Five Kerbal base to Mun from Kerbin with 5500 delta V - Let's do this!

[antihifi]

First of all, I'm lazy. As we all know laziness costs you a lot in this game…

In career mode I got a contract to put a base on the Mun with capacity for 5 kerbals, a cupola, a research module, power, etc. Aside from being lazy I'm also cheap so ideally I would have put this together in orbit in a couple of SSTO Spaceplane launches but sadly I have not been able to design a mk3 based spaceplane that can carry up those large 2.75m parts.

So, being a cheapskate I decided I would not spend more than 100k on this mission and wanted a low part count. This would be a one way mission for five brave (stupid) Kerbals.

Now my first rocket was a bit too much over 100k and in testing I decided it was overpowered and I knew I could get to the Mun with less. I rebuilt the rocket and didn't really check the deltaV. To be extra cheap I also decided I was going to try to recover the boosters (a fatal mistake). During launch I hit "[" to switch to the boosters to deploy the parachutes. I then switched back to the rocket and from that point there was no "revert to VAB" option. I was stuck with this rocket. It became immediately clear that this rocket wasn't going to make it to the Mun with the little deltaV it had. So I reverted back to the launchpad. As you can see it has a measly 5,508 deltaV. I thought it might be on just the outside of possible to land this thing on the Mun but it had to be flown perfectly. Let's give it a go!!!!!

Oh great Wilbo is already panicking. If you're freaking out now man you're going to be really loving it when you're coming in for your landing on the Mun at 800 m/s 2000 meters above the surface nearly horizontally. Take a chill pill. I've got this.

Getting into a very low 80km LKO was crucial to conserve the little deltaV I was working with. I was watching my time to apoapsis like a hawk trying to build up a lot of orbital velocity without getting too high up.

Ok! We're in orbit and have sue deltaV to spare. Let's start messing with maneuver nodes and see how low of a periapsis we can get for out Munshot.

We're well on our way to the Mun now. Doing one last correction burn to drop our periapsis near to the surface. To conserve even more fuel we're going to tweak the periapsis down further using just RCS. We're being reaaaaally conservative with what little LF we've got left.

The last bit of tweaking was done with just RCS. We don't have the LF to an orbit. We are coming in low and very very hot. We are going to have to bleed off a lot of speed with just our tiny radially mounted rockets and a splash of fuel!

We came in at around 860 m/s 11km up. We had about 45 seconds to burn off all that excess horizontal speed. The first few, um, "simulated" attempts resulted in spectacular crashes. I couldn't take a screenshot of the final approach because Wilbo and I were way too panicked and furiously trying to bleed off speed while not draining the little fuel we had left.

Touchdown! We did it! With a whopping 39 m/s deltaV to spare! That was hairy. None of us thought it was even possible!!!

Enjoy your new home you Fine Young Kerbals!!!!!!

Edited January 16, 2015 by antihifi

[technicalfool]

Uhm, just so you know for future endeavours: Those contracts should only require space for 5 (or 7, or however many) kerbals. You can send up a completely empty base with a probe core, so long as there's 5 empty seats in it.

So now you know!

[antihifi]

Oh I know! I just wanted to send up all five for fun!