KerbalX

Description

This is a better version of my previous Falcon Heavy.

Improvements:

• Landing Gear is powered, can deploy reliably @ >20 m/s
• Landing Gear is stronger, will reliably support up to 5 m/s impact
• Better separation, also with better aesthetics
• More thrust control, AGs 1-4 activates a specific number of engines to make landings smoother
• Now has fuel flow priority

Instructions:

Ejecting the Boosters and Core

• Throttle up and stage or press 1
• Press 5 twice to jettison boosters and retract struts
  • If you are going for a full recovery, the bottom tanks should have ~2000 units of Liquid Fuel before jettison
• Send the Core stage and payload onto a high suborbital trajectory and complete Landing if you don’t have FMRS
• Press 6 to jettison the core stage
• You can take it from here…

Landing

• If you saved the ~2000 units of Liquid Fuel, you should have plenty of ΔV to boost back and land with more to spare
• Start by using the RCS to point at the horizon directly beneath the retrograde marker on the navball and throttle up
  • If you have the Trajectories mod, aim to set the + just past the CommNet station (where the green line ends)
  • If not, you will have to estimate both the Coriolis effect (Kerbin’s rotation) and atmospheric drag (or get the mod NOW)
• Set the navball to surface mode and then set the SAS to retrograde
• If you do not have FMRS, either get it now, be a legit god, or prepare to sacrifice one of the boosters
• Press B to deploy the gridfins, right click on them, and press the first two buttons
• If you have MechJeb, set landing guidance to land somewhere once the altitude drops to ~20 km and disregard the next 3 lines
• If you have Kerbal Engineer, throttle up at the suicide burn altitude
• If you are a purist, just keep the speed at around 1/10 your altitude
• If there is too much thrust, press 2-4 to decrease the number of engines active
• When your speed drops to 20 m/s, press 0 to deploy the gear and press F to prevent the SAS from freaking out
• Beware, the engines will cut when each leg docks
• At touchdown, slowly decrease the throttle to prevent the legs from bouncing and flipping the craft
• Cut the throttle
• IMPORTANT: Press FN + F2 and FN + F1

Built in the SPH in KSP version 1.3.1.

Details

• Type: SPH
• Class: lifter
• Part Count: 914
• Pure Stock

Recommended Mods

This is a stock craft and can be landed in a completely vanilla game. That said, I encourage you to get the following mods to make touchdown less explosive:

• Trajectories
• Kerbal Engineer (Redux)
• MechJeb
• StageRecovery (if you want to recover automatically)