Landing Bags

[Crush]

How about adding landing bags as parts? I think that this would be a really kerbal way of landing.

What are landing bags?

Landing bags are huge airbags which are inflated before landing. When a craft deorbits, the bags cushion its impact. This is a much more efficient way to land than using retro-rockets, and it works on planets with little or no atmosphere.

But that's crazy, in real spaceflight, nobody would...

... actually, there are quite a lot of missions which succesfully used landing bags. The Soviet Luna probes landed on Landing Bags, and the Pathfinder probes and MER rovers on Mars did too.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Crush

[shand]

last check there were one or two on spaceport. i'll have a look see if i can find them again. no idea if they are compatable with .21.x

EDIT: FOR .18 - but might be worth trying: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/smse_srmech_-airbags-v1-for-ksp-0-18-only/

EDIT 2: again .18 i beleive: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/cp-airbag-system/

Edited August 5, 2013 by shand

[Beeman]

I would be completely okay with landing airbags. They could work like procedural fairings, but start deflated then somehow encapsulate your payload for its rough landing.

[shand]

I think there are other parts more in need of procedural attention. solar panels for one would be "easy" and very very useful. a procedural fuel tank again would be awesome (depth only, fixed width).

But yes. i've never used such a part but if they were no more obstructive then an RCS port (not thruster block) then you could surface coat your ship easily enough, and allow for only protecting one side to save resources or using them for boyancy/docking protectors. theres a lot of potential.

[vzq]

The way i see this working is a radial parachute type part that deploys a cluster of balloons on activation.

These balls would function in a way similar to rover wheels, be a bit bouncy, have relatively high impact tolerance and pop after getting hit too hard.

Then on second activation or automatically when the craft has stopped, all balloons would pop just like parachutes vanish on ground.

[rdfox]

As a side note, the Mercury capsule also used a landing bag, jettisoning its heat shield once it was hanging under the parachute and deploying the landing bag so that the astronaut would have a nice gentle splashdown (compared to the 20mph impact that you got in Gemini and Apollo). While not *really* needed, we weren't sure that the couch design was up to an uncushioned landing, particularly if the capsule came down on land, so the landing bag design was used. (This also led to a number of near-heart attacks and the shortening of John Glenn's Mercury flight when they got a spurious indication that his landing bag had deployed in orbit, complete with leaving the retrofire package on the spacecraft during re-entry to hope that it would hold the heatshield in place. While it hadn't done so, the mere thought that it might certainly didn't improve the odds of Gemini or Apollo having a landing bag.)

Ironically, the Soviets, when confronted with the same issue of needing to cushion their landings (since they planned for land landings from the start), came up with two simple solutions--the Vostok spacecraft simply had an ejection seat, and the pilot parachuted down separately, allowing the spacecraft to land harder, since it was tougher than the bag of bones that it was carrying; Soyuz, on the other hand, included (and still includes) a ring of solid rockets that fire about one second before touchdown to provide additional braking and cut the impact speed roughly in half. (I'm not sure what technique was used in Voshkod, but then, Voshkod only flew twice, IIRC.) As a side note, the Soviets kept Vostok's precise recovery system details secret for a very long time, because under Féderation Aéronautique Internationale rules, to be considered a successful manned flight, the pilot must land inside the vehicle he took off in, and thus the Vostok system would have been disqualified from being the "first manned spaceflight" under the FAI rules that were internationally accepted for firsts and record attempts--indeed, since that was revealed, the FAI record books now list Alan Shepard in Freedom Seven (MR-3) as the first manned spaceflight, and John Glenn in Friendship Seven (MA-6) as the first manned orbital spaceflight.