Mister Dilsby

And here I thought your forum title referred to real life ancient history

Never! I will abuse the 25km physics range to build a ginormous tower. It will have one lander can bolted to the top of the platform and one at the bottom so I can do instantaneous crew transfers and not have to place ten thousand ladder rungs in the VAB.

Eeeenteresting. Honestly my dream for Eve was always to ascend from sea level to ~30km in an ion glider, then shoot a capsule to orbit from there. I went the way I did because I didn't want to develop any more planes on a soon-to-be-obsoleted aero model... and yeah, based on my early experiments with ion gliders I think the fixed lift-drag will help quite a bit for a winged craft. But I hadn't considered the effects of new aero in Eve on a craft without lifting surfaces. I suppose you and Laie are right; having the drag penalty tied to mass instead of area/Cd really does hurt Eve ascenders. I for one hope that the balancing makes Eve Rocks as hard as ever, we can't have all these whippersnappers coming in after the fact and stealing our purple thunder. - - - Updated - - - I've got it! A set of huge-S electric fans that reduce local pressure in a bubble around the ship to 1ATM. In stock, please

Well they could be flights--haven't you ever run a flag over with a rover?

The ultimate compliment, thank you! I think it will survive aero just fine, but the thrust-in-atmosphere correction will put it and all other Eve designs at risk. In the case of the Evorama lander I'd expect the thrust at liftoff of the Kerbodyne KS-25x4 core to be about 12% lower, ~2800 rather than 3200, which would be worse than losing two aerospikes. Unless there are some other changes to thrust and Isp to compensate, this will drive every V1.0 Eve lander to aerospikes--and before we all start making pancakes, remember that the new drag model will likely doom such endeavors to failure. Eve Rocks is going to be a whole new big purple ball game, and I for one am looking forward to the challenge

Outstanding mission, and the most entertaining/informative report I've ever seen. May the grey eyes always shine brightly upon your missions!

In direct answer to the question "why is it so hard", it's because the fuel requirement increases exponentially, not linearly, as you ad dV. Cars are easy, their fuel requirement increases roughly linearly. If your efficiency is 6 liters/100km (~40mpg) and you want to go 200km, you carry 12 liters of fuel. If you want to go 500km, you need 30 liters. If you want to go 10,000 km--well, that's when it starts to go non-linear, as carrying 600 liters around is going to hurt your fuel economy. Up to that point it really doesn't matter, because over the ranges involved in surface transport it does not take many grams of fuel to move around. But fighting gravity, ESPECIALLY Eve's gravity, costs loads of fuel. And it costs fuel to lift fuel. It's easy to build a ship that weighs about 10tons, has enough thrust to lift on Eve, and gets 1000dV. But then you have to add a stage to lift 10t of dead weight for the next 1000dV, and maybe that stage weighs 15 tons. Now you have 25t of dead weight to lift for the next 1000dV, and maybe that next stage weighs 30tons. Etc, etc, etc. You probably know all this, but getting familiar with the math really helps. If you can do logarithms, you can solve dV equations by hand rather than relying on mods like KER. (see http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Advanced_Rocket_Design) As Starhawk and RIC mentioned, the Eve Rocks Challenge Thread is a great place to learn how others made an exponential series converge to a reasonable and finite number. Don't be afraid to steal someone's design ideas (and leave them +rep for it!), it's the ultimate compliment.

Hilarious. I would have repped you for the Latin alone. Hope you make it!

Thank you Perry, what a very nice thing to say! Of course it was easy compared to yours, since I landed at altitude and you went somewhere you could check helmet seals

Yes. To be perfectly clear, the OP's chutes are NOT being "ripped away", it has nothing to do with landing speed in FAR or otherwise. Stock chutes disappear whenever a craft is in contact with the ground. It sounds like the OP is trying to use chutes to slow the ship after it's on the runway, which is a perfectly reasonable idea and would look AWESOME but is just not supported by the game.

If the (lack of) thumbnail problem can't be fixed, we're going to have to think carefully about how many images we put in a single album. Sure, some of this is just editing discipline, but there are cases (for example big challenges like Jool-5) where you have to post a lot of evidence for review. With thumbnails, people who just want to see the ships can look for those and not click through 300 maneuver nodes.

Everyone has to decide this for themselves, but IMO hacking/editing/cheating to fix a problem like this is OK. If you need an in-game justification, say he stacked up enough surface samples to stand and reach the next rung. Then yeah, test your ladders next time For high-grav worlds it's a good idea to hyperedit to surface in sandbox and test there.

Thank you! That's roughly the region I was targeting too, but I ended up at about 5degS 165degW. That site was only about 2000m and not as flat.

Beautiful, have some rep! Can you give the coordinates of that spot please? It's flatter, bigger and higher than any place on Eve I've managed to find yet.

I think that happened when Tedgee fell on his head ...no, seriously, I am using the "Patent Licensing" and "Open-Source Tech" strategies to convert all my science points to funds and reputation since my tech tree is complete. See http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Strategies. What you're actually seeing on the screen is that I got zero science, because 614.7 points were subtracted.

This is exactly why I wanted to go to Eve prior to 1.0. My lander uses mostly aerospikes, but I do carry a Kerbo 25x4 in the core. Post-1.0 and the new aero model, I'll probably explore wing assists for Eve.

Best practice to rendezvous with anything is to reduce relative velocity to zero as you reduce distance to zero. On the navball, you will "push" the retrogade marker towards target heading as you approach, thus reducing velocity and correcting heading at the same time. If approaching at ~1km/s I like to decelerate to ~100m/s within 20km, and steadily decrease until I am closing at ~10m/s with 2km to go and ~1m/s within 100m.

I like! Looks nice and clean. You know, it almost looks like the top section could SSTO, or maybe get close with a bit of help: i.e. launch (vertically) with the turbojets of the two Laythe ships, transition to nuclears and the Rockos on the Tylo lander (they appear to be clear of obstructions and able to thrust) to reach orbit. Then you could do an orbital assembly to the transfer/Jool system maneuver stage, maybe save some mass and cost from the booster section. But certainly, this should work fine as-is.

The 45 degree ladder piece is the way I usually do it, the other way is to angle the extension ladder itself as shown here. Look at the 2nd ladder down, not the one that goes to the capsule but the one that goes to the top of that FL-T100 tank-- a few degrees of tilt was enough to let the Kerbal scramble to the top of the tank. Use the rotational gizmos in the VAB or SPH to rotate ladders and ALWAYS test before you leave Kerbin. Note that this will supposedly be fixed in V1: Kerbals will have the ability to "scramble" over obstacles, hopefully this will include the tops of ladders.

I'm still bathing in the warm purple glow of WIN after returning one Kerbal and two surface samples from Eve to the KSC runway. Respectfully submitted for your consideration, my entry for Level 2 of the Eve Rocks Challenge. Executive Summary Cruiser KSS Wasabi Maru and Evorama lander docked in orbit and were refueled for transfer to Eve. Wasabi Maru was unable to use the main LV-N engine set for the transfer due to an exhaust impingement problem, but successfully towed the lander using auxiliary aerospikes. A drone rover was dropped to the landing zone in the region of 10deg S, 170deg W. This site was chosen via Kerbalmaps for its proximity to ocean, relative flatness, and mean altitude of ~2000m. Evorama landed near the rover, which drove to it autonomously. Tedgee Kerman collected a suface sample at the landing site and drove the rover ~120km in each direction to collect an additional sample from the Explodium Sea. Tedgee piloted the Evorama successfully to orbit and docked with KSS Kerbin Maru for the return home. A Bumblefly medium SSTO met the ships in LKO, took the crew and lander can aboard with all the surface samples, and delivered same to the KSC runway. Parameters Game Version: v0.90. Mods used: EVE, Kerbal Engineer, Alarm Clock Total Weight and Part Count (Kerbin liftoff): 580t and 360 parts not including service missions (see below) Lander @Eve Liftoff: 158t, surface dV 10,700, altitude 1925m Mission Cost: approx. 1.5 million funds (note: KSS Wasabi Maru still in service) Ship Details Two major vessels left Kerbin for Eve: Eveorama Lander: 180t loaded, 199 parts. This ship went to LKO under its own power, single stage. There is some incidental clipping of the Oscar fuel tanks in the upper stage but I think nothing egregious. KSS Wasabi Maru utility cruiser. It lifted mostly empty and refueled in LKO. It carries a surface rover in the cargo bay. ~180t and ~100 parts fully loaded in orbit. Aesthetic clipping only, mainly around the LV-N engine cluster. Refueling of both ships in LKO was accomplished by three drone tanker flights. (not pictured). Each drone cost about 305,000 funds. Two service flights by SSTO cargo planes were also made, one to replace the rover and one to bring the crew and Eve landing capsule back to KSC. Mission Details I've posted these in the Mission Reports forum, but here are the albums in sequence: 1. Ships to LKO and prep for transfer 2. Service missions 3. Interplanetary transfer 4. Surface Ops 5. Ascent, Kerbin return and recovery Finally, a shot of the recovery screen showing the recovered can and its two surface samples. This was something I ALWAYS wanted to do and I couldn't be happier. Special thanks to all the ones who went before and were generous with their advice and help, and to Laie for maintaining this thread. As stated before I am in no hurry to get a badge--I know I've been to Big Purple and lived to post about it.

WHOOOOO!!! We made it! Here's the album showing ascent, Eve orbital rendezvous, Kerbin arrival and landing at KSC. Now over to the Eve Rocks Challenge thread to submit my entry, and I suppose I'll have to update my sig with the Eve Challenge Wreath!

I agree, those aesthetics are worth a little lag. Loving the look of those lights and the openness of the space defined by the struts.

Two landings, some night driving for Tedgee, and this mission is all done except for the hard part. Next up, ascent!

That's a very good practice. Problem for me is I ran out of room on the chart: 1,2,3-jet engine sets (I fly a lot of big multiengine spaceplanes and shut off groups to conserve air at high altitude w/o throttling) 4-air intakes 5-main rockets 6-auxiliary rockets 7,8,9,0--everything else