Subscribe to download
Colony Heavy Lander (Vanilla)

UPDATED VERSION HERE: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2809153809

Vanilla heavy planet lander. Designed for natural gravity up to 1.5G. Designed for surface to space transport of ground vehicles and heavy cargo. Large and robust cargo bay outfitted with conveyor capabilities.

With it being stated that the blue ion thrusters will only be 30% effective in a planets atmoshphere the only other option will be hydrogen or atmospheric thrusters that are due to come out soon. I wanted a universal propulson method so hydrogen was the best way to go.

Flying the ship in a naturally gravity enviorment can be tricky at first. Being hydrogen your only propulsion method, you need to watch your tank levels religiously and do whatever you can to conserve your reserves. Each rotatable engine has 1 large hydrogen tank assigned to it. The four rotatable engines are designed to burn and be adjusted to give the ship a nuetral bouyancy whilst hovering. In a 1G enviorment without a payload this lander can hover stationary for 10 minutes at 4 MN of thrust exiting the VTOL engines. These 10 minutes of burn time does not account for the slight adjustments needed to correct drift over a certain spot. You do have room for some manuevering around a planet surface for finding a good spot to land. It is not recommended to exceed 1.0 meters per sec on descent just before touch down. This will help keep the landing gear intact.

After watching the live stream and timing the decrease in the planest gravitational pull vs distance traveled, I highly advise you do not attempt to leave a planets surface without AT LEAST 50% of hydrogen left in your tanks.

When leaving a planets surface adjust the VTOL engines output to give you a nuetral bouyancy and only use local thrusters to accelerate to the max speed. Once you are ascending from the planet at max speed, decrease your VTOL thrust as the gravitaional pull decreases. This ensures you are saving as much fuel as possible. When you are free of all planet gravity, you can now rotate the engines to space travel.

Trucks from the screenshot can be found here.