Lyra

Part 3: Taking on Tylo Tiny correction burn on our way to Jool's largest moon. Circularization to low Tylo orbit was split into three parts, each about 200-300 m/s. This here is the initial capture burn. The six nuclear engines fire up for the second periapsis burn as Jool vanishes behind the limb of the massive moon. Just before the last burn, circularizing the mothership into a 30 km Tylo orbit. Now in a nice low orbit, Bill Kerman jets his way over to the two-stage lander - nicknamed "Teeny Tiny Tylo 5" - and decouples from the mothership. The lander's lower stage will both land and provide the first ~600 or so dV for ascent, and the upper stage will be reused for the Vall landing. The descent to Tylo's surface. Holding retrograde, Teeny Tiny Tylo 5 burns off its speed until it's going about 400-500 m/s, then cuts off its engines til about 7500 m above the ground, where it fires them again for landing. Second flag planted! I didn't get a screenshot of the stage separation in time, as the timing of the ascent and separation is quite precise, but here's the top stage/future Vall lander on its way to orbit again. Got a really good approach almost right away - this whole mission had some of the smoothest dockings I've ever had. The lander is stuck on the side of the ship like a barnacle, ready for the inter-moon journey after some refueling. An 800 m/s burn takes us to the edge of Tylo's SOI. The transfer window for Tylo to Vall means that you can only encounter the latter after just barely escaping the former, and careful planning is required to make sure one doesn't completely overshoot Vall. I did a short burn right after the last screenshot to finally escape. Tomorrow will be the last of the three inner moons, and also the one I'm most familiar with - Vall. See you then

Delta IV Scout, Soldier, Demo, Pyro, Spy, Sniper, Engineer, Medic, and Sandvich

Part 2: Laythe Landing Planning an encounter with Laythe was fairly easy. I initially wanted to do a flyby first, but the game didn't want to display encounters correctly after that, so I loaded up a quicksave from just after when I captured into Jool's SOI and planned a regular encounter. The capture burn is relatively short. In total, circularization cost about 700 dV. Plane change to a more equatorial orbit. Val's view out the command pod window. She'll get to see it up close soon in that spaceplane! The final circularization burn, about halfway done. The main ship will remain in a 61 km orbit while Val and the spaceplane visit Laythe's surface. Undocked and ready to enter Laythe's atmosphere. Periapsis is about 45 km. I ended up skipping off the atmosphere at one point, which wasn't too fun. Land coming up on the horizon - it's the island that I tried to aim for. I've landed on that island many times, and it has a nice flat beach on the south end for craft to land on. Will my speed drop in time for me to land on it? Nope. Flying right past it. Ah well, there's still plenty of land ahead. We're in the thicker atmosphere and aiming for the flatter parts of that crater rim. Hopefully I can make it... Gliding above the mountains. At this point I quicksaved in case I crash-landed. Gear down! I did in fact end up crashing. A lot. About 15 times, actually. Easily the most infuriating part of the whole mission. I was so focused on landing that I didn't take any more screenshots until I had touched down safely... ...which we can now see here. The now-used parachutes on the back helped a LOT. First flag planted! Now for ascent; it's not shown but I timewarped to a point where the main ship was just behind the plane. We're actually facing westward, so once the plane is in the air I'll have to do a quick turn to get us on track. Flung myself off a hill with not quite enough lift to get airborne yet. This little maneuver helped avoid ANOTHER crash into Laythe's mountainsides. Turn complete. It's a fairly normal ascent from here. And just like that, we're back in low Laythe orbit. Got a near-perfect encounter for docking, and with over 500 m/s in the tank it should be easy to dock. I used the patented Lowne Lazy Method™ of docking for the spaceplane - almost no RCS needed. We're docked! The remaining liquid fuel will be transferred to the main ship, while the dead weight of the oxidizer will stay in the plane when it's ditched to save on mass. Goodbye, spaceplane. You served us well... Now it's time for our escape burn to Tylo, leaving the ocean moon behind. Goodbye Laythe! Tomorrow I'll post the Tylo landing - surprisingly much easier than Laythe. See you then

Honestly when am I not tired? TUBM has a bunch of cardboard tubes in their room

Redstone rocket, but in the Minecraft sense

Soyuz with 36 boosters and 6 wings that says "BE NOT AFRAID"

Thank you! I'll definitely do that for my next mission. I already had the other settings on, thankfully

Hello everyone! I recently flew a Jool 5 mission that, as the title says, was done in one launch. Here's how it went. I'll be uploading the report in seven parts, with (hopefully) one per day, for each leg of the mission: from Kerbin to Jool (this one), one for each moon, and return to Kerbin. Part 1: Launch! We begin on the pad with this massive rocket - nicknamed the "Colossus" - that appears to be almost half fairing. I don't have either DLC, so Mammoth spam (Spammoth?) it is. The two boosters, connected to the core via fuel pipes, will get the rocket off the pad before separating and letting the core carry it to a suborbital trajectory. There's also an extra Vector that's been attached to the bottom of the core stage, because the TWR was far too low with only the Mammoth. All systems are nominal, staging triple-checked, and Val, Bill, and Bob are all on board. We are clear to launch. Liftoff! A fairly standard gravity turn. Booster separation! The core stage will carry us to a roughly 100km altitude. The core stage is empty now and the Rhino will take us to orbit and beyond. Our apoapsis is just above 100 km. Fairing deployed and the interplanetary craft is revealed! It has a small SSTO for Laythe, a two-stage Tylo lander that will refuel for Vall, and an ion lander for the two outer moons. A 350 m/s circularization burn puts us into LKO. Launch happened at a Jool transfer window, so we're able to plan our Kerbin escape burn immediately. Two staging events will happen during this burn - the Rhino engine and the lower liquid fuel tank will both be dropped. And here are those staging events now. Goodbye Kerbin! The crew plans a correction burn and Tylo gravity assist in deep space. We want our periapsis to be nice and close to Laythe's orbit, and the apoapsis not too far out. As you can see, this required a close scrape with Tylo. (the second maneuver there is only because KSP doesn't like to show my trajectory beyond Tylo's SOI when plotting an assist from Kerbin or interplanetary space unless I put a maneuver node in Tylo's SOI. I deleted it right after the correction burn.) Hello Jool! And hello Tylo, too! The aforementioned close scrape of Tylo. The crew will be getting much closer soon with that lander in the back, but for now the moon has done its job. Val, Bill, and Bob are safely captured around Jool. And with that, the crew is in a stable orbit around the green giant. This is all for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with what was arguably the most annoying part of the whole mission: the Laythe landing.

Soyuz with 6-way symmetry

Delta V, the fifth rocket of the Delta family. It can go anywhere.

Because nobody knows how he looks these days Where do you start your gravity turn?

Take a bite, if your teeth are still intact it's probably the fruit How do you ascend from Tylo?

Granted. The CSS programming language vanishes forever and all webpages look horrendous for years. I wish for a glass of lemonade

Banned for having "darth" in your display name. The Jedi Order must remain safe.

SLS, but the RS-25s are replaced with Minecraft flying machines

Perfected my single-stage Tylo lander, now with power generation and an orbital dV that I'm comfortable with - somewhere around 440 m/s, more than enough for docking. I saved a bunch of weight by removing the landing legs - makes touchdown a little riskier, but it's worth the savings. Also, I didn't quite do this today, but earlier this week I decided to push the limits of ion craft and make an ion Mun lander powered by fuel cells. Here it is touching down, and later being used as an "ablative heat shield" that surprisingly didn't "ablate" at all during reentry and allowed the pilot to safely parachute away once I had slowed down. That's actually the farthest those overheat bars ever got. I fired the engines all the way through descent because they were still producing a decent amount of deceleration, down to about 5 km. The ultimate goal is a Vall lander, to further optimize my Jool 5 plan so I only have to capture at Laythe and Tylo. Could potentially be optimized even more by modifying my all-liquid SSTO from a week or so ago to transfer to Laythe on its own and come back.

When you dream about a Tylo lander, recreate it when you wake up, and realize it works

Banned for using the word "ban" more than twice in a sentence

Over-engineering is better than under-engineering. That extra ton of fuel will save you someday. Test every part of a complex mission or craft. All but the simplest things must be tested. Especially landers. Make sure your landing gear works properly. Quicksave regularly.

Tried my hand at single-stage Tylo landers (almost all failures), then got bored and made an SSTO that gets about 2800 dV in LKO. I did end up making a successful single-stage Tylo lander as well, but it has no way to generate power other than its alternator and its dV after re-orbiting is a bit tight for me to be comfortable, so it's redesign time tomorrow. Also wrote the start of a terrible Python program to make fuel cell calculations a bit easier since there's no good calculator online. I might post the code for it somewhere if I ever get it finished.

Finished my single-launch Jool 5 mission I posted a couple of days ago, and made this plane to celebrate:

Launched my single-launch Jool 5 mission! It's my second attempt at the challenge (the first was scrubbed due to poor planning and lack of fuel) and this time I think I'll make it. Here it is just before LKO insertion.

Made this all-liquid SSTO a few days ago, it only just barely made it to LKO with the low thrust of the nuclear engine. It does have something like 2200 dV after it gets up though, so that's certainly something

Finalized some craft details for my upcoming Jool 5 mission in a single launch, and made a neat logo/flag for it in Powerpoint of all things:

Thank you for the answer, guess I'll move them to the exterior somewhere. They were on my "mothership" which is a huge ugly mess of nukes and has loads of free space, so it's fairly inconsequential.