Halam

Some good ideas there to get me thinking, thank you all. I'll try a few more attempts at getting to orbit and docking as you've suggested. Failing that I'll revise my initial plan and come up with a new rover design with a more powerful ascent stage. I didn't realise Kerbals could transfer through the Klaw, that will make the solution to this much easier. Thanks again, and I'll let you know how it goes.

I have a challenging problem that I'd like some ideas with solving. I have a lander with a tourist & pilot on the north pole of Duna and I am unable to get them to all the way back to orbit to rendezvous with the "go back home" ship. (My vehicle setup is a carbon copy of Apollo configuration; Saturn V rocket stages, with separate CM & LM modules. So right now the LM (or "DM" in this case!) is sitting nicely at the pole, and the CM is waiting patiently in a polar orbit. I had previously already tested this setup on Duna, and it was fine for an equatorial landing and re-ascent to orbit but I've found out the hard way that I need much more dV to make it back to orbit from the north pole. As mentioned, the lander is based on Apollo's LM so is made up of a terrier engine descent stage (that still has fuel remaining), separator, and the ascent stage is an MEM with a poodle engine. There is a docking port on the top of the MEM. Since the tourist can't EVA, I can't land a new ship nearby to pick them up. Neither can I land a rover, drive them elsewhere, and take off from there on a new ship - again because the tourist can't EVA. So I am stuck with having to somehow physically get the existing LM/DM back to orbit with the tourist inside. One potential solution I am thinking of is to build a tall "heavy lift" rover on vertically extendable hydraulic wheels, land it near the LM/DM, park it over it, pick it up by mating a docking port on the underside of the rover with the one on the top of the MEM, and then drive it to the equator, drop it off so that it can attempt to take off to orbit from there. I have tested this solution at the space center with the same lander and an initial design for the Heavy Lift Rover and it seems to work fine in theory on KSC's runway. But considering I'd have to somehow land this monster rover on Duna, then drive it all the way to the equator seems daunting. So that's basically it. Am I overthinking this and have overlooked a very basic solution, or is there any other way to solve this one? I don't want to abandon the tourist as he is part of a much larger contract, and also the satisfaction of solving this one would be immense.