Halp! My Kerbals are stranded!

[butterknife]

I actually didn't do ANY staging when I reworked the lander. That's my fault. If you stage it so that you still have the four tanks on your descent, you should have PLENTY of fuel for both landing and return

Fixed it, and then got really really close to touching down next to the crew. Unfortunately, even though I had enough DV to reach Duna and return, I didn't really have enough DV to get to my crew. I strapped four more smaller FL-T400 fuel cans to the top stage, and I reckon that should probably give me enough gas to touch down within a few kilometers of the boys. I'll find out tomorrow. I gotta get some sleep.

Edited July 11, 2014 by butterknife

[Roastduck]

Fixed it, and then got really really close to touching down next to the crew. Unfortunately, even though I had enough DV to reach Duna and return, I didn't really have enough DV to get to my crew. I strapped four more smaller FL-T400 fuel cans to the top stage, and I recon that should probably give me enough gas to touch down within a few kilometers of the boys. I'll find out tomorrow. I gotta get some sleep.

good opportunity to brush up on some precision landing techniques lol there are a few tutorials on youtube. I'm glad my alterations got you there, though

[butterknife]

Oh, had to add a second stage of chutes, too. Since Duna's atmo is thinner, I put 4 chutes on the lander. I figure it should help me touch down nice and soft without having to burn much fuel to keep it soft.

[butterknife]

Well. Here's where I'm at now.

[butterknife]

Yeah. It's a girder with seat belts, sitting on a big ol' can of rocket fuel. Took me almost all six of those tall cans of fuel to get within four kilometers. Unfortunately, the poodle doesn't offer enough control for me to be able to navigate it closer to my men. And since the rover is stuck, they're in for a little hike. Although, I think after these past five years on Duna, they'll look forward to getting off this dustball.

Oh yeah. Because the auto nav is such a bad pilot and required so much fuel to do such a simple job, some budget cuts had to be made in the way of. . . amenities. So Jeb, Bill and Bob are gonna have to ride. . . Uh. . . What's worse than coach? They've got seat belts, though. So that should work alright, yeah?

[Taki117]

That's a bit of a hike, but totally doable. You're issue is I'm not entirely sure you have enough dV to get back into Orbit, much less back to Kerbin. (Unless you have a ship in orbit already with Enough dV to get back, in which case disregard previous statement) You're maneuver node says 655.4m/s, but you will need about twice that to get into orbit because of atmospheric drag. (Not a big issue on Duna, but it is there)

In either case I wish you the best of luck with your rescue.

[butterknife]

Here's the save for this shebang. This bucket lander had four main stages. Because screw asparagus models. I want to fly rockets, not bloomin' onions. The launch vehicle consisted of the biggest main sail in the game, sitting under two of the biggest fuel cans. It had. . . I think it was four or six of those four-engine liquid fuel boosters, with three giant solid fuel boosters on the sides of each of those. The liquid fuel was rigged to flow back to the middle mainsail engine once it was all burnt. The solid fuel got shed at 25,000m out of Kerbin, the liquid boosters were shed at about 80,000, and the momentum carried the middle mainsail to around 200,000 meters.

From there, orbit was easy, if not tedious. From here, that stage was shed. The next was another giant kerbodyne mainsail rigged to a modest single kerbodyne can of gas. This provided the necessary escape velocity that carried our intrepid seatbelt girder-drone on an approach vector for Duna. It also allowed us to correct our approach midway, and got us on a vector to within 1.5 million meters away from Duna. After this midcourse correction, it was shed. Now, you'll notice a big orange can of fuel? It's hooked to one of those more modest medium-sized mainsails. This was used to do a final approach correction that put us on course for a 128,000 meter periapsis from Duna. This was a very minor burn of about four seconds. Once we reached or near periapsis, the remaining fuel was used to slow us down to a shallow circular orbit of about 45,000 meters, and do most of the course correction. After that, it was just a lot of dead weight that was making turning around pretty hard. It was shed with about 30% of it's fuel remaining. My final approach was super shallow, and as you can see, we landed about 4km from the crew. I did a lot better than I thought I could. Now to hike my dudes out of there, and hope we make it back.

Now I just need to take off and burn west, just like a mun return, right?

[Kryxal]

Optimal takeoff profile is to burn east, actually ... add the planet's rotation to your orbital velocity. Oh, and repack your chutes before you try to take off, of course.

Once you're in orbit, your return profile will have you burning to leave Duna's orbit in the retrograde direction, assuming you launched to the east probably shortly after you come on to the day side in your orbit, shouldn't be much of a problem if you have the fuel for it. If you don't have the fuel to break orbit, better you don't try, just send an in-space rescue.

[butterknife]

They made it. I'm just going to link you to my steam album of screen shots, documenting their return flight.

I had plenty of fuel left, but I burned it all at reentry. I figured if I landed too hard, I'd rather go crunch than boom.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/butterknife/screenshots/?appid=220200&sort=oldestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall

This was legitimately the toughest thing I've done yet in KSP. I learned a lot. Thanks for all the help, everybody!

Edited July 12, 2014 by butterknife

[Vahal]

Well, a decoupler just above the last SAS and your little guy would descend like a feather in the wind.

Just for the "challenge" I dld your save and tried to rescue the 3 green heroes.

I managed to build an overkill rocket with more than enough dV to this mission. The RIP (Rescue: InterPlanetary) has 13K3 dV and is easy to fly.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

It was fun to rescue those poor guys with stock parts.