OJT

Here's my entry with a relatively simple design 2 RAPIERs and one NERVA engine. It has a probe core so it can be flown autonomously. Fuel tanks aren't filled up completely so you can balance the weight around if needed. And it also has a cargo bay, which is somewhat small but sizeable enough to fit, for example, this Minmus lander Next set of pictures show the craft getting to orbit, deploying the payload and returning back to KSC autonomously, while the pilot in the lander continues all the way to Minmus and lands here. Pilot also returned back to Kerbin in the same lander successfully, but I forgot to take pictures Here's the craft file if anyone is interested

Hello there Been playing the game for about 280 hours on Steam and enjoying every second of it. I advanced quite far in my Career save and explored big part of the Kerbol System. Then I saw the Jool 5 thread and decided to attempt it myself. I will be attempting both Level 3 (land one unique Kerbal per each moon) and Jebediah's Level (collect as much science) challenges for my Jool 5 attempt. Game difficulty is Normal Part 0: Prep Work We gonna start... with unmanned mission first. Thing is, Jool is pretty much the only planet that I didn't research extensively and except for couple of relays and (partially successful) Laythe drone landing I haven't done much around there. Doing unmanned mission first will give me a good training on maneuvering inside the Joolian System and it is also a good opportunity to establish a satellite network (KerbNet can be useful to determine landing spots and various biomes). Also, I will launch satellites with Resource Scanners to determine good landing spots for ISRU mining Here's the satellite stack: 16 big dish relays, 4 per each inner moon and 2 per each outer moon. 4 resource scanners, 1 per inner moon and the 4th one will first scan Bop and then travel to Pol Here's the launch vehicle. I sadly don't have Making History DLC, so the fairing had to be somewhat oversized to fit everything in Launch to LKO was trivial (as trivial as you can get with a rocket of that size) After trans-joolian insertion burn and over a ingame year of travel time the carrier reaches Joolian System I inserted the carrier into elliptical Jool orbit that intersected Vall's orbit and deployed the first batch of satellites Every satellite is based on MTM Stage with 4 ion engines and 2 RTGs. The satellites have full targeting capability, lots of xenon gas and enough TWR to not make the burns too slow. However battery charge turned out to be, let's say, lower than I needed, but I didn't know it at the time and this will come back later First on the list was Vall. And there came up the first problem: apparently RTGs don't replenish the charge of the craft when it is not in the focus. Because of that, after making my Vall insertion burns and reaching the moon, half of my satellites were lower on charge than I needed them to be (and we all know how power-hungry ion engines are). I persevered, however, and managed to place all satellites into orbits around Vall Next one was Tylo. Armed with newfound knowledge about RTGs, I stayed with each satellite after Tylo insertion burn to let it replenish the charge and this time I placed all satellites without any problems Laythe was by far the one that took longest. First, due to poor planning the encounter speed of my satellites was too high, which required very long circularization burns. Second, even though MTM Stage packs 4000 electric charge in it, it only has enough charge to fire the ion engines continuously for 2 minutes. Third, because you can only control one ship at the time (duh) and I needed to do very long burns on 5 satellites, I only managed to successfully circularize one. Due to that, I had to improvise gravity assists on the fly (although I know the basics of it, I've never done any in game), but I somehow managed it: couple of orbits around Jool, 3 correction burns and two Tylo assists later my satellites encountered Laythe with more sensible speeds and I easily placed them into orbits. Took way longer than it should've, but at least I grabbed some nice snaps After the Laythe shenanigans, reaching Bop and Pol was a piece of cake. The practice with gravity assists also helped: I used Tylo again to slingshot my sats to required paths. It didn't go completely without any screwups though: when I was focusing on something else one of the Bop relays disappeared without any trace. It wasn't on orbit that would intersect other moons' SOIs, it even had an alarm set for a correction burn, but it simply vanished. I still have no idea what could've happened to it. A sacrifice to Kraken I guess lol Bop pics After the Resource ScanSat scanned Bop, it went to Pol and scanned it aswell And this concludes the prequel to my Jool 5 attempt: a satellite network established, resources of all moons scanned, valuable lessons about orbital mechanics learned. Stay tuned for next part lads