king of nowhere

I tried. i needed 1000 m/s to get up to jool's intercept, making it no more convenient than going straight there from kerbin. i was hoping i could use the first trajectory i found, an assist from duna putting me directly on another intercept from duna the following orbit, but now i can't find it anymore. the first time i got it without even trying. On the other hand, i discovered i can get a similar effect by aerobraking on duna. in fact, i can perform an aerocapture directly without coming even close to damaging my ship. i think i'm falling in love with duna's atmosphere. ok, i was aiming for jool, why am i so excited about stopping at duna? i actually want to visit both, and i want to spend as little deltaV as possible before reaching laythe and tylo, because then i will drop the really heavy landers and i will be much more fuel efficient. but it would take me 2500 m/s to reach jool directly. yes, it's normally 2000, but with this low twr i needed a lot of course correction, even though i raised my kerbin apoapsis first. for jool i still need 1000 m/s after i went in kerbin escape trajectory, that's 15 minutes burn, i can't do it precisely, hence the extra cost. but for duna, i can reach it with a 900 m/s burn with a mun assist, and i can raise my periapsis first, reducing the manuever to a mangeable 5 minutes burn. i only needed, like, 30 m/s of correction. and from duna i can reach jool with 1300 m/s. which means that if i can aerobrake my duna insertion, stopping to duna first becomes cheaper than going straight to jool

Yes, i realized that thing a few hours ago. i will look for eve slingshots too. EDIT: i just tried, and i can raise my apoapsis as far as duna, so not worth it. i guess i could try to set up a second passage after that, but then there isn't much to gain over doing the same manuever with duna ouch. well, good to know at least. yes. that's why i don't worry about missing the trajectory even if i have a ship with long burn time. the problem is, i would like to see where that second gravity assist would send me. Will it raise my apoapsis enough for a jool encounter? or will i be stuck halfway needing to burn more fuel than i would have with a direct trajectory? in that case, how much would it help if i burn at periapsis? I was trying to simulate that stuff to get a good estimate of what would be the most convenient trajectory. but it seems the game mechanics won't let me.

I am trying to simulate a complex manuever involving a duna flyby for a gravity slingshot putting me in another flyby on the next orbit to hopefully get an assist towards jool. i know it won't unfold exactly as planned without some course correction, but i just want to study if the manuever is feasible, if it will net enough of a deltaV reduction to be worth the effort. at first all is ok. i set up the first burn, the mid--course plane correction, and i slingshot past duna. i come out pretty close to be on intercept again, so i make another course correction. i get the second orbit to enter duna's SoI, i try to get closer... and suddenly the manuever skews and goes somewhere else. now i've been trying for a good ten minutes, every time i try to fine-tune the second flyby, at some point the orbits change. slightly, but enough to set me completely off. here is one screenshot notice the second duna periapsis, in T- 2 years and notice how it's now no longer there. there is instead a closer approach for 110k km. i must stress, this is NOT me fiddling with the manuevers. i did absolutely nothing except reloading the game. you can see that the manuever has the same exact amount of deltaV, and it is made in the very same second. as i try fiddling my manuever, the game keep flickering between those two states, putting all my manuevers off. Is there any way i can make a simulation with more than 3 or 4 manuevers without actually tying it directly? (this specific ship has pretty low TWR, i'd need to make a couple of apoapsis raising before the big burn, and i'd really rather not spend half an hour like that for just a simulation)

C'mon! Why you still doubt if just a few post above I said i did it?* I already posted the album, but in case you missed, that is 80km deeper into Jools atmosphere: ok, i should have been more specific: you can dip 2 km, but not 3, with an orbiter that is not specifically designed for it. i had an orbiter that was just designed for space operation, and i could dip it a couple km in the atmosphere without burning - barely. enough to get high atmosphere science and i could get achievement for atmospheric flight. anything more requires a dedicated craft with dedicated solutions.

I have experimented this directly, and i can say for sure that you can indeed dip 2 km (but absolutely not 3) and do science in the high atmosphere with an orbiter. You can even get an EVA report, if you are fast enough to get it and put the astronaut back before he gets incinerated. as for reaching low atmosphere, your best bet, when dealing with a thick atmosphere, is to use propellers. this way, the atmosphere becomes your friend. so you need thermal shielding to survive aerobraking, propellers to fly in the atmosphere, and rockets to get back into orbit. and given how much speed you need for jool orbit, you'll need nerv and/or ion propulsion. if you feel confident, you can try making a big project of it

it's.... absolutely NOT the same thing. I also have crafts that can go anywhere this ship can go everywhere except laythe and eve, perform science, and it has excellent mining capacity. i also made a bigger, 400-ton version to refuel the really big stuff. This rover can reach almost everywhere too, and i built a module with extra fuel to reach moho (it didn't have enough deltaV for landing otherwise), and another module with extra rockets to land on tylo. and it is fun to drive and this spaceplane can almost takeoff from eve and reach orbit. i must still improve aerodinamics a bit. anyway, i already can ssto on kerbin or laythe (including doing it from water) and it drops a smaller helicopter to move around. if i attached a couple disposable boosters to it, it would orbit from eve. so, i also have 3 ships that can do the grand tour. yet, none of that is my boundless dream. boundless would have a cargo bay containing all of those vehicles, though. indeed, boundless would be a huge fuel tank, some nerv rockets, and some amenities, and docking ports for those vessels. but take 3 relatively complex vessels, dock them together, and it's already kraken food.

i don't know of any exact method besides trying. spaceflight is as much art as science. well, of course the fastest way would be to point at kerbin and burn several km/s worth. you'll certainly be fast then. but it would be very wasteful. yes and no. when you have a simple system like kerbin-mun, and you always use the same optimized trajectory, then you will always get the same time, or close enough; because you are always doing the same manuever. you would get higher times if you were doing an inefficient manuever. On the other hand, when you get to more complex realities like an interplanetary transfer, then the flight time will vary considerably, even among the same launch window. I once sent 4 probes together to jool, with similar deltaV, on what i thought were similar trajectories, but more than one year passed between the first and the last.

I've seen other people do it, so I am posting my attempt in the mission report section. A part of me feels bad about it. Who am I trying to impress? I'm no scott manley. Do I think I'm good enough that people will want to look at my stuff? then again, the exhistance of the mission report section, and the variety of posters there, shows that yes, there are people who may be interested in it.

Part 3 Assembling Marco Polonium "Less is more". A sound motto about space. Generally they utter it when pushing for small, simple crafts. But then, if you can accomplish several missions with a single ship, you are doing less. That is, less ships. If you use one ship to do the job of three or four, that's certainly less. Marco Polonium is the mothership I built for the task. I was originally naming it Marco Polo, from the famous traveler. Like Marco Polo, it's going to visit faraway places and come back after a few decades. Then I thought, this thing has nuclear engines, Marco Polo didn't. So I gave it its actual name. Polonium is a byproduct of a nuclear reactor. Again, for all its difficulties, a single ship to explore everywhere has its advantages. A single small lander can explore all the small worlds out there, except for Tylo and Laythe. Instead of sending one ship to each of those places, I could send one single ship, saving on the cost of having to launch a new one every time. And going from Duna to Jool is cheaper than going from Kerbin. And once you are at Jool, again going to Eeloo is cheaper than coming back and sending a new mission to Kerbin. And if I can make a single large ship, I can use the efficient nuclear propulsion without worrying about costs - or about how to recover it after every mission. So, that's the general plan. Have a mothership. With nuclear engines and plenty of fuel. Have a small lander attached to it. Figure something out for Tylo and Laythe. Get good antennas, because I can't afford a relay network. And find ways to manage it all within the 30 parts and 140 tons limit. And find ways to get all that stuff in orbit on a tight budget. So. Back to the drawing board. those are the technologies available at this time. The two most expensive pieces are the nuclear engine and the antenna strong enough to communicate from Jool 1) Launcher Unfortunately, strapping a parachute on a booster won't work; we all know they get deleted in the atmosphere. I had practice with launchers that could go suborbital in the first stage, then I would circularize with the second stage and still have time to assist the landing of the launcher. But then the launcher would end up at the end of a parabolic trajectory, quite far from the ksc, and I could recover only about 70% of the cost. Luckily, getting ssto on Kerbin is not difficult. All you need is a spaceplane a big rocket with a relatively small payload. After some experimenting, I developed this workhorse The cost for launching, at net from recovery, is around 9000. The payload is easily 20 tons, though I learned eventually to stretch it up to 25. The twin boar engine has a high resistance to impacts, so I can get away with less parachutes and no rocket assisted braking. In fact, the main problem is the rocket tipping and crashing the fuel tanks; to prevent that, I put the parachutes asymmetrically so that it would land tilted and fall gently on a side. It works perfectly on water, sometimes it fails on rough terrain. It has 14 parts, but if needed I can skip the reaction wheel and the batteries, going down to 11. In this case, I must decouple the payload when I am already in the correct orientation for the deorbiting burn, make the deorbiting burn, deactivate SAS, and hybernate the probe core immediately. I can also remove the ground stabilizers and one parachute, though I will have to reload the launch a few times because it may flip randomly before I even turn on the engine. With one less parachute it will only survive with water landing and some well-timed rocket braking. But it's 8 parts. And if the payload has a docking port, I can use the docking port to connect to the launcher, and skip the decoupler. If I have a few spare parts to add I can put some solar panels on it so I don't have to reload if I accidentally leave SAS on. In any case autostrutting is mandatory. It took me a long while to accept an aerodinamic fairing. I didn't want to use it because it adds extra cost that is not recovered. But I eventually discovered that a good fairing can increase my payload from 20 to 25 tons (the limit, because then the whole rocket would be 140 tons exactly, and I cannot afford a level 3 launch pad), while adding 1000 that are not recovered. And I generally save a couple tons of fuel, which I can also transfer to my ship. This effective and reliable vehicle allowed me to construct a big ship with limited - yes, I said reliable. For once, I have something that works properly. A few early models exploded because I forgot to autostrut everything and the payload started swinging, but after I worked out the kinks, I never had a catastrophic failure, and I most often make a perfect launch at the first try. This is the only vehicle I developed for this challenge that I would actually use in a normal career. I haven't found a way to reliably land it with precision besides save scumming. Those launchers have too little control to keep retrograde in the atmosphere, so each one will slow down a bit more or a bit less. 2) Small lander Technically I don't need science instruments, since I have decided I won't research anything else. But screw it, I am confident and I want to bring in some luxuries (almost half this thing's cost is the seismometer). This time I also can afford to make something with a wide base. I will put a parachute on it, because I will land it back to Kerbin eventually for all those "we came back from ..." achievements. Since I have it, I can also use it on Duna. So the greater fuel budgets I will need are 1700 m/s to get down and up from Vall, or to get up from Duna after landing with parachutes (the map says 1450, but a large lander will have horrible aerodinamics). 2000 m/s is a good target for deltaV. I want to use all the science instruments available, I will need a Terrier to get up from Duna. I can use the lighter landing pod, since I will only use it in atmosphere once. I don't strictly need landing gear, but since I have some spare parts, I decided to put wheels. This is the result It won't win a competition, and it's certainly not suitable for long distances, but it does its job, and it's very light. It has a total of 2 tons of fuel. I will need the full tank to take off from Duna, and also for Vall. For Ike, Bop, Pol and Dres I can use less fuel. If I use it on Gilly and Moho, I will have a chance to get back to Kerbin for refueling. All considered, 8 tons of fuel seem a reasonable stockpile to do everything. 3) Tylo/Laythe landing This gets trickier. Landing on Tylo would require 5000 m/s, so, a rocket with stages. Laythe at least allows aerobraking. In the phylosophy of reusing as much stuff as possible, I settled for an ssto for Laythe, that would then couple with an extra fuel tank to land on Tylo. This is what I came up with The lower part, that looks like a spaceplane (it's not), is the lander. It will first land on Laythe, with parachutes. It will land on solid ground, a feat I intend to achieve, again, by save-scumming. The three fuel tanks on the bottom are horrible for flying in atmosphere, but I needed a large base to land this thing upright, or I'd be unable to leave. The docking port in front, and the various instruments jutting out, are also horrible. The fins are needed to keep this thing flying straight - though they double up as landing legs. unfortunately, with low part limits and low technology, that's all I could come up with. It can take off and orbit from Laythe, at least. It is the only piece I did not send up with the launcher. It has 29 parts, and it is barely not good enough to ssto from Kerbin. I solved this, again, by putting a disposable fuel tank on top of the docking port. After it returns from Laythe, the middle tank provides enough fuel to resupply it. It will be drained and discarded. The huge tank on the left with thud rockets on it is the Tylo descent stage. It will be consummed going down, and ditched before take off. I must be careful to couple it with the engines staggered if I don't want them to just push down the lander's lateral tanks. This stage was too heavy for the launcher, so I had to send it half empty. I filled it with the spare fuel I had in the other launch vehicles; one ton here, half a ton there, I managed to complete Marco Polonium without needing a dedicated refueling mission for the landers. Since this thing is so heavy (around 50 tons) I can't wait to get to Jool and get rid of all this mass. In retrospect, I made a mistake; I should have added a decoupler after the lander's command pod. This way, after returning from Tylo, I could keep the pod for the "Returned from Tylo's surface" bonus, but I wouldn't need to carry around a useless reliant engine and some empty tanks. However, I realized it only halfway through the mission, when it became clear I'd need more fuel, and I didn't want to restart. 4) Ship core After getting a good idea of what I would need to drag around for the mission (about 70 tons of landers and rocket fuel, plus as much liquid fuel as I could afford to send) it was time to design the main ship. It was clear I'd get a horrible TWR. I could mitigate this with more engines, but I had limited funding. I settled on 4 engines as a compromise. And I wanted a modular design, so I could keep attaching more parts; but also in a way that would be compatible with a moving spacecraft. And I wanted to bring in a few luxuries: a cupola, because you get some real stunning views along the way that I want to enjoy in first person perspective, and a laboratory, because I want to level up my crew (can't wait to have Jeb at level 3 so I can track the manuevers authomatically). And to make more science, even if I won't use it, just FOR SCIENCE! This is the first stage, still coupled to the launcher. The launcher run out of fuel (NERVs are heavy), so the Marco Polonium core is towing the launcher to orbit to drop it near the ksc. The first parts are assembled. In the middle, the service probe is handling a couple of fuel tanks A detail of the service probe. I didn't use it much to handle tanks because direct coupling with the launcher allowed me to leech the launcher of whatever leftover fuel it could still give, but it still turned out very useful. Assembly goes on. Here I have 2 launchers still attached; the first had plenty of spare rocket fuel, but it could not transfer it to the ship until I sent the larger tanks All the landers are placed correctly. Now I will send fuel tanks as long as my money will allow And that's it! The Marco Polonium is all its glory! Front view And detailed schematics Now that it is complete, this little jewel totals 192.6 tons, for a total of 194 parts. And I managed to build it entirely with 270k . Sending it up in small pieces of no more than 20 tons and 20 parts each. I lost track of the exact number of flights required, but it was about a dozen, in three days of hard work gaming, and I consider it one of my finest creations - not because I couldn't do better, as I have many designs in my regular career that far outstips its performance, but because of the great constraints I took when making it. TWR when full is 0.12, very low, but it can be worked around with clever manuevering and course corrections. It's hard to get a good deltaV estimate. As it is, it's about 5000 m/s with just the liquid fuel festoon, but I will drop spent fuel tanks, and I will use up rocket fuel with the landers, so the mass will also decrease. And when I get to Tylo, I will drop a good half of my mass. I would have liked more fuel, if possible, but I literally cannot afford to send up another mission. I could still launch a smaller rocket, but at this point a dozen tons of fuel more or less aren't going to make any difference. How far will I go? Will I manage to visit enough outer worlds to end the challenge? Part 4, the travels of Marco Polonium, is still going on. I will post when I finish

Part 2 To the moon(s) "We choose to go to Mun in this decade and do the other things, and since they are not hard enough, we also choose to do them with minimal technology, inadequate equipment, and to also visit Minmus with a single mission before coming back" J. F. Kerman Actually, sending a single mission to Mun and Minmus together makes a lot of sense. Once you are on Mun orbit, you can spend 250 m/s to get back to Kerbin. Or, you could spend 200 m/s to go on a Minmus intercept, where you can circularize with 50 m/s. Then you drop a lander that can go down and back with 350 m/s, and finally 150 m/s wil see you home. So, you can visit both moons by adding just 25% extra deltaV to a Mun mission. Then again, even trying just for Mun is not trivial without adequate means. I made this lander Yes, I know what you are thinking. This is a horrible lander. It is tall, thin, narrow, with small landing legs. It doesn't even have solar panels. And if you are not thinking that, you should be. But I didn't have much choice. I only had limited tech. I had 190 science, and I had two priorities: docking ports, to get the "docking manuever" and "build a space station" achievements, and they required 90 science alone, plus 45 for the prerequisite tech (on the plus side, that prerequisite also gave me the science jr, for moar science). And second, I needed a Terrier engine, because you try making a low cost Mun mission without a dedicated last stage engine. A Spark would have been better, but that was too expensive. Anyway, there was no chance to get niceties like solar panels, or better landing legs, or fairings. I tried to get a wide base by more exotic designs, like this one (yes, it has 4 stacks, but only 2 engines. That I was willing to even consider such an abomination should stand as testament to how desperate I was) But they all performed too porly in the atmosphere. And with the limit of 30 parts (no money to upgrade the VAB) I also could not afford to brute force this with more boosters. So, thin lander will have to be. Then I needed an orbiter. The lander would spend all its fuel for landing and take off. I needed an orbiter that could tow the lander the rest of the way. And the whole would be rather heavy. Also, I needed more batteries, and with the 30 parts limit it was a problem. In the end I came up with this design It's not clear from this angle, but the three bosters on the bottom are not attached with decouplers. They are just stacked side by side. So I have the 3 boosters for the start, then I ditch them and I use a second booster to get suborbital. In all this process I have virtually no control, so I made sure to keep pointing in the right direction by adding fins on both the first and second stage (I could have used a Swivel, but it was more expensive). And then it circularizes using the fuel from the upper tank, the one attached over the docking port, that it will - of course - ditch before docking. Normal rockets discard stages from the bottom, but that requires using a new engine, and increases cost. Why not ditch stages from the top? Maybe for fear that they will crash over the ship? Seriously, have you seen the pieces of junk I'm trying to fly? If we were ranking the possible causes for catastrophic failure, "hit by the top tank" won't even make it to the top 10. But the total cost was less than 25k (including the lander's launcher, which was actually a sane design); the 170k I had available would seem a lot of money for this mission, but I had to upgrade the launch pad, and I had to upgrade the tracking station and mission control if I wanted manuever nodes. By the way, this is the only launch system where I did not painstakingly recover every single piece of hardware. Flying this thing to orbit wasn't easy (it involved restarting the flight several times. Sometimes the lateral boosters would spontaneously detach in the launch pad). Managing a rendez-vous with the tracking station at level 1 also was a bother (it involved reaching orbit behind the lander, putting apoapsis and periapsis a couple km lower, and then wait). Once they were within 100 km range, though, I was able to select the lander as a target, and then I could get a better rendez-vous by following the target on the navisphere. Once I docked the lander and orbiter (and exchanged crews, which netted a bit more money) I used that money to up the tracking station. Still mission control was level 1, so I could not set up manuever nodes. How do I time my burn to reach Mun precisely? Three ways: eyeballing, save scumming, and correction manuevers. As soon as I got to Mun, I upgraded mission control too; there's no way I could eyeball a Mun-Minmus transfer. I had Bob in the orbiter to refresh the science experiments, and Jeb in the lander because landing without a "hold retrograde" function was already hard enough without giving up on SAS entirely. I made sure to get a spacewalk over all the biomes I could reach for extra science. Finally I landed I knew where I could find a Mun arc (which I discovered entirely by accident on a previous career), so I got that bit of extra money too. Landing this thing is even worse than it looks. Unless the ground is perfectly flat, it just won't stay upright. Oh, if you land it well, SAS will keep it stable. But as soon as your pilot goes out, it flops. Even 5 degrees of ground inclination is enough to make landing unstable. And there's no way to judge accurately the inclination before landing, this game doesn't offer the best perspective. Still, there is a solution: manually adjust the springs in the landing legs. I was able to make some legs longer or shorter by increasing or decreasing spring value, until it was stable. The first time it took me over 10 minutes. Then I had to scrap the mission and restart because I had run out of battery, and I made an orbiter with more batteries. The second time it took me 5 minutes. Then I run out of jetpack fuel trying to reach the mun arc. I reloaded again, trying to land closer. By the time I made this actual landing, I was perhaps the greatest world expert at adjusting spring values to keep a lander upright. Mun and Minmus move so slow, you can transfer between them with barely any fuel. I love them! Landing on Minmus was much easier, because unlike Mun, it has some perfectly flat ground that's very easy to spot from orbit. With the Minmus landing I got enough money to upgrade the r&d at level 2, so I could get surface samples. I managed to land close to the border of the flats, so I could get 2 different biomes. An unexpected source of difficulty was keeping the science jr whole during descent. It has great thermal sensitivity. I could have let it burn and landed anyway, but recovering it was worth more money. And it let me perform one last experiment on whatever biome I would land. I barely managed it Again, the rewards were great. since I was there, I also scraped up a little rover to get science around the various ksc buildings With this influx of science and money, it was time for the next step. The first mission achieved orbit. The second explored all the Kerbin system. the third would get all the other planets, or die trying

After reaching the point in my career where I could do anything I wanted, just by building a bigger rocket and/or using my refueling stations everywhere, I found this nice challenge to spice things up. My funding is limited by exploring new places, so no more grinding up money with tourist flights (I made so many, they became boring), no more grinding up science by landing those tourists in a different biome every time, and no more easy mission with infinite fuel available. And especially no brute forcing my way through anything else I can't tackle otherwise. But I decided to not just apply to the challenge, but also to be elegant about it. So, as further conditions - no use of policies. Sure, I could get some extra money by selling all the science I get, but science has no price. Or I could beg the government for money, but reputation also has no price. As for all the paperwork that's done by the admins, the only use it can possibly have is to cram it up a booster and use it as solid fuel. And unfortunately it's not good, too low Isp - no isru. I can gather enough for a level 3 r&d and then mine Kerbin and sell fuel, but it's not elegant. - sending as few ships as I can. Because making one single multistage ship that goes everywhere is probably more efficient (at least, you reuse all the parts) and, again, more elegant. Originally I was hoping I could do it with 3 missions, but looks like I will need 4 Part 1 Early orbiting Objective is reaching orbit with the first flight. but first i need some science. Studying the goo, I unlock the thermometer. Studying the thermometer on the launchpad and landing strip, and with a couple EVA, I unlock the barometer. with the barometer I unlock basic rocketry, and I get the swivel. With the swivel, I make the first orbiter Yes, this thing can reach orbit; in fact, it can reach a 250 km apoapsis, unlocking the "outer space" science. If it is piloted very carefully. Which is especially hard having Bob on board and no SAS. It took me three tries, but I managed to come back with 10 m/s left. 51 m/s left out of 2750 available may seem a safe margin, but I need to finish raising my periapsis for a full orbit, then I need to deorbit with enough precision to fall near the ksc, and finally I need a bit to soften the landing But the rewards are big. All the achievements up to "first orbit" in one go, with minimal expence, and all science experiments around Kerbin

this is taking longer than i planned. i know i will make it, because i have the ship ready to visit every planet and everything... the problem is, i'm still limited to 30 parts and 140 tons per launch, so building a 200 ton ship in orbit one 20-ton piece at a time, then deorbiting the launcher taking care to land it close to ksc for maximum recovery funding is a long endeavor. i spent the last days launching ship parts, docking ship parts, deorbiting launchers, reloading games because the launcher landed too long, or too short, or landed in the mountains and crashed down a ravine, or reloading because i forgot to deactivate SAS and now my launcher (on which i was unable to put solar panels because of 30 part limit) is out of battery.... then i launched and went up to jool, spent hours trying gravity assists to minimize fuel consumption, realized i would be out of fuel at the end of it, so i reloaded back to duna and i'm now assembling another 200 ton ship to provide extra fuel for the other one... it's a lot of work. but it's very satisfying when progress is made

Boundless is the project i've always wnated to do, but never will Boundless would be a mothership capable of fulfilling every possible contract without ever launching anything else. it would have nuclear rockets with at least 5 km/s of deltaV when full, enough crew space for dozens, and several attached service ship. among them, mining ships to refuel from small moons, rovers, spaceplanes, enough that for every place, some of those ships would have ssto capacity. this ship would literally do anything indeed, by now many of my regular ships could serve as service ship for it. i only miss the eve ssto, on which i have been working for weeks; i have a project for a propeller plane that can fly electrically past the worst of the atmosphere and then use rockets, and i reached the point where it can work if i can improve the aerodinamics. i say that because i've seen a youtube video of a similar working concept; my plane can reach the same altitude before needing the rockets (well, actually i am a couple km shy) and it has the same amount of deltaV, but it misses orbit by about 1 km/s. i suspended work on it because it was very stressful, having no idea if any parts were different. that spaceplane then has a small helicopter inside a cargo bay, so it would reach everywhere on the planet. once i go back to work on the eve ssto, and if i manage to make it work (even just enough to go suborbital for long enough that i can pick it up with another ship), then making Boundless would not be hard. i'd just have to take a bunch of fuel tanks and labs and some embellishment and attach to it all the ships and rovers i already have as service ships. the reason i will never make Boundless is that once i do that, the resulting monstruosity would be well over 1000 parts, and it would get eaten by the kraken for sure

I learned a few tricks for using gravity assists in the jool system. i was unable to gain much because when i used one to slow down, it would lower my apoapsis, but also my periapsis, i would then be in a collision course with jool and would need to raise my orbit, losing anything i gained. I realized 1) i don't need to kiss the cloud top. my old instincts to stay as close as possible to the planet to maximize oberth effect are incompatible with getting gravity assists. with this simple trick, i was able to skip the injection burn and use a laythe flyby to enter orbit, and my periapsis is still above the clouds. incidentallty, if i do not need an injection burn, i also do not need oberth effect. 2) a gravity assist, like any other manuever, has a greater influence on the opposite side of the orbit. this means that using laythe will have a greater impact on apoapsis, and using tylo will have a greater effect on periapsis. so i figured out, i need to use laythe to brake and reduce my apoapsis, and i have to accelerate with tylo to raise my periapsis and avoid crashing in the clouds. I still need course corrections, of course, but it's saving a lot of fuel. on the left is my heavy duty mining vehicle (400 tons. let is the medium mining vehicle, 80 tons) and this is with panels and radiators unfolded it produces like 500 electricity per second on kerbin orbit, which is a total overkill. on the plus side, it works nicely also on duna. do notice how the lower panels are mounted on hydraulic pistons to separate them from the main body, or they'd be covered by the other solar panels. and i made a version for jool with even more solar panels, i used 2 pistons on top of each other for some of the lower layer panels. by the way, why do you care for having power through the night? are you using one of the mods for resource management? because it is basically impossible to keep up with the drilling consumption on battery power. you can run some small modules throught the night, but it's impossible way too impractical to keep the drills working by night

to be more exact, when you are in the atmosphere, crafts farther than 20 or 25 km from you are deleted. so, your boosters disappear when reaching that distance. there are mods to avoid it. personally, i started launching bigger rockets that can go directly to orbit with the first stage when i want to recover them.

you see it also when you aerobrake on returning to kerbin; in the beginning your speed increases even though the atmosphere is slowing you. specifically, orbiting jool is very fast, over 9000 m/s, and you gain speed very quickly when closing in to periapsis. it's easy to gain speed faster than you are burning. then again, it's always worth checking that the rocket is pointed correctly.

so i am assembling a big ship in orbit, and i am using recoverable launchers to do the trick. they get into orbit as ssto with a 20 ton payload, i take the payload, deorbit and recover them. some of the payloads weren't exactly 20 tons, or perhaps i did fly them especially well, anyway, i still have a couple tons of fuel in them. i want to transfer them to the orbiter before undocking. but i don't want to drain the tanks completely, as the launcher still needs enough to deorbit and get recovered. and here is the difficulty. because when i start the fuel transfer, the numbers zip by very fast, and i can't stop them with any reliability. i would live to leave 45 fuel and 55 oxidizer in the launcher (which uses rockomax jumbo tanks), while transferring everything else in the orbiter (which uses many mismatched tanks in the 5-20 ton range). it took me a dozen tries of transfer, stop, reverse, stop, transfer again, stop again, always trying to hit the right moment, until i eventually managed some satisfying results: 40-44 in one launcher, 45-56 in the other. but i really think there should be a better way to set up fuel targets during transfer. is there a better way? P.S. i now realize i also have a small 1-ton tank on a probe attached to the main ship, i could empty the launcher completely, then refill it with the whole content of the small tank, then refill the small tank from one of the larger tanks. still not ideal. and considering the bug every time you transfer fuel, which in my case requires reloading to fix, this method is also time consuming.

post a picture so we can see your issue. it may be that the ground you're trying to escavate has 0% ore content. you did scan ore content, did you? or for some reason the drill is not properly deployed. without picture there's no way to tell

i expand on the original with a new related question: i now determined that when i land and then come back to orbit, i always get the achievement. but! if i detach my ships, then attach them again, i get the docking and the space station, but not the rendez-vous. i assume the ships must become separated by some distance in order to get a rendez vous achievement, but how much? i can't land in jool and sun orbit

if i may give a little hint: you can put some stage separators under those nose cones. this way, they do their job during launch, but you can shed them in orbit. it saves a couple tons of dead weight, which on a mining vehicle means a couple tons extra fuel for every trip. you can even put docking ports on those towers and attach the nose cones to the docking ports.

rockets on eve are a bad idea, but you can put a helicopter-like propeller. in fact, you can make a helicopter quite easily, or just a rover with a propeller pointing backwards for water propulsion (warning: propellers seem to have problems in water. keep it exposed to the air)

I know. i tried those solutions. the problem is, they are still wasteful in fuel. i line up for a perfect jool intercept, and instead of having a 500 km periapsis i find myself with a million-km periapsis. so i have to make a correction for 100--300 m/s, that negates everything i gain. I mean, i could use a cheetah engine instead of a terrier, it's 500 kg heavier, but over twice as powerful, and slightly more efficient. oh, the whole thing would not be a huge deal if i could have just pointed the probes generally towards jool and made a course correction midway. then i could just burn prograde and if the burn is long, i can raise the orbit first. but my probes had little communication capacity, i could control them close to kerbin and i could control them once they got near my main ship, but during the trip, they were out of control. for communication they would have needed at least a HG-55, which is expensive. shaving the costs to the bone and recovering anything that could be recovered i managed to spend 15k to send 8 tons of fuel in jool intercept; adding such a big antenna would have increased cost by 10% at least. so i had to line up a perfect intercept while launching from kerbin. in that launch window, it generally involved burning something like 1900 prograde, 800 antinormal and 500 radial. and you realize that trying to make that kind of careful trajectory while orbiting around a planet is a bit of a lost cause. in fact, in the future i will just join those probes together, put a poodle on the last one (or even a nerv if the thing is big enough) and put a single antenna somewhere. that would allow me to make the midway course correction, so it won't matter that the first burn is inaccurate. i will need to spend the antenna money only once. and i can discard some fuel tanks as they get empty, so it's even more fuel efficient.

i learned a new valuable lesson I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar i made a ship to visit all the outer world. it has good amounts of fuel, but I need to send resupply missions to it every once in a while anyway. still, a resupply mission is much cheaper than a new ship, so it's worth it. I went to duna, landed on duna and ike, grabbed a refueling mission, all fine. i went to dres, and i had enough left that i could go to another destination before refueling. after seeing how much deltaV it would take to go to jool or eeloo, i decided to go to jool; it is cheaper to go there because i can use aerobraking to circularize. so, once i have the jool intercept, i need only 200 m/s to enter a stable orbit, then i can aerobrake until my apoapsis reaches laythe, then i can get to laythe with just some minor course corrections, and on laythe i can aerobrake. before going further, i must stress that i never made any mission in the jool system. i launched several missions to it on my main career, with isru implements and everything, but none has yet arrived. and i put that on hold to run a challenge. so, no actual experience. but i ran a lot of missions to almost everywhere, and can it really be any different that the kerbin-mun-minmus system? I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar anyway, the plan was that after i pay for the 2000 m/s to get a jool intercept from kerbin, i could set up a rendez-vous cheaply. so i sent 3 resupplying probes and a special lander for tylo and laythe (the regular lander has too little thrust for those planets). Since i am in a challenge i must be tight with money, so i only equipped a basic antenna on my probes. they connect to the main ship, and the main ship has the big antennas. i also put small engines on them, which caused no shortage of problems, with burn time exceeding 20 minutes in LKO. No matter how attractive the prospect of saving weight is, I shall not try to make a 2000 m/s burn in LKO with a TWR of 0.1 needless to say, i spent more fuel in course correction manuevers than i gained for saving half a ton on a 20 ton payload. anyway, i launched the 4 missions to jool. then i discovered that they would reach jool before the main ship. i launched the main ship from dres half a year earlier, so i didn't bother to check. but of course it moves slower. and since my probes rely on the main ship for communication, it means those probes would be out of communication all the time, and would be lost. so i had to change the trajectory with the main ship, losing 1000 m/s to arrive before the probes. and i only had 1500 m/s to start with. so, i arrived on jool, and i made the injection burn. i now have 200 m/s left. the first probe arrives. and i realize that since jool system is much bigger than kerbin system, the probes are still out of control most of the times. the biggest surprise came from aerobraking, though. i set a "safe" passage at 180 km, and my ship... disintegrated. heat shields? what? i made this manuever hundreds of time on kerbin without need for heat shields, just stay a bit higher and make a few more passes. well, you don't enter kerbin atmosphere at 9000 m/s. after some trial and error i managed to pass at 193 km, the ship barely survived, and i slowed by an astounding 5 m/s! ok, it will take some time, but it can be done. and surely i can use gravity assist from the various moons to help me. yes, the gravity assist. i found myself on an encounter with tylo. as it is, i will slow down and fall into jool. if i pass on the other side of the planet, i will accelerate and be kicked out of the jool system altogether. i tried to play with small correction manuevers, i even managed to set up a very complicated course where my first tylo intercept would kick me to a second tylo intercept, which will put me on a trajectory to laythe... but still, i have the choice between falling into jool or be kicked out of the system. a capture burn would be 3000 m/s. incidentally, if i were to rocket brake on jool periapsis and get on course to laythe, it would only cost 800 m/s, plus 400 m/s for capture. and then i could truly circularize with aerobraking. hey, i used to have just enough deltaV for it, before i had to hurry up my jool encounter.... and of course, trying to set up a rendez-vous with a probe would be hopeless. they all arrived at different times and resulted in trajectories with different orientations. jool is too big to make manuevers around it conveniently. I shall not assume i can do something just because i can do something similar Moral of the story, i should have made some dummy trials on jool before sending 5 ships to it, the main one with barely any fuel left. i have to reload for a couple dozen hours of gameplay. at this point, i think i'll just restart the challenge and do it better. at least i learned how you navigate the moons and the atmosphere: you don't. you spend those 1200 m/s to get into a laythe orbit, and from there it's all right. the jool system offers some stunning views, though

manually adding some struts to reinforce the structure also may help

as a test, you can try pressing f3 after it explodes, it will generally tel you what exploded first, which is useful to figure out the problem