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I'm playing KSP for a while now and I once did a trip to Eve and back, learning some stuff on the way. I see a lot of people struggling with Eve return missions and I noticed that I have a few tips that would be helpful for many of those people, so I decided to write a guide about it. If you see any errors in it, feel free to ping me. Who is this guide for? Before following this tutorial, you should have already done other manned interplanetary missions (with safe return to Kerbin) and you should be able to put a few hundred tons payload to LKO in a single launch. Useful mods: You might be able to complete the mission without these mods, but I highly recommend using them since it will make stuff easier. Trajectories RCS Build Aid Kerbal Engineer Redux Where to start (and where to not start) The challenging part of the mission will be the journey from Eve's surface back to Kerbin and not the other way. You should begin by designing a vehicle that can get away from Eve's surface. Don't worry about landing on Eve yet. (We'll place parachutes, landing legs and heat shields on decouplers and eject it all after landing on Eve.) For now, just pretend the KSC is located on Eve and you want to design a rocket for a one-way trip to Kerbin (or just to Eve's orbit if you want to do an Apollo style mission). You can do test flights from Eve's surface by teleporting your vessel to Eve using HyperEdit or the cheat menu and hit "Revert Flight" afterwards. Important: Do not start dealing with how to land on Eve before you're completely sure that your vehicle can get away from Eve, otherwise you'll probably waste time designing a landing system for a ship that doesn't work. Apollo style makes lander design much easier since you'll have to carry much less mass from Eve's surface to Eve's orbit, but it is possible to do it without Apollo style (I did this myself). Vehicle design You can refer to the Community Delta-V Map for the delta-V requirements, but the delta-V readouts will not replace a test flight! The Wiki says the following about rocket engines at low altitudes on Eve: However, I remember that this was already written on the wiki before the Making History DLC was released, so it could be possible that some engines from this DLC are also well-suited, but I haven't done further research in this direction. I decided to use the Vector engine because my vehicle quickly became quite big and therefore needed a lot of trust and the Vectors are more compact than the Mammoth. Just pick the one that suits your design the most. For more efficiency you should use asparagus staging. Feel free to put the capsule under a fairing. You can later attach a command pod at the bottom (on a decoupler) and use crew transfer instead of ladders. How to land your vehicle on Eve For landing, we'll need to add a few stuff. Place it on decouplers so that you can dump it before taking off again. RCS Build Aid can display what the touchdown speed will be with the current ammount of parachutes. This may be helpful. Since your design is probably quite big, you'll want to use 10 meter heat shields. You can also clip multiple of them into each other if one isn't big enough. Large heart shields at the bottom will probably cause your lander to flip around during reentry because they act like a very big parachute and force your ship to face prograde. This will lead to your ship being destroyed by reentry heating. You can compensate this by adding even more heat shields at the top of your vessel. These won't serve as heat shields but they'll stabilize the vessel during reentry. If you still have problems, you can try if a prograde reentry works better since you have heatshields on both prograde and retrograde side. You'll have to drop the heat shields before touchdown. You may have to experiment a bit until you find a way to safely separate them. Don't forget to attach the landing legs on decouplers too. Eject them at the moment you ignite the engines for takeoff and you should be fine.

Mephisto Metalworks and Aeronautics. The Future is now. Link to Kerbalx-Hangars: https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/craft XR-Series: Go everywhere - Kerbol Exploratory Latest Version is the XR-06 Ranger Mk III SSTA with attached Javelin Eve Landerfor four Kerbals https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-06-Ranger-Mk-III-Grand-Tour-with-Javelin-Eve-Lander Older Version is the XR-02 Ranger Mk I https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-02-Ranger-XR-04-Agamemnon-SSTA-and-Eve-Lander Four different crafts in one package: Ranger is a powerful SSTA, Agamemnon is a lightweight Eve lander and ascent vehicle, Tycho is the final stage of the Eve lander and can be docked into Ranger's service bay. Brahe is a moon truck addon for Tycho. Both can fit into Ranger's Service bay. The XR project was built upon results the older X-84 Akkadian / Ishtar project: Fly to every moon and planet in the stock solar system as well as in the outer planets mod and collect science with three Kerbals. The take-off-weight of Ranger SSTA / Agamemnon Eve Lander Combo is 30 t lower than the Akkadian / Ishtar at 120t. XR-01a Tycho Space Sledge https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-01a-Tycho-Space-Sledge XR-01b Brahe Moon Truck https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-01b-Brahe-Moon-Truck XR-02 Ranger https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-02-Long-Range-Scout-Moho--Tylo--Laythe--Kerbin XR-03 Ninsianna Eve Lander and Ascent Vehicle (32t, for Beginners) https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-03-Ninsianna-Eve-Lander XR-04 Agamemnon Eve Lander and Ascent Vehicle (26t, for advanced Players) https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-02-Ranger-XR-04-Agamemnon-SSTA-and-Eve-Lander XR-01 a/b Tycho / Brahe combo XR-02 Ranger SSTA XR-03 Ninsianna Eve lander with 32t Ascent Vehicle XR-04 Agamemnon Eve Lander with 26t Ascent Vehicle XR-02 /04 Ranger SSTA with Agamemnon Eve Lander - 120t take off weight. Enough oooomph for every planet and moon. XR-08 Behemoth Multi Mission SSTA 30t to Minmus, 10t to Tylo surface and back (with ISRU...) https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-08-Behemoth XR-08 Behemoth with Space Station https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XR-08-Behemoth-with-Station Dolphin Mk V Mini SSTO https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/Dolphin-Mk-V XS-Series Extra Small to orbit: Small is the new big, thought the marketing guys. Here's to space on a budget. XS-01 Viper - upload pending- Viper is a lightweight, single use crew transfer system with a rapier and an ion stage. At 30 parts and 5.5t take off weight, it brings one Kerbal into orbit with 7.600 m/s dv left. This should suffice for most destinations in the Kerbol system. Fancy stuff like landing gears or parachutes is omitted. Just power up the engine and fly. TWR in orbit for the ion stage is 0.3, which is fairly reasonable. In order to not only bring pilots into space, it has drone core equipped. XS-02 Sparrow - upload pending - Sparrow is a light weight single stage to orbit concept with one rapier and one ion engine. At 6.3t take off weight, it brings one Kerbal to orbit regardless of profession. As the ion engine only has an TWR of 0.07 in low Kerbin orbit, getting somewhere is a game of patience. XS-03 Sparrowhawk https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XS-03-Sparrowhawk-RapierIon-SSTO-to-Minmus An improved version of the Sparrow, the XS-03 Sparrowhawk has significantly greater ranger and twice the thrust in low orbit. Now even with landing gear.The larger battery pack as well as the quad ion engines allow for sustained ion burns of app. 250 m/s. The TWR of 0.12 in LKO is fairly reasonable for ion engines. XS-04 All-Seeing Eye https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XS-04-All-Seeing-Eye The latest excrements in ore surveillance technology. Also knows your bad habbits and browser history. Comes equipped with ressource scanners, regular and relay antennas as well as repeateable science experiments. Powered by "a excrementsload of batteries and some spare ion engines", as the designers at the Kerbal Space Center put so eloquently. Comes with solar panels. Has roughly 15.000 m/s dV with ion engines, so evading it by moving to Dres or Eeloo seems kind of futile. Better use that incognito mode in your browser more often.... XS-05 Mighty Flea https://kerbalx.com/Mephisto/XS-05-Mighty-Flea-3t-Micro-SSTO 3t to orbit in a single stage. Kerbal included. No science experiments, no shenanigans. Mephisto. (To infinity and beyond.)

After my last mission to Moho, land with science and Kerbals and return (the deltaV to slowdown at Moho was insane), I decided my next stop would be Eve as that was the next launch window and is the next planet in. I probably don't have the tech for it, but I am trying to land with science and Kerbals and return. The main tech needed that I am missing is the inflatable heat shield or even the largest std one, and most of my designs are based around mitigating this. This will actually be my first atmospheric landing and lift off from playing nearly 440hrs, I am probably nuts for trying it, especially from reading up the difficulty of ascent and the thickness of atmosphere. I am trying out different parts in sandbox, so as to not have to cheat in career, or risk my precious Kerbals (I am fine sacrificing them in sandbox). In my trials I am cheating things to orbit, or whatever place I need to be to test out various parts. So far I am around 2 weeks or so of casual playing. For now, I will just add my old and current designs with a little bit on each. My current progress is, I have a lander with science that can land and take off with a success of around 25%. (Low, I know) I am currently still optimizing this part. The Poodles are just to de-orbit when cheating into Eve orbit. The heat shield arrangement is 1. to keep me stable in Eve atmosphere and 2. to protect my final stage terrier from going boom on descent. When in lower atmosphere, it does some interesting wiggling about. This like most of my screenshots is a slightly older version, but it is still mostly the same. I have an interplanetary stage with enough deltaV to get me there (and back when the lander is ditched). Though I have not tested this yet with my current version of lander. Std interplanetary type stage? This is an earlier version of both the lander and the interplanetary stage, but I don't seem to have a more recent screenshot. The 2 pods are so I can take a scientist with me to reset experiments in Eve space. I have also managed to get the full thing into Kerbin orbit. No screenshot of this, but I dare say it looks like any other std heavy lifter. It did look like it was going to cost 600k to launch the monstrosity. I am closeish to the full mission and it is looking possible, but really difficult (and expensive). I cant find many screenshots of my failures, but here is my first attempt of something that would escape Eve. I gave this up pretty quickly as it was too heavy and SRBs don't seem like they are a good idea to haul to Eve, lots of research after this failure. which lead to my current design. Extras, I met my first real Kraken last night, due to issues dumping my top heat shield I quick saved under parachute power, when I reloaded, things started accelerating randomly. I tried to stage to see if this would sort it, and parts ended up heading out of the solar system at 10milion+ m/s. Bonus pictures of my Moho crafts. I will try and keep this updated and detail my trials and tribulations to be able to achieve it in my career save. I do not want any advice yet (unless I ask for it) as I like to work things out myself and research myself (Hope I don't offend anyone here, I know you are all awesome helpful people). Once I am done, any advice or constructive criticism for a try in the future will be welcome, or even learning for future missions. Wish me luck! Edit: I totally forgot to add that I am not using mods, I didn't use them even when deltaV wasn't calculated and made a nice spreadsheet to calculate for me. I want to add the graphics mods some time, but I am happy with struggling with the various game play struggles... especially with some of the quality of life changes since I last played.

Not sure if this is the right place in Forums to pose this question (moderator - please feel free to move this!) I recently downloaded the X-51 Hyperion III from Kerbal-X. Its truly a beautiful craft and I (barely) managed to fly her into LKO under manual control. Used up quite a bit of fuel along the way mind you. And in the words of Mattingley from Apollo 13 "Sorry Guys, my burn rate was too high...I'd like to run the sim again". Seriously, though, I have oddles of questions on how best to use the X-51, especially the Eve Lander which comes pre-loaded in the cargo bay. Is there a Users Manual somewhere, or at least a set of good advice? Cheers and thank you, Jon (and Fly Safe!)

The Eve mission had been planned for months, but Jeb blew up most of the KSC's fuel tanks in a joyride test flight. However, the tiny Oscar B fuel tanks intended for probes survived. Now you must build an Eve lander that only uses Oscar B fuel tanks. Rules: A lander must land on Eve's surface and safely return a Kerbal to Kerbin. External command seats are allowed. The only fuel tanks allowed on the lander are Oscar B tanks. No srb's or monoprop tanks allowed on the lander. Oscar B fuel tanks are not required to transport the lander to Eve. See the scoring section for more info. Any engine is allowed except for srb's and monoprop engines on the lander. Yes, this means you can put a Mammoth engine under an Oscar B tank if you really want to. If you can, please attempt doing this without an ISRU. You must use at least 100% re-entry heating. No excessive part clipping. Multiple launches are allowed but please include them in your mission report. Any mods used must be listed in your mission report. Please include either a list of images (imgur album) or a video of your mission. Include the craft's mass etc. in the vab, launches, major burns, etc. I shouldn't need to say this, but no cheating/f12 for infinite fuel/hyperedit. Hyperedit is allowed for testing purposes but not in the final mission. Mods Allowed: Any informational mods (Kerbal Engineer Redux, Mechjeb, Trajectories, Nano Gagues, Transfer Window Planner, etc.) Any visual mods (Environmental Visual Enhancements, Scatterer, Planetshine, Distant Object, Various skyboxes, etc.) Certain miscellaneous mods (Chatterer, [X] Science, etc.) Mods Disallowed: Mods that add parts (except Kerbal Engineer Redux and Mechjeb) Mods that edit the physics, atmosphere, gravity, etc. Using cheat mods such as hyperedit during the mission. Be careful! Oscar B landers can have very high part counts! Scoring: You will be scored by the following levels: Level 1: Transport 1 or more Kerbals to Eve's surface and return the Kerbals to Kerbin. Oscar B tanks are only used on the lander. Non-Oscar B tanks are used in the launcher and transfer stage to get the lander to Eve. Level 2: Transport 1 or more Kerbals to Eve's surface and return the Kerbals to Kerbin. Oscar B tanks are used on the lander and on the transfer stage to get the lander to Eve. Level 3: Transport 1 or more Kerbals to Eve's surface and return the Kerbals to Kerbin. Oscar B tanks are used throughout the entire mission and no other fuel tanks are used. Level 4: Impress me! Expand on this challenge and do the seemingly impossible! Some examples: Extremely low mass/cost, unique design, or building an SSTO. (Building an Oscar B Eve SSTO is probably impossible but if you manage to do so you are amazing.) Leaderboards: Level 1: Level 2: @sevenperforce Level 3: Level 4: I would love to see your entries in the comments below!

In the title lads. I built a heavy lander (around 54t) capable of carrying a crew of 2 Kerbals. I have built it with Eve in mind (hence the aerodynamic fairing, which carries the final ascent stage module); now I know that the required Delta-V is something around 6000-7000m/s but I have tested this lander on Kerbin - with 3320m/s Delta-V it was able to circularise an orbit of 500,000km above the surface (with about 15% fuel remaining). Considering the fact I've built a 1 man rival lander with double the Delta-V, this lander performed MUCH better in Kerbin testing. So would it then be capable of an Eve entry and ascent (to an orbiter waiting above)? Pics can be seen here;