Mupollo 11, or how I learned how to land on a celestial body the hard way.

[sharpspoonful]

This is a short venture into my first extraterrestrial landing.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Duna and Minimus are next. I'll eventually install Kethane and start mining. Thanks for being an awesomely supportive community, and thank you for taking a look!

Edited October 8, 2013 by sharpspoonful
Forgot my opening line!

[Astraph]

My fiancee sends her sympathies to Jessica. She had to endeure two weeks of designing & testing my SSTO

Still, that rocket looks pretty huge... What was its power & mass?

[sharpspoonful]

It is an overall 584.75T, with the lander being 15.30T, and the overall Dv was roughly 6697. There was extra fuel to give myself a bit of maneuvering space, and to get the lander back into munar orbit for a recovery ship (the one in LKO) to take them back to Kerbin.

Jessica's response: "To be fair, I got to play Skyrim while you were playing with your rocket. Not even mad..." and "Awww, you put me on the mun!"

Edited October 8, 2013 by sharpspoonful
Jessica's response

[Astraph]

I used the Saturn V presented on the wiki, which is around 700 tonnes, if I remember correctly. Not something to be proud of, taking into account my lander was far smaller... On the other hand, I don't use MechJeb

And gaming girlfriends/fiancees unite - I had to delay my first landing so that she'd see Jebediah put the flag on the Mun

[Specialist290]

Nicely done! Also nice to have such a chill... girlfriend? Fiancee? Wife? Ah well, nice to know she's OK with it

[sharpspoonful]

@ Astreph: I used MechJeb to show me how to land, and watched a tutorial on youtube. I did the landing guidance once, then reloaded to try on my own. But the Hohmann transfer, and munar orbit was done manually. I use mechjeb for rendezvous, ascent guidance from Kerbin, and for the info panes. I know, its the controversial hot button right now, but it is an excellent tool for teaching. Thank you though, and Jessica sympathizes with your fiancee!

I really want to establish a small colony in that spot, as it is fairly flat, and on the edge of some interesting craters (to do some sweet jumps off of). With this being my first landing, I might be able to utilize a smaller lift in my next landing.

@ Specialist290: Thank you! She is a really relaxed girlfriend, and will leave me to my own devices so long as a eventually sleep. If I don't, I get scolded.

As for the weight, I used my 50T LKO lift design. Mostly because after I had crunched the numbers for the required Dv and figured the weight of the lander, It was only off by 1000+ or so Dv, so it cut some R&D time out of the equation. Kind of like how NASA did with the Mercury missions.

Edited October 8, 2013 by sharpspoonful
Spelling. Adding content. Adding a K here and there....

[Astraph]

Don't take the MechJeb reference as a way to depreciate your effort. From what I see, this mod has some features I'd love to see in vanilla game (such as easily accessable mass & power values)... As long as you make your most challenging manouvers yourself, I don't care whether there's MechJeb onboard

I checked by Saturn V spin-off... Well, I overestimated the mass - it's 565 tonnes in start position, with 10,300 KN of starting thrust (5*Mainsail + 8*solid boosters). Damn, I need to finally get a grip on Tsiolkovsky's equation so that I won't be like "I have no idea what I'm doing" when experimenting with new lifter designs...

[suzin.felipe]

Wow, that was a huge lander!

My first landing was with the "Toyota Corolla" type lander. took me ages to go big as you did in the first try.

[sharpspoonful]

If 'Merica could, then I could.

FOR GLORY.

@Astraph: Sorry if it sounded defensive, it wasn't. I'm just tired of people having to defend themselves for using a plugin is all.