Roger C

Ok, here's my second attempt at a mission report. Again, I'm new at this, so your patience is appreciated. I added a number of more pictures and organized them. Apparently I didn't save the changes the first time around. First, the pics: http://imgur.com/a/93pAK KSP Version 0.9 Launch Vehicle: Mass: 4,386 metric tons Parts: 769 Cost: 3,332,142 Tanker Vehicle: Mass:4,616 metric tons Parts:579 Cost: 2,963,263 Approach: I designed a lander which flew to Eve using auxiliary nuclear engines. It docked with a fuel tanker in Eve orbit, before using the auxiliary nuclear engines to do a deorbit burn. Landing was accomplished with parachutes and a last second burst from the main engines. The landing site was random. I was just happy to find somewhere dry and flat. Return to Kerbin was accomlished by docking with the tanker a second time and extracting a nuclear engine and fuel canister. Landing on Kerbin was accomplished without parachutes using the last stage conventional engines. Craft files available if needed. Roger

Hi All, I have been playing Kerbal for a while, but this is my first forum post. Please excuse any rookie mistakes. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take on Eve. After successfully returning a Kerbal yesterday, I decided to see how many other people had accomplished this. When I came across this thread, I wanted to post my results. First, some pics: http://imgur.com/a/93pAK KSP Version 0.9 Launch Vehicle: Mass: 4,386 metric tons Parts: 769 Cost: 3,332,142 Tanker Vehicle: Mass:4,616 metric tons Parts:579 Cost: 2,963,263 Approach: The first launch was the lander. I spent a lot more time optimizing the lander than the launch vehicle, so it didn't fly overly well and could probably be made smaller. However, it got the job done. If you look closely at the lander on the launch pad, it has a ring of nuclear engines around it. These are used to get the lander from LKO to LEO, where it rendevous with the tanker. It takes about half of the large fuel tanks to get there. The tanker is nothing special. It's just a large fuel can with a bunch of nuclear engines. It also carries an extra nuclear engine and fuel tank at the top, which is how the Kerbal gets home. Once in LKO, it travels to LEO under its own power, rendevous and then docks with the lander. After docking, the lander can be refueled before final descent. When undocked, the nuclear engines provide the necessary deorbiting burn without depleting the main fuel tanks. Once in Eve's atmosphere, the lander has a number of parachutes which slow descent to about 13 m/s. I went through the numbers, and figured out that landing by parachute alone simply isn't practical. At 40m or so I flared the main engine for a soft landing. The lander is touchy due to it's mass, but it does work. My landing site was random. In fact, I landed it a couple of times hoping to hit something close to sea level. No such luck. My calculations show that it should be able to achieve orbit from sea level, but my landing sites were both in the 1000m - 2000 m range. Once landed, it's a fairly straightforward hop back into orbit. From sea level, it should have just enough fuel to make a 107km orbit. From where I landed, I had between 400m/s and 500m/s of deltaV left over, and neither of my landing flares were very efficient. Final docking was done from the tanker, as the lander can doesn't have an RCS system. After the second docking with the tanker, the lander is refueled and the nuclear engine extracted for the trip home. My biggest mistake in this mission was forgetting to put parachutes on the lander can. In an effort to save mass, I didn't put a decoupling ring between the lander can and the last fuel tank. This saved the mission. Fortunately, the two small engines had enough TWR that if I undocked from the nuclear engine and fuel tank, I could actively land the can on Kerbin. It ended up being a splash down, but the lander and Kerbal survived without difficulty. I had three mods installed. The first was MecJeb, the second was KerbalEngineer, and the third was HyperEdit. I never used KE, but I was too lazy to uninstall it. HyperEdit was used in the design phase, but the actual mission was flown from start to finish. I figure HyperEdit isn't much different than a NASA computer simulation prior to an actual launch. I did use MechJeb for a number of operations, notably for calculating the Kerbin-Eve-Kerbin transfers. All parts were stock. I'm happy to provide craft files if needed. Roger