reusable mun lander and rover

[Lar-E]

For my next trick, I'd like to build a reusable Mun lander that I can leave parked in a Munar orbit, refuel as necessary, and use as a shuttle down to the surface. I'd like this contraption to carry (once) a small rover that I would drop off on the surface after the first landing. Now, I'm not looking to CHEAT by copying someone else's design, but I would like to have a look at what other people have come up with, peek at an example or two. Can you guys point me in an, er, prograde direction?

[Sirine]

Your "Mun shuttle", what does it means to be carry? a small rover? anything else?

[KerbMav]

Just built a lander as always. If you only want it to bring the rover down once, use radial engines instead of on big one below the lander and use it as a sky crane the first time you land: drop the rover, slide away, touch down.

[Lar-E]

Sirine, just three trusting and optimistic Kerbals. KerbMav, thanks!

[Tokay Gris]

How about this one?

With this vessel, I landed on three of Jools moons.

Even the rover is reusable and can be docked again.

[Sirine]

The above better than mine...

Edited September 6, 2013 by Sirine

[Dunbaratu]

Here's an orbiting Munar station with a few landers attached and some crew quarters. I just used up a lot of fuel so there's only one orange tank left but at full size I usually have 2 there:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=171084390

This is one of the lander/rovers detached and on its way to landing, with a 3-man crew inside:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=171084619

After Landing, the rover detaches from the bottom docking ring and can be driven about. It's rather large because I get sick and tired of driving around at 5 m/s so I make them with wide wheelbases to let me drive faster without flipping. Also, there's little engines on the front and back pointing up that can be used to force it down when it starts flipping:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=171084834

Although your design has you leaving the rover behind, mine is designed to be able to hook it up again and take it back to the station for re-use elsewhere. I drive it under the lander and then use the up-thrusters to push the rover up into the docking ring of the lander. Then I can take it back up:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=171085641

(I had the above as image URLS first but it's very hard to get the steam community screenshots to work as IMG urls because they only show you the links to the html page not to the image, and the steam client doesn't let you get the URL of the image itself like a real browser does.)

Edited September 6, 2013 by Steven Mading

[Sirine]

As I said, your is much better.

[Michael232]

Why bother with lander? If your rover has enough punch, it can return to the orbit as well.

[Johnno]

A lander built around the Mk1-2 command pod is horribly wasteful in my opinion given the mass of the command pod. I prefer building around the Mk2 lander can, less mass and more compact. If you're dead set on bringing 3 crew down you could slap on a Mk1 lander can and still have less mass than the command pod, or you could even just stick 3 Mk1 cans together for even greater mass savings. Or for simplicity, a hitchhiker storage container + reaction wheel for 4 kerbal reusable lander with less mass and better control.

For a reusable craft I'd say less tanks is better, easier to refuel. Also, you don't even need that many engines. A Mk2 lander can with a rockomax x200-8 (thinnest 2.5 meter tank) and a single LV-N engine has 3000+ m/s delta-v with a fully equipped lander and a TWR of over 3 on Mün. More engines equals more mass equals more fuel equals more mass etc etc etc.

I threw this together as a simple demonstration picture, so it's not strutted/optimized/ready for flight, but you can see how little you can get away with. Nor does it have a rover but that'd be easy enough to attach, can toss a drop tank on the other side for balance or even just bring two rovers. And it wouldn't decrease the TWR or delta-v much if you build light enough, even then a reusable Mün lander only really needs around 1500 m/s delta-v with plenty of extra fuel for error margin.

[Sirine]

Here another inspiration.

Edited September 6, 2013 by Sirine

[thescientist]

A lander built around the Mk1-2 command pod is horribly wasteful in my opinion given the mass of the command pod. I prefer building around the Mk2 lander can, less mass and more compact. If you're dead set on bringing 3 crew down you could slap on a Mk1 lander can and still have less mass than the command pod, or you could even just stick 3 Mk1 cans together for even greater mass savings. Or for simplicity, a hitchhiker storage container + reaction wheel for 4 kerbal reusable lander with less mass and better control.

For a reusable craft I'd say less tanks is better, easier to refuel. Also, you don't even need that many engines. A Mk2 lander can with a rockomax x200-8 (thinnest 2.5 meter tank) and a single LV-N engine has 3000+ m/s delta-v with a fully equipped lander and a TWR of over 3 on Mün. More engines equals more mass equals more fuel equals more mass etc etc etc.

I threw this together as a simple demonstration picture, so it's not strutted/optimized/ready for flight, but you can see how little you can get away with. Nor does it have a rover but that'd be easy enough to attach, can toss a drop tank on the other side for balance or even just bring two rovers. And it wouldn't decrease the TWR or delta-v much if you build light enough, even then a reusable Mün lander only really needs around 1500 m/s delta-v with plenty of extra fuel for error margin.

I think that with 3000 m/s you can land on a lot of planets and moons of the Kerbolian sistem, so you "Demonstrative-lander" is nearly a working one.

Althought, the most impressive thing is the single nuclear engine.

BTW as shown in many posts before, building a reusable lander is possible and quite easy, so, so I'm going to talk about the rover. A little ago I've analyzed the problem, then I wrote some solution:

1. Build a tall lander with the lander on the bottom

2. Place it radially with a decouple to free it after landing (note: must be light or may need a ballast to balance the lander)

3a. Build a lander with the rover below and then drop some meter over the surface OR 3b. use a KAS crane to make the operation a little more elegant and safe

4. Place it on the top and use an RCS skycrane-but it is very hard to manage

5. Land the rover with another rocket

6. Use a cargo bay from a mod or builded using stock parts

I hope this help!

[KerbMav]

I find the landing struts most intriguing ... *tilts head*

And:

7. Built a deployment apparatus with Robotics parts

[Scarecrow88]

This was my rover and the lander that put it on the surface.

[Tokay Gris]

"Also, you don't even need that many engines."

That is true. But my lander was build to land on Bop, Pol and Vall... the first two don't need that much thrust, but for Vall I decided to play it safe.

[Skorpychan]

Here's mine:

http://imgur.com/a/5z9Op#0

Small and simple is best, IMO.

Ignore the rest of the rocket; that's just to get it off Kerbin and to the Mun. It's got enough DeltaV to make it down to the Mun and back up again, easily. Currently, it uses the last bit of fuel in the transfer stage to get most of the way to a Mun landing, and has enough fuel left to get back to Kerbin. The rover can be dropped off after landing thanks to the decoupler on top of it. Just land as normal, then drop it to the ground. Don't do that without the brakes on; it'll roll away.

The rover is fairly slow and bad at steep slopes, but it's small, light, and roves well. Range is about 5-6 minutes of continuous use, before you have to stop and deploy the rear panels to recharge the batteries. The shot of it in the SPH is a redesign with different rear panels and more battery. Carries two kerbals, though, and is great for roaming about over short distances.

Works great for shuttling crew to my Munbases from the shuttle landing sites, though.

Edited September 6, 2013 by Skorpychan

[Johnno]

But my lander was build to land on Bop, Pol and Vall... the first two don't need that much thrust, but for Vall I decided to play it safe.

My demo lander would still have 2.15 TWR on Vall and with ~3000 m/s delta-v more than enough to land (~1200 m/s required) and take off.

I had actually forgotten about it but doing the demo lander jogged my memory, I previously used a similar design to land on Eeloo. Not 100% reusable, but could've been designed to be, I challenged myself for a minimalistic design so if you look carefully the RCS tank, RCS thrusters and flight computer actually detatch from the lander after docking and transferring crew, so that I didn't need separate RCS/computer on my return craft which stayed in orbit during landing.

[Specialist290]

Really, though, if it's only going to and from the Mun's surface, the LV-N is absolute overkill for most landers.

You could probably take Johnno's design and swap out the LV-N for an LV-909, and the weight saved would make up for any lost fuel efficiency (at least to the point where it wouldn't make any difference on a 2-way trip). You could even shave off a little more weight by getting rid of those I-beams, since with the LV-909's shorter profile you could afford to mount the landing legs higher.

[Dunbaratu]

Why bother with lander? If your rover has enough punch, it can return to the orbit as well.

The stuff for the lander tends to make the rover topheavy. Rovers drive better when they're dedicated to just roving and therefore have a low profile without a lot of stuff up on top. A detachable/reattachable rover allows you to leave all the heavy fuel and engine for returning to orbit behind while the rover drives around without it.

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

Here's my solution:

[Dunbaratu]

Wow how on earth do you steer that thing without rolling it over. so narrow....

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

Wow how on earth do you steer that thing without rolling it over. so narrow....

Lots of negative camber. Plus, it's pretty low.

It's one of my earliest designs. I went to Duna before I ever went to the Mun. I don't even think I have the .craft file for it anymore.

My recent rovers are far more intelligently designed.

Edited September 6, 2013 by ThreeMartiniLaunch

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

Found some other old timey Duna shots....

Keep in mind, in those days it was more about picking up space babes than doing science.

And driving the Duna Buggy, you were sure to pick up the space babes.

[HansBlix]

See below... made to fit in a 3.75M fairing. Requires procedural fairings, and a parts mod with 3.7m rockets

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Tank Buddy]

I had an interesting design that dropped rovers from underneath, with radialy mounted engines and a Jr docking port. I could load up to 3 rovers at a time (stacked with decouplers) and refuel using the rocket that delivered the rovers. It was practical until I had more than 30 rovers on the surface of minmus. It was just too efficient.