Deneb X - A thoroughly overbuilt, 99% stock Munship

[hobbified]

With 52 LFTs, 9 LV-T30s, 8 LV-T45s, 4 3x-couplers, a single ASAS, no RCS, 3 RCS fuel tanks (?), 15 struts, 15 fuel lines, and 3 of CaptainSlug\'s LEM-5 lander legs, because the stock options for landers are just lame. Overbuilt for what it needs to do? Yeah... but it\'s stable and controllable and fun all the way. My second 'stock' mun-craft.

At launch, the Deneb X is burning twelve engines — six inboard LV-T30s, three outboard LV-T45s, and three strap-on LV-T30s. The fuel lines are routed so that at launch, all fuel is provided by the twelve strap-on LFTs. After approximately one minute of full thrust, these tanks empty and are jettisoned.

For about another fifteen seconds, all twelve engines are supplied by the three upper tanks above the strap-on T30s. After that point, the two fuel systems are separated, with the nine main engines burning fuel from their 21 remaining tanks, and the strap-on engines burning their remaining tanks (one each). At 140 seconds into the flight, the strap-ons burn out, and are jettisoned.

The nine main engines provide a few more minutes of lift, with the lower-thrust outboard T45s burning slightly longer than the inboard T30 cluster. When burning straight up, the Deneb will be at 100km after first-stage cutoff, with velocity to take the remaining stages to a 200km apogee.

The next stage is the one I envisioned as the 'trans-munar stage', although it doesn\'t quite make it. Powered by three LV-T45 engines, it carries nine fuel tanks. Three of them are radially mounted (without decouplers) to serve as attachment points for the first stage. Those RCS tanks I mentioned before are simply to stop the fuel in these tanks from flowing from the second stage down to the first, since 0.13 marked stack decouplers as capable of passing fuel. The second stage is capable of lifting its payload to over 2,000km when flying a gravity turn.

Next is the munar descent stage, which also powers the rest of the trip to the Mun. Its core is a stack decoupler, with three fuel fuel tanks mounted to it radially, an LV-T45 mounted below it, and lander legs mounted to the fuel tanks. It\'s quite a sturdy lander, and lands easily at 10m/s, even when 5 of that is horizontal — making Mun landings easy and saving me the trouble of having to carry RCS. Three tanks of fuel is way more than sufficient for the landing, but good for structural stability.

For the trip home, I take off with the descent stage and burn the remaining fuel, before leaving it behind to crash back into the Mun, then burn the rest of the way home with the ascent stage, which is just one LFT, another LV-T45, and the ASAS sitting below the CM. Re-entry is done with just the CM and chute; usually I have enough fuel that I can stop in orbit and pick which ocean I want to drop in.

Okay, that\'s way more than enough talk. Here\'s the pics and craft file.

[Tim_Barrett]

Do the legs weigh in on how much they make up compared to the rest of the ship?

It should be how important they are to a successful mission.