Astyrrean

Astyrrean

I've made another video (but I still need to upload to YouTube) with a more traditional ascent profile (gravity turn at 50k or so). The bottom line is that the vertical profile is not that inefficient comparatively. I managed to save just 500 m/s vacuum DeltaV with a gravity turn, at the price of making the ascent much much harder to pilot (overheating being an even greater issue; staging high risk of collisions.) At the end of the day, if you can pull 16g acceleration with the upper stages for long enough, accelerating to the 3,000 m/s or so of LEO velocity is so fast that the loss of speed to Gravity is minimal (in this case, roughly that 500 m mentioned above.)

I honestly wasn't sure it was even possible. Took me a week but finally, success. It is incredibly hard in v1.0.2 because of the atmosphere changes. Anyway, Jeb now has "plant flag at Eve" on his list and is happily back at Kerbin's space center. Visual narrative here: http://imgur.com/gallery/O9RiR/new?forcedesktop=1 Video of return to orbit of the 800-ton lander from Eve's surface (by far the most complex step) here: Enjoy. Time to think about a new challenge ... Astyrrean / Filippo