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Mining lander

This lander is intended to fly to Duna, Moho, Eeloo, Vall, or Mun, land there, hop around to land in all of the different biomes to pick up science, and then return to land on Kerbin. It also includes everything necessary to do all of the deployable science on the chosen planet or moon, as well as some extra probe cores so that when you land on Kerbin, you get credit for recovering five vehicles that landed on your target, not one.

The mining lander is really three vehicles in one. The lander proper is in the middle, with my Kerbin re-entry module at the top of the lander, and some mining equipment and fuel tanks below it. It includes a SEQ-9 container module with all of the deployable science, as well as a partially filled fuel tank on the opposite side to balance the weight.

The lander itself has 3528 m/s of vacuum delta-v, and the wolfhound engine offers over 7.17 m/s^2 of acceleration at full fuel. The full suite of mining equipment allows you to refill the fuel tanks, and the fuel cell arrays allow you to mine day or night, regardless of how far from the Sun you are.

The lander has wheels to allow you to drive around. They're primarily there to allow hitting the ground harder without exploding, now that lander legs are broken to the point of being useless. It's not the nicest vehicle to drive, but the mass is low enough to the ground that it can drive fine on modest slopes, and stay put after landing on fairly steep ones.

The top vehicle is there to offer about 2000 m/s of extra delta-v for your return trip to Kerbin. Once the lander reaches a low orbit about your target planet or moon, you stage to disconnect the top vehicle. You leave it in a low orbit while the lander hops around, then rendezvous with the vehicle when ready to return to Kerbin, using the advanced grabbing unit to connect them. You then shut down the terrier engine and rely on the lander's wolfhound engine until the lander's fuel is exhausted. After that, you stage to drop most of the lander, keeping only the core module connected to the top vehicle, and restart the terrier engine.

It is never strictly necessary to use the top vehicle. When traveling to Mun, it should be ignored. For the other target destinations, the top vehicle allows a large delta-v buffer to allow a sloppy return to Kerbin to still work fine.

The bottom vehicle is mainly to deliver the top two vehicles to your target. Once there, however, the bottom vehicle contains antennas and a probe core, so as to remain controllable on its own. After setting up the deployable science, you can crash the bottom vehicle into your target in order to instantly max out the grand slam passive seismometer science. This prevents needing to bring a separate vehicle to max the science.

For Moho, you'll need to stage to disconnect the lander from the crasher while several days away from your encounter. Bring the bottom vehicle down to perhaps 50 m/s of delta-v remaining before disconnecting, then use that remaining delta-v to burn mostly away from the planet while ending up on course for a direct collision. That way, once you get the lander proper to a low orbit, you have perhaps hour or so to land and set up the deployed science before the crasher arrives to bring the boom.

In an experiment, I had a little over 1000 m/s of delta-v to spare when landing on Moho. That gives you some margin for error even there, and you should have a much larger margin for error on the other planets or moons where this vehicle is intended for use. I also had over 2800 m/s of delta-v to spare when returning from Moho, though most of that was due to using the top vehicle.

You can do something similar for Vall or Eeloo, though they're a lot more forgiving than Moho, as the speeds involved will be much slower and the margin for error in delta-v usage much larger. This is completely unnecessary on Duna and Mun, and for that matter, won't even work on Duna, as the crasher would vanish in Duna's atmosphere before landing.

For Duna, you should get the combined vehicle into a low orbit before splitting off the crasher. After that, you can have the lander land, deploy the deployable science, and then switch to the crasher to manually bring it to the ground.

When landing on Duna, you can deploy the parachutes to slow you for landing. Depending on your elevation and fuel level, the parachutes will slow you to about 30-50 m/s. While the wheels may survive such an impact, it's likely to land awkwardly and flip you over. It's much better to finish the landing with a modest retrograde burn. An engineer in the top command pod can go on EVA, repack the parachutes without moving, and then re-enter the command pod.

When returning to Kerbin, you disconnect any extra parts and have the Kerbin re-entry module enter Kerbin's atmosphere alone. The final landing directions are on the page for the re-entry module itself.

The mining lander also works on the smaller planets and moons. It is overkill there, however, as you don't need to mine in order to hop around to all of the biomes and return to Kerbin. I recommend using one of my smaller landers instead.