lightest eve sea level return vehicle? 16 tons?

[nuclear_turkey]

start height - 220m
start mass - 16 tons
- https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/4qyy65/lightweight_sea_level_launch_from_eve_under_16/ -

do i win with the lightest return vehicle? :¬)

[magnemoe]

Impressive, how does the rotor work?
And its the lightest I have seen in KSP 1.x

[RocketBlam]

I did a challenge for the lightest Eve lander from any altitude (it's in the Challenges section ) pre-1.0, and the lightest was 19 tons... from a pretty high altitude though. That was stock, and required a capsule, but damned impressive job. You have my like, sir.

Or is this stock?

Edited July 3, 2016 by RocketBlam

[KerikBalm]

I am also curious how you got the rotor to work without spinning the whole craft.

But it certainly beats all the post 1.0 records that I've seen

Edited July 3, 2016 by KerikBalm

[martinborgen]

I recently made my first eve ascent, and the lander was 24 tons, but that wouldn't lift off, so I burned some fuel, to 21 tons and made it - if I remove the empty tanks, it's at 19 tons - I'm suprised to see how close I was to the ones here! 

[Snark]

My initial reaction on seeing the thread title was "whoa, no way!"  -- then I realized there's no crew pod on the craft.  Makes a pretty big difference. 

I assume there's a mod you're using to get the rotor to spin 'round.

One question:  how do you power the thing?  Clearly it's using reaction wheels to spin the wings around, which means you're using electricity.  It'll take a long time to work your way up through that much atmosphere, and quite a bit of electrical power, but I don't see any major electrical-generating equipment on there, or major battery storage.  Where are you getting the power from to keep it running?

On a related note:

 

[nosirrbro]

20 minutes ago, Snark said:

My initial reaction on seeing the thread title was "whoa, no way!"  -- then I realized there's no crew pod on the craft.  Makes a pretty big difference. 

I assume there's a mod you're using to get the rotor to spin 'round.

One question:  how do you power the thing?  Clearly it's using reaction wheels to spin the wings around, which means you're using electricity.  It'll take a long time to work your way up through that much atmosphere, and quite a bit of electrical power, but I don't see any major electrical-generating equipment on there, or major battery storage.  Where are you getting the power from to keep it running?

On a related note:

 

Maybe he just uses an insane amount of RTGs?

[Snark]

8 minutes ago, nosirrbro said:

Maybe he just uses an insane amount of RTGs?

Nope, not gonna cut it (or at least, I wouldn't think so).  Those things have abysmal power-per-kilogram.  80 kilograms for a measly 0.75 EC per second.