My first return trip to Eve (Pic heavy)

[xendelaar]

Today I achieved a new milestone in my KSP career. I performed a return trip to Eve!

Here is my mission report.

The idea was simple... Get a dirt sample of Eve back to the KSC with a vessel that could be launched from any altitude from the surface of Eve, provided that an ore resource is available.

If figured that after I engineered a proper Eve-Lifter, everything else would be peace of cake.. but boy was I wrong. I made several (rather dumb) mistakes, which made the mission much more time consuming, frustrating but also challenging! The mssion plan was as follows:

- Build a manned Eve-lifter and get it to orbit

- Fly to Eve and land on any spot that contains ore

- Take a dirt sample and do SCIENCE

- Send a miner-refiner vessel to the same spot

- Fill the eve lifter with fresh Evean fuel

- Get to orbit with the Eve Lifter

- transfer Kerbal (and science) to transport vessel and head back to the KSC

- ...

- Profits!

First, I head into the VAB and started engineering my buns of. The Eve lifter had to:

1- have approximately 8000 delta-V (VAC) to be able to reach orbit.

2- have lots of parachutes, landing gears, reaction wheels and air brakes for landing purposes (getting from kerbin to Eve)

3- be streamlined as much as possible to reduce drag

After some tinkering and hyper-editing I finally created a proper vessel, which wasn't as aesthetically pleasing as I would have hoped.. But it worked, so who cares : I called it the Eve Ascender

With the lifter ready, I calculated my transfer window and launched my vessel

Second stage

After I reached orbit I noticed I didn't have enough fuel to get to Eve, so I send a Refueller vessel to the Eve Ascender. I really had a difficult time with docking. The darn Claw just wouldn't attach to the Eve Ascender even though both vessels were touching each other intensively (not in a dirty way). After a couple of rage quits I finally did manage to dock both ships... but the whole endeavour took me at least one evening.

The next fase was the transfer to Eve, which proceeded without any trouble. I used aerobraking to reduce my orbital velocity at Eve. I didn't take any pictures of the transfer, but here you can see a picture while I'm in the SOI of Eve

Lowering Pe to 83 km so we can aerobrake

After 40 orbits I reached an Ap of approximately 150km wich was low enough to perform a de-orbitting manoeuvre without any heat shields. Now I just had to find a ore rich landing spot. I didn't have any M700 satellites in orbit of Eve so I had to send one over. So I sent one together with my miner-converter rover.

Transferring to Eve

I made a polar encounter with the planet so I had to adjust the angle of the rover when I reached the An-node. For the M700 satellite this was perfect so I decoupled the vessels and let them go their separate ways

The Rove was the first to enter the SOI of Eve. I made it fly an equatorial just like the Eve Ascender.

Some time later, the M700 satellite entered the SOI of Eve. I made it fly an polar orbit and performed a rough scan of the surface. I forgot to take pictures of this stage...

After the M700 satellite reached a polar orbit around Eve I performed a resource scan and found a nice spot to land my Eve- Ascender and Rover. First I de-orbited the Ascender.

Landing was a piece of cake

Landing was quite easy. The Eve ascender lander on a slight slope, but I figured that shouldn't be a problem. After landing, Bob was thrilled to get out and retrieve a dirt sample.

After retrieving the sample, Bob gazed across Eves' landscape with great pleasure. With the dirt sample in his pocked, it was time to land the rover and give the Eve Ascender some new fuel!

Pinpoint landing near the Eve Ascender was a challenge, but I managed to land pretty close after some trail and error:

Not bad... not bad at all!

I lost one solar panel due to heating problems, but I had enough panels left so that was not a problem.

The Rover's landing spot was 12km from Eve Ascender landing spot. So I had to make a small joy ride to get both vehicles together.

I extended the panels and headed towards the Eve- Ascender.

The rover was rather slow so I used some "turbo's" to increase the velocity some times

Almost there!

The trip went smooth and in no time I got to the Ascender. Docking was again a pain in the behind... The landing gear of the Eve-ascender was blocking the claw. I eventually had to lower the landing gear to get connected. After that I started mining and converting Ore.

After filling up the tanks, it was time to head back into space. I released the rover, decoupled all ladders, gears and parachutes and launched into the atmosphere.

Lift off was a bit messy. The Rover got demolished by the blast... but who cares!

I used a pretty steep ascending profile to get out the soupophere a soon as possible

Starting gravity turn. I didn't have a clue if this was the best approach...

Circulizing

Putting the vessel into a 1.000km parking orbit

The launch was a succes. When I reached orbit I had enough fuel to put the vessel into a 1.000 km parking orbit. I didn't have enough delta V to get back to Kerbin. So while Eve Ascender was in orbit, I sent a return capsule from KSC to Eve. I completely forgot to bring a return tug to Eve... DOH.

Reaching orbit

I got a nice encounter with Eve and plotted a rendevous node with the Eve ascender

The return capsule rendezvoused with the Eve-Ascender. I didn't have any docking ports so Bob had to fly to the return capsule.

There she is! Let's pack are stuff and switch vessels!

Don't forget the Dirt sample

Now let's hop over to the other vessel!

Climbing aboard the capsule

Let's get back home!!

The return trip was easy peasy.

Trying to land near the KSC

The opened the parachute near the mountains of the KSC

Mission complete!

And there we have it. I finished my mission: I retrieved a dirt sample from Eve

It sure as heck wasn't the most efficient mission of all time, but I had lots of fun. I hope you've enjoyed my mission report. Sorry for the long post.

Edited October 24, 2015 by xendelaar

[Starhawk]

Good job!

Eve return is no easy feat even post 1.0. Nice mission report.

Happy landings!

[Dafni]

Nice mission!

[Sanic]

Should have brought some extra science, that's all I can say besides great job.

[xendelaar]

@Everybody: thanks for the kind words. It was an awesome experience.

@Sanic,

I wanted to do a visit-every-biome-and-collect-all-the-science- kind of mission but I figured it would take forever to get to all biomes in this kind of atmosphere, so I scratched that of my list. I have to admit I could have put more science stuff on my Rover or lifter! My next Eve mission will be packed with science parts!

Edited October 30, 2015 by xendelaar

[nsgallup]

Eve ascent is one of the harder things in this game, I still haven't tried it post 1.0, kudos to you.

[Mister Dilsby]

Eve descent and ascent are no joke--great work and thanks for posting this as an example of how it can be done.