First stage: Parachute, command, 1 90 units liquid tank , 3-4 medium landing struts, 3-4 24-77 engines.
Second stage: SAS, ASAS, RCS tank, 3 RCS, 1 180 units liquid tank, nuke engine.
Third stage: 4 long solid boosters.
Fourth stage: 4 Mk1 jet fuselage with jet fuel, 8 turbojet engines, 16 ramair intakes. Some bracing added.
I make it to stable Kerbin orbit with more than 130 fuel to spare in my second stage tank. From there, it’s easy and fuel-cheap to swing to the Mun if you wait until for the right moment and use your fuel conservatively. That’s enough to land on the Mun and perhaps make it back to Kerbil although I’m not sure about the latter; I don’t have much practice taking off from the Mun.
Son of a bitch. I’m taking out a test flight on a new design, and everything is going well and I realize my orbit is on a good path to alter to intercept minmus. Cool. So I head out towards minmus, make a few corrections along the way, and actually manage to plot a course to orbit minmus. My second stage gets me into an almost-orbit around minmus, but I have a last stage with just the command module, a small fuel tank, and a small engine. Plenty enough to make that last burn to get into minmus orbit, and then even enough left to break the orbit and get back to Kerbin.
Except, as I said, it was a new design, and I realized too late that I forgot a decoupler. When I jettison the second stage to start the third stage, I realize I accidentally eject the third stage too. I’m now just a command module and I’m on a collision course with minmus.
On the plus side, two missions in a row I crashed into two different moons. That’s something.
Hilarious disasters stemming from critical design failure that you discover only very late in the mission are definitely part and parcel of the Kerbal Space Program experience.
On my first Mün landing, when I designed the lander/command module (which I used as an integrated unit, rather than attempting a rendezvous with separate modules, which I’m still not good at), I noticed that I could put an small SAS unit on top of the three-man command module. I thought, great plan! I’ll put one there, and put the parachute on top of that! Genius!
…
A successful Mün landing follows, completed with an inscribed plaque on a flag planted to memorialize the occasion.
The return trajectory is wildly successful, with Earth reentry over the ocean plotted from a single burn, no Mün orbit required.
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Upon reentry, after on otherwise textbook mission, the Kerbalnauts (Jebediah, Bill, and Bob) discover the critical design flaw. The SAS is easily separated from the capsule with force of the parachute.
This separation duly occurs approximately 100 meters above the ocean, resulting in the critical loss of structural integrity of the capsule, and the deaths of all aboard.
It doesn’t strike me as a good idea to use SRBs in the later stages. Seems like you should always burn those at the initial launch and then get rid of them.
For clarity’s sake, I should mention that I named the stages from top to bottom. Hence, the fourth stage is the first to go. That was my bad.
“What is the core of stages 3 and 4?”
The SRBs are attached to the nuke engine. The jet engines are attached to the SRBs.
Another thing that works is attaching a bi-coupler to the bottom of the nuke engine and then attaching two bi-couplers to it. This functions as a quadri-coupler. The ship can get a little too high in that configuration, though.
SRB not being used at launch:
Rockets need fuel and oxidizer. Jet engines need fuel only because the oxidizer is taken from the atmosphere. This design allows me to avoid carrying oxidizer for the first 10-20KM, which are the most demanding in terms of thrust and weight. This results in having to carry both less oxidizer and fuel.
I use the jet engines as high as they have enough air coming in (about 20K last time I did it). When they get to around 0.02 of air intake, I chuck them and then use SRBs which I bank at a progressively shallower angle Eastward. Since the SRBs are ignited where the air starts to get thin, they don’t have to fight air resistance anywhere near as much as if they were ignited at launch. With the thin air and the built up velocity, 4 SRBs are enough to get the apoapsis of stages 1 & 2 above 70K (200K last time I did it). Once I get above 70K, I chuck the SRBs and fire the nuke engine at low thrust to get my periapsis above 70K. 131/180 fuel in the tank last I did it.
Since you may have difficulty picturing it, I’ll show you images.
Here is a somewhat modified version which uses 8 fuselages and 32 intakes to get higher. If you want to picture the one I described before, just imagine it with a double jet engine at each fuselage and no second layer of jet fuselage.
I changed up a few things and got even better results. The changes are obvious except for the addition of RCS because it spins during the jet engine phase and the SRB phase requires rapid changes.
I nearly got into stable orbit with the SRBs. With a little thrust from the nuke engine, I got a periapsis of 70K and an apoapsis of about 1.5M with this much fuel left:
I managed to get Jeremiah Kerbal up about 15,000 metres and get him back to the ground without dying. That’s a huge accomplishment for me. You guys are so far ahead I’m wondering if you studied this at school. I can’t even get stages to separate.
We all go through a stage of hilarious disastrous attempts. You’ll get to where we are a lot faster than you think. This is a game where failure is fun and where thinking things through pays off.
This 18 ton vehicle gets the 1 ton xenon probe into stable orbit with more than 690/700 Xenon fuel left in the probe. If I worked out the angles better during the SRB phase, I wouldn’t even need to use the Xenon engine to get a periapsis above 70K. Escaping Kerbin without using the Xenon engine is easy.
After I got the idea of using as much ambient oxidizer before using rockets, I researched it and found that this is a jury-rigged way of creating a sort of air turborocket. I guess KSP will eventually include air turborockets as parts but until then, this Munatic design has to be used to replicate its advantages. Perhaps someone has already created such a mod?
When you are building the ship you have to pay attention to the order where things are going on the right hand side. If you let the game decide, it will put the gantry release somewhere near the final stage separation.
