Do I Need landing legs for Ike?

[epicbuilder333]

Answer it!

[Scotius]

No. You can land on your engine bell, on the fuel tanks, cleverly placed girders, wings...whatever. But you HAVE to land on something that will not explode, break, fall off on the contact with the ground. Something that can provide stability even on uneven ground. So why not landing legs?

[RSwordsman]

Nope. My horrifically-inexperienced shipbuilding opinion, though, is that one should always have landing legs for landing. Things happen.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Specialist290

[lajoswinkler]

Nah, you don't need legs. Legs are for cushioning impacts and widening the base that touches the surface.

You can have nice looking probes without any legs. Remember Venera probes?

Drop... Beep, beep, beep.

[Ghost13]

Landng legs are prety much useless on Ike (maybe the new ones in 0.22 is better but still). The gravity is so low that I remember landing my ship on just one landing leg (under crazy angle) I landed at night side and could not understand what the hell is happened with my lander untill the sun rose. So basically just capsule will be ok. Frankly speaking you dont even need a lander you can land on Ike with just kerbonaut and return to the mothership with just kerbonaut 600 dv in the space siuit is more than enough for that. Just jumping bring you more than 100 meter over the surface and takes few minutes to return to the ground.

[CaptainArchmage]

From experience, you don't need landing legs to land on the Mün, and Ike has lower gravity, high elevations that are subject to even weaker gravitational fields, and of course the terrain has not been updated to the procedurally generated one that makes landing much more hazardous. Most of the spacecraft I landed on the Mün without using landing legs were either in 0.13 where they did not exist, or were landing on an upper stage thanks to excess fuel or curiosity.

Besides stability, a major difference between landing on an engine or tank and landing on proper legs or angled beams or girders is you need to keep your landing speed to below 6m/s, rather than 10-12 m/s.

[1D-1()T]

Landng legs are prety much useless on Ike (maybe the new ones in 0.22 is better but still). The gravity is so low that I remember landing my ship on just one landing leg (under crazy angle) I landed at night side and could not understand what the hell is happened with my lander untill the sun rose. So basically just capsule will be ok. Frankly speaking you dont even need a lander you can land on Ike with just kerbonaut and return to the mothership with just kerbonaut 600 dv in the space siuit is more than enough for that. Just jumping bring you more than 100 meter over the surface and takes few minutes to return to the ground.

Are you sure? That sounds a lot like Gilly...

[Kasuha]

You don't need landing legs anywhere. It all depends on your skills.

[DrMonte]

You know - legs do nice for liftoff not only for landing. Pulling them up and lowering down in low gravity when landed will throw you up quite high. Depends on craft to leg ratio you could reach first 100m just with legs jump.

Hmm, I didn't thought of travelling this way over the terrain that would be a design. I'll have to build a "jumper" and send it to Minmus.

[SRV Ron]

You can land without them as long as you come down on something flat and don't hit the ground too hard.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Ike is a little harder to land on than the Mün, but anything stable on the Mün is probably going to be okay landing on Ike. Just watch out for the terrain, Ike is bumpier and has less flat.

[Javster]

You know - legs do nice for liftoff not only for landing. Pulling them up and lowering down in low gravity when landed will throw you up quite high. Depends on craft to leg ratio you could reach first 100m just with legs jump.

Hmm, I didn't thought of travelling this way over the terrain that would be a design. I'll have to build a "jumper" and send it to Minmus.

Watch out,. or the space cops will be yelling "pull over, pullover!"