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Landing legs that splay out farther?


Galane

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I have a 16,000 unit Kethane mining lander mostly built, but the stock heavy landing legs just aren't up to snuff, not even with the spring stiffness jacked up to 10. They just don't go out far enough to make the lander stable on anything but fairly gentle Munscape slopes.

I'd rather not stick bits of girder all around to have the legs spread out farther.

It has two 16K Kethane tanks side by side under a ReStock Bigger, Badder BiCoupler and will have the booster built down from two more of those under the tanks. Trying to keep it as slim as possible and avoid asparagus if I can on this one.

Benefit of what I have so far is I'll be able to use half of the booster on its own as a separate booster subassembly for other launches.

Performance of the lander so far is a bit iffy. MechJeb wavers the throttle up and down during landing and after filling the tanks with hyperedit it can barely make it to a 15K Mun orbit and MechJeb won't shut the engines off completely at the end of circularizing. A sign it needs moar boosters . Will probably have to find somewhere to stick on more fuel tanks, which will mean the (completely untested) booster will likely need more...

But first, it needs better legs.

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My miners run into the same issues, so here's what I did:

-mechjeb likes to be able to turn quickly, reaction wheels help a lot, but be careful not turn on SAS when docked in orbit.

-have you considered putting the 2 kethane tanks with two fuel tanks around a central core? The way you describe it seems like it's a bit long and that its center of mass might be a bit high for landing stability.

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The kethane tanks are side by side and the lander's four fuel tanks are stretchy tanks with LV-909 engines on their bottom ends. The fuel tanks are stuck to the sides of the kethane tanks. From above it's like an 8 with a smaller circle top and bottom (the drills) and smaller circles to either side of the upper and lower sections of the 8 (the fuel tanks).

The 16,000 unit kethane tanks are just tall and when full they're heavy. I thought about laying them down side by side to lower the COM but given the problems I had with Large Rover built around one laying down tank and another with two 4,000 unit tanks in tandem (I tried assembling them *on top* of a Bigger, Badder, Bi-coupler with stack separators.) I figured upright and underneath the bi-coupler and making it a lander would be easier, especially for building the booster.

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