Going to Mun, eventually

[Steve-S]

Here's my stuff in orbit at the 'KerbaN International Space Station And Shuttle Service' (were not doing an acronym on this one publicly). Still have to send up a tanker to refuel the transfer vehicle. then undock the lander & rover combo and dock them to the transfer vehicle. I'm guessing I'll have enough fuel to make it at least twice. Maybe. Going to be fun with all 3 docked on single standard ports. I'm planning on landing the lander with the rover on top and then using the RCS to set the lander down on the surface. Should work right?

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this. Didn't see a better one.

[Motokid600]

So the station is not going to the Mun? Because you'd have a really hard time getting it there as is. But as for everything else it looks good. Does the lander have an ascent stage to meet up with the transfer vehile to make a return trip? Hard to tell from the pic. As for getting the rover off the top via rcs..might be a bit nerve racking. It's not Minmus so Rcs thrusters might have a hard time and the rover might just end up falling off the top instead. Only one way to find out though I guess.

[bonyetty]

Looks the goods to me. Go on do it. Horizontal velosity can be a problem with no atmosphere so it can be a good to cancel a few thousand meters up and then drop vertically. Although tipping over might help with deploying that rover. Good luck.

[Hailedbean]

I try to cancel my horizontal velocity around 10k when approaching the Mun. But my Mun Base's altitude is like 4k.

[VintageXP]

Nice design there. With a bit of experience, you could actually place the rover under the lander and use radial engines instead. Mun is quite an easy place to land, you don't need that much fuel, so less fueltanks and the addition of radial engines would work fine. You should try an Apollo style Mun mission, you can learn a lot from it.

[SkyRender]

It's always interesting to see how others approach a problem... For example, here's something I worked on earlier today:

On the far right of my Mun station is the trio that went down to the surface: a base, a skycrane, and a rover. After leaving the station, the skycrane released the rover, grabbed onto the top of the base, and attached the rover to the bottom of the base. Then they all went down to the surface, and the rover was dropped off from a mostly-hovering state about 10 meters above the surface (with brakes already on, naturally). Then the skycrane moved over a bit and dropped off the base.

It worked like a charm, and now I have a permanent base and rover on the surface that aren't marred by any sort of engine nacelles. The skycrane will be going back up to the station once I refuel it (Kethane is awesome, on a related note), making the whole operation 100% reusable.

[Steve-S]

The station does not go, I already have a space hotel orbiting Mun. I'm not sure if the RCS alone will be enough on Mun but I'll see when I get there. If not I can always lay it down and detach the rover that way. I'm guessing it might just drop off a side when I un-dock it anyway. I thought about putting the rover on the bottom but couldn't wrap my head around that design for some reason. I wanted to have a separate ascent stage also but couldn't get my head around that either (slow brain week). Really like your setup SkyRender. Looks cool.

Off to work (sure is getting in the way of my space program). :-)

[Skorpychan]

Quite the complex design. I find I'm able to get there and back with a rover with a straight vertically staged design, and nothing on docking ports at all.

It can even return if I pack enough fuel!

Although I haven't tried the returnable design with the rover yet; the rover demands radial engines due to being nestled under the fuel tank, and the returnable design uses a good-size engine.

The downside is that you get a small debris field near the landing site as the transfer stage crashes into it, and have a limited fuel budget for suborbital hops and landing aborts.

When using it to resupply Munbases, there's always a danger of firing the transfer stage into the base itself if you're not careful. Decoupler + big engine + heavy stage suddenly not braking = very fast debris.

Oh, and you can't land it on mountains on Kerbin, because it'll tip over and explode if you do. Might be wise to make the entire lander reusable instead of dumping the engine and fuel tanks to ease re-entry.