Tallest ship to successfully land on the Mun (stock parts only)

[TheTomGod]

If any of you can land this abomination of mine on the moon you win all the internets.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, I landed this stack on Minmus... I suppose it wouldn\'t have enough power to safely land on the Mun though.

[MarkoRagnos]

This wasn\'t my first attempt at it, but certainly my actual first \'successful\' at landing on the mun back in 0.15 days.

[woland]

I don\'t usually land without mechjeb so it was fairly challenging.

[aontas]

I haven\'t actually used MechJeb. How much easier does it make navigation/landing?

Also, @sean mirrsen (as I can see the ladders on your rocket, or anyone else who knows)... how do you extend the periscopic ladders? mine don\'t ever seem to actually extend so I never use them.

[Sean Mirrsen]

They've got a fairly finicky active area around the boxy part, but if you right click that (the part doesn't highlight when you hover over it), you get a context menu with the option to extend 'em. Unlike all other context menus, this works even if you're EVA, so you can extend a ladder of the craft you're standing next to.

Edited August 4, 2012 by Sean Mirrsen

[A Fat Pokemon]

My craft is about a third of the size of aontas, and I can get my second stage on the Mun =/ you might need some improvement on that thing, O.o

[Slogan9]

I was playing around with the part files and I 'changed' some parts quite dramatically and (dont ask me how) but I created a srb that would be able to touch the moon and kerbin at the same time due to it's immense size and it did not crash my game, however when I rebooted ksp the game just crashed until I deleted the part. FYI this was in 0.13ish

[Captisaac21198]

I haven\'t actually used MechJeb. How much easier does it make navigation/landing?

Also, @sean mirrsen (as I can see the ladders on your rocket, or anyone else who knows)... how do you extend the periscopic ladders? mine don\'t ever seem to actually extend so I never use them.

Mechjeb does make the flying/landing aspect of the game easier (almost completely done by computer) and you can extend the ladders by right-clicking on or around them, then clicking "extend". Hope this helps!

[PLB]

What exactly did THAT look like? I can somewhat picture it, but it's hard to imagine anything like it...

[Nao]

My 51m mun-tower. (around 27.5 FLT-400's stacked on top of each other) - i think i beat woland's by around 2 tanks

No Mechjeb and no RCS. It took forever to pitch it for pro/retro-grades.

Landed in the dark crater on the bright side and almost lost it on touch down :3

First stage included one FLT-400 with LV-T30 LFE on each of the six lower "wings".

Also tried to not abuse the fuel bug as much as possible, but landing had to be done at low power.

edit: spoiler fixed: Im bad at this

Edited August 11, 2012 by Nao

[trekkie_]

it's important to note all the ships with ~20+ fuel tanks height are either using mods to launch from orbit, or the fuel bug to save on fuel, because I've probably done 50 runs with similar designs, and even if you can get into orbit and circularize, you basically run out of fuel a few seconds into transferring to mun (best case scenario!)....that's about as far as you can possibly get no matter how well planned every stage is, and no matter what types of engines you use or how efficiently you use them.

under stock circumstances without using mods or bugs, it's pretty much impossible to have enough fuel to get to mun let alone circularize orbit around it or land on it with ships of that size. the main reason being that you have to carry all that extra weight the entire time, where normally you would just jettison empty tanks. plus you would need massive amounts of fuel to slow down something that large and heavy without exploding from the impact speed. sure they're tall....and they're on mun, but that's not really the accomplishment.....the real accomplishment is taking off without any fuel bugs/mods, getting to mun, and landing....which is only something you can do with a much smaller craft else you will run out of fuel no matter what your design is.

Edited August 11, 2012 by trekkie_

[Nao]

Welp than i probably live in another dimension because my ship using only full throttle had 5,5 tank of fuel left after transferring to mun. Then i lost a lot of fuel on retrograde and landing since the pitch control was very hard without RCS. I started normally from KSC and didn't used any mods.

Unfortunately i don't have any screenshots saved on my Kerth -> mun -> Kerth -> mun -> Kerth run in .14 but that ship had 80 fuel tanks (still have craft file if you want to try it). Also .16's toroidal areospikes are lighter and more fuel efficient (not 100% sure) than .14's LFE's.

Actually most of my designs now have more than 20 tanks, and the one thing that is really inhibiting really crazy big rockets is CPU power right now.

edit: after some testing and number crunching .14 had more efficient engines by a large margin ( 0,262 kg of fuel per second per 1kN of force for 0.16 toroidal areospike to 0,176 kg/s/kN for patch 0.14 LFE , using standard fuel tank as fuel source ) but still that only mean that you need more fuel and engines to sent similar load to space.

Edited August 11, 2012 by Nao

[r_rolo1]

Well, my comp would go supernova if I tried to do something of that size, but couldn't you improve the height quite a lot by adding empty fuselages, engine nacelles or radial engine bodies ? The last two are the length of a FL-T400 tank and weight just a little bit more than a empty one ...

[Nao]

The thing i noticed while building spaceplanes is that the longer the chain of parts from the command pod the heavier on cpu it gets. Just using large fuel tanks it would be easy to have a ship even taller, but for now the fuel bug is bugging me a lot and i don't feel like I'm achieving anything with it, so its actually making me hold on other challenges as well.

As for lighter parts , they are really not needed as empty fuel tank is the lightest of them all. And my rocket only needed 7 LFE, if i wanted to fly something even heavier i would use toroidal areospikes or get more engines/boosters

Alternatively wings give even more length for part but they are making whole lot of new problems with ascent as well as mun landing

[trekkie_]

NOOOOO!!......

I shall rename it from the munpire state building to the leaning tower of mun and pretend it never fell over.

Edited August 11, 2012 by trekkie_

[cheezedoodle]

i managed to land this on the mun but it was a little bigger i had to ditch a stage because i couldnt get it to land straight but here it is

[Werwolf]

lol, these are some of the most rediculous rockets I've ever seen... nice work all!