Tiaga

I've built a few ships in 1.04 with nuclear engines and I forgot to add radiators every time. Never had an overheating issue with long burn times so far. Did they add radiators and then made them pointless by reducing the heat generation? I've read a few people have problems with reaction wheels overheating but I haven't seen it.

Looks good! Did you mount the air brakes on backwards? Doesn't matter I don't think. Makes it unique anyways. If you want to make it a little more efficient I think you could put the parachutes and air brakes on octagonal struts and then put the struts on some radial decouplers. Will help with the weight and drag. Although I'm not sure if an expended decoupler still adds drag? Testing is needed. Is that a pod on the very bottom of the craft so you don't have to have any ladders? That was my biggest mistake. I didn't know you could transfer kerbals between pods so I had ladders that would explode during descent. It seems like the new aero forces everyone into the same type of design. In .90 (see the Eve Rocks Challenge) every ship was different. My first try at taking off from eve was an old style pancake ship and it did work so its not impossible, just not very efficient. I hope people post some more different styles of ships. Also I want to see someone do the Jebediah level of the Eve Rocks Challenge in 1.0...

There wasn't much fuel left in the landing section of the ship when I took off (maybe 100 D/V?). I ditched it immediately just to make it easier to get pointed in the correct direction. Also I knew I would have plenty of D/V to get into orbit. If you look at the ascent pics there is one where my rocket is pointing the wrong way because it flipped over and I still made it to orbit. And with the nosecones for liftoff at Kerbin. I really don't think drag is much of a consideration once a rocket reaches that size since the rocket was pretty much a pancake at that point, but they could've helped a little (and probably looked cooler). Definitely not a perfect rocket, but it worked

I only used chutes at all because my ship would land head first. And I only used around 500 delta V to land so its not really worth the hassle of trying to get normal parachutes from ripping your ship apart. I had nosecones for the actually launcher. Nosecones don't help for landing. I've tried aerobraking other craft and stuff starts exploding pretty quickly (ladders especially). I don't see how it could be done unless you are using a small ship. Ya, I probably didn't need the reaction wheel. Originally I wasn't going to use fins but was too difficult to not use them. The last decoupler was to ditch the tank and engine for the return trip.

I never really liked doing the orbital construction. Frame rates seem to be 10 times worse when flying next to large ships and it is a bit more work. The ship is pretty ugly except for the launcher and the pics with all of those air brakes out while landing look pretty good.

How do you do this? I didn't know you could. I did use all the stock engines if that helps. Your craft looks cool. How low an altitude can you take off with it?

Weight at kerbin is 17,732 tons. At Eve landing weight is approximately 444 tons (is less than that since alot of fuel is gone to deorbit and land). Weight immediately after lift off is 164 tons.

I agree completely. Nuclear engines were not fun pre-1.0. Now they are less fun.

So I got a contract in my career mode to plant a flag on eve. So I decided to fire up the sandbox game and start designing and testing a eve lander. Haven't seen anyone else post a return mission from eve so I thought I would post my mission to "help" others. Although I'm sure there are better way to do things. My final rocket cost was $9.6 million and the mission contract offered $652K. I'm not sure if its possible to make money on this contract? And if it is I would think you would have to land on the highest eve mountain which means a ton of reloading for all the failures. I wanted to make a craft that could at least launch from 1000m so where I landed wasn't a big deal as long as I landed in one piece. Also once I had the eve landing and interplanetary stages designed I pretty much started strapping on engines and fuel tanks to get off of kerbin. Which could have been done better and saved some money. When 1.0 was coming out I was worried that this mission would be too easy compared to .90. Boy was I wrong! Arguably it is easier to launch off of eve but the extra delta v required to land and get into eve orbit makes it overall more difficult (see lessons learned below). Lessons learned: -Drag is Huge! And it doesn't work like you would expect. For instance, I built a rocket that would get into eve orbit...Then I added ladders for my kerbal and it would no longer get into orbit. Things like struts as talked about in other threads also cause more drag than expected (IMO). -Aero braking to get into orbit like in .90 doesn't seem to be viable unless you have a very small craft. Which means packing on alot more delta v to get into orbit at eve. -Its difficult to land without your ladders exploding due to heat. Which means deorbiting with a lot of delta V to get your speed down. I used a lot of air brakes to help with this. They seem to be pretty helpful. -Drogue parachutes are helpful here. They don't rip your aircraft into pieces when trying to land and keep your craft pointing the right direction when trying to land. -In .90 i used to shoot for 1.4 TWR to get off of EVE. With the limited testing I did being around 2.0 is much better. I was seeing mach effects and re-entry effects until about 32,000m during my launch. Below is the pictures from the mission. I forgot to put a second kerbal in the 2nd capsule and I used hyperedit to get the 2nd kerbal to my spacecraft (Doh!). So now is the time to call me a cheating *. Also I used kerbal engineer and KW rocketry (maybe some B9) addons. http://imgur.com/a/0rora

I'm trying to work out the physics of collected heat, area, and speed in my brain but its not going well.

I don't understand why a smaller vessel with batteries and solar panels on the exterior will not explode during descent but a larger vessel with exterior batteries and solar panels will explode due to heat. Example: Put a small vessel and a large vessel with solar panels in orbit of eve and try to land it. The solar panels on the small vessel will survive but the larger vessel will not.

Here is a picture of the bottom of the lander if that helps. http://imgur.com/1CrO3WH There are 20 of the tall skinny tanks (with the landing gear) that arn't setup properly for asparagus staging, but they should be empty by the time you land and they all fall off at the same time. As soon as those tanks drop everything is asparagus staged. There are 4 larger tanks that drop off first (in sets of twos) that do not have any engines on the bottom. Basically those got slapped on at the end of the design when I realized I didn't have enough delta V. Then The largest engines drop off next. Next are the skipper engines to go and then the center section with the tiny red engines. Here is a picture showing the underside of the interplanetary transfer stage. http://i.imgur.com/PkODMvX.png It has one of the medium long, extra large tanks with 8 nuclear engines around the bottom of it in the very center. And then 8 smaller tanks around it with one nuclear engine on each.

I vote for Laie's sanity over having a silly badge or internet recognition. I still think this thread serves a purpose in looking at other peoples design ideas. I posted my submission because I landed the large and very heavy 3 kerbol command pod on eve and I thought it was cool. I think my submission also highlights how overpowered those little red rockmax 48-7s engines are. The flexibility and power they offer are very good. The only reason not to use them is if your trying to reduce the part count. My suggestion would be to make a very large note in the first post and say that new submissions will no longer be reviewed.

Here is my submission for Jebediah level. Not sure how to embed the images into the post so here is the link. http://imgur.com/a/Y8zQm#0