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The time has come for Kerbal-kind to leave our small blue oasis on Kerbin and venture out into the great beyond - to the unknown worlds that beckon us from afar like silent lanterns adrift in the night. We are resolved to go to Jool! To unlock the secrets of the unknown, and hopefully also to come back! Prologue: What follows is my account of the planning, execution and aftermath of the Magellan mission to the Jool system in my career save. I have spend the majority of my time playing KSP within the Kerbin system visiting the Mun and Minmus ad nauseum, and unlocking most of the tech tree. Besides Duna, I have never visited any other body in a career save. My goal in this career is to send missions to visit all the celestial bodies in the Kerbol system. Some will be manned and some unmanned. With a Jool transfer window approaching in 41 days, I have decided to take a bold step towards this goal by sending a crew of valiant (or maybe daft) kerbals to this giant green world and her moons. Magellan Mission The Magellan mission will take after the great explorer Ferdinand Magellan in attempting a feat which has never before been done (by me). To send a manned mission to the Jool system, take science data on all the worlds therein and return to Kerbin. I'm calling this a Jool-4.5 mission because unlike the Jool-5 mission reports from challenges, there will be no flags or footprints on Tylo, instead I will have a probe land and report back with science data. But the rest of the moons will be visited by Kerbals. Here is the mission patch for the Magellan Mission : The patch shows the silhouettes of Jool, Laythe, Val and Tylo against a backdrop of stars and backlit by the sun as the spacecraft flies by. It is modeled after the STS-41 mission patch. The motto is latin for "To the stars through adversity", and was totally Magellan's rallying cry on his voyage something I thought sounded cool. This mission report is primarily for my own benefit, as something to look back on when this mission is over, but I hope others will find it enjoyable as well. I intend to chronicle my thinking as it relates to mission planning, vehicle design and testing and mission execution in a matter of fact way, and not to write a story or a novel. Right now, I'm not planning to do much if any roleplaying from a Kerbal standpoint, but who know maybe I will get carried away later on. Notes about my playstyle: At this stage, I have designed the vehicle and a rough sketch of the mission plan. I build and test all my vehicles in a sandbox save and then copy the craft files to my career save. For testing purposes, I am allowing myself cheats to get the vehicle into LKO, but no testing will be done in the Jool system. This will hopefully force me to think more carefully about what conditions I will encounter at Jool and will preserve the newness of the experience for me when I actually fly the mission in my career save. I do use quite a few mods, but no part mods (aside from SCANSAT). The mods that I use fall under one of three categories: (1) Visual enhancements (2) Sounds/Effects to increase immersion and (3) Gameplay tools (ie KER) What's Next: In the next posts I will be showcasing the design of the spacecraft, and possibly doing some on-orbit testing. Once I unlock all the parts I need in my career save we will get onto the meat of the mission.