The MunJumper

[Awaras]

Well, this is the first ship I made that I feel confident enough to present to you folks... I wanted to see how big a lander I can put on the Mun using only stock parts. I wanted to have a lander that would be able to land in several locations on the Mun and return safely to Kerbin.

Here is my rocket, the MunJumper. It consists of 48 fuel tanks, 12 LV-T30 engines, 5 LV-T45 engines, 36 boosters (can never have too many boosters), 1 ASAS, 2 SAS (not sure if 2 do any better than 1, but still...), 1 RCS fuel tank and assorted decouplers, fuel lines and such.

This ship strained my computer to its limits. While I was placing the last boosters on it, my frame rate was somethin like 1 frame in 3 seconds, painful to watch.

The bottom 18 boosters light off at launch, boosting the ship to 100m/s at around 2700 meters altitude.

After the first set of boosters burn out, they are ejected and 12 of the remaining 18 boosters are lit off. (Tried boosting with all 18 but that made my ship fall apart. Go figure... I think it is better to spread out the boosters a little instead of using them all at once anyway.) After they burn out, the remaining 6 boosters are ignited.

The MunJumper uses the onion layer approach - the outer fuel tank stacks feed all engines and are dropped as they get exhausted to release dead weight. The ship is pretty responsive during ascent thanks to the single LV-T45 gimballed engine burning in the center of the stack.

The center fuel stack feeds the four fuel tanks with the gimballed engines so they will burn longer. I considered adding a decoupler below the ASAS to jettison the center stack once it is expended, but I would have had to rebuild half of the rocket to do this, and considering my framerate I did not feel like it.

The first version of this rocket did not have the four extra fuel tanks and engines, and instead had only one stack of four fuel tanks. It could go to the mun, but the munar burn would take an age and a half, so I added MOAR engines... ;D

Anyhow, I was able to land at three of the large craters in one mission and return to Kerbin with fuel to spare, I can post pictures if you like. I know the ship could probably use some improvement, and would love to hear your opinions. First of all, I did not use any RCS at all during the mission, so I could probably remove the tank and rcs thrusters to save weight. Second, i do not know if two SAS modules do any better than one, so maybe one of them could go too. Third, do you think that adding a decoupler behind the ASAS to drop the center 3 tanks and engine would pay off, weight wise?

[Monkthespy]

The more SAS you have, the more stability. With really unstable rockets, sometimes I had to add like, 20 SAS.

[Robo336]

I usually use ASAS combined with some winglets and gimballing engines.

So far that has kept any of my death traps... I mean rockets, stable.

Nice lander

[Awaras]

I usually use ASAS combined with some winglets and gimballing engines.

So far that has kept any of my death traps... I mean rockets, stable.

Nice lander

The lander is also very stable. I Think the two SAS modules give it a lot of maneuverability. I did not need to use any RCS for all three landings... I would remove the RCS tank but I am using v13.2 and it messes with the staging...

[segaprophet]

This is the sort of smart design I like to see!