When landing a spacecraft on unprepared terrain, you must avoid creating a crater under the landing legs or sandblasting nearby structures with the ejected regolith. Some proposed landers like the Hercules Single-Stage Reusable Vehicle use nose-mounted and canted rocket engines to avoid erosion, but this leads to thrust loss due to the cosine law.

After seeing a representation of the tetrahedral spacecraft from the novel "The Red Peri", I imagined a similarly-shaped folding lander with a top-mounted gimbaled engine which would not suffer cosine thrust loss and keep the cargo low to the ground.