Foxster

This thread has reminded me of the flexibility in playing KSP... If it's your thing then you can put effort into finding a clever maneuver to save dV. Or you can engineer your craft to give you enough dV that a relatively brute force transfer will work. Depends where your interest and skill lies. Both will get the job done.

Do it if you fancy a challenge but otherwise it's a bit of waste of time. The dV saved could likely be made up with optimising your craft a little. If you are struggling to find the dV you need then say something about the mission or post piccies.

Fins at the rear are preferable to useless ballast mass at the front for a couple of reasons... Fins are lighter, so you are carrying less deadweight to orbit and wasting dV. Some fins are steerable, which helps with getting a good gravity turn. There are downsides though: Fins add mass and, particularly, more drag. So if you design the rocket to minimise or avoid them then it can be more efficient but perhaps not enough to matter much unless the craft is large. Then a combination of keeping mass high with fuel priority, using engines with good gimballing, and some fins will probably be efficient.

You only need enough life support to get to orbit. A mothership can have a cache for a return journey.

Not necessarily on Eve. That might be true on an airless or thin atmosphere body but on Eve the increased drag of the engines+fuel and coupling parts means you won't get the hoped-for payload doubling.

The thing about Eve compared to Kerbin is that you have to take the thickness and draginess of the atmosphere much more into account. It is possible to build a craft that will put a Kerbal in a mk1 capsule into orbit from sea level that weighs about 23t and with only ~5700 dV. That craft must be very carefully designed and flown though. A similar but non-optimal craft can weigh three times as much and take 8000+ dV to get to orbit. The "secret" is to make your Eve craft low drag. Make it thin and don't have anything not absolutely essential on board and certainly nothing that adds any drag; with one important thing being to drop anything not needed to make orbit before lifting off e.g. chutes, air-brakes, solar panels, science experiments, landing gear, etc. So, there is no simple answer to your question. It depends on your launch altitude, the draginess of your craft and the efficiency of your engine choices.

That's not what you said though. You said the fix to a noodle rockets was to use tons of struts. You might get away with that on Kerbin but not on Eve.

We don't all want to or have the the ability to play KSP like Scott Manley. Some of us just pick the bits of the game that suit us. If rendezvousing is a pain in the butt that we can't or don't want to master then that's our choice.

We must be building very different craft and perhaps even on a different planet. What could you possibly want to get to orbit on Eve that requires a Mammoth?

Install MechJeb and either let it show you how to do a rendezvous or just let it do it for you.

Not a good idea if the plan is to fly the craft to orbit again. Struts are very draggy on Eve.

You have a few common Eve craft design problems going on there. The answer to a failing Eve craft is almost never to add stuff - it's about taking stuff away. That and reducing drag - that's more important than messing with almost anything else. You can greatly reduce the accomodation mass by using a mk1 capsule and a mk1 crew cabin instead of the mk1-3. Get rid of the RCS completely - total waste of payload. Dump all the 'chutes, airbrakes and anything else to do with landing before leaving Eve. You seem to have a probe core in there half way up. What's that for? Get rid of the struts (very draggy and heavy) and use auto-struts. Go mk1 all the way to reduce drag. What's in the service bay? Dump the solar panels and anything else bolted to the outside of the craft. TT-70 Radial Decouplers are very draggy. Use hardpoints instead. Make sure the stacks are pointy. Vector engines are the best lower stage engines on Eve. A Terrier for the upper stage is good. What are those black and white striped things below the RCS tank? Once the mass (and drag) are reduced a lot you won't need the RCS and additional reaction wheels but you will need some kind of fins at the bottom. By having a heatshield in there I'm guessing you plan to bring the lander back to Kerbin. If so, don't. Do it Apollo style. Just get your three crew down to Eve and back to Eve orbit, nothing else at all. Have the mothership do the rendezvous.

I disagree. The Vector is a superior engine for Eve. As well as its better performance characteristics you have to understand that Eve craft are about drag. The Vector being mk1-sized means it has low drag and so does the tanks it's attached to. The Eve 3000 Challenge is about minimum cost with a large payload, which is where the TwinBoar might win but that is special case that doesn't necessarily apply for most Eve craft. Unless of course you are only designing Eve 3000 craft?

Let's be a tad more honest here... The MH engines were made OP to sell the expansion. Now no one is buying KSP for the expansion, they have been made more realistic.

A crewed Eve landing and return is considered an end-game challenge by many. It's still my favorite. The other biggy is to visit all of Jool's moons with one mission. Establishing a re-fuel facility at Eeloo is also kinda fun. Personally I'd not want to tackle the more challenging missions without MechJeb just so that I can concentrate on the craft design and mission planning without having to worry about the tedium of the burns.

Pretty much. Except for "...never use a size larger than default..." should be "...never use a size other than default (if it matches the tank) and the smallest...". This can be important where you have a large engine like the Mastodon and both the mid (which is a visible size match for 1.5 tanks) and large (the default) cause a lot of drag when attached to 1.5 tanks. So, use engines as you did before engine variants were introduced and match the default variant to the tank size. If you want to use another variant and drag could be an issue then only use the smallest variant and this can lead to the lowest overall drag for a craft.

It can make quite a difference, costing hundreds of dV by orbit depending on how many engines your craft has. On Eve it can easily make the difference whether you make orbit or not.

You may think that matching a rocket engine variant base size to the attached tank size will lead to the lowest drag. Wrong. There is a small drop in the drag of the tank (~2) by correctly matching the engine size to the tank but this is not the case for the engine's drag. Matching the engine base size to the tank size can lead to massively more drag for the craft. In fact, when an engine has variants it is far and away best to use the smallest variant in all cases e.g. a Mastodon engine can have the following drag at 5km altitude on a simple rocket: Small variant: 9 Mid variant (matches tank size): 336 Large variant: 793 So, using anything other than the smallest engine variant can lead to huge drag losses for a craft. The exception being if you use the default engine variant size and match that to the tank it is attached to, in which case you get something like the drag of the smallest variant.

You aren't warping are you?

Why do you feel you have to stop yourself? My personal aesthetics are for function over appearance i.e. it has to work efficiently as the first priority. However, that doesn't mean my craft are a random pile of parts. Once I have the function, I then spend probably even more time arranging those parts so that it is pleasing to my eye but I don't do things that reduce the efficiency of the craft other than tiny amounts. I also won't clip parts inside others where this would not be possible IRL, so no tanks within tanks and such. But that's just my preferences. You might be quite happy with an escalating part count and as long as the craft does what you want it to then what's wrong with that?

Just for giggles, here's a two-man craft so you can take a pilot and a scientist: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0elqb76bvnksh1k/Mun 2.craft?dl=0

True. Gets the job done though and it's solid with a good dV margin

Here's a craft that you can build with your tech that has a good dV safety margin (~1000dV) built in: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lf24nc56wikbo5e/Mun 1.craft?dl=0 I'd get the first level electrical next so that you have solar panels and then get the rest of the experiments then the nuke engines. By that point you can go anywhere.

Could you post a picture of your tech tree?

Couple of thoughts... You don't have enough dV there. I can see just two stages plus the SRBs. Think of adding another. You don't need a lot of dV to get back from the Mun so make that a fairly small lander. Dump the experiments before leaving the Mun to save mass. Don't bother with making orbit at Kerbin on the way back, go straight for re-entry. It'll work if all you re-enter is the capsule. What are all those parts below the materials experiment? You can save some dV getting to Kerbin orbit by sticking all the bits and pieces in a service bay. A single small chute on the top instead of the nosecone will be enough back at Kerbin. If you have unlocked the small solar panels then stick 3-4 on the top because the Mun and back is a long way on batteries. If you can fly the craft with just a scientist then you will only need to take one of each experiment because the scientist can reset them.