SSTO Lunar-VTOL

Capable of landing on Minmus or Mun and returning without refueling. Theoretically able to make one way trips to Duna, Eve Dres and Jool Orbit, but these have not been tested yet.

Extremely hard to fly Are you Kerbal enough to try?

If flown correctly you should reach 100km LKO with 2700ms dV spare (or just under). That is just enough to land on Mun and return, but the margin for error is very low. If you have 2600ms dV or less once in LKO I would abort the attempt.

craft has been slightly updated, I’ve shaved off a tiny bit more weight (<0.1ton) by reducing the levels in the septrons in the emergency eject system. So, slightly less able to save lives, slightly more dV available.

I’ve also added MechJeb2 as it really is impossible to fly precisely enough unless you use the SURF feature.

Details

• Type: SPH
• Style: spaceplane
• Part Count: 50
• Mods: 2

Flight Instructions

I’ve just uploaded a vid showing how I fly this tricky devil of a craft =>

• To start; whack space and action group 2 in very quick succession, (or don’t stage and just hit action group 1). If you stage to start, then the emergency eject will be the next stage, which personally I find useful
• Start pulling up when you’re going ~75ms. The nose comes up slowly to start and then suddenly comes up, so watch out for tail strikes (usually fatal)
• Once airborne pitch up to 45 degrees
• When your Ap reaches 12km pitch down to 20 degrees

• When your Ap reaches 20km pitch down to 10 degrees to lower your ascent speed to 70ms. Once at 70ms vertical speed, pitch up to 11 degrees. Now you have to be very precise. You want to keep your vertical accent speed around 70-75m/s. You will need to make pitch adjustments of +/- 0.2 degrees to do this!! As you reach 25+km the engines will sound like they’re going to flame out. Be brave and press on, you shouldn’t flame out until around 36km. The engines will fade down like dying embers, but you will keep accelerating.
• When you reach an alt of 30km set your pitch so the vertical ascent is gradually increasing (a pitch of ~11.4 - 11.6 degrees should do it)
• When you reach 34km (you should now be going around 2050-2100ms by now) pitch up to 15 degrees. Now it gets a bit tricky, the rocket engine is under the craft so you have to rotate before firing it up.
• When the engines flame out (your Ap should be almost 70km now) hit action group 1 and as fast as you can, select control from here on the docking port, set a pitch of 30 and a roll of 180 and then hit action group 2 to bring the rocket engine online. (this must all be done in just 1-2 seconds!) I said she was hard to fly!
• Very shortly after as your Ap nears 90km pitch to 20 degrees and burn until you have an Ap of 115-118km (it will fall back to 100km by the time you clear the atmo).
• circularize as normal to reach a 100x100km orbit and pray like hell that you have nearly 2700ms of dV spare.

Now you can head to land on Mun, but you need to be as efficient as possible in your transfer, capture and landing. Try and use no more than 840ms dV in the transfer and aim to arrive with a Pe of ~40km. Do a capture burn to bring the Ap to around 200km. Orbit till you reach you Ap and then lower your Pe to ~5-6km, your going to need to do as daring a suicide burn as possible to land. Wait till you reach your Pe of 6km before starting and be as efficient as possible. After landing the bare minimum dV you should have left is 850ms, but ideally you want to have 900ms or more left over to make it home safely.

When landing back at Kerbin you should be able to glide all the way down, if you have some jet fuel left it does help to give you a little more lift before touch down. And set her down very gently!! This craft is not built for strength, its a flying can with as much as possible stripped out!

Enjoy!!

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