SatunV

I've been using something like this lately to get crew to and from my station so I'll post it here. Not exactly Dragon like as it's crewed, and not exactly DragonV2 like as it only carries 3 Kerbals. Also I don't really "resupply" the station as much as cart Kerbals back and forth but it would be fairly trivial to swap out the pod and life support stuff for something automated to do resupply runs. Everything gets returned to Kerbin except for one Separator which is left in orbit. I've built a station in a 300x300km orbit with an inclination of 22.7 degrees which, apart from being a nice inclination to have a station in, has the benefit that anything launched to it passes over that little island to the north east of KSC. I'm using that island as a landing zone for my booster stages. The basic flight profile is: - launch then separate upper stage at about 50kms with an apoapsis of about 94kms - burn upper stage until apoapsis is 250kms (still sub orbital) - switch back to booster stage and land on the island -switch back to upper stage and circularise orbit at 250kms - separate crew vehicle, rendezvous with station, and dock - switch back to upper stage and deorbit - undock and deorbit crew vehicle All stock parts but I've used TweakScale on 2 parts to make it look better. I also use KOS with some scripts I've written for the launch, booster landing, and upper stage deorbit and EDL sequence. Also using Kerbal Engineer, PreciseNode, Docking Alignment Indicator, Remote Tech, TAC life support.

You're probably right, if I'd known I was going to land on a perfectly flat area then I could have used a few less. However I had conducted a few uncrewed missions very similar to this before hand and had found that if I landed on more sloping areas with fewer legs I risked them failing. Besides I'm happy to pay the dV toll for a worry free landing :-)

Flew Jeb to Eve, he planted a flag, and I flew him home. Only mods were KW Rocketry, Kerbal Engineer, and Enhanced NavBall.

My uncrewed Eve return ship was pretty big, though not as big as the crewed version I'm working on now! The return stages (the small 2.5m tanks at the top) were launched to a low retrograde Kerbin orbit un-fueled and required a separate launch to fill them up before departing for Eve. Ad Astra :-D