dawg

I have effectively orbited Kerbin multiple times within the atmosphere on zero fuel and landed back at the runway. I used batteries charged by solar for takeoff and solar power was sufficient to keep the batteries charged and the props running indefinitely. I simply flew to a specific altitude and adjusted the prop pitch until I was flying at the sidereal rotation velocity of Kerbin.

I always set up my games with orbital refueling stations around Minmus and Kerbin. No parts were transferred, just ore & fuel, which the lander could have picked up from Minmus itself. Are there any other unwritten rules I need to meet? Not entering another SoI? Not landing before a moon of Jool? I could probably lift it with full ore tanks off Kerbin or refuel at Minmus, though I'm not really driven to waste another 7-8 hours of my life. It was ultimately more for my entertainment going to Jool again, after such a long time ignoring it.

Yes. Is that not allowed?

The SSTO was used to ferry the Kerbals back to Kerbin after their return from Jool. While the mothership was in transit to Jool, I sent the SSTO up to wait for their return. The mothership had to dock with it, because this one doesn't have RCS (didn't need it, but instead needed 5 seats for Kerbals). The Indefinite Laythe Lander was a spaceplane based on the same design, but cut down for some weight savings; they're very closely related and based on one of my reliable SSTO designs. The lander version only carried one Kerbal and went from Low Laythe Orbit to Laythe's surface, then back to Laythe orbit (it was total overkill considering the high atmospheric density and very high altitude that air breathing works). The Indefinite SSTO ascended from Kerbin to orbit, waited there in LKO for the mission to return, then acted as a shuttle for their final leg down to Kerbin.

Mission video: I should have trusted MechJeb. Alternate landing ending, using MechJeb to land. This is the playlist of the original videos from the mission. Includes crashes.

I just realized that my latest Jool 5 mission has an SSTO that should qualify for this, though I've made a bunch of SSTOs over the years. The Indefinite SSTO launched from the runway, went to orbit, remained in orbit for years waiting for the Kerbals to return from Jool, was docked with, transferred Kerbals, deorbited, and landed at the KSC bouncing off the runway and onto the grass...

Thoroughly Kerbal landing where I failed to shut the engines off or even line up with the runway perfectly, so it went bouncing off and came to a stop out here, but they're all back in one piece. Five moons, a number of malfunctions, a huge screwup on Laythe, a few crashes, and lots of ore, but here we are. Remarkable how small ships can be these days. I tried to reduce some weight and ended up without enough power for SAS on Laythe and didn't realize those puny solar panels would barely charge the plane, so Jeb flew most of that mission manually. The remainder of The Indefinite (hitchhiker module, lander can module, mining lander, main engine tug, and adapter tug) is still in orbit with approximately 6000 liquid fuel worth of Ore and full tanks. Considered returning with just the crew quarters and lander can, but wasn't sure I could pull it off and wanted a little extra space for the Kerbals on their long journey home. Had to fly the mission over multiple days, so I'll need to clip, merge, and speed up the video. It took nearly 9 hours to fly the mission. *EDIT: OpenShot is processing the video now. Hopefully it turns out over night so I can upload tomorrow.* *EDIT2: OpenShot failed. Switched to Shotcut and it is capable of using hardware encoding. Should have the entire thing done in 2-2.5 3-3.5 hours, then it's the long slog to upload the 2GB 4.5GB-5GB (or so) of recompressed/accelerated/cleaned video to YouTube.* *EDIT3: I'm also uploading all the originals with the crashes and assorted junk at the beginning and ends. Will make a playlist for those, if anyone really wants to watch the entire thing in real time. There are 52.6GB of these raw videos.* Route: Kerbin: Ascent Minmus: Docking and transfer of fuel and ore before departing Kerbin for Jool. Kerbin: Ascent of Indefinite SSTO. Left in LKO. Jool: Orbit between Tylo and Bop. Reconfiguration for Tylo landing. Tylo: Landing and ascent. Lander can connected to small tug/adapter for remainder of trip. Jool: Docking and refuel. Reconfiguration for Bop landing. Bop: Landing, mining, refueling, ascent, docking, refuel, reland, mining, refueling, ascent, and docking. Jool: Docking. Relocate to orbit between Laythe and Vall. Reconfigure for Laythe landing. Laythe: Landing without SAS after power issue, ascent was similarly troubled due to power issue, docking, and probe flight into the atmosphere to burn up, because garbage. Originally planned to leave it in orbit for future missions. Vall: Reconfigure for landing, landing, ascent, and docking. Pol: Landing, mining, ascent, and docking. Jool: Orbit, depart for Kerbin. Kerbin: Orbit, dock with Indefinite SSTO, transfer crew, descent, landing, and photo.

I'm not sure any of my electric planes have ever done anything near that speed; on Kerbin they peak out somewhere around 350m/s if I recall correctly. Assuming that velocity is possible and maintained, you could arrive 31.9 hours later, with about 4.1 hours left before sunset. In theory, mind you.

I have done this with a small solar electric plane that could effectively orbit Kerbin within the atmosphere. It took off from the runway, turned around, then reached precisely SRV speed at a given altitude before I set MJ to hold altitude, velocity, and heading. I landed it after two orbits (roughly 12 hours) on the KSC runway because I missed my first landing window.

Hi Everyone, I did a Jool-5 all the way back in 2013 (Ziv's original thread, one of the first handful of Jeb's level, which I botched mightily by failing to take a screenshot of the recovery science), long before ISRUs, when we were allowed refuel missions, had nowhere near as powerful/large parts as we do today (the launch rockets were all complex asparagus setups, tanks were relatively tiny, etc), etc. Honestly, it's a miracle I succeeded, as Tylo almost got me (seriously, I tried that landing so many times and finally landed it by hand after numerous MechJeb and hand flight failures because that craft was super complex) and I had more landers than I really should have needed. I completed it at Jeb's level. After that, which took weeks of planning/building/testing and days of doing the mission, the draw of Jool was low and I haven't been back. Not that I've been playing much over the years - that was a real burnout mission. Over the last week or so, I've been putting together my second Jool mission with the same core targets (landing on all the moons), then thought I'd actually document it and see if I could complete another Jool-5 mission. It turns out that at least one of my modern construction patterns was forbidden (clipping the nuclear engines inside a fuel tank so I could radially mount them, as I do on all my short-range tug ships). Had to do a little reconstruction, change a few things, and fiddle a little more to get it to where I needed it. I decided I'd go for a Level 3 instead of a Jeb's this time, just because Science is so crazy now with everything you need to pack. The original plan was for the SSTO to dock in LKO before heading to Minmus for a refuel and then setting off for Jool, but I found that it was nearly impossible to balance the ship with this method of construction and I'd have needed to heavily redesign one of my fairly reliable SSTO designs more than I already did to support Laythe, so I ultimately decided to add more rockets and simply launch the whole thing all at once with these new bigger parts and fairings. I present to you the mothership that will bring our five brave Kerbals to Jool, Laythe, Vall, Tylo, Bop, and Pol: The Indefinite And to prove that this mess can get into orbit without resorting to cheats, a test launch: Let me know if you notice anything obvious that would make this ineligible based on the rules as I understand them: Removed HyperEdit in preparation for this mission, but did use it for testing while developing the landers so I'm not caught with a lander that doesn't have enough fuel to land somewhere (although that mining lander is sketchy and I have never tested it at all, not even landing it on Minmus; hopefully MechJeb is right and it'll have the TWR to lift off from Bop and Pol). This ship has no clipped parts except, possibly, the tail fin on the spaceplane, which I had to absolute position into place. Most of this ship is fuel tanks, crew quarters, and engines. I unclipped the nuclear engines from their respective Mk1 fuselage tanks, which is standard on my Kerbin region tugs that are parked on all my stations (one will be seen in the post-mission briefing). One launch. One. Launch. This is insane. It took a bunch last time. Should have everything I need here, though it will be rearranged frequently for the landings. All Kerbals are in cabins. Using ISRU since refueling is not allowed. This ship is designed to convert ore to fuel, which boosts the dV enough to get it to Jool, and it will be refueling itself while in transit to Jool. Verified that the Tylo and Laythe landers have working ladders that allow entry to the ships from the ground. Normal. CommNet is off in the new save that I'm using for this mission. This save also has one of my standard orbiting Minmus Fuel Stations at 250km stocked with all fuels and ore. There is also a lander on Minmus used for refueling that station. The target is to return the Kerbals from LKO using an SSTO shuttle. This is stock with the DLCs and MechJeb, with which I hope to do almost all maneuvers. My current plan for the actual submission is to make a video of the entire mission, I just need to find a time when I can do it in one shot, as it'll probably take ~4-5 hours...

I'm getting some super weird effects with Vernier engines. I put 4 of them on a rocket for the first making history since all my mods don't work right, but for some reason trying to turn had them rotating my craft instead of turning it. Epic crashes ensued. I tried many different designs and it just wouldn't turn properly, it'd spin to the right when turned right.

I use it for: - All the information windows. You need to know all of this and most either isn't available in the base game or is tedious to get. - Ascent when it is available (career mode). - Most maneuvers. It allows me to do other things while they're happening. I can do them without it, but it takes that much more time. - Landing, because throttle control isn't fine enough for me. - Rendezvous/Docking. It was incredibly useful when I was doing my JOOL-5 mission because I could set each of my reconfiguration "ships" to do something different simultaneously. Flying each one manually would have been very inefficient time-wise, and I don't do this for a living. Being able to use it well is almost as hard as learning to do the maneuvers manually. If you don't know what you're doing, it really can't help you, and using it wrong is very wasteful... I don't think I'd spend as much time playing if I didn't have it because it would be too much of a time/attention sink.

I can't get over 1.5km without the beam exploding. I launch at a 45 degree angle using a mainsail... If it goes much beyond that, it explodes on impact. Haven't got it into the ocean yet.

Don't feel bad. This is an extremely hard mission. It took me over two real life weeks of quite a few hours every day (I'd estimate 6+ every weekday and most of the day every weekend day) to build, test, get all the parts for this mission into orbit, and assemble my ship. Also, send extra fuel missions. That's what I did...

My total science at the end was 9609.1... Sadly, it was dark. In the foreground you see the remains of the lander and in the background the hitchhikers and the science modules. Jeb is such a lunatic.