ComradeGoat

Build your plane with the rear wheels as close to the wingtips and as far back as practical (within the confines of needing tone able to rotate to lift off). Unlock steering on the nose wheel only, and disable brakes on the nose wheel only. This aids stability on the ground. Land with a positive angle of attack, to slow your horizontal speed as much as possible.

The main problem with this is that your orbit round Kerbin takes so long that you will not likely line up your launch window with the burn to lower periapsis.

Sounds like a potential use case for a fuel station at Minmus, but bear in mind in making the logistics easier by not hauling fuel around kerbin's SOI, your persistent interplanetary ships are going to have to be larger because getting most places from Minmus requires more fuel than getting there from LKO, and getting back to Minmus to refuel is a bit more expensive too (not much though because the heavy lifting is mostly done by aerobraking there). Still seems like a no-brainer to me. If you want to mine fuel at Minmus, haul it to a station in LKO and use that as your interplanetary refuelling depot, then you only need the capacity in one ship: your fuel tanker, rather than all of them. It's not going to hurt much either as you can aerobrake to LKO, and you'll be returning to Minmus almost empty, so one nuke will give you decent TWR and burn not much fuel. Now what about Jool? I think for much the same reasons, you want your fuelling station at Laythe, and your mining operation at Vall (although IME Laythe aerobrakes are always a bit fraught). Must get round to giving Kethane a try sometime. It sounds like a lot of fun.

No problem, I edited it in afterwards :-)

No I'm not. See my post above. It takes more delta V to burn from Minmus to Jool than it does from LKO to Jool, even before you take into account the fuel burned to get from LKO to Minmus. Starting from both, with a fully fuelled ship, the difference is about 400-500m/s (in LKO's favour). If you count the fuel taken to get to Minmus as well, then LKO wins by about 1,500 m/s. Hardly minimal! This is counterintuitive, I grant but it is correct. You can easily check it yourself using manoeuvre nodes. And it's "she", BTW.

Most of the delta V to Jool comes *after* you reach Kerbin escape velocity. Seriously, try it: put a ship in a solar orbit, just beyond Kerbin's SOI and an identical one at LKO, both fully fuelled. Do a direct burn to Jool with both; the one starting in LKO will arrive with more fuel left. The closer to Kerbin periapsis you are, and the lower that periapsis is, the more each unit of fuel burned will raise your aphelion. You could try to use the Oberth Effect at Minmus, but it's tiny in comparison. Starting from there is sabotaging you, not helping you. Edit: I've just done it myself. Two identical ships, one in LKO (just above 100km), one in orbit around Minmus (20km, ish), Hohmann transfer to escape Kerbin's SOI and raise aphelion to Jool's orbit. From Minmus orbit: 2365 m/s From LKO: 1980 m/s Conclusion: Refuelling at Minmus for a Jool transfer is not merely wasted effort; it's actually counterproductive.

But if you fly to Jool from Minmus, you need more delta Vs to get there than if you do a burn from LKO.

Yes, increasing your eccentricity to get a low Kerbin Pe for the Oberth Effect is more than worth it. The difficulty is that Minmus' orbit is so long, you may miss your launch window while waiting for the right point to do this.

This neglects two things: aerocapture and the Oberth Effect. Duna is so small that the latter makes using it as a staging post to Jool impractical, however, despite entering orbit being free, due to aerocapture. Not really. The most efficient burn to Jool is done as close to LKO as possible, to utilise the Oberth Effect. In your scenario, not only do you lose the advantage of Oberth for the latter part of the trip, you also have to circularise your solar orbit to rendezvous with the fuelling station by burning to raise your perihelion. Once you've done that, you need to raise your aphelion to Jool without the benefit of the Oberth Effect. Doing a direct burn to Jool gets you the Oberth Effect at LKO departure all the way to your aphelion, and raising your perihelion is free because that's basically what aerocapture at Jool is doing. Frankly, you'll do far better with a fuelling station at Laythe, perhaps topped up by a Kethane mining operation on Vall. Vall is easy to land on and take off from, Laythe is easy to get to from Kerbin because you can do pretty much the entire "stopping at the other end" thing through aerocapture (once at Jool, again at Laythe). All you have to do is make sure your vessel has enough delta V to burn from LKO to Jool, but that's probably less than the delta V you'd need to burn from LKO to your fuelling station and stop when you get there. You also have the problem of where to top your fuelling station up from. In a solar orbit, you basically have to ship it from Kerbin. If it's at Laythe, you can mine it on Vall if Kethane is your thing.

I play with Kerbal Engineer Redux, Protractor, Kerbal Alarm Clock and Toolbar (as well as TAC Fuel Balancer, but that's not relevant here). If you base your game around launch windows, those three mods are essential to avoid you losing track of what you're doing to the complexity of trying to organise it.

You try sending a flat pack space station to Laythe with only one LVN from LKO when an orbit only takes a few minute. By the time you've done your orbit burns, you're probably on to the next launch window! Some of us don't do out and back missions. Some of us build deep space orbital stations.

Me too. Laythe killed every kerbal I threw at it when I was trying to do VOTL/parachute landers. I really do think spaceplanes are the only way to go with Laythe. For me, switching to planes turned an unfriendly, ominous deathtrap moon into a prime resort planet.

This valley floor is at 0 metres, and your parachutes will slow you to 20m/s... This plateau is quite a bit higher, and when your 'chutes open, it's already too late. Goodbye!

Duna. Atmosphere not quite thick enough to slow you down properly, but great for ripping craft apart when the parachutes deploy. I've landed on lots of bodies, even the mighty Tylo, but Duna still kills more of my kerbals than anywhere else. Launch windows are so infrequent that it's annoying to test new designs there too. Have a new lander design now that I hope will ale Duna safer, but it'll be ages before I can test it.

My approach to Joolian moon missions is to have a permanent base in orbit around Laythe, so once they get out there, the Kerbals get to stay in a nice large space station and take a plane down to the surface anytime they want to experience gravity. In theory I could bring them back to Kerbin, but I never seem to do so.

Quite. I try to keep nuke powered ships around, but I'm not averse to deorbiting the odd one into the oceans of Laythe.

Tylo. Demands respect. Enough said.

Seems like an awful lot of fuel, unless that's your Kerbin ascent vehicle too? Why so much RCS? Also, aerospikes have little to recommend them on airless bodies; their big win is high ISP under atmospheric pressure, but Tylo has no atmosphere. My lander uses 5 LV-48S engines and one Poodle.

You can do a decent job with the 1 kerbal lander can. Here's my (stock, except for KER) Tylo lander - returns to orbit with about 1,000m/s DV in hand:

How is it not as described? It landed, didn't it?

Second this. My save game became paralysis before KAC, as I tended to make use of launch windows as they came up, I began to owe track of my missions, especially when multiple ones needed attention within a short timespan. KAC saved my space programme! Something like it definitely needs to be in the stock game.

No autopilot mods, no egregiously unrealistic entry angles, no quicksave (but when developing aircraft, etc.. "restore to SPH/VAB" counts as "simulation"), keep heavy launches to a bare minimum (i.e. 1.5 full orange tanks is about the limit of a single payload, and a lift that heavy would be rare), try to use SSTO planes where feasible. Hitchhiker or (for shorter transfers, i.e. between Joolian moons, or, in extremes, Moho or Eve), the Mk1-2 command pod.

Forgot the postcard. Lander has one more stage for the descent, which was jettisoned before landing. Only mod used is engineer redux: manual piloting, no mechjeb.

My Tylo mission finally got there. Got my brave kerbal into the lander, detached from the mothership, and accidentally separated the main descent stage. Oops! Thankfully I'd brought 2 landers. Got in the other one, took it down to a 20k circular orbit and started to burn, with around 7000m/s in the tanks. I used about half of that getting down, and the landing was far more relaxed than I thought possible. Indeed, towards the end I had enough thrust in hand that I throttled back about 50% to avoid coming to a stop hundreds of metres above the ground, which would have been expensive. Got back to my orbiting mothership with around 1,000m/s left in the final stage of the 3 stage lander. Transferred the fuel, deorbited any remnants of the lander and burned for Laythe, to rendezvous with my station there. Landed on Tylo on the first try, no casualties. Can't quite believe it let me off so easily.

I build them in LKO, sticking the components on the end of a tug with a bunch of NERVAs, held together with clamp-o-tron seniors, stick a couple of small RCS tugs with ASAS modules at strategic points for stability, and reassemble it at the other end.