My first round trip mission to Duna

[Kelderek]

I know it may seem like nothing special to make a round trip to Duna, but it was a major operation for me and was the first time I had managed a round trip anywhere other than the Mun or Minmus. I have a ton of one-way treks logged, but I knew that a round trip would be a bigger challenge.

Here's the album with some notes:

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I learned a lot from doing this mission. I'm sure that I designed way more of a rocket and lander than is necessary, but I didn't know how much wiggle room I would need for my own piloting errors that were sure to crop up. There were two main flaws I found in my design that I would change for the future:

1. While my lander was symmetric and balanced around the CoM, my RCS thruster placement was not centered relative to my command pod. I had placed the thrusters so that they would be balanced around the CoM, but because they were not centered for the command pod, it meant that simple translations in one direction would fire the thrusters in two directions. This made my docking with the transfer stage after leaving the Duna surface a real pain. I could probably fix this by holding the shift key when placing the thrusters to change their angle relative to the command pod -- they had only been off by about 10 degrees, but that was enough to be problematic.

I had made the lander with 4 engines and 4 asparagus fuel tanks, but I wanted a small gap where the hatches would be -- this is why my thrusters had been placed slightly off angle.

2. I should never have put any engines on my transfer stage, I should have just made it a big fuel tank. I designed it with 4 LV-N engines, but that exactly what I also have on my lander. Once I was up and flying with the two stages, I had that facepalm moment when I knew that it was twice the engines I really needed. I had 8 engines total between the two stages, but I only ever had 4 powered up at one time. I think this happened because all of my previous landers were tiny by comparison and would never have enough thrust (to my liking) to be used for transferring between worlds, so I always had designed my middle stages to have their own engines. But this Duna lander was big enough to have enough engines to do both jobs of landing and making interplanetary tranfers.

Anyway, it was tons of intense fun for me, and I hope you enjoy the album.

[Commander Zoom]

Congratulations on your achievement! And thanks for the post.

I'm working on bringing my own first Duna crew home soon - would have already, but other missions and launch windows came up first.

[Scotius]

Streamlining your designs is a sure sign you are becoming a mature KSP player Congratulations. Also succesful Duna mission - another important milestone in KSP. Congratulations

[Cydonian Monk]

Landed on the Duna Ice Caps, no less. Nice mission!

[kriseric]

Done like a pro, actually.

[Kelderek]

Landed on the Duna Ice Caps, no less. Nice mission!

It was too bad that it didn't count as a different biome, I would have had more science for it. I had landed on Duna previously (that lander is still there) and transmitted back some data so my science returns were a little lower because of that.