Escape from Duna

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This weekend I had a few too many beers and built a ROCKET SHIP, which I promptly put into orbit before going to bed three hours early. The next morning I woke up early, put a pot on, and sat down to redesign the thing before my child woke up. This is the end result, which had about 1km/s more delta-V and was a tad prettier because I hid the RTGs and landing lights behind the engines, and fixed some of the landing gear alignment issues I'd seen. I also added parachutes for atmospheric landing.

I then decided that 4km/s of Delta-V was enough to get to Duna, land, and get back into orbit, so I thought I'd give that a try. I had a truck in orbit that I'd used on a previous mission with plenty of fuel and RCS, so that would get me back to Kerbin. Filled with romantic images of rocket ships landing on mars, I motored off to Duna during the next transfer window. I set up an aerobrake at 10km, which turned out to be just a tad too low for the craft. Fortunately, I had enough room to burn the engines at full power for a good minute before the parachutes hit. The craft is just too tall to manage in a pinch, so I landed it on its side.

Well, here I was with three Kerbals to rescue and a craft still unproven. Why not Send another craft to get them? This time the aerobrake was perfect, and I set up a nice manual landing within 1.2km. Unfortunately I had no idea how to land this craft yet, so I ended up cratering most of the bottom half. The crew survived, though.

Now I had six kerbals to rescue. Well, the ROCKET SHIP could handle seven at a time, why not send it? NO PROBLEM! This time I quicksaved before landing, which I rarely do, because I was getting sick of sending crews to their potential doom in my attempts to figure out this craft. Three tries later I had her figured out: Full burn from 40km, drop throttle a bit once you hit 6km, once the chutes open full burn down to a gentle 2m/s landing. After that, it's all terrain (because of how tall the damn thing is).

Side note: On one of the tries I went for the screenshot button and accidentally pulled up my landing gear (which are bound to "1") and destroyed one of my engines. My wife had a good laugh at my expense.

Once we were down I had Luke Kerman jetpack over to the ship, which took quite some time and was fairly dangerous at any reasonable speed (he took a good faceslide when he reached the ship). The ship was also low on fuel and I had doubts about getting to orbit. I needed a new plan.

Once I reached Duna, I lowered the payload to the surface using its own fuel.

Five seats, fuel, and ample KAS gear. Thankfully I had added KAS plugs onto the ROCKET SHIP so it could be refueled when needed. The first downed craft had a good supply of fuel left over, so I wasn't worried about how much I'd be bringing down with me; so long as I could transfer it, I was good. Thus, this rover was a fairly reasonable 16 tons including its landing sled. I motored it over to the second craft, which was the furthest, and gathered up the Kerbals.

I then drove them to the first downed craft, gathered the two remaining Kerbals, and pumped all the filthy lucre out of the remaining tanks.

One more trek across the face of Duna and we were back at the functional ship with all Kerbals present and a full load of fuel.

We lifted off to rendezvous with the interplanetary truck.

I let MechJeb plan the rendezvous nodes and was pretty happy with them ... until the ROCKET SHIP ripped off all of the truck's solar panels on one side and also knocked out the wingtip RCS port. Sometimes you can be too precise... I'm a pretty damn good docking pilot so I wasn't too worried. I linked us up in short order and got the ROCKET SHIP all fueled up and ready to go.

See you during the next transfer window!

[KvickFlygarn87]

SUCCESS!

Hilarious.

[Amoun]

I quiet enjoyed that hahahahaha

And learned somethings too ;D

[Specialist290]

Nicely done!

I like the idea of putting landing legs on wings to give better ground clearance to the engines. I've seen it done before, but I can't remember who did it. In any case, this has reminded me that I still need to try something like that.

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I like the idea of putting landing legs on wings to give better ground clearance to the engines. I've seen it done before, but I can't remember who did it. In any case, this has reminded me that I still need to try something like that.

They're actually attached to short I-beams, which are strutted to the central short I-beam that the craft launches on. The wings are almost entirely cosmetic, aside from acting as extensions for the RCS.