Munar landing fun and games.

It's taken me far longer than I wanted to build a ship with enough dv to get me to the Mun and back. After I finally got into orbit, I discovered I forgot solar panels and batteries. Sigh. For some reason I reloaded the game instead of reverting. Whatever.

I slapped on the solar panels, and took the oppotunity to delve further into the tyranny of the rocket equation (seriously, I had an excessive amount of fuel, but couldn't figure out how to cut back). Anyway, lauch, orbit, fine. Everything is groovy until I notice that adding that small fuel tank has lowered my engine below my landing struts. Because fuck me by this point, right? I'm way too far into it to turn back so I land and bust my engine, stranding my on the Mun. I EVA and see - Valentina? I thought Jeb was on this ship. But... that must mean. Oh shit.

I go to the tracking station and there's Jeb, on an escape trajectory from Kerbin. At least I picked up on it before I couldn't turn back. So I start burning fuel and keeping my periapsis at 25k-30k. Once I drained my speed and was at ~90k, I hit space to stage. One last problem though. turns out I attached the final fuel tank directly to the heat shield, no separator. So even if by some miracle Jeb doesn't blow up on re-entry (he will), that last staging released my parachutes, and there's no way those survive the heat. So I just lost my two orange pilots, just to land on the Mun.

Heed my warning, folks: Check your staging, check your components, check their relation to each other.