[0.14] Short rocket with lander... and some interesting staging

[wuggy]

I thought I\'d share my short, simple rocket. It uses some slightly odd staging which I\'ve not seen elsewhere on the forum. (Admittedly, I\'ve not looked very hard...). Whilst fairly short, it\'s enough to get the lander to the Mun and back with 1.5 tanks of fuel to spare in the orbital transfer stage.

Stage 1: All 5 engine fire, with the central fuel tanks being refilled, and 2 of the 4 external tanks being refilled. We\'re basically fuelling 5 engines from 2 of the external stacks. At the end of this stage, we eject the empty stacks and their engines. This stage gets us to 300m/s at an altitude around 13Km.

Stage 2: Remaining 3 engines fire, again with the central stack refilled by the remaining external tanks. The 2 external stacks are ejected when empty. This stage gets us all the way to orbital velocity, and most of the way to a circular orbit.

Stage 3: The single engine on the central stack is our main engine. Initially it\'s needed for the last 10% of thrust to circularise the orbit around Kerbin, leaving plenty of fuel for a transfer to the Mun. I usually use it when landing on the Mun to slow down descent until around 3Km from the surface (usually with 1 to 1.5 tanks still full), then jetison it to crash into the Munar surface.

Stage 4: From a small height, the single fuel tank and small engine on the landing stage has enough to land safely, relaunch, make Munar orbit, and transfer back to Kerbin - with fuel left over.

The staging is a bit \'non-standard\' (and takes some manual setting up) but it seems to work quite well!

[Caesar15]

that seems pretty small for a mun lander, but if it works dont change it!

[Kosmo-not]

@ wuggy:

The staging scheme you are using is not odd at all. In fact, I use it on a lot of my rockets. Kosmo-Zero Mk6 is an example of this.

@ Caesar15:

The smallest mun lander I have seen uses 3.5 tanks of fuel for the whole mission, but has only the engine to land on and has no parachute. The smallest mun lander I know of that has parachute and landing legs is my Koalemos II with 5 tanks of fuel.

[Awaras]

I use this kind of staging all the time. BTW, you do not need to connect the bottom of one stage to the top of another stage, bottom to bottom works the same (fuel tanks prioritize drawing fuel from fuel lines before drawing from fuel tanks above) and looks cleaner with shorter fuel lines...

Check out this thread for tips for using fuel lines:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8368.0

[wuggy]

Kosmo-not: The staging scheme did strike me as being fairly obvious, but I\'d not seen many (or any) examples of it\'s use. Maybe I need a better memory!

Awaras: Aha. I remember having some problems with bottom-to-bottom connected fuel lines on a previous build (0.13.2 maybe?) where fuel would be consumed from the upper tanks in the stack, and it\'s a hold-over from that. The guide is handy.

This design, incidentally, is very similar to the upper stages of a 'Sun flyby and return' rocket, which did (just about) have enough fuel in it for it\'s mission. (With the extra stages I\'d reach a Kerbil orbit with the 2 external stacks 95% full). The only problem is the pilot being a bit crap and missing Kerbin on the return orbit!

[Kosmo-not]

Bottom-to-bottom fuel lines work just fine. It\'s when you create fuel loops (a tank pumping fuel around back into itself) that fuel consumption gets a bit quirky.

[Duban]

Yes, this way of staging is very common although it is not the end all be all of KSP either.

[NovaSilisko]

I\'ve never seen this type of staging before. I HAVE seen staging where all four boosters feed the central tank, but not a two-at-a-time approach.

[corinoco]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_and_a_half

In the bizarre alternate universe known as the Real World this kind of staging system was used for the early Atlas rockets.

[dire]

I\'m playing with a similar rocket, but instead of one column on each pylon, I have four, which drop in sequence (each of the outer columns feeds into the inner columns). It\'s taking me a while to land on the moon, because instead of just my payload (3 ASAS modules) I can land with fuel in each of the innermost columns...which makes it really hard to steer Also, I only have the \'demo\' version so far and not being able to save my munar approach is frustrating =P

[sal_vager]

I\'ve been making my rockets this way for ages, I like to call it daisy chaining

I went through a stage of trying to get the most out of my boosters and this setup seemed to work the best, I got fed up with the usual giant rockets that killed my framerate and I needed to make rockets with fewer parts overall.