Rethinking the orbital bus plan | Mission Planning Workgroup | Forum

We could probably make the entire stack somewhat shorter by designing the lander with a folding seat.

Good idea. That might be a little bit hard for me to change in the model though, because scaling the curved members will probably distort them in unintended ways.

Do we have any reasonable estimates on how big of tanks we need for the purpose of these concept renders, or are we still just going off of some guess that got made however long ago? If there aren't good numbers here, I don't think we should be putting too much faith in these renders for the purpose of whether or not it will fit in a given payload fairing.

These tanks are purely a guess. Once we know the required volume I should be able to just stretch/shrink the tanks and frame while keeping the same tank diameter.

Also, we have four engines on the LMM and four propellant tanks. If each tank uses a common bulkhead to separate the oxidizer and fuel then each tank could feed one engine.

I am also slightly concerned about engine out scenarios. If we lose one engine then we have a few options. Either we use the RCS to maintain our original trajectory, or we cut the symmetric engine and accept a lower acceleration. This introduces a problem with one tank feeding one engine because then we would have inaccessible fuel.

Here is a public dropbox link for the most current Google SketchUp concept render.

This will help everyone get a feel for the design since you'll be able to manipulate it in 3d.