to touch down on the Mun and then get back to Kerbal, however the game froze on the flight back (I had plenty of fuel and even packed the parachute!!!)... Have pics of the rocket, lander, and Munar takeoff. Have a video as well and will post it to youtube if anyone wants to see... until the game crashed... (last pic is the final stage after separating from the \'lander module\'. The image is of KSP frozen just as it is leaving the Mun\'s orbit about to transition into an eliptical Kearth orbit)

Do note that 2 of the SRB\'s used for landing fell off (even thought I was going less than 0.5m/s on landing). Might mean a deduction from the total weight.

Weights: (calculated with 1 empty and 2 full liquid fuel tanks as seen in the images)

6 empty SRB\'s and 12 struts - 15.76

4 empy SRB\'s and 7 struts - 14.79

A tip for anyone trying this, using the landing SRB\'s to slow down vertical velocity when approaching the Munar surface works like a charm (was able to slow down from 700+ m/s to about 150 m/s at an altitude of 250 km)

(Please forgive the smartphone pics, it was all I had on short notice)

[Letum]

Wow! hell of a lander.

No CoG issues with that.

[chickenplucker]

I keep buckling the engines off mine. Few more tries, I got this...

[Zool]

I keep buckling the engines off mine. Few more tries, I got this...

I thought I was pretty daring trying to land my entire lunar mission launch vehicle, similar design, but with half as many fuel tanks.

[chickenplucker]

Wow, I want to see that. One stage should earn you a bunch of extra cookies . The one in the screen shot is the 5th (?) stage of a massive pile of of struts and boosters, which in turn likes to make a massive pile of boosters and struts on the Mun.

[Zool]

Not a single stage, I took my previous lunar lander rocket, and added 3 massive liquid boosters to land the entire thing on the Mun, but it was still smaller than your\'s. The landing didn\'t go too hot. Oh the kerbanity!

[Letum]

That\'s a beast!

[Letum]

I have finally managed to beat this (after much trying).

It landed with a weight of ~44t

[A Fat Pokemon]

Don\'t know how heavy it is, but I hope its size gives you a reasonable estimate...