king of nowhere

for the stock greenhouse, you made a calculation mistake. food per second should be 0.0000063796 i applied the patch to my game, where I had this self-sufficient ship, and it was losing food. i remade the calculations, and I got the new value, which is almost twice the one you posted. Can't say if there are similar mistakes with the other greenhouses, as i don't have those mods EDIT: but aside from that, it works perfectly. THANK YOU Do you have an idea what it means to run a 300-years mission and having to stop every 200 days to harvest food? i wish i had that earlier. (in retrospect, it's simple enough that i could have done it myself. but i never thought of just ignoring the normal crop cycle)

ok, let me get this straight: 1) I only have kerbalism greenhouses, so i only need @PART[kerbalism-greenhouse]:NEEDS[ProfileDefault]:AFTER[KerbalismDefault] // Default Kerbalism greenhouse { @MODULE[Greenhouse] { @crop_rate = 0.00000000005 OUTPUT_RESOURCE { name = Food rate = 0.000003190104 } } } this part, right? 2) I can do that to my exhisting profile, and it will start working for missions already in progress? 3) where exactly do I need to copy the stuff? do i make a new config file, or do I copy into an exhisting config file? if so, you've done me a huge service

as i said, it's about 50 rad. 1 hour at 1 rad/h will give your kerbonaut 1 rad, which will equate to 2% radiation damage. but you don't need to send a probe to measure radiations. you press B while on the map, centered on a body, and you see its radiation belts, and how much radiation they have. as a rule of thumb, the inner belt of kerbin and the belts of jool are the only one that are really dangerous. everything else, you can mostly ignore. solar storms are also dangerous, but if you correctly use fuel tanks as sunshields, they won't be an issue

can I propose this as a heritage challenge?

no, not really. acceleration is lower because the wheels will skid on the ground, but there is no gravity limitation to top speed. well, except the speed at which you stop driving on the surface and you start taking suborbital jumps. that speed depends on the topography as much as anything else. on minmus, on the flattest grounds, i reached 58 m/s - the theoretical limit for the ruggedized wheels. even on the other terrain, i could easily reach 30 m/s, thanks mostly to minmus being very even. It's also more difficult to control the rover in low gravity; it takes practice, and special training. if you're not deactivating reaction wheels, them alone will veer your rover off course. To drive in low gravity, my preferred method is to have a rover with powerful reaction wheels, which are deactivated during normal driving. have a hotkey to activate them, and do it when you start losing control. use the reaction wheels to keep your rover wheels pointed at the ground. this way, the rover won't be ever broken. top speeds i reached on small moons with this approach and ruggedized wheels are: minmus: 58 m/s (flat), 35 m/s (normal terrain) pol: 12 m/s (normal), 20 m/s (downhill); poll terrain is extremely rugged, it's impossible to move without bouncing around places bop: 50 m/s; despite its mountainous nature, it is rugged on the large size, but the surface is smooth enough to pick up speed. Ike: 70 m/s (downhill) at that speed, it's more suborbital jumping than driving. I could have gone even faster, but I broke a wheel gilly: 4 m/s. doesn't look like much, but 15 m/s is enough to orbit, it's actually a lot. stopping was complicated. there seems to be a hard limit of 1/4th to 1/3rd of the orbital speed, go that fast and you won't be in contact with the ground anymore. unless on perfectly flat ground. rugged topography lowers that limit. the wheels themselves have a 58 m/s limit, which can only be surpassed going downhill jumping downhill faster than 70/80 m/s is too likely to break wheels gravity itself is not much of a problem unless you surpass the hard limit

that depends on a lot of factor. assuming you play in the stock game, there should be no problem with reentry from orbit with most normal parts. unless there was some heat sensitive part outside of your fairing. fairings have pretty good thermal resistance, in general, so I assume you made some building mistake? can you post a picture?

while my main mission is slowly inching towards its end, i also took some time to move forward my secondary mission: slate elcano. From the equator, I just reached the south pole, here shown in all its glitchy glory i also deployed a small science station (to the left of the rover, in the only available patch of flat ground). it has no practical value whatsoever, but i placed it for the art last image is without light amplification. i had decided i wanted to use just the floodlights, without any extra light, but the last few kilometers i gave up on that. have you seen how incredibly shattered that terrain is? driving around it in high gravity is already hard enough, without the additional difficulty of not seeing where I'm going. it doesn't help that lights seem to have some sort of glitch so that while the rover should illuminate everything in a 60° arc in front of it, in practice there are always a lot of dark spots. I can tell it's a glitch because they move around.

yes, 8.9 mrad is what's hitting jeb inside the habitat. 1 rad/h (habitat) will kill your crew in roughly 50 hours. 9 mrad is 1/100th of that, so you'll have 5000 hours. about 2 years. not as safe as you'd like, but works for a mission around kerbin. not sure what the background should be; 0.032 looks a bit high for a magnetosphere, but then, i'm used to have active shields and ignore that. anyway, a hitchhicker container with radiation decontamination unit will heal 1% every 4 days, so you can be safe forever with that radiation level. from your shielding efficiency I can tell you're at hard level, meaning 70% max shielding. in those conditions you can stay 3 days inside the outer radiation belt of jool, which is just enough time to land on the inner moons.

After two weeks of failures - granted, two weeks where I didn't have much time for ksp, but still - I finally managed to crack a route for Plock, last destination of my extended kerbalism grand tour. I was surprised by how hard it was. It's not that it takes too much deltaV to reach Plock. Starting from Mun, it takes 1000 m/s at kerbin periapsis to reach Jool, and from there a gravity assist will fling you anywhere. My A'Tuin has 5500 m/s, more than enough even for the return trip (for convoluted reasons, as part of the challenge I must pretend I don't know whether I will have the option of refueling on Plock. Refueling spots are rare under the mod combination I'm using). It's not even that travel time is too much for life support. My A'Tuin carries enough water and stuff to keep growing food for 70 years. It's the combination of everything. I can take a Hohmann transfer and reach Plock in 50 years. It would cost less than 2000 m/s, with the Jool assist. But then, I'd be stuck in the most remote place in the solar system, with only 20 years worth of life support, and it would take multiple decades to go anywhere else. And there's precious few opportunities to get water. But I'd still have 4000 m/s to get back on a high energy trajectory? No, because those 2000 m/s are just from Kerbin's periapsis. I am starting from Mun, as the only reasonable source of nitrogen I have. And none of the smaller moons have water anyway. So I'm spending 600 m/s to orbit and 280 m/s to get a kerbin periapsis. To further complicate matters, the only good biome for refueling on Mun is polar crater, which forces a polar orbit. with all the complication this entails for going in kerbin's equatorial orbit with periapsis at a specific place. And then, with low thrust nuclear engines, those 1000 m/s periapsis burn easily become 1400. I could save some of that by using the higher thrust chemical engines, but those are much less efficient. So I'm actually spending close to 3000 m/s. Of the 2500 m/s left, I must save at least 700 to land on Ike. Then from Plock it takes 800 m/s just to get a Jool approach in 35 years. I won't have enough fuel to take a high energy transfer, and not enough food to take the low energy one. the low energy transfer, using the Jool-Sarnus gravity assist, will get me to Plock, but using over half my fuel and my water supply. Or, I can take a high energy transfer for Plock. Jool gives the needed energy for it, and thanks to the convenient location of Sarnus I can reach Plock in 25 years, spending maybe an extra 200 m/s course correction. But intercept speed will be much higher, 1500 m/s. Add a generous extra because of low thrust. So I'd be stuck with maybe 1500 m/s to come back. I can take the 35 year route for Jool, at this point I'd have 10 years left of life support, and less than 700 m/s. I could use Jool to get in a direct intercept for Duna, but intercept speed would be too high. And not enough time to gravity assist my way out of it. And I didn't factor in some moderate course corrections, I can ignore 100 m/s when I have 5000, but when I'm planning down to 700, they make the difference. the attempt to reach plock in 25 years, still by the jool-sarnus route But I finally cracked it, because I realized that in this century it is reasonably cheap to get from Neidon to Plock. A high energy transfer starting from Nissee will take 2000 m/s and 30 years, leaving enough fuel and time to return safely. Nissee is the stroke of luck that made up for not having water on Minmus and Gilly. Nissee is smaller than Minmus, and it has all resources I need for Isru. On a crater conveniently located near the equator. It is in high orbit around Neidon, making it cheap to leave - although there is no chance of getting Oberth effect. And Neidon's other moon, Thatmo, is great to insert into the system by aerobraking, thanks to its small size and thin atmosphere. It would be the perfect place to resupply, except that Neidon is so distant from everywhere. The other time I was there, I had to spend 2000 m/s to reach Urlum on a high energy "fast" transfer lasting 35 years! But now Neidon is close enough to Plock, giving me the chance for this. This transfer should be the final obstacle. The route for Neidon. 40 years are acceptable when I know I'll find a safe haven in the end. Plock is to the left, just out of the screen; i need to take a better screenshot to include it too What time I could devote to ksp in the last two weeks have been a constant attempt at getting those things right. - figure out a way to syncronize your ascent from Mun to get the desired kerbin periapsis - try the Jool direct route, be unable to find a good one - try to launch from Dres, give up because the Dres-Jool window is not properly aligned for a subsequent Jool-Plock - notice the Jool-Sarnus route, spend time trying to find the best year to launch from Mun - try hard to refine the Jool-Sarnus-Plock route, then give up on it - consider the pros and cons of launching from Ike - decide to go to Neidon - try multiple years to find the best time for the Jool-Neidon assist In all this, I've gone to Mun's orbit a dozen times. I tinkered with manuever nodes in no less than 3 kerbin-jool transfer windows. I suffered through multiple 1 km/s manuevers with TWR 0.1 and lag. I had no idea it would be this hard. I thought the six gravity assists to reach Moho with my fuel budget would be the hardest part. but I took to that immediately. Those were much more difficult. But finally, finally I have found the solution. Looking forward to finishing this challenge, that I started in june. and then I will have to find something else to do

I though the docking port between the rover and the descent stage was more evident. the rover has 2500 m/s, with TWR 1.7 on Tylo. I made it with redundant engines because i have part failure; it can still reach orbit with 6 engines if one is broken. The descent stage is expendable. it also has 2500 m/s once docked to the rover, so, enough for the landing. it also has redundant engines, it can work with 6. it can land on tylo with a bit of fuel left - that fuel is lost, though, no way to recover it. An ssto landing stage for that rover would weight well over 100 tons, while the heavy descent stage is only 35 tons. So, I land with the heavy descent stage, hitting the surface with its landing legs. by the way, they cushion very well, i've crashed on the surface at 20 m/s and survived. also, landing this thing is a breeze; an extremely wide base to land even on very irregular ground, and a lot of thrust because by that time the fuel tank is mostly empty. after landing i detach the rover, and i cannot dock it again - i tried when working on alternative systems, even if i use rockets to float gently against the docking port, it fails. the rover returns to orbit on its own power afterwards. with the exception of tylo (and OPM Slate), which require heavy descent stages, the rover is capable of landing from orbit and orbiting again from any other smaller body, up to Duna or OPM Wal. it's by far the best non-isru system i ever came up with. some pictures under the spoiler huh. i didn't knew that. then you set out to perform a very difficult task. there are very few instances of a jool 5 launched all in one go; most of us launch stuff in orbit one by one, and assemble the spaceship there. Just be aware that doing it in a single launch is very, very complex, and don't feel bad if you fail. I think you may find some inspiration from my Marco Polonium mission. I sent it to orbit in multiple launches, because i had weight limitations on the launch pad. But the overall shape of the ship is something that you could use The tylo-laythe lander (7) can also perform as a lander for everywhere else, though the light lander (2) is lighter and cheaper. With the tylo descent stage (9) you can assemble them in line, with the rest of your mothership behind (including the fuel needed for everything). the whole stack may be linear and stable enough to be launched from kerbin in one go. And by the way, using nuclear and drop tanks you could get by without a taxi. though a well-made taxi does provide utility with minimal increase in complexity. Here is my first really dedicated taxi it's got a docking port in front to put the lander, and another docking port on the back to dock with the rest of the mothership. it has 4 engines because i'm playing with part failure and i need redundancy, but 2 would have been fine - and would have saved 6 tons of dry weight. same goes for the multiple antennas and reaction wheels. as you can see, the taxi is nothing more than a fuel tank with rockets and docking port. if made for it, you can stack it in line (and it helps if you have to launch the whole thing from kerbin in one go). it's just a convenient way of bringing the lander from high orbit to low orbit without having to move around the rest of the mothership. you can even dock it in the back of your mothership and use the taxi's engines for additional thrust; you can have the rest of the "mothership" be nothing but a bunch of fuel tanks

the taxi is very lightweight. the mothership is heavy. moving around the taxi is much cheaper than moving around the mothership. It saves deltaV on the mothership. Once in low kerbin orbit, your mothership needs 2000 m/s to reach Jool. Then, if you want to actually go to low orbit on all the planets, you need - 200 m/s to get captured by laythe, then you can circularize by aerobraking - 600 m/s to leave laythe - 300 m/s to circularize around Vall, and just as much to leave - 800 m/s to circularize around Tylo, and just as much to leave - roughly 1000 m/s for the Bop/Pol part of the mission - 1000 m/s to return to Kerbin total 7000 m/s. with a taxi you park your mothership in high jool orbit, so you only need 3500 m/s for the mothership, plus a little extra for the taxi. the point of the taxi is that it is much more light than the mothership, so that moving it around is almost free. say your lander has a dry weight of 2 tons, including a terrier engine (Mk1 lander can, terrier, and a few amenities). to this, you add 3 tons of fuel - and 375 tons of fuel tanks. Your lander has a bit over 2800 m/s deltaV, with TWR 1.11. It can orbit tylo comfortably, and it can go down and up on all the other moons. Your taxi now has to carry that around. you want a crew pod on it, so let's say your taxi has a dry weight of 5 tons: 4,1 for nerv+Mk1 crew pod, and the rest on amenities like batteries, reaction wheels, and the likes. Add in the lander, which is dry weight as far as the taxi is concerned, you can add only 8 tons of fuel (and 1 ton of fuel tank) and you get 4300 m/s of deltaV. at a very low thrust, but the taxi will only move in orbit, you don't need high thrust. Actually, your taxi has a better deltaV than that, because on the return trip the lander will be empty. 4300 m/s is more than enough to carry the lander anywhere in the jool system and then return to the mothership to refuel. So you have this 19-ton package, that consumes no more than 8 tons of liquid fuel and 3 tons of rocket fuel for every landing, and it lets you reach all your target. your mothership must only carry 50 tons of fuel to the jool system, and then the taxi will move around. All your mothership has to do is carry 60 tons of lander+taxi+fuel with 3500 m/s. if you do not use a taxi, then your mothership must do all those transfers itself. it means that, when it brakes around vall, it will carry with itself all the fuel needed to land on tylo, all the fuel needed to reach bop and pol, all the fuel needed to return to kerbin. and then it will carry them back out of vall. and so on for all the moons. it's ridiculously more expensive. this is a simplified model, because it does not account for a special tylo lander nor a laythe lander, but those make the use of a taxi even more poignant. if you have a taxi, you park the laythe lander in high jool orbit and only move it when you land on laythe. if you use the mothership, then you will be carrying your heavy laythe lander up and down tylo's gravity well. or, if you land first on laythe, you carry the tylo lander up and down needlessly. isru will definitely simplify the mission (so much so, that i stopped using it because it wasn't fun). even then, a taxi would be useful, if nothing else because you won't need to carry around the mining equipment. but with isru, you can be as wasteful as you like, fuel is infinite. so it doesn't really matter (that's why i'm not having fun with stock isru; it does not reward good design). I solved the problem by putting the landing legs on the expendable descent stage. additional benefit that, as you land with the descent stage almost empty, you have really high twr near the end, when you need it most. additional complication, this design requires a lander with wheels to get away from the spent descent stage. but i want to move around the surface anyway... still, just adding a small command probe on the descent stage so you can use its last fuel to fly it away should suffice.

nothing says you have to stop at mothership and lander. indeed, having done a lot of grand tours, i find the best architecture is three-fold: mothership, lander, and taxi. the taxi is a smaller mothership that can ferry your lander from the mothership to low orbit, and back. consider it: the mothership is big, and expensive to move. if you have to orbit every moon, it uses up lots of fuel. you want to park it somewhere, and use its engines as little as possible. the lander needs a high thrust to fight gravity. it must have big engines, to get the high thrust. all the weight from the engines is going to kill its deltaV, and adding fuel will force you to add even bigger engines. you don't want your lander to be too heavy with fuel. so, how to get your lander from the mothership without increasing fuel consumption too much? The taxi is the answer to that. the taxi is small enough, only slightly bigger than the lander. but it has low power, high efficiency engines, so it's much more fuel-effective. tipically i use nervs for the taxi, while the lander needs chemical engines, in your case tipically terriers. the taxi can ferry the lander from wherever the mothership is parked to low orbit. it allows for a much smaller lander, because the lander can now hold only the bare minimum of fuel to land and orbit, and it's much cheaper than using the mothership for the same purpose. and of course, in your case it will also let you keep an astronaut in orbit while you land.

if you want an opinion on your ship, you should post a picture where your ship can be seen clearly. That said, I see no deltaV indication. where are the rockets? the fuel tanks? what part of the mission is that? is it going to the mun? is it returning? why did it fail? lack of deltaV? inefficient manuevering leading to waste of fuel? really, if it was possible to look at a picture like this without any more input and give an opinion, this would be a very dull game, and rocketry would be a dull science.

Part 17: Been there, done that Thanks to the efficient transfer to Moho, A'Tuin has enough fuel left to land on Mun. It arrives there after two Eve gravity assists, and it stocks up on fuel in preparation for Plock 17.1) The tail end of gravity assists 17.2) Polar crater once again

you lose a bit of reputation over time, so if you stay idle 20 years your reputation will sink. other than that, i know of no other ill effect

I've long been in the "dres is useless" camp, but i have to admit i was underrating dres. in my current kerbalism+OPM grand tour, with kerbalism isru rules, dres has been a useful refueling base. under those rules, to refuel I need to find ore, water and uranium (for the nuclear reactors, isru under kerbalism rules requires thousands of electric charge per second) all in the same biome; for a fluke of bad luck, Ike has both uranium and water but not in the same biome, minmus and gilly have no water, pol has no water. Bop has no water by design, and the inner moons of jool are stuck inside a killer radiation belt. So I can only refuel on Mun, Duna (but very expensive to land and take off), and Dres. Going to Dres for refueling before taking a gravity assist from Jool saved a few hundred m/s compared with making the same manuever from Mun. So, i have to concede that under a very specific combination of mods, with very specific mission objectives (which, incidentally, i don't think anyone else has ever been crazy enough to try), with a very specific random resource distribution, then Dres has some limited usefulness as refueling base for mild fuel savings. But hey, I've long thought Dres was good for absolutely nothing, so it's still a step up

No, no real formula that I know of - maybe one, but later about this. You just have to calculate, manually, your orbital time. The good news is, it's easier than it looks like; i recently learned it, and it worked immediately. I made a very simple datasheet to calculate this As you can see on the red circle, the two lines of numbers are just iterations, where the same numer is added over and over. In this case the upper line is the orbital period of Eve, and the lower line is the orbital period of my spaceship. So, the first line is just telling me that eve will return to the same position after 261.9 days, and then after 523.8 days, and then after 785.7.... while my spaceship will return to the intercept in 174.6 days, and then the next time in 349, and so on. And i just manually look if some of those numbers check. In this case, the datasheet shows that in 523.8 days eve will pass again through the intercept having made 2 orbits, while my spaceship will pass in the same spot at the same time having made 3 orbits, so a 2:3 resonance. But i used a 9:10 on kerbin earlier, and it's not any different. If the numbers don't check, i look where the numbers are closer, and I try to refine it. For example, in this case maybe i started with 180 days of orbital period, saw i would be late for a 2:3 resonance, and tried to adjust for a faster orbit. if that was not possible, i could have tried for a 3:4 resonance, and so on. there are more refined ways and more accurate tools, but this one suffices. Manuever-node wise, the way to do it is to set up a manuever node (without any actual deltaV used) after the gravity assist. it will tell you the new orbital period. so you try to adjust your flyby so that the new orbital period, shown in the second manuever node, will match what you calculated. You can't see your new orbital time when you adjust the flyby, you have to tinker with the correction manuever blindly and then select the second manuever node and see if the orbital time is right. however, with a bit of trial and error you can do it. and if your new orbit is a few hours shorter or longer than it should be, a correction manuever to fix that is cheap - so long as it's just a few hours. This image shows one such manuever planned. You can see the new orbital period, 385 days, in the bottom left corner of the image; it's the 9:10 resonance with kerbin i calculated. you can see the manuever node selected. Now, i said that there was some formula in addition to all this. Namely, there are 2 other mathematical boundaries. The first, and most important, is that you leave your planet after the flyby at the same speed you arrived, only in a different direction. example of why this is important: after my third kerbin flyby, i reached an intercept to eve. i was aiming for moho, and from eve to moho a transfer takes roughly 1000 m/s excess speed (in addition to eve escape). but my trajectory from kerbin had a 600 m/s intercept speed over eve. Guess what? No matter how much i tinkered with the trajectories, i could never intercept moho the way i wanted. I had to provide the additional 400 m/s with a burn at eve periapsis. So, if you've ejected from earth at the minimum excess speed, you won't ever be able to reach jupiter with any amount of flybys. you need two planets to bounce against each other, gaining energy at every step. on kerbin you can also use mun, if you include a mun flyby you can leave kerbin at a different speed than you had coming in. but the real moon has too much of an orbital inclination and too slow an orbital time for this to be practical. On the plus side, if you left earth on an inclined orbit, you can use the flyby to change your orbital inclination for free. second boundary, every planet can give you an assist for a limited amount of deltaV - the closer the pass, the higher the deltaV. if that deltaV is not enough, you have to make multiple passages. For example, kerbin can give you roughly 500 m/s kick, maybe 700. if you are coming from jool, excess speed of 1000 m/s, and you want to go to eve, you can do it - convert your excess speed of 1000 m/s going away from the sun to 1000 m/s going towards the sun. But you won't be able to do it in one passage. not even in 2. you have to first lower solar apoapsis, ejecting into a resonant orbit to meet kerbin again, lower apoapsis again, into another resonant orbit, and finally you can leave kerbin with kerbin as your solar apoapsis. because you had to change your speed by 2000 m/s, and kerbin can give at most 700 m/s, so you needed no less than 3 flybys. I can't give you hard numbers, unfortunately. especially not for rss. I hope I was clear. In addition, I can link you to the mission report where i describe how i went from ike to moho with resonant gravity assists. It took very long, but it was surprisingly cheap, and very rewarding. and my mothership didn't have enough deltaV to do it any other way. It is described in detail, so you may get some additional information.

when i was inexperienced, i too was ignoring engine mass and looking only at Isp. huge mistake. in ksp, engine mass is easily 20-30% of your total dry mass; it's a fairly large amount. In your case, your fuel tank has 1 ton of dry weight, so the poodle engine would almost double the mass compared to the terrier+tank ensemble. on the other hand, scrimping too much on engine mass will reduce thrust, which will make manuever more inefficient, leading to more deltaV losses than you gain.

any chance that one of the newer versions will have the option of authomatically harvest crops in greenhouses? or at least add that to an action key? because my 250-years-long mission would be a lot smoother if i didn't have to stop twice per year to manually harvest 19 different greenhouses

yes, the no contract career challenge is a real fun one. and it's a great step to improve on efficiency. just lowering money rewards does not help, in fact; you only need more grinding for the same amount of money. and lowering science reward just makes it more grindy. i mean, look at crystalline nanodiamond caveman: you do a lot of launchpad testing to pay for sending a rocket in orbit just to hope to maybe deorbit in the right biome and get a single science report from that biome.... how is that a solution to grinding? the no contract career is the only one where there is literally no incentive to grinding, and all the incentive to go new places. i think we should make it one of the heritage challenges, just like the jool 5 or the kerpollo. is there some formal way to propose it?

the puff engine can get Isp 240 in vacuum, enough to make it feasible. for atmospheres, an helicopter could lift the rocket high enough, like my helicopterocket model for eve. if we want actual RCS instead of the puff engine, vernor engines may have enough thrust. it's probably feasible. but i already have my hands full of other challenges to try it myself for now.

is there a way to do that? because if i had known a way to do that, of course it would have been the first thing i would have tried

there. that small thing is a slate ascent vehicle, it was sandwitched between the return module and a rover. i removed one docking port (in retrospect, i should have used stage separators, but i figured docking ports may come out useful), but i can't remove the second because it's the root part of the lander.

i don't have ksp open for an exact count, but it's in the 100ish range. it was 340 total with the launcher

I put on hold my main mission to start an elcano on OPM Slate. Slate would be a beautiful planet, if it wasn't so hard to drive on it. For this I created a new rover. It was meant to be showy, good in mountain terrain, and fun to drive. due to its gaudy aspect, i called it Tamarromobile (which roughly translates as pimpmobile) that cupola on top is mounted on a rotating servo, so that i can set it on continuous rotation with a KAL controller and enjoy a 360° panorama. To make it challenging, i decided i would send the rover in a real mission, and I would try to do it with a single launch. I launched bigger ships before, but i never had such a ridiculously oversized payload fairing. it weighted 50 tons alone but it was spectacular when it was activated From right to left: the last stage of the launcher, which still has a few hundred m/s left. then the cruise stage, with enough fuel to reach slate after a jool gravity assist. then there is a Mk3 crew cabin, that's the reentry capsule; together with the hitchhicker container next to it they make up the return module. there's also a couple of large antennas with probe cores, those are relay satellites to be deployed around. then there is the ascent vehicle, to carry the crew from the surface back to the return module. and finally the rover proper, with its sky crane. the sky crane was unconventional, because the cupola is blocking its normal binding point at the rover's center of mass. so i had to use two sky cranes equidistant from the center of mass, and I had to make them asymmetric. This in turn prevented them to just fly upward, so I had to devise the peculiar way to remove it shown in the picture. Before removing the other sky crane, i have to rotate the cupola out of the way. one of the sky cranes broke an rtg in the process.