Muetdhiver

I would really like to see a eve and gilly mission. Plus its way more fun than mun farming madness Some material bays discarded with the aerobraking would work neatly Indeed.

Actually shields are not needed for the comeback from jool. A 1.25m service bay below the capsule is enough and will also protect the science container just fine. Don't do a direct landing though, do a 40-45 km aerocapture then landing. IIRC I did 42 km. It weights 0.1t vs a lot for a heat shield. Most OP module In the game if you ask me As for fuel: it will be quite costly from tylo but not too bad. I did return on a lf-t 400 plus spark. (From bop) Spark > terrier for 1t capsule + lf-t 400 So long as twr is not important... (in fact the spark is still better even with an 800 tank)

Ladder riding to minmus. Pure Madness. I love it. OCTO before ports is ballsy, nice to see it did work. This serie is getting better and better and makes for a jolly read. I'm impatient to see your next move... minmus farming to interplanetary ? OTOH, you already have everything you need for a Duna flyby already...

I tried both the radiator cage and the 125 service bay death trap approach to riding along to space, but in the end the 2xMk1 while holding on the ladder proved "easier" (*For me, YMMV) Issues I faced : radiators if angled have horrible aerodynamics and I got crazy instabilities and flip overs. Not good. 125 service bay : didn't find a way to put the poor sucker in. (IMO, the service bay, if there is a practical way of making it work is the superior option on paper : heat shielding, don't need an extra mk1, no off center stuff)

Mental XD. I hope you'll make it. It's going to be tough. Really looking forward to read the serie. I will try it at some point, but I need a recovery period from the Jool thing. Chilling in "easy" career GPP for now. Dumb question : In my caveman I never had any temp survey contracts. Is there something one has to do to trigger them ? TBH, one of the reason to put Jeb around Duna with a thermometer in a polar orbit was solving the cashflow problem*. But the missions never came (for any body).

Indeed. In my caveman evolved play in 3.2X / SETI I uses the woomerang site as a giant cluster of antenas to overcome the horrible l1 tracking stations. I was able to get to duna that way, though I had to lauch a relay probe behind the first one. Though in vanilla one only has access to the HG-5, So I'm unsure of how far such a sheme can stretch... Snarkverse does sound like fun. Will try it.

Rocket math is pretty much a neccessity for interplanetary caveman. Otherwise you have no idea if you are on budget or not and efficient transfer burns (i.e. using Oberth as much as possible) are not really possible. (You must know if you have to abort, because an interplanetary rescue mission in caveman is going to be a crapshot once out of a planetary SOI) It becomes even worse for orbital assembly where tanks may or may not get there 100% full. DV = LN(m_wet/m_dry) * 9.81 * ISP is all you need. put it in an xls sheet and let it do the math for you. (LN : natural log), wet mass : mass with fuel of the stage. dry mass : mass without the fuel of the stage. Thumb rules : If 1/3 is fuel mass : 4x ISP If 1/2 is fuel mass : 7x ISP If 2/3 is fuel mass : 11x ISP I hope this helps ^^ And best of luck with Tylo. You will need at least 3K DV to get down and 2.5K up. Going with 6K is probably a good idea. One concern I have with your craft is that the capsule cannot reenter kerbin atmosphere and survive from a Jool transfer. You will need at least a 125 service bay for that. Remember that you can't transfer your crew, so the capsule has to be used for everything (and this implies that the chute and the science box have to be there too... wich pushes dry mass up).

Frankly amazing caveman run. I really loved the mun comnet and probe approach. And the duna mission was beautifull done with the dual landing. And the guts to finish it... WP. I can't see myself doing an NCD just now, thinking caveman rendez-vous and on lawn assembly is cringe inducing at the moment. I already felt Diamond was grindy and went interplanetary because I hate biome farming, and Mun biome farming sounded too dreadfull to me. Interplanetary is less risky than it seems so long as one does not obsess over getting an encounter at the first pass. Doing radial burns like you did for Duna is very, very costly (and risky) compared to waiting two or three more years with a corrected AP. Jool moons are terrifying though. I would not go there as a first choice for a caveman run. Eve is very gentle and low risk. Lower risk than Duna since there is no Ike.

More like Eukaryote level XD. It was loads if fun and a very good challenge. I would be very, very impressed by a caveman landing on all jool's moons. I'm not 100% certain it's possible due to the wobblyness of such a ship... and the assembly process is a bit too crazy for me.

Replicating what turbo pumped did is bloody hard. I did put 500 m/s of DV in lko and did reach 650 m/s above sea. But not with the same craft... It seems to me that the aerodynamics and angle of attack has to be perfect, i.e. tge plane must fly with the nose to prograde and stay nearly horizontal. Then the juno can push above 430 and then things keep going up to 650. I was only able to do it with one craft, and when I changed something the magic was gone.

Jool5 lite and Dodging Tylo. I thought getting to jool was the hard part. Then I remembered : both Tylo and Laythe can mess you up bad. Bad braking : Jool dive. Bad Sling : say hello to eeloo on your way out. OTOH, good slings will save us fuel. Maybe. Here is how I planed to dodge bad encounters : measure orbital period of the ship, and divide it by the moons orbital periods. If it's something like integer, half or quarter, they will be placed in predictable fashion. Since I want to still visit them, all I got to do is plan gor gentle encounters by shifting the fractions away from nice ratios. I got lucky on the first orbit, no encounter. I use this to keep Tylo pined while trying to arrange for nice (read high altitude) encounter with laythe. However I can't manage Valls at the same time. The Laythe encounter has to be replaned, but it's just more maths. Things do work out but the Sling is still stronger than I expected. AP is shifted, but also lifted to the edge of Jool SOI. Not far enough from Laythe I guess. Still, one big one is done. To avoid further trouble I raise PE beyond Laythe. On the way back I meed Valls again. That rock. Bracking on the way down is not good, but it's really a nudge, pushing us below Laythe. I push it up again. Costly but worth it. That way we only have Tylo to deal with. And well, surprise Valls. The Tylo encounter is planed carefull to push us (hopefully) a bit toward Pol and roundify our orbit a bit. Getting to Pol costs all the remaining fuel from the drop tank. We know are running with 3.9K DV in the tanks. Pol is easy to land on. No problems here. No lucky greenolith this time. At this point I still have a lot of DV left. I decide to not play safely and try to do a Bop landing. I have 3.4K DV, and I think 2K will be enough for the return. 1.4K should be more than enough for Bop. I don't correct inclination this time, so the encounter is a bit trickier to get. Still, that quite a bit of DV saved. After Bop and more science, time for going hope. Fuel is more than enough it seems. I burn hard but come out above Duna. More Fuel. PE to Kerbin - ish. Then ritual inclination correction. Then the now usual AP correction to catch Kerbin. This was a very challenging serie. I did some some previous Jool expedition in 3.2x with heavy hardware, so I had an idea of how bad Tylo and Laythe would be. What I did not expect is how difficult it is to avoid them without patched conics... The overall trip took 40 years in game. Time for Valentina to head for the retirement home now. Btw. The service bay handles kerbin aerocapture from jool like a boss. Did get very red though. Anyway. This will mark the end of this Caveman run for me. I will return to 3.2x caveman evolved, although I'll do it Gael. I hope that the trick to do interplanetary transfer was clear enough and usefull to other brave cavemens . Interplanetary is much more fun than biome farming. And Special thanks to ManEatingApe for the lawn built rockets ideas. It was fun and challenging. And a bit frustrating too

Done ! Now. The Crunchy bits. My initial plan was Mun Sling, Kerbin-Kerbin Sling and then Jool. Turns out that Mun slings are near impossible to setup well enough and are not worth the trouble. As for K-K slings, it's completly doable in caveman, so long as one des not care about angle of arrival (which controls the sling direction...) Turns out K-K sling with a tangent at Pe 2yr orbit is only good for braking So, I decided to rolls back and do a "direct" transfer. Burn for 2000 DV, as well as possible (i.e. so that the hyperbola sticks to Prograde w.r.t the kerbol centric orbit). I had to correct the AP and inclination to get the AP touching Jool orbit. Then I waited. And missed Jool by 345.76 days (vessel too early). Since jool orbit is 4845.44 days, adding the advance we get that in 5191.20 days after passing AP, the vessel must be at AP again or miss Jool. Using T = 2*Pi*sqrt(A0^3/Mu) where A0 is the semi-major axis and Mu = GM (grav cst * mass of kerbol) along with the knowledge of the period of our orbit once we get to AP again (period was 2363.04 dy), we can compute the period we need for the next orbit to get Jool. Since now we have 5191.20 - 2363.04 = 2828.16 dy, we have to slow our orbit (i.e. raise our PE) such that we get there at the right time. The new A0 is simply A0_new = (A0)*((2828.16 / 2363.04)^2)^(1/3). Substracting AP to 2*A0_new we get our new PE of 24099896873 m. The burn is quite costly, be we have packed quite some fuel for the trip. More than 7.7K overall. We get a perfect encounter, and we have (if my math are right) 4.85K Dv left, minus the retro burn. Next part will be Jool system exploration while keeping an eye on DV for the return...

TBH Caveman Eve landing / Jool V if at all possible would entice using a kraken spawning contraption of mighty proportions... and for eve, landing such contraption in one piece and then flying it back. Without advanced engines I really can't see it at all possible. Anything with more than three 2.5m mains section joined with quadruple Jr ports can't be turned under thrust. This means that to go bigger one would have to dock stuff radialy. Which may cause load balancing issues and even more wienerli behaviour. If I can do a bop or pol landing I'll be more than happy already. And assembling a 100 - 200t vessel required for a Jool V / Eve mission would require dozens of lawn built rockets, which causes all kind of funding issues in Diamond (As an example my Icy Mint Explorer is already putting me down 180K). It's already Eukariotic levels of crazy. Anyhow. The Icy Mint Exploration vessel is now assembled. 4 Lawn-mower heavy rockets where used, which was far from an easy task. The Wet mass excluding the 2% fuel in the initial booster for the return vessel is about 28 tons. I haven't computed the DV so far. But it will be done prior to going ! As a note : A tylo lander would be at least 30t. Which means that the launch vessel would be in the 100+ tons range. I can't see it done either. It would have to lauch dozens of Lawn-mowers to do that. Edit : DV with optimal staging will be 7500 m/s. Neat.

I made a second launch with a much improved lower stage (2 additional thuds). However, it's terribly wobbly and it seems to me that the wobblyness of the wienerli rocket causes a lot of loss from drag. This seriously hampers the efficiency of the rocket overall. The lower stage higher TWR makes things worse, and it looks to me that TWR above 1.5 quickly becomes very problematic. Also, any attempt at starting the gravity turn early is a recipe for near deconstruction experiences. @ManEatingApe : Have you had the same issues with lawn built rockets ? Did you find ways to mitigate them ? Still the rocket performs much better now. The upper stage still need some amount of work tough. I only need the engine section now. If I can put 4.5t of fuel with it, it should be enough. Flight plan is as follow : Mun grav assist (training ground), with aim at a 2 yr orbit returning to Kerbin Atter 2 years, Kerbin encounter (hopefully) and grav assist for Jool. Orbit correction if Jool is missed (will be) Wait, Wait, Wait. Encounter. 200 m/s minimal capture. Use grav assist(s) to get up to Pol or Bop with as many encounters as possible. Bop or Pol landing. Return burn to kerbin, corrections, wait and all that.

Nice idea. But it does seem heavy, especially because landing on Tylo is the hard part. My lander / return rocket weights 25 tons, but the return part is only 6.5 tons. If your return part is 20 tons, the lander will be very heavy, meaning the jool ship will be really, really heavy. Which is a problem with Jr Ports. My estimate for a caveman jool5 is a ship of 225 tons. Less in making history due to the OP Wolfhound. I have made some calculations, and it seems that I can add 2300 m/s of DV to the ship I already have in LKO. That will push things over 6300 m/s overall DV which should (?) be enough for a Jool return mission. The only problem is braking in the jool system without patched conics. I feel that aerocapture might be a bit suicidal (?) given the velocities involved*. OTOH, if I remember right, gravity braking capture is doable with Tylo, The only problem being getting an encounter, Short of solving the lambert problem, I can't see a "clever" caveman way of doing it. (though I can still make a Jool flyby as a first expedition) *Has anyone some experience with Jool aerobraking without inflatable shields ?

So. After hours of fiddling and some caveman SSTO fun things, I finally got to lawn build a rocket with caveman tech. It was not easy, and I messed up the design, meaning the the whole lauch was a near failure (First stage : not enough fuel, second stage too soon, too heavy and not enough TWR). I wasted way too much fuel on the ascent, and gravity turn was so bad Valentina cried. Anyhow. It's in orbit and it still has 4060 m/s of DV. Clearly not enough for Jool with safety margins, but enough for either : Duna, Eve, Minmus Greenolith search or kerbin grav assist test with the aim of preparing for jool. Note that I could also send a second rocket with a fuel / booster stage and go for a small scope Jool mission. Which should I do ?

Actually while direct interplanetary transfers are indeed very difficult (I'd say borderline impossible with the exception of duna), transfers with corrections over several orbits are not especially difficult. Once I get this damnable lawn built jool rocket built I'll document the steps. Though for jool I'm trying to find a way to do it faster if possible.

Actually Rendez-Vous and docking is not that hard in Caveman once you figure a few tricks out. Start with launch with the target about 15-20° before KSC. Cancel out difference in inclination if any. Match orbits but keep AP slightly above. Wait. Wait. Reduce AP a bit. Wait some more. Wait. Once at max zoom the target and vessel appear to be close by (i.e. 5mm), it means that you are in visual range. Point ahead of target apparent motion and burn. Repeat till close enough to select docking port as target. Proceed as usual. But... Cavemans can't transfer fuel with L1 facilities. I know, it's really anoying and complicates missions. For a Caveman Duna landing you have to dock the ship with a fuel pod. Getting the duna encounter is the hard part, not the assembly. (Return is easier because Kerbin has zero excentricity). And Ike is a terrifying piece of rock for Cavemans. Unless one ditches the refueling SSTO as a drop tank... I know for a fact that one can get to Duna with T2 tech (reliant only) and that 2100 d/v is enough for a return trip with Duna orbit, doable in a single Caveman launch. The way I see it, a flyby should be possible with a kerbin grav assist : theorectical Dv for this is 1050 m/s, plus return correction and correction burn for the duna gravit assist/brake from the flyby. It can probably be done with say 1400 to 1500 m/s. If we grav assist for 300 m/s (?) then it does look doable on paper. Maybe The big question is how to get a grav assist right without patched conics.

Wow. 1000 m/s in LKO is more than I thought possible. Hats off. I like the whesley + 2x terrier design a lot I must say. It seems the only way to go to 18t without using too much parts and too much dead weight. Mine did not get anywhere yet though Is it possible to get to duna and back with a caveman SSTO ? It might be possible using a kerbin grav assist with a 1.33 or 1.5 year orbit... i.e. Launch 4 or 3 years ahead of the window and do a kerbin assist to save fuel ? Although, without patched conics it would be a tall order. Maybe with iterative orbital corrections like to get to Eve with caveman tech. Hm. Interesting questions.

The spark is an amazing engine. The only problem with it is that like the Juno, one generally need several of them. Which is often a problem with the 30 parts limits. One terrier and two sparks with a bit of Oscar B clipping is really nice to get a 100 kn engine with good vacuum isp. An other fantastic use of the spark is as verniers engine for a reliant. On an 18t rocket this push twr to 1.3 which is full of win. Also epic twr means it can beat the terrier in some cases as a vacuum engine when dry mass is low, despite worse isp. 25km pe for spaceplane re-entry : thanks for the tip. Nearly got to the ksc.

As I'm terrible at planes in KSP, so It took me an inordinate number of tries. In the end I went for a single terrier and 4 junos with a design mimicking what Turbo Pumped did. 650 m/s on Junos is indeed possible. I was skeptical at first, but it the craft is well balanced and you keep altitude low, it works ! (It takes a long time to reach the speed though). With such speed you get to 10km with 500 m/s which is really neat. The the terrier kicks in and voilà ! Aerobraking was done with the trusted helicopter method, otherwise all the intakes went poof. It was quite fun, but I still suck at SSTO's. I lost the terrier at landing, and I'm not good enough to keep back to the space center.

Hell, that's really lovely stuff. I have to try to build one now. Damn you all XD. Btw, all of this made me think about a staged caveman spaceplane where the wings and junos are ditched in flight, with a terrier setup with drop tanks in the front part of the plane. I Wonder what kind of mass fraction can be put in LKO with such a scheme. Junos are amazing engine as they can reach Mach2, unlike later (and bigger) engines of it's type. Caveman rockets seems to top out at 3.5 tons of payload for me, so if there is a way to push this up this would be really neat.

AFAIK, there is one greenolith per body. They all give a random locked but accessible tech. Actually, both Tylo and Laythe will be hard to crack and killers DV wise. At the moment I'm considering restricting landing to Val / Pol /Bob and flybys / orbits for the others. On pad assembly is a Kraken Den. By first estimates a full jool5 with landings will need a vessel in the range of 150 to 200t in lko. Big issues are the impossibility of fuel transfer, which means that every lander is single use and no crew transfer means that the cabin must stay the same. That makes for one 24t tylo lander, 3x6t landers for the four other bodies and an additional 6t return vessel. Adding 25t of fuel for jool system travelling, the payload will be about 75t. Adding in the ejection burn and tylo encounter / capture about 3.3K dv are needed. At 350 isp that will be about 11x or mass ratio close to 3. I.e. 200t+. Can it be done with all the docking ports required ? Or will it be buggy as hell ?

By Jool5 you mean getting in each moons SOI or orbiting each moons or Landing on them ? Landing is probably a no go (?). I mean, one would need a gaszillion DV on top of inefficient transfer burns. Quick clarification : Are greenolith T6 techs allowed ?

I built a Ker spreadsheet and will make a "clean" Jool mission to make up for it. I might try to use on pad assembly for the giggles.