Let me share my mission with you! I just completed my first successful Duna mission (manned, I had sent probes before), with a dual purpose of landing successfully and also retrieving Jebediah Kerman who had been stranded in the command module there without enough delta v to return home (but with enough, which I siphoned into my own spaceship once I got there. Bob and Bill had died in the service of science in this failed attempt.
Last time the lander had been too small, (or really, I hadn't put drouge chutes on it and its parachute was cannibalized from the return module, which I had planned to fix once the lander was back in orbit), so this time I added loads of solid rocket boosters. This was with the same command module and interplanetary stage that I had been using for the last one, which meant I found out half way through the mission that I didn't have enough delta v.
The only option I had was to aerobrake on Duna's atmosphere at 30km. I will be honest I used quicksaves here in order to find the right height that wouldn't kill me. At the same time I was burning hard and staged half way through, dropping off the inteplanetary stage into Duna's atmosphere. It fell like a burning longship leaving the cove. Things started exploding, and we lost our folding antennae which I had left extended for some reason. Somehow it worked. Valentina and the scientist were an aurora over the red planet.
I put the Crisgard in the lander and separated so that it would hit the atmosphere again and its orbit would decay, and then went to fix the orbit for the command module. Between its skips, I matched my orbit close to Jebediahs'.
The lander skipped off of Duna's thin atmosphere for a couple of orbits, decaying the velocity until it was more manageable. And then came the landing. I had two drouge shoots, which I turned to deploy at the minimum pressure possible, but they came out frighteningly late. The two main parachoutes also deployed very close to the ground, and for a moment I was scared it was too late… but they shot out, and my speed quickly dropped to a steady amount.
A steady amount that was too fast. 40 metres per second. I used my RCS to try and slow, and considered using an SRB, but it would have been too much and would have killed me. Without any other option, I extended the landing gear and prayed. Please, don't be an explosion. It exploded. Parts scattered everwhere. It was a warzone.
Once the d
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