Mister Dilsby

Right. A closer approximation I've considered is to look at the chart of dV FROM various altitudes to orbit, and assume it works in reverse direction. The table (on the Eve wiki page) says that the dV required from sea level is 11282, and the dV required from 5000m is 8888. So one could assume that it costs 2394 m/s to get from sea level to 5000m... I dunno.

After unsucceeding with a few 150t Eve return landers I am trying to go the other way: an ultralight ion-powered ship. No, this is not an SSTO attempt, I know that's impossible! But I am pretty sure that I can use the ion engines to bring the final stage (rocket-powered lawn chair) high enough to carry Jeb the rest of the way. However I do not want to try to fly on xenon and sunlight alone all the way from sea level to 32km; I would like to punch through the mashed potato lower atmosphere with a liquid-fueled booster section, and start ion power a few km up. So here's the question at last: has anyone worked out the delta V required to get to certain altitude? That is, if it takes 12000 dV to get from sea level to orbit, how high will each 1000 dV bring me? If I know that, I can design the booster to lift the ion plane that far. If folks are interested I'll post progress of the ion ship. This would be a three-stage to orbit concept. (booster, ion plane, rocket lawn chair) Thank you!

Creature, that is a fantastic idea. Maybe I can rig some kind of retro/chute combination that kills landing speed enough... If not VTOL, then HTO/SL.

Wait, did you say THIRTY TON spaceplane? KSC: "Buzz, you're coming in a little hot." BUZZ: "I can hold it." KSC: "You're at 270 m/s and you're heading into a hill. Abort landing." BUZZ: "Negative, Control, I got this. Speed is now 170. Gear down." KSC: "Buzz, mission parameter is 50 m/s or no go on landing. Abort." BUZZ: "What? No one told me that." Jeb: "I wrote a note, it's taped over your navball." Buzz: "Oh, I have a navball?" (rips off note) HOLY KUZZBOT! I'm gonna die!" KSC: "Abort! Abort!" Jeb: "Get the science!" Buzz: "I got your kuzzing science right here! ABORT, ABORT! FULL THROTTLE UP!" ...As luck would have it, Jeb and the boost stage were nearly directly overhead when Buzz pulled up, and only 20km away when he stabilized orbit. Docked successfully; there may be enough fuel left for another low-altitude pass to get the rest of the science, and return home. But no way is this ship landing on the surface. Too heavy, not enough lift for a horizontal landing. Back to the VAB to design a proper lander, or spaceplane that can tail-sit.

Docking and Duna intercept successful! But Jeb did not drive the straightest curved line to get there and we may have a fuel situation. Buzz will have to use as little fuel as possible to glide to landing and return to low Duna orbit. Contingency plan is to abandon the 30 ton spaceplane and come back to LKO with the boost trailer.

Nice, I like how the rover is suspended between your descent stage tanks. Sort of a poor Kerbal's skycrane

...but no time for improvements now, 'cause the boost section is in matching orbit on schedule, and Dunaglide K3 is on final approach to dock!

Thanks! I did consider that, but then of course I would have had to add some more airbreathing engines for the ascent through Kerbin atmosphere. (if I wanted to keep the SSTO,SO plan) Takeoff weight is about 30 tons, and I found I ran out of runway too soon on just the single turbojet. If I could have (easily) staged turbojets over aerospikes I probably would have done exactly that, as I did in the center mount. Hard to see from the photos, but what I did was put a decoupler over the docking port with the FL-100 tank and a turbojet, and tied the FL-100 to the main centerline tank with hoses. ETA: Now that I think on it some more, yeah I could have put better rocket engines than RAPIERS on it, and still had enough turbojet to orbit, 3-4 different ways. Maybe next time--but hey, this way I'll be able to a long powered descent after Kerbin re-entry and will have a better chance of hitting a good landing spot.

Nice reports! So is Jeb perma-dead, or will he reappear on the roster in a few missions, like in the vanilla game? If so, looking forward to the press release explaining how the heck he fell 67km and lived.

Yep, that's about par for KSP, where 15% of EVA losses are due to kerbonauts opening their helmets to get at tools! BUT... Buzz was able to get to finally corral his ship, get it back to the runway, remember which end to point to space, and reach a nice high circular orbit to wait for the interplanetary stage! Here he is dropping the wing-mounted jet fuel tanks. The center turbojet also comes off, to expose the docking port.

...Oh. We'll, this isn't going to inspire confidence in my ability to get to Duna, is it?

So I'm planning a Duna mission with a spaceplane. Idea is to get the SSTOSO plane up in LKO (that's 'Single Stage to Orbit, Sort Of' because I use drop tanks and also eject one turbojet after it flames out) , then dock with with the transdunar stage. First order of business was to roll the plane over next to the launch pad for a group photo before launching the two ships. That's spaceplane pilot Buzz Kerman standing between them: This is where Buzz realized he hadn't set the parking brake in the unmanned plane. (Also, that it does not have a parking brake.) It started to roll--down one launchpad berm, up another, back and forth as Buzz frantically chased after it. I don't have pictures of this, as (1) I was jamming WASD and the view controls to try to intercept the ladder, and (2) I was laughing too hard. A couple of times the ship passed right over him, narrowly missing his head with the drop tanks and ram intakes. Finally Buzz thought to wait halfway up a berm and managed to grab the ladder when it came by. I think when (if?) this ship is on the ground at Duna, I'll retract the nosegear just in case.

Whoops! It's all fixed. Trouble was I installed with an upper-level folder that did not need to be there. I re-ordered the folders and it all works now. And now, back to space. Really appreciate Starwaster pointing me to the right files to examine, and being willing to look through them for me.

Thanks so much for looking into this, Starwaster. I can't go to dropbox or pastebin from where I am right now, but will do so later. This may be the relevant part of my output_log: Also, on looking into the part cfg files, I see that the 2.5m heatshield is by a different programmer (nhnifong) than the others (bobcat) and was done in a different style. Will post the rest of the output and msg you when it's done--again, thanks for the help!

Installed a couple of days ago and loving it. But the 2.5m heat shield seems to be missing from my install. It doesn't appear in the tech tree or the VAB, not even on sandbox. I looked in GameData and found that the deadlyReentry_2.5Heatshield folder contains a model.mu, a model000.mbm and a part.cfg, but not the model000.png and model001.png files that the other 3 heatshield part folders seem to have. I downloaded a fresh .zip file and no dice. Any ideas? Thanks all!