Apollo 11 Style Rocket (KW Rocketry)

[HansBlix]

Long time player (well longish, started just before .20, but plenty of hours), first time poster .

Thought i'd share with you all some photo's of my Saturn V/Apollo 11 style rocket. Lots of trial and error, only parts mods are KW rocketry, mechjeb and kerbal eng.

Consist of 3 lifter stages with enough juice to get to a 150km orbit, and some left over to de-orbit the last stage (i hate space junk). first stage is an SC-4 tank and a SC-0 tank under it (to stop overheat) with a Griffon XX engine. Second Stage is a smaller 3.75M tank with another Griffon XX. Third stage is a 2.5M medium sized tank with a Griffon G8-D engine.

Above this is a small 2 stage lander lander contained within a 2.5m Interstage separator, with the command module with a vesta VR-1 engine and a large 1.25m tank above that. Also a small escape tower on top to make it look like the real deal.

Stats:

Total Launch Weight: 306,449.8kg

Total Delta V 6685m/s atmo, 7750m/s vac (excluding the lander's 2 stages... kerbil eng is weird sometimes).

TWR: 1.26 @ launch

Managed to get to 150k orbit, intercept Mun, land, take-off, redock and intercept kerbin with a sliver of fuel to spare (not the best yet at efficient transfers). Couple of small issues that will require some tweaking. The separator between the lander and command module would not get out of the way! Had to do some fancy flying to knock it away before I could cleanly dock with the lander. Ran out of fuel just before touching down on the Mun, luckily was close enough to bounce to a rough landing . Forgot the batteries where on the bottom part of the lander (which stayed behind) so ran out of electricity, luckily managed to get into a roughly circular orbit before this and use the command module to pick the lander up. And for the piece de resistance.......I forgot to EVA my kerbil back into the command module for re-entry, tried to do it at the last minute but well u can see the results in the pics.... oops, poor Loming Kerman

Hope you enjoy the pics. Suggestions for improvement welcome!

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[DisarmingBaton5]

Wow! Well done. I guess everyone builds an apollo-style mission at some point.

Criticisms:

-The third stage should be used to perform TLI, not the SM.

-Engine clusters. Should be 5 large engines in the first stage, 5 smaller engines in the second, and 1 engine in the third.

Hope this helps!

[HansBlix]

Thanks Disarming, I love this game for that sense of achievement. Should note i used mechjeb for the launch (after so many test flights the launch got old fast ), but other than that all manual.

Wow didn't realise they used the 3rd stage for TLI. I will have a look later, but based on previous passes, my guess is that the 3rd stage should have enough delta v left over to do the insertion. Will be a close thing though.

On the engine clusters, good point, will have to see if i can manually do the clusters to match. Was going to change the third stage engine anyway as it sticks out from the fairing a small amount, and i wanted to keep it looking as authentic as possible.

Now i just have to work out how to do it with a 3 man command pod and a 2 man lander. The lift stages just don't scale so good though :S

Cheers!