(STOCK) Eve SpnKr II - sea level Eve return vessel (video)

[sedativechunk]

Eve SpnKr II

Hello KSP community I have come out of retirement of this game to create a new ship for landing and returning from Eve! One that that has always irked me with KSP is the lack of Eve landers (most likely due to the difficulty of landing on the planet). Another thing that has always bothered me is when people have built vessels needed to be launched from 7-8,000km above sea level. Realistically, I don't see someone sending living beings (kerbals) to another planet with a ship that won't be able to return if it lands off of it's target (which is very plausible with 1.0 now).

I have built a vessel to solve all of these problems and more. using a series of aerospike engines with mainsail engines for initial take off, I have created a ship capable of landing at sea level on Eve and returning safely to orbit. After it gets off the ground, decouplers eject all of the parachutes, spare batteries, landing gears, and more safely from the vessel. The ship must be flow straight up the entire flight until 45-60km a gravity turn could be cautiously done. I also never go at full thrust as the ship wants to burn up and also causes aerodynamic issues, especially when ejecting the mainsail engines. This ship has a lot of 

YouTube Preview: https://youtu.be/FG9irV0ZJ74

Note: okay dumb video got corrupted (I'm actually REALLY furious it's screwed up!), but here is the first couple minutes of landing and launch (it's still uploading but should be done soon). It did in fact make it to orbit though successfully. I'll see if I can make another one later at lower quality so I can record the whole thing.

Link to craft file: http://www.filedropper.com/evespnkrii

Sorry if these are supposed to be uploaded somewhere else - apparently the forum isn't allowing me to upload files. I seen an issue on another thread about posting file sharing sites but I don't know where else to post it. 

 

Edits/Testing

I have not built a launch vessel yet to take this from Kerbin to Eve but plan on doing so soon (I've been using hyperedit for testing now). I also did one reentry test with heat shields attached to all the rocket engines and it made it successfully, although I think I'm going to have to move the battery packs into a storage bay as they currently burn up in re-entry. I'm also thinking of adding more parachutes. Right now it descends at 5.2k/ms and sometimes this causes the landing legs to sometimes go through the surface (I party blame Squad for not fixing that issue yet). As long as there is some space between the surface/engines usually launch doesn't have any problems. 

[selfish_meme]

Actually most people launching from 7-8000m is pre 1.0, the dV requirement dropped from like 12kms dV to about 7kms dV with the new atmosphere, still it's always awesome to see new Eve vehicles.

Make an account on imgur, its the best integrated picture sharing site, KerbalX is really good for craft sharing

Edited February 23, 2016 by selfish_meme