Makes it to the mun and Back

[rayfound]

Completely Stock.

After a few of these:

Finally made it! (and return!)

Lots of gas to make it home. Successful landing.

Rocket spins pretty bad in the atmosphere, but I just hit SAS before launch and everything works fine.

I fly on the central stage all the way until about 5000M above the munar surface, zero out velocity, de-couple, then make final descent with the lander/return stage and gravity.

[rayfound]

Downloaded 5 times, anyone have any feedback? I thought it had a pretty forgiving fuel budget. I need to rebuild it to eliminate the atmospheric rotation issue, which I think is doable, but since it works, I haven\'t bothered.

I appreciate any feedback.

[Corona688]

Interesting arrangement on the landing fins. I\'d tried that but couldn\'t find the magic way to make it work.

I\'d try making a smaller top stage, one tank, but add an RCS tank and 8 thrusters, so you can fine-tune your landing with IJKL keys. Half a tank on that should escape from Mun and put you right back to Kerbal if aimed right.

Any reason its so tall? The taller it is, the harder it is to fly. You can substitute one set of tanks below a tricoupler for three stacked ones above...

[Waterlimon]

Seemed to work pretty well.

At the start i didnt notice that the outer pillars of fuel were empty so i carried them with me for some time (not long probably)

Then i orbited for a while waiting for mun to grab the rocket in its SoI.

I stopped most horizontal motion and landed to like 500 meters from the surface using the stage before the lander, but then i accidentally too many stages and separated command pod from the lander while the lander was still somehow connected to the stage before it (i thought the lander wasnt activated yet because it didnt detach from the stage before it because the stage before it still had the engines on... so i pressed space a few times lolo)

[rayfound]

Thanks for the pointers guys. I\'ve made a few tweaks so far, but have largely kept the design intact. Atmo-spin has been reduced, though not eliminated.

I like having 2 nearly full tanks on Mun departure, so I am able to do a significant retro-burn to slow reentry @ Kerbin. It just seems like that will be important at some point in the game.

As for RCS - I do need to try that... I\'ve honestly not used RCS at all.

Also, The whole design can be made shorter relatively easy - that\'s something I should play with.

[Corona688]

I like having 2 nearly full tanks on Mun departure, so I am able to do a significant retro-burn to slow reentry @ Kerbin. It just seems like that will be important at some point in the game.

What I do is I aim to orbit kerbin, not to hit it. But make the low end really low, inside the atmosphere, below 40,000 feet you\'ll get lots of atmospheric resistance but not too much if you get the height right. This lets you kill a lot of velocity without killing a lot of fuel or enduring a lot of gees.