ManEatingApe

Great! Any tips/tricks to share? An Imgur or video tutorial would be amazing Agreed - getting that intercept close to Jool will make all the difference. Here are some rough figures capturing from a Kerbin Hohmann transfer to an highly elliptical Jool orbit: PE at 250,000m = 220 m/s PE at 62,500km (Tylo) = 615 m/s PE at 110,000km (Bop) = 1,335 m/s PE in the sticks (1,000,000km) = 1,800 m/s We'll need more dV on top of this to circularize this orbit. Using Tylo's Oberth effect we can do this for about 300 m/s. Doing the same maneuver at Tylo orbit but outside its SOI costs about 900 m/s (ouch) This is a great feature. Simplifying logistics will help the mission succeed. I was hoping to get away with almost no pad assembly, perhaps only a frame to hang everything off, or the central transfer section.

I did enjoy your mission (linked here for convenience - 10th post on this page of the Caveman challenge) Just bear in mind that we need more than a arbitrary encounter for the mothership. It must end up in a orbit of our choosing (say for example either Tylo or Jool at 0° inclination) to make the rest of the mission possible. Intentionally trading excess dV for an easier life when recovering from suboptimal encounters is one approach, repeated F5/F9 is another, like most things the optimum trade-off is probably somewhere in the middle. The mission is vanilla KSP, no mods, no DLC expansions.

I feel things are starting to come together! So far we have: @IncongruousGoat Compact Tylo lander @dvader Laythe ascent/descent (great video by the way, really like the simplification enabled by water take-off!) @Muetdhiver Orbital rendezvous scripts I propose we simply re-use @IncongruousGoat's Tylo lander twice for the remaining moons. A Tylo lander needs about 4,600 m/s which for example is plenty to leave low Tylo orbit, rendevous with Vall, land, return to orbit, then eject and rendezvous with a fresh craft for Bop & Pol, then onwards to Laythe.

@Muetdhiver and @dvader I volunteer you both as navigators. Solutions using protractors, duct tape, twine or sextants leveraging the new HD star field are encouraged! Advanced equation solving is also supported as long as the input values are available in the game UI (e.g. orbit AP and PE) Would anyone like to volunteer some lander designs? With the Kerbal-on-a-ladder approach, we should be able to make a tidy Tylo lander around the 2 ton mark.

Without patched conics, even getting an intercept is an achievement and they tend to be...suboptimal Here's one of mine from a caveman to Duna mission - you can see that the inclination is way off and the craft just about grazed the edge of Duna's SOI making the capture burn very expensive. I'd recommend that folks clone the save, use the debug menu to place a test craft into orbit and give it a try, in order to get a feel for the difficulty involved. My suggestion is that we massively over-provision the mothership with dV, 2200 m/s for the Hohmann to Jool and say another 2000 m/s for the "tweaks" needed.

Difficulty setting is normal, however Science isn't strictly necessary as the entire available tech tree has already been unlocked. Although for bragging rights I'd like to at least return an EVA report from the surface of each moon, so we should consider bringing a science container on the mother ship. Agreed, more than one Kerbal sounds painful. I'm concerned about running low on EVA fuel with all the rendezvouses required, so that's the rationale behind a pod for the return journey. Completely willing to chance it with ladders all the way though! A highly elliptical orbit around Tylo has lots of advantages in terms of dV as you can eject to Laythe, Vall, Bop and Pol really cheaply for around 20 m/s. I have used this approach successfully before for a Jool 5, having stolen it from @5thHorseman Downsides are that it's very very tricky to rendezvous with elliptical Tylo orbit, so I like your idea of sending the other moon landers on ahead unmanned and rendezvousing with them at the respective moons.

I've updated the rules as discussed and created an initial base game with 10M funds and tech tree unlocked up to and including level 5. Clone it from the GitHub repository linked in the OP. We should think about the mission profile next. Looks like we want to send a Kerbal on a ladder to Jool. Open questions: 1 Kerbal or more? Keep Kerbal on a ladder for Vall, Bop and Pol landings also? Ladder or pod for the return journey? Parking orbit for the mothership? Sequence of moon landings? @IncongruousGoat Great research into the drift, extremely thorough! @Pds314 What @Muetdhiver said. The tech tree is limited to what can be unlocked using the Level 1 R&D facility, meaning up to and including the Level 5 (90 science) nodes.

Neat, nice work testing the Kerbal atmospheric re-entry system. Unlike other challenges just getting the parts to orbit can be tricky! This is a good start, the Poodle is a good fit for the mothership. I think the best plan is to design the landers first, the mission profile second then work backwards from there as these choices will affect the requirements for the mothership. Any suggestions/observations for the rules/contribution model?

@IncongruousGoat @dvader Thanks for the feedback, I'm happy to accept your suggestions. The proposed rules would then be: Vanilla KSP 1.7.3, no DLC Jool-5 challenge rules apply Caveman challenge rules apply, except: Testing using HyperEdit/debug menu is OK (but obviously no shenanigans during mission itself) Adding funds to the save using debug menu is OK (effectively sandbox mode except for Tier 1 buildings) Normal difficulty, CommNet off I'll leave this proposal stand until Monday August 12, if I don't hear any objections/suggestions by then we'll proceed with these rules. This touches on what I wanted to resolve next - contribution model. My initial suggestion is this: Create a new career mode save game, using the debug menu to unlock the tech tree up to and including level 5 then adding plenty of funds, say 10M. Create an initial savefile numbered "0" Upload the savegame to DropBox and include the link in the OP Each time a player makes a contribution, they add a new save incrementing the number by one e.g. "1.sfs", "2.sfs" and so on. (this preserves the history in the savegame in case we need to rollback) Players then send me the latest file and I update the DropBox link in the OP Players can include their craft files in the save game - this is a community effort, so I'd encourage sharing each other's designs. Craft files would be prefixed with their creator's username to allow easy sorting (e.g my craft files would be "mea - foo.craft", "mea - bar.craft") Some other thoughts: How do people feel about GitHub instead of DropBox - we could submit contributions as PRs instead We need a process to serialize access when building the mothership to avoid conflicts e.g imagine the following scenario ManEatingGoat and IncongruousApe are both working on version 5 of the save file. ManEatingGoat adds a part to the mothership and saves it as version 6 IncongruousApe adds a part to the mothership and also saves it as version 6 Now we have a tricky problem!

Absolutely, once the rules are solidified, I'll create a base game and we can take it from there. Updated the OP to make this clear. There's lots to contribute before even leaving LKO (in fact probably the bulk of the work). So plenty of opportunity to help out around Kerbin if you like!

Thanks for the reminder - rules updated! @Muetdhiver @IncongruousGoat @dvader Regarding rules, I'm suggesting: Union of Caveman and Jool-5 rules That would mean no testing craft on Laythe or Tylo using debug menu. We'd have to do our best on Kerbin and accept the risk. Raising funds by completing contracts. A little grindy but higher kudos. (We could re-visit if things get too grindy) Commnet disabled (to allow probe controlled Kerbal-on-a-ladder designs) Allow MH and BG (this would unlock potential cranes and construction equipment on Kerbin and prop designs for Laythe) but no problem if folks have objections to DLC Let me know what you think.

Done! Let's move all discussion to this thread... @The Dunatian You're more than welcome to join in

The goal of this challenge is for multiple players to collaboratively plan, build and fly a Jool-5 mission. The catch? We'll be attempting it Caveman style - meaning Tier 1 buildings, 30 part limit, 18t weight limit, primitive tech, no maneuver nodes, no patched conics, no resource transfer, no EVA and no mods (except visual & audio). Caveman challenge and Jool-5 challenge threads linked for guidance and inspiration. A lot of patience, practice and ingenuity will be required to pull off the tricky ground and orbital assembly necessary to construct a craft capable of the mission, to say nothing of actually flying the contraption to the moons of Jool and back. Anyone is welcome to make any contribution small or large to the effort. Fair warning: In order to succeed it will take considerable planning, orchestration and team work. If you're more of a lone wolf or lean towards instant gratification then this is not the challenge for you. On the other hand if you are in (or aspire to) project management or middle management then this may be right up your alley (really selling it here I know...) Download shared save game from here The shared save game is available as a public GitHub repository. To contribute fork the repo, then open a pull request. I haven't quite worked out how to serialize access during mother ship assembly, suggestions welcome. To help keep everything on track the mission will take part in 4 phases, details of each phase in the respective spoiler. [DONE] Phase 1: Mission Definition [IN PROGRESS] Phase 2: Mission Planning [TODO] Phase 3: Mothership Assembly [TODO] Phase 4: Mission Execution

Great! If there's enough interest, I'll split off the mission attempt into a separate thread (to not clutter this one)

Fellow cave dwellers, what do we think of the idea of a community caveman Jool-5? My proposal is that each participant would design a craft for a specific moon, loft it into orbit then rendezvous with a mother ship for orbital assembly. For example (just spitballing) we could break down the effort into: Laythe Lander Tylo Lander Val Lander Bop & Pol Lander Return vehicle Jool transfer vehicle Then participants would take turns flying their respective sections of the mission. There would be much lawn and orbital assembly!