Who here has landed a usable aircraft on Laythe?

[Darren9]

Yes, I dragged one there, and it wasn't part of a return mission.

[Silverchain]

I've not done much with Laythe at all except for a few uncrewed rover drops and some very naff planes, so it's one of my new priority targets. There were some lovely looking cliffs I saw on one of (I think) Xeroignite's maps, I really want to get some Kerbal boots down there!

[Aegrim]

http://i.imgur.com/Zxy7Y10.png

This was just to look for landing sites, the return stage for my spaceplane to laythe is on its way to laythe now, but the actual spaceplane hasn't been sent yet.

[mellojoe]

I HAVE!!!

Brand new project I've been working on. I had a mini station around Jool, and I finally made a fun little 3-man SSTO. I took 1 plus 1 and got 3. Laythe road trip! My little plane can make it from Laythe, out to my Jool station, and back to Laythe. Which makes it great for juggling crews around. I have a ship that can go round trip from Kerbin to Jool to ressuply the Jool orbital station. Consequently, I can fully restock Laythe, change crews, and never have to worry about accidentally stranding anyone in the Jool system.

Pictures coming soon.

Here's a teaser:

This is taking my plane out to meet up with my lander cans and rover I now have on Laythe as well. It was a 3-ship expedition. I used the plane to go first, to scout out a good landing site. Then I dropped the two landers one-after-the-other and I ended up getting them close enough to each other, but a short distance from my landed plane. It was a simple matter of flying the plane (pictured here) to carry my Kerbals to their new home away from home.

[mellojoe]

Here's my thread and my write-up on my Laythe mission.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/50468-Oh-my-god-we-made-it-to-Laythe!

[sporkafife]

I've never taken anything with wings to any of the other atmospheric bodies. I've landed an SSTO on Minmus and the Mun but they lust landed on their engines vertically as if they were a regular lander. My next project is probably going to be to take a small probe that can glide to either Duna or Eve to explore, it will probably have an ion engine to just so it can fly for longer

I have. tencharsstuipid.

This sort of comment kind of bugs me. The way I see it, the huge advantage of the lower limit for characters is to stop 1-2 word comments that arguably add nothing to the thread.

[_Aramchek_]

I can't wait for the .22 update and the sub assembly stuff, I've been doing a lot of work on making "sci-fi-ish" low gravity planes and ships, and being able to easily strap one of the designs I've made on to a rocket and send it back out to the jool system is going to be quite fun I'm thinking.

[Zephram Kerman]

Well you won't know until you scan and find out. Failure is always an option.

This guy found plenty of the green liquid....

Hey, thanks for the plug. I'm rather proud of that plane.

Just for the record, Intrepid didn't do the actual mapping. My first shot to Laythe was a simple scanner satellite that mapped the whole globe first. In my case, it found eight deposits that sortof overlap land masses. So I built this plane to investigate all eight of those overlap sites, and to pick the best site for a colony.

Except for the kethane stuff, and MechJeb, it's all stock. Intrepid can refuel at each landing site, land almost anywhere using VTOL (including water), rover around using Brotoro's Bird Dog idea, and cruise very high and fast without airhogging. I forget the altitude and speed on Laythe, but it'll do 1600 m/s at 26km on Kerbin. Fuel range was sufficient to reach high altitude cruise twice without refuelling. (Once, we hit checked spots in a row that did not overlap, so we safely ditched in mid-ocean.)

The one in the video is an old version, from before kethane had the geodesic map. Nowadays it's a lot easier to determine if the kethane is on land or not. So Intrepid II replaced all those solar panels with a kethoelectric converter; now it is even more efficient and effective.

Edited September 24, 2013 by Zephram Kerman

[Zeroignite]

I've not done much with Laythe at all except for a few uncrewed rover drops and some very naff planes, so it's one of my new priority targets. There were some lovely looking cliffs I saw on one of (I think) Xeroignite's maps, I really want to get some Kerbal boots down there!

This map? [huge image]

Yep, Laythe has some amazing cliffs. I think the most dramatic is around -20, 180

[bsalis]

Cliffs? .. if your flying Laythe, this cliff is a must visit...

(not my gif)

[FacticiusVir]

A friend challenged me to build an SSTO that could fly to Laythe and back with no staging, refueling or otherwise; so here she is, the Archangel 2:

Safely on Laythe:

Setting off for home:

The secret? F**ktons of Xenon.

Edited September 25, 2013 by FacticiusVir
Added missing launch picture.

[Bishop149]

The secret? F**ktons of Xenon.

. . . and time!

Ion burning to Jool Space must have taken hours!

[Dooz]

I have a vtol hybrid on laythe a bit hard to land but gets the job done carrys about 8 kerbals in a star wars stylish way

Edited September 25, 2013 by Dooz

[FacticiusVir]

Honestly, I'd stick it on 4x physical warp, go get a coffee and leave it for 20-30mins to run the burns. Also, I didn't realise that solar power is reduced out by Jool, so the Ion drives were running at one-third power on the way back.

[oberlerchner123]

I have done that before but I didn't want to post the same thing that I posted in the screenshot thread.

Just a few minutes ago though I landed another aircraft on Laythe, giving my Laythe outpost personell a way home in the future.

It does have a lot more fuel than it really needs, it made it to Kerbin Orbit with 1200m/s ÃŽâ€V spare, but I just wanted to see how building a space plane around 1 orange tank goes, and I kinda liked the simple yet cool look of it.

Here it is leaving Kerbin orbit, docked to the IPDS2, and my Vall Lander + it's spare fuel tank.

Oh and yes it was quite fun docking this thing, squeezing in the plane between 4 orange fuel tanks with about half a meter on each side.

[MrPopcup]

I did land 2 spacecrafts that can circularize laythe, also 2 rovers, 3 hitchker storage containers and two of them with solar panels.