My screwy Eve lander works, but there are bigger problems

[Victor12]

Eve is hard to get back from, we all know that.

and now that i have a functional mother ship and lander in space, I've actually been attempting to get eve. but there are a butt load of problems. from eight-minute escape burns to just plain burning up in the atmosphere, I need someone who is experienced to get this thing and seven kerbals to eve and back. they also have to deploy the comm array around eve and its moon, land the eve science units and fix the return pods. craft files below.

 

https://kerbalx.com/Victor/EVE-MOTHER-SHIP

https://kerbalx.com/Victor/EVE2-LANDER

https://kerbalx.com/Victor/EVE-COM-NET-CORE

[Human Person]

I‘ll take a look.

 

So, I've looked at the Eve Lander. Staging was messed up, so I fixed it and let Mechjeb do it's magic to tell me if it will be able to launch from EVE:

 

First, I looked at the ascent vehicle

TWR: 

Your ascent vehicle will not be able to lift off from sea level, but you will have good chances of lifting off at 3.5 km altitude or above (this is where the SLT hits 1.1, wich is ok for EVE). BTW: what are the Ant engines for?

Delta v

Your Delta v for Ascent seems to be around 5000 m/s, which is too little for EVE. I would pack at least 7 to 8 km/s here. don't worry about the size of the rocket, there are a couple of ways to get more delta v out of yours. 

- dump any excess weight, especially in the last stage. make that as lightweight as possible. The big Monoprop tank on the top, you don't need that. You also don't need the heat shield underneath the capsule. Dump all the RCS Thrusters on there (Jeez those are a lot), you better have something in Orbit that can dock with the craft after its ascent so the actual crew capsule is just passive in this docking. make sure you can dump the shutes just before or during liftoff, the landing legs too. I f you don't want to do that, make at least sure all the chutes are on the booster that is being dropped first.

- maybe reconsider using the Mainsail. It has some ISP in the thick atmosphere but Vectors and Aerospikes (I love me some Aerospikes on my eve landers) are better suited for those conditions.

 

Aerodynamics

Any particular reason not to use nosecones on the boosters? there's literally no better application for those than on Eve ascent vehicles

 

reentry and landing

I see you chose the 2 inflatable heatshield approach. I have no experience with that design, but I know it has worked for others. my approach usually is a big heatshield on the bottom and large wing pieces (I make them into a giant grid fin) at the top.

This is - for me at least - the most tricky part and requires a lot of testing. Hyperedit is your friend.

 

The landing legs won't reach the ground. you will land on your engine bells, blowing them up and or tumbling over.

 

 

The relays look good, as does your mothership (what is the purpose of the vector stage on there though?)

 

Edited January 3, 2018 by Physics Student

[Plusck]

Hi, I'm having a look at it but I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding the whole thing.

I downloaded only the "eve lander" ship.

The trouble is, I'm not sure how much of it is a lander.
Also, I'm not entire sure of the purpose of the Ants, the first in the staging. They don't really do much, and you have Vectors open to space so I'm not sure why you don't have them available.
And you cannot land on the vectors because the landing gear doesn't reach below the end of the Vector bells. I'm assuming you're planning to lift of with them, but you'll probably destroy the Vectors on landing whatever happens. If they aren't destroyed, the landing craft will probably tip over...

And finally, all the stages are out of whack. You have far too many parachutes, but they are staged after you get rid of all your ladders etc.

Anyway, I'm trying to get it down and I'll see what I can do after reordering all the stages.

Second set of observations: you're never going to make orbit with that. The only way to make orbit from Eve is to have everything pared down to a minimum.

750 units of monoprop most definitely does NOT count as "paring things down to a minimum". With that huge tank on board, you are making it impossible before you even start trying to optimise engines and aero

[Plusck]

Final set of "design option" observations: you're making it hard on yourself trying to use the hugely heavy mk1-2 pod. I'm sure it's doable, but all other options have to be ideal for it to work.
What is not ideal is: shielded docking port: good for heat tolerance, bad for drag. Since drag is a huge issue on Eve, the shielded docking port is a terrible idea.
All those RCS thrusters: they are dead weight, and the monoprop tank is dead weight. If you think you need attitude control on the way down, I suspect it's Vernor or nothing.
Shedding weight on the surface: you have girders on decouplers which are facing upwards. On Eve, they will move up a few centimetres then crash down hard onto your ship. It's an extremely difficult problem, but you must absolutely make sure that anything ejected from the ship will fall away from the ship (even if it lands at a 10° angle). This isn't going to work

[Snark]

7 hours ago, Victor12 said:

craft files below

One suggestion:  posting a craft file is all well and good, but could you please post screen shots as well?  In a lot of ways, they're actually more useful than .craft files.  Reason:  It makes it much easier for a larger number of people to help you.  With a .craft file, nobody can do anything unless they download it, copy it into their install, and spin up KSP.  That keeps away everyone who's not at a KSP computer, and is also inconvenient enough that a lot of folks won't bother.  On the other hand, if you post a screenshot, an awful lot of your problems are easy to diagnose at a glance, and people can see it right there on their browser, so it's much more convenient for them to help, so you're likely to get a lot more advice. 

[Plusck]

Well, the eve lander is getting down to the ground, looks for sure that it'll make it but for now, I have one or two more observations:

- those girders holding the top heatshield on: you're trying to make a circle, which is impossible in KSP. Girders are connected to the core of the craft by two decouplers. They converge on the heatshield making an apparent circle. This cannot work by definition. Somewhere in there, the parts are not connected together. KSP craft are built as a tree: if branches intertwine later, they may look attached but they are not.

- the aforementioned girders and top heatshield might be possible to jettison before you open your parachutes, but the staging sequence isn't right. I managed to destroy the ship utterly trying to get rid of it;

- there is no way you'll make orbit. KER tells me the craft has 5100 m/s on it, which is reasonable from what I can see. That means you're about 2,500 m/s short of making orbit.

- sincerely, get rid of the monoprop tank. It used about 30-50 monoprop getting down from orbit and was rock steady. Lose the tank and use only what is in the Mk1-2 pod.

[Plusck]

This should show you what I mean. I moused over the bottom left girder. Everything in green is therefore connected to it:

Crucially, the top heatshield isnt.

Now, having just brought the ship down to 350 m/s over Eve, I can confirm that this isn't a problem here. Weight is pretty balanced, the stuts hold everything together so there is no problem as such. 

However, you really need to jettison all that before staging the parachutes and before hitting the ground. The problem there is you will be jettisoning one very draggy inflated heat shield and one branch of the girders, which could easily swing into your command pod, and one heavy and much less draggy bunch of girders, which might want to go faster than the rest of the ship and bounce all the way down your lander causing untold damage.

Aaaaand incidentally: that hitchhiker can is under everything else, under the heatshield, in a section of ship that has no command pod or probe core. So either the people in there are going to freeze in orbit until someone comes to rescue them, or they're gonna die die dead....

[Plusck]

34 minutes ago, Snark said:

On the other hand, if you post a screenshot, an awful lot of your problems are easy to diagnose at a glance, and people can see it right there on their browser, so it's much more convenient for them to help, so you're likely to get a lot more advice. 

Quite. The VAB screenshot I pasted is of the lander craft with no changes, so that should let people get a good idea of that part of the ship. Staging is obviously not right and I assume that the real ship is not staged in that order. A more reasonable staging sequence gives 5190m/s via KER once the bottom section under the inflatable heatshield is lost.

Engines are 2x Ant, 2x Vector on radial stacks; 1x Mainsail under the orange tank, 1x Poodle at the top of the stack.

But seriously, who needs more advice when you have mine?

Edited January 3, 2018 by Plusck

[Snark]

17 minutes ago, Plusck said:

The VAB screenshot I pasted is of the lander craft with no changes

Whoa, what?!  You mean, that thing you pictured in the VAB is the actual thing that lands on the Eve surface?

That is way too tall and skinny.  It'll topple right over when it lands on the surface, unless it lands somewhere dead level, which is almost nowhere on Eve.

And sticking that one 10m heat shield waaaaaay out in front like that, on that lightweight girder contraption... when there are all those heavy engines at the other end... is a guarantee that there's no way that thing's going to keep the heat shield pointing forward during entry.  It's going to flip around.

[Plusck]

7 hours ago, Snark said:

Whoa, what?!  You mean, that thing you pictured in the VAB is the actual thing that lands on the Eve surface?

That is way too tall and skinny.  It'll topple right over when it lands on the surface, unless it lands somewhere dead level, which is almost nowhere on Eve.

And sticking that one 10m heat shield waaaaaay out in front like that, on that lightweight girder contraption... when there are all those heavy engines at the other end... is a guarantee that there's no way that thing's going to keep the heat shield pointing forward during entry.  It's going to flip around.

There is a stack separator above the hitchhiker can there, and a heatshield above it.
I tried it last night and it was rock solid down to 350 m/s (leaving the big drive unit and hitchhiker can in orbit), so there is no problem with re-entry. I didn't manage to get the pre-parachute staging right though, so I blew it before getting it on the ground.

So, definitely fine for de-orbiting. Doesn't look fine for landing and definitely not fine for getting back up to orbit afterwards, for the reasons I and @Physics Student gave.

[Victor12]

13 hours ago, Plusck said:

Hi, I'm having a look at it but I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding the whole thing.

I downloaded only the "eve lander" ship.

The trouble is, I'm not sure how much of it is a lander.
Also, I'm not entire sure of the purpose of the Ants, the first in the staging. They don't really do much, and you have Vectors open to space so I'm not sure why you don't have them available.
And you cannot land on the vectors because the landing gear doesn't reach below the end of the Vector bells. I'm assuming you're planning to lift of with them, but you'll probably destroy the Vectors on landing whatever happens. If they aren't destroyed, the landing craft will probably tip over...

And finally, all the stages are out of whack. You have far too many parachutes, but they are staged after you get rid of all your ladders etc.

Anyway, I'm trying to get it down and I'll see what I can do after reordering all the stages.

Second set of observations: you're never going to make orbit with that. The only way to make orbit from Eve is to have everything pared down to a minimum.

750 units of monoprop most definitely does NOT count as "paring things down to a minimum". With that huge tank on board, you are making it impossible before you even start trying to optimise engines and aero

I get lazy and just add ant engines to see when the fuel runs out. I see the Monopropellant logic, will fix, but remember, this thing was designed to be launched and then docked to the mother ship. it was a pain and half of the monopropellant was gone. maybe I'll use Vernor engines instead. or I could just single launch the whole thing, I have a rocket big enough to do it. will fix parachutes.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Victor12
opps

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

@Snark, I see a lot of problems with the craft in question (at least what I can see from @Plusck's helpful screenshot; I am not on KerbalX), but being too tall and skinny is not one of them. With proper landing leg spacing, it'll be fine. However, I'm with you in thinking it'll begin flipping by the time it hits 50km; and therefore completely destroyed before it hits 40km. However, if I'm reading it right, it sounds like Plusck is saying it makes it to the surface; so maybe I'm not seeing it right.

 

 

 

For getting back to orbit though, I just don't see it. Eve has a high peak somewhere, so maybe that's his intention? To get the Mk1-2 and a 2.5m service module back to orbit, I needed a 500 ton lander.

 

 

Granted, I'm attempting to make a direct ascent back to Kerbin (and coming up about 100m/s shy), but you still need some power to lift the crazy-heavy Mk1-2.

 

 

And as a quick aside, I actually did use the shielded docking port. I know it's draggy, but I like how it looks. And I've found crappy aerodynamics can be overcome with power and sheer hardheadedness. 

[Victor12]

12 hours ago, Plusck said:

This should show you what I mean. I moused over the bottom left girder. Everything in green is therefore connected to it:

Crucially, the top heatshield isnt.

Now, having just brought the ship down to 350 m/s over Eve, I can confirm that this isn't a problem here. Weight is pretty balanced, the stuts hold everything together so there is no problem as such. 

However, you really need to jettison all that before staging the parachutes and before hitting the ground. The problem there is you will be jettisoning one very draggy inflated heat shield and one branch of the girders, which could easily swing into your command pod, and one heavy and much less draggy bunch of girders, which might want to go faster than the rest of the ship and bounce all the way down your lander causing untold damage.

Aaaaand incidentally: that hitchhiker can is under everything else, under the heatshield, in a section of ship that has no command pod or probe core. So either the people in there are going to freeze in orbit until someone comes to rescue them, or they're gonna die die dead....

The hitchhiker is part of the stage that was supposed to stay in orbit, along with the nerve engines, only the stuff from the bottom heat shield up is supposed to reach eve. Anyway, it does not suppose to be there, the mother ship is supposed to drag the lander to eve.

14 hours ago, Physics Student said:

I‘ll take a look.

 

So, I've looked at the Eve Lander. Staging was messed up, so I fixed it and let Mechjeb do it's magic to tell me if it will be able to launch from EVE:

 

First, I looked at the ascent vehicle

TWR: 

Your ascent vehicle will not be able to lift off from sea level, but you will have good chances of lifting off at 3.5 km altitude or above (this is where the SLT hits 1.1, wich is ok for EVE). BTW: what are the Ant engines for?

Delta v

Your Delta v for Ascent seems to be around 5000 m/s, which is too little for EVE. I would pack at least 7 to 8 km/s here. don't worry about the size of the rocket, there are a couple of ways to get more delta v out of yours. 

- dump any excess weight, especially in the last stage. make that as lightweight as possible. The big Monoprop tank on the top, you don't need that. You also don't need the heat shield underneath the capsule. Dump all the RCS Thrusters on there (Jeez those are a lot), you better have something in Orbit that can dock with the craft after its ascent so the actual crew capsule is just passive in this docking. make sure you can dump the shutes just before or during liftoff, the landing legs too. I f you don't want to do that, make at least sure all the chutes are on the booster that is being dropped first.

- maybe reconsider using the Mainsail. It has some ISP in the thick atmosphere but Vectors and Aerospikes (I love me some Aerospikes on my eve landers) are better suited for those conditions.

 

Aerodynamics

Any particular reason not to use nosecones on the boosters? there's literally no better application for those than on Eve ascent vehicles

 

reentry and landing

I see you chose the 2 inflatable heatshield approach. I have no experience with that design, but I know it has worked for others. my approach usually is a big heatshield on the bottom and large wing pieces (I make them into a giant grid fin) at the top.

This is - for me at least - the most tricky part and requires a lot of testing. Hyperedit is your friend.

 

The landing legs won't reach the ground. you will land on your engine bells, blowing them up and or tumbling over.

 

 

The relays look good, as does your mothership (what is the purpose of the vector stage on there though?)

 

8

The nose cones kept blowing up on the way down, so I ditched them. the vectors on the mothership were glued there so the thing could actually make the mun escape maneuver since the 700-meter burn took eight whole minutes with lander attached. I tried the wing thing too but they kept blowing up like the nose cones, since i,m reentering at 3800 m/s (simulations with hyper edit,), and if i must, i could do a water landing.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Victor12
Incorrect

[Victor12]

To all those saying the lander is to skinny here is what it is supposed to look like. without  the docking ports and menouvering and blah blah blah.

https://kerbalx.com/Victor/EVE3-LANDER

[Victor12]

13 hours ago, Snark said:

One suggestion:  posting a craft file is all well and good, but could you please post screen shots as well?  In a lot of ways, they're actually more useful than .craft files.  Reason:  It makes it much easier for a larger number of people to help you.  With a .craft file, nobody can do anything unless they download it, copy it into their install, and spin up KSP.  That keeps away everyone who's not at a KSP computer, and is also inconvenient enough that a lot of folks won't bother.  On the other hand, if you post a screenshot, an awful lot of your problems are easy to diagnose at a glance, and people can see it right there on their browser, so it's much more convenient for them to help, so you're likely to get a lot more advice. 

It won't let me, All my screenshots are JPG on a hard drive and I can't just paste them on.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Victor12

[Plusck]

1 hour ago, Victor12 said:

The hitchhiker is part of the stage that was supposed to stay in orbit, along with the nerve engines, only the stuff from the bottom heat shield up is supposed to reach eve. Anyway, it does not suppose to be there, the mother ship is supposed to drag the lander to eve.

The nose cones kept blowing up on the way down, so I ditched them. the vectors on the mothership were glued there so the thing could actually make the mun escape maneuver since the 700-meter burn took eight whole minutes with lander attached. I tried the wing thing too but they kept blowing up like the nose cones, since i,m reentering at 3800 m/s (simulations with hyper edit,), and if i must, i could do a water landing.

Yes, I guessed as much, so I ditched the hitchhiker can and drive in orbit.

I took it down from a 100km orbit. First brought Pe down to 80km using the Ants, then switched on RCS and retrograde hold and nothing ever looked like it was getting too hot. Max surface velocity was about 3150 m/s I think.

The trouble is that the things that you're doing to make life easier (big monoprop tank, no nosecones, Ants on the bottom of 1.25m stacks) are all going to destroy any chance of getting back off the surface again. Even the fact that you're coming in at 3800 m/s is going to penalise you since you're coming in hot with a big lander, which means more need for struts and control authority and more chances for things to break.

Eve's gravity is a nightmare. Every second you spend going slowly upwards will cost a huge amount of fuel, but you can't go fast because that drag on both ends of the 1.25m stacks will cost you even more fuel. Any excess weight will further penalise you.

I recently made it from very near sea level with something like 7600 m/s (vacuum) dv, lifting off with pairs of Vectors and Aerospikes. It's a very typical solution if you do a search. However, the Mainsail has lower ISP than either of them in Eve's lower atmosphere, so beware.

42 minutes ago, Victor12 said:

Sure but how, i'm playing on a laptop.

It's easy - F1 for screenshot, then just go to imgur and upload it there, then right-click to "view image" and copy the address (don't copy the automatically generated link, it doesn't work to insert the actual image in you post) and paste it directly into the textbox here.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Plusck

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Victor12 said:

Sure but how, i'm playing on a laptop.

Doesn't matter what hardware you're playing on, it works the same way. 

Here's how to post a screenshot:

Spoiler

1. Take a screenshot in-game.  (On Windows, the default key to do this is F1.  Not sure what it is on other operating systems.)  The screenshot will be saved as a .png file in the "Screenshots" folder of your KSP install.
2. Post your screenshot to some third-party image-sharing site.
   • Any site will do, though imgur.com tends to be the most popular since it's so easy to use and doesn't require you to create an account.
   • If you're using imgur:  Click the green "New post" button up top, then when it gives you the "drop image here" screen, drag your screenshot from the Screenshots folder and drop it in the box.  Imgur will then take a moment while it uploads, and then gives you a page that has your image on it.
3. Once your screenshot is posted there, right click on the image itself and choose "copy image location".  (Important, you want the URL of the image itself, not the URL of the page.)
4. In your post here in the KSP forum, paste the URL that you just copied.
5. Presto!  It will get automagically converted into an inline image.

 

6 hours ago, Plusck said:

There is a stack separator above the hitchhiker can there, and a heatshield above it.
I tried it last night and it was rock solid down to 350 m/s (leaving the big drive unit and hitchhiker can in orbit)

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.    Was kinda hard to see in the screenshot.

Yah, having a heat shield on both ends is handy, and guarantees stability... because then, the ship will either be stable or stable , and whichever one it chooses will be fine because there's a heat shield on each end.

2 hours ago, Victor12 said:

To all those saying the lander is to skinny here is what it is supposed to look like. without  the docking ports and menouvering and blah blah blah.

https://kerbalx.com/Victor/EVE3-LANDER

Sorry, that doesn't actually help, because it's another .craft link and not a screenshot so no one can even look at it unless they're in front of a KSP computer.  However, I can look at the screenshot that @Plusck helpfully posted, and now I see where you've got the landing legs, so I have a pretty good idea of what the actual lander looks like.

And yeah, it looks riskily tall and skinny unless you happen to get lucky and land somewhere that's practically dead level (which is a rarity on Eve, which tends to be somewhat bumpy everywhere).  Not saying it's impossible (@Cpt Kerbalkrunch gives a good example) ... just, be prepared that you could land on a slight slope and then hilarity will ensue.

2 hours ago, Victor12 said:

The nose cones kept blowing up on the way down, so I ditched them

Okay, but that means you won't be going back up again.  The atmosphere of Eve is an absolute killer on ascent-- designing a lander that has enough dV to get back to orbit, while having enough TWR to handle the initial vertical climb, is an absolute bear, and it is vitally important to be streamlined.  You must have nosecones on those things.  If they were blowing up on descent, then you need to figure out how to arrange your heat shielding to deal with that.

Along with the others, I'd strongly suggest ditching the Mk1-2 pod.  It's ridiculously overweight.  You can carry three kerbals for less than half the mass if you stick a Mk1 pod on top of a Mk1 crew cabin.  Cutting the final payload-to-orbit stage in half will give you twice the oomph-- you can either cut your overall lander mass in half, or get a bunch more dV out of it (especially on the final stage).  From looking at your design, I suspect you'll need the latter.

Assuming you make it back to orbit, what's your plan for getting back to Kerbin?  It looks to me like you've got a heat shield under your command pod; is it your plan that the same crew parts that ascend from the surface of Eve will go all the way back home to Kerbin and reenter?  If so, how will it do that?

Reason I ask:  If your idea is that it will fly itself home, I'd suggest seriously rethinking that idea.  Doing that means that you have to pack enough dV on that last stage-- and by "enough dV", I mean a lot, like over 1300 m/s-- to do it.  Which means you're schlepping all that heavy return-to-Kerbin fuel down to the surface of Eve and back, which is a huge amount of dead weight and seriously cuts into your dV budget.  My suggestion, which would make your life a whole lot easier:  don't try to do that.  Leave a Kerbin-return vehicle parked in Eve orbit.  Make it so that your Eve lander has one mission and one mission only, and that's to get to low orbit, so that it burns its last ounce of fuel doing that and ends up empty.  Then you just transfer the kerbals (and science) to the Kerbin-return vehicle you left in orbit, and send that home.

Doing that will give you a whole lot of win.  Biggest advantage is not sending the dead weight of that fuel down to Eve surface and back, but there are other bonuses too.  You don't need any heat shield on that last stage, since it will never be reentering on Kerbin.  And you don't need a decoupler for the last stage; more mass savings.  And so on and so forth.

And back on the subject of getting your lander off the surface and up to orbit:  really, seriously, obsessively don't lift anything off the surface that you don't absolutely have to.  Parachutes?  Only need 'em going down, not up-- put them on radial decouplers, so you can jettison them once you've landed.  Saves the mass (and drag) when you're going back up.  RCS thrusters?  Monopropellant tanks?  Get rid of them all, you don't need them.  Have the pointiest nosecone you can get on every single thing that's going to be ascending off the surface; aerodynamics is king.  Fuel lines for asparagus staging?  Additional mass and drag, don't need 'em-- get rid of them, and use fuel-flow priority and crossfeed-enabled decouplers so that you can get the exact same asparagus staging effect without needing any fuel ducts.  And so forth.

TL;DR:  whatever lifts off the surface of Eve should consist of engines, fuel tanks, crew pods, and aerodynamic hardware, and the absolute bare minimum of anything else.  If you see anything on it that's not one of those things, ask yourself:  "Do I really need to lift that off the surface?  Is it really impossible to either do without it or leave it behind?"  And only keep it if the answer is is an unambiguous "yes, absolutely, no way around it."

[Foxster]

22 hours ago, Victor12 said:

"...seven kerbals to eve and back..."

There's your problem. 

Eve is the end-game place to return from and a step-change from just about anywhere else. You have to think minimalistic, light, skinny and streamlined. It's a non-trivial task returning a single crewman, never mind seven. 

I suggest re-thinking your plans so that you can do whatever you plan with a smaller number of crew or else set up a permanent colony. 

[Victor12]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

Doesn't matter what hardware you're playing on, it works the same way. 

Here's how to post a screenshot:

  Hide contents

1. Take a screenshot in-game.  (On Windows, the default key to do this is F1.  Not sure what it is on other operating systems.)  The screenshot will be saved as a .png file in the "Screenshots" folder of your KSP install.
2. Post your screenshot to some third-party image-sharing site.
   • Any site will do, though imgur.com tends to be the most popular since it's so easy to use and doesn't require you to create an account.
   • If you're using imgur:  Click the green "New post" button up top, then when it gives you the "drop image here" screen, drag your screenshot from the Screenshots folder and drop it in the box.  Imgur will then take a moment while it uploads, and then gives you a page that has your image on it.
3. Once your screenshot is posted there, right click on the image itself and choose "copy image location".  (Important, you want the URL of the image itself, not the URL of the page.)
4. In your post here in the KSP forum, paste the URL that you just copied.
5. Presto!  It will get automagically converted into an inline image.

 

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.    Was kinda hard to see in the screenshot.

Yah, having a heat shield on both ends is handy, and guarantees stability... because then, the ship will either be stable or stable , and whichever one it chooses will be fine because there's a heat shield on each end.

Sorry, that doesn't actually help, because it's another .craft link and not a screenshot so no one can even look at it unless they're in front of a KSP computer.  However, I can look at the screenshot that @Plusck helpfully posted, and now I see where you've got the landing legs, so I have a pretty good idea of what the actual lander looks like.

And yeah, it looks riskily tall and skinny unless you happen to get lucky and land somewhere that's practically dead level (which is a rarity on Eve, which tends to be somewhat bumpy everywhere).  Not saying it's impossible (@Cpt Kerbalkrunch gives a good example) ... just, be prepared that you could land on a slight slope and then hilarity will ensue.

Okay, but that means you won't be going back up again.  The atmosphere of Eve is an absolute killer on ascent-- designing a lander that has enough dV to get back to orbit, while having enough TWR to handle the initial vertical climb, is an absolute bear, and it is vitally important to be streamlined.  You must have nosecones on those things.  If they were blowing up on descent, then you need to figure out how to arrange your heat shielding to deal with that.

Along with the others, I'd strongly suggest ditching the Mk1-2 pod.  It's ridiculously overweight.  You can carry three kerbals for less than half the mass if you stick a Mk1 pod on top of a Mk1 crew cabin.  Cutting the final payload-to-orbit stage in half will give you twice the oomph-- you can either cut your overall lander mass in half, or get a bunch more dV out of it (especially on the final stage).  From looking at your design, I suspect you'll need the latter.

Assuming you make it back to orbit, what's your plan for getting back to Kerbin?  It looks to me like you've got a heat shield under your command pod; is it your plan that the same crew parts that ascend from the surface of Eve will go all the way back home to Kerbin and reenter?  If so, how will it do that?

Reason I ask:  If your idea is that it will fly itself home, I'd suggest seriously rethinking that idea.  Doing that means that you have to pack enough dV on that last stage-- and by "enough dV", I mean a lot, like over 1300 m/s-- to do it.  Which means you're schlepping all that heavy return-to-Kerbin fuel down to the surface of Eve and back, which is a huge amount of dead weight and seriously cuts into your dV budget.  My suggestion, which would make your life a whole lot easier:  don't try to do that.  Leave a Kerbin-return vehicle parked in Eve orbit.  Make it so that your Eve lander has one mission and one mission only, and that's to get to low orbit, so that it burns its last ounce of fuel doing that and ends up empty.  Then you just transfer the kerbals (and science) to the Kerbin-return vehicle you left in orbit, and send that home.

Doing that will give you a whole lot of win.  Biggest advantage is not sending the dead weight of that fuel down to Eve surface and back, but there are other bonuses too.  You don't need any heat shield on that last stage, since it will never be reentering on Kerbin.  And you don't need a decoupler for the last stage; more mass savings.  And so on and so forth.

And back on the subject of getting your lander off the surface and up to orbit:  really, seriously, obsessively don't lift anything off the surface that you don't absolutely have to.  Parachutes?  Only need 'em going down, not up-- put them on radial decouplers, so you can jettison them once you've landed.  Saves the mass (and drag) when you're going back up.  RCS thrusters?  Monopropellant tanks?  Get rid of them all, you don't need them.  Have the pointiest nosecone you can get on every single thing that's going to be ascending off the surface; aerodynamics is king.  Fuel lines for asparagus staging?  Additional mass and drag, don't need 'em-- get rid of them, and use fuel-flow priority and crossfeed-enabled decouplers so that you can get the exact same asparagus staging effect without needing any fuel ducts.  And so forth.

TL;DR:  whatever lifts off the surface of Eve should consist of engines, fuel tanks, crew pods, and aerodynamic hardware, and the absolute bare minimum of anything else.  If you see anything on it that's not one of those things, ask yourself:  "Do I really need to lift that off the surface?  Is it really impossible to either do without it or leave it behind?"  And only keep it if the answer is is an unambiguous "yes, absolutely, no way around it."

I actually do have big, huge mothership to get my kerbals back to kerbin, it was based on the Hermes from the movie the Martian. cost doesn't matter since I am in sandbox mode. and find nose cones that won't blow up or add a sky crane to slow it down, got it.

[Victor12]

All the screenshots. It is the lander, followed by the entire ship assembled and then the mother ship.

 

Boy, this thing is a hot mess.

 

and yes, I have a rocket big enough to launch this thing.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Victor12
Mistake

[Snark]

23 minutes ago, Victor12 said:

find nose cones that won't blow up

It's not "find nose cones that don't blow up"... rather, it's "make sure your nose cones are behind the heat shield so they don't get hot."

Out of curiosity, when you say "nose cone", which KSP part do you mean, exactly?

By the way:  If you're having heating/explosion problems during Eve atmospheric entry, are you aware of KSP's thermal overlay?  It can be handy in diagnosing problems.  Just hit F11 to toggle it on/off.

When it's on, the "cool" parts on your ship will be colored red, with the color shading into orange, yellow, then white as they get hotter.  Ideally, what you should observe as you go flaming through the atmosphere is that the heat shield in front should be bright yellow-white, and the parts immediately right next to it might get into the orange, but everything else should be a cool red.  If you're seeing bits of the ship that are lighting up to hotter temperatures, that can show you where stuff is "peeking" out from behind the heat shield and getting fried, which in turn can help you to adjust the positioning of parts and/or heat shield to get them safely tucked in the shield's "shadow".

[Victor12]

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

It's not "find nose cones that don't blow up"... rather, it's "make sure your nose cones are behind the heat shield so they don't get hot."

Out of curiosity, when you say "nose cone", which KSP part do you mean, exactly?

By the way:  If you're having heating/explosion problems during Eve atmospheric entry, are you aware of KSP's thermal overlay?  It can be handy in diagnosing problems.  Just hit F11 to toggle it on/off.

When it's on, the "cool" parts on your ship will be colored red, with the color shading into orange, yellow, then white as they get hotter.  Ideally, what you should observe as you go flaming through the atmosphere is that the heat shield in front should be bright yellow-white, and the parts immediately right next to it might get into the orange, but everything else should be a cool red.  If you're seeing bits of the ship that are lighting up to hotter temperatures, that can show you where stuff is "peeking" out from behind the heat shield and getting fried, which in turn can help you to adjust the positioning of parts and/or heat shield to get them safely tucked in the shield's "shadow".

I should explain, back in the "testing stage" I was trying to instead create a kind of umbrella on the bottom of the lander using seven 10 meter heat shields. this tended to lure in the Kraken a lot and usually ended up getting the heat shields jettisoned "early". now, the heat shield was glitchy but they did there job, once they got "detached" most of the craft could slow down enough using the "tumble around like crazy" method to deploy the drogue chutes. the thing always burned up though were the nose cones though. so I ditched them pretty early on. later I refined the reentry system and forgot to put the nose cones back on, just tested it, they should survive.

[Snark]

23 minutes ago, Victor12 said:

I should explain, back in the "testing stage" I was trying to instead create a kind of umbrella on the bottom of the lander using seven 10 meter heat shields. this tended to lure in the Kraken a lot and usually ended up getting the heat shields jettisoned "early". now, the heat shield was glitchy but they did there job, once they got "detached" most of the craft could slow down enough using the "tumble around like crazy" method to deploy the drogue chutes. the thing always burned up though were the nose cones though. so I ditched them pretty early on. later I refined the reentry system and forgot to put the nose cones back on, just tested it, they should survive.

Ah, okay, that makes sense.

By the way, just FYI:  there is zero need for drogue chutes on Eve, ever.  The atmosphere's so tall and so dense that there's basically zero chance that any ship will ever faceplant before slowing to a safe speed for standard chutes.  So whatever your design is, you can almost certainly just remove any drogue chutes you have with no ill effects.

Another thing to bear in mind, as you evaluate design options:  The 10m heat shields can be really helpful even when they're not actually shielding anything, i.e. if they're trailing along behind the ship, or off to the side, or something.  That's because they're basically a big "parachute" and have lots of drag for slowing down the ship safely.  So when you're considering design options, don't assume they have to be in front.  Having one in front to hide your ship from the airflow is good, but adding additional ones on the side can be useful, too.

A related anecdote:  I've even had successful ship designs (elsewhere than Eve) whose only heat shield was  a 10m shield on the back of the ship.  The actual ship itself had nothing shielding it from the incoming airflow.  But the -facing shield helped it by acting as a "parachute" that slowed the ship down quite a bit when it was still in the upper atmosphere, so that by the time it got down into the charbroil zone, it had slowed enough that it could survive without shields.

[Victor12]

Any other problems now that I have the screen shots?

[Cpt Kerbalkrunch]

4 hours ago, Victor12 said:

Any other problems now that I have the screen shots?

@Victor12, I don't like to give repetitive advice, but I would advise the same for you as I did for another player on this subforum. First off, I'm not advocating completing scrapping your mission and starting from scratch, but I think you might end up doing that yourself. Eve really needs to be done backwards. The ascent vehicle comes first. If you want to lift 7 Kerbals, that's fine, you can do so. Just design your ascent vehicle, Alt-F12 it to Eve orbit, turn on ignore max temperature, and get it down to the surface. Now see if it can make orbit. It most likely won't. Go back to the VAB and make some tweaks. Then try it again. And again. And again until you can make orbit. Now add your shields, turn heating back on, and see if it can reach the surface. It most likely won't. Go back to the VAB and make some tweaks. Then try it again. And again. And again until you can reach the surface. Congratulations. The hard part is over. Now build a transfer stage to get it to Eve from LKO. Then build a launch vehicle that can get the whole thing off of Kerbin and into orbit in the first place. This is the way I go about Eve missions. All the trial and error will teach you an awful lot about the Purple Widow Maker. Hope all goes well.