r_rolo1

Looks nice Without seeing the .craft file ... a) Do you really need the nuke engine? As far as I can deduce from the pics, the aerospikes do most of the work on the landing stage up to ev and the nuke engine only works solo in the return. Eye-balling the issue the nuke engine alone weights almost a third of the return ship even when the tanks are full so it wouldn't have been more economical to use a LV-909 ? Using chutes could had helped with the Eve landing fuel wise? Again eye-balling things but 6 small chutes could probably make you to not use any fuel at all to land ...

Yup, those are the whole rockets Note that this are for 1 way travels and only for celestial bodies with a atmosphere, 2 things that reduces the dV requirements to the scale of a Mun landing and back rocket even for a Laythe trip ( Eve and Duna require even less ). They require some precise manouvering ( especially the IX version ), so automation is advised atleast in the ascent ( that is by far the trickiest part ), but even good human piloting could work with this ( just see the video from Scott Manley I linked in post #1 for a similar fuel budget in a human hand ) Feel free to What gripes me more about this is the fact that you can't put anything below a aerospike, a thing that makes designing a delivery rocket below a bigger challenge

Ok, after some extra development, I present you Afrodite VIII: and Afrodite IX: As you can see, significant decreases in the fuel budget were made but both ships are able to get to Laythe and land there. In fact I made a double mission to Laythe with both ships: First of all I forgot to take pics until the interplanetary burn of the first ship... Anyway, after the Afrodite IX burn it made a very close flyby of the Mun: It was not planned ( basically the Mun SoI got in the way ), but it meant that the two ships, with only 8h of difference in launch, got to Jool with almost 40 days of interval ( Afrodite VIII got a far less close flyby ). I would had preferred that the Mun had not gotten in the way TBH. Afrodite VIII orbit after burn and fuel in stock Afrodite IX orbit after plane correction and minor adjustments. Laythe encounters are relatively easy to get, fortunately. Orbit after entering Jool SoI and after corrections. Almost 48 L of fuel left, that is perfectly enough if the aerobraking is done well. Details after entering Laythe SoI. A minor burn to reduce Pe made for a 7.1g aerobrake and a almost polar orbit with a decent 2g landing: Using mechjeb landing autopilot to deduce where in Laythe the predicted landing spot is in preparation for corrections for a landing on dry ground ... and with so little fuel we can't let mechjeb to do the manouver ( it tends to burn idiotically to change planes ). I ended correcting a little to land in the island to the left of the landing spot in the pic. Parachuting in ... Bill postcard with Jool in the backround and fuel left. Meanwhile Afrodite VIII was still going ... btw I got a very infuriating ... er, feature of the game that decided to recalculate the orbit of the ship when I got to +/- 7 days before getting to Jool SoI making it 29 days to Jool (!) and wasting my Laythe encounter. Attempts to correct it were sucessful ... until 12h later when it got to the same 22 days of difference ( note, all of this while still supposedly "on rails" orbit. I even tried to warp while focused in other ship but the result was the same ). So I ended passing the last 7 days of the Jool approach trying to correct this issue and ended spending almost 20 L of fuel in this feature. I'll post a bug report later ... Anyway, here is my hardly maintained Laythe encounter when I finally entered Jool SoI and escaped those crazy orbit recalcs: Because Jeb was already tired of being in the ship ( and because I was pretty frustrated with losing half a hour making corrections to workaround a bug ) and because he wanted to show he was more of a bad@ss than Bill, he wasted a perfectly fine Laythe equatorial approach ( the best one I got so far ) in a 19 g reentry in Laythe ( to that island in the center of the screen ): A final 2001-style pic before entering Laythe atm. Jeb is ecstatic about the prospect of doing a 19 g reentry , as you can see Parachuting in ... And postcard, with Jeb all smiles of showing Bill how it's done. The ship had a little more than 50 l of fuel left ... I am certain that in normal non-buggy conditions it would end with more than 60 l And the two ships in orbital view. Bill and Jeb will have to swim a lot to get to each other :/ As you can see the sacrifice of the safety decoupler alone allowed for saving almost a small tank of fuel ( note that the two ships have not the same fuel budget ). I think it is possible to shave a little more of fuel, but the margin of manouver is already quite slim on Afrodite IX and most likely I'll not risk it much more Saves below. Like the Afrodite IV and V, both links have zip files with both a stock and a mechjeb +protractor modded version ( the one I actually used in both cases ) Afrodite VIII Afrodite IX To be honest I think that Afrodite VIII is a pretty decent return stage for a Laythe trip. Just have to find a way of putting a rocket below ... :/

Or maybe Daisy

It depends of if Jool has oxygen or not ( aka do jet engines work in Jool? ). If not, most likely a high content in chlorine . if it has oxygen ... well things are more complicated :/

More, that crater is on the Jool side of Laythe ( Laythe is tidally locked with Jool ). My theory is that something very massive and dense hit Laythe and that a substantial chunk of it is still there below surface....

See my Afrodite IV. It definitely achieves the title of distinction 4 ... and possibly 5 @ infatuatedPP You could had done more if you had less tanks in the central stage ( empty tanks still weight )

Say, using Mk1 fuselages as floating devices, like in here .

Hum, etchasketch imgur album got me thinking ... maybe a water landing plane could work a landing? That , if possible , would be the best idea given how hard is to find flat land in Laythe and with so much water :/

Well, I do like 0.17 ( except the accursed CTD when entering the tracking station *mad* ), but I have to agree that going to planets with the tools we have in game can be quite a bunch of work. A good solution to that would be ,besides adding in game protractors of some kind, to have a, let's say a 4-5 Gm sphere around every planet and a in game tool that warned you that you were close of a planet SoI when you were in a orbit that took you inside of it ( besides Jool, the SoI of the other planets are quite small ) and a actual orbital planner with a open windows to X display option. For better or worse, we already left the " eyeball Mun in the horizon and thrust" phase with this patch :/ and the game tools should reflect that.

In fact that doesn't look like a huge crater , RL Mimas or Miranda style ?

@ Wayfare Asparagus is inherently unstable because of the strut forces of the fuel lines and the non-radial display of them in there, but that normally can be circumvented by strutting and more control ( even putting some extra SAS can help ). I've done some rockets of that size with asparagus and it can definitely be done. IMHO the real issue in most cases ( not here though ) is the lack of strutting in the bottom: pylons and decouplers are inherently more flexible than what you want in here and they will make the engines to wobble slightly out of the vertical. This will get worse as the rocket loses mass, but it can be solved by extra strutting in the lower parts to the center part and even between tanks in the same stage ... dirty but effective. @ Analogy: I agree with the poster in the last page that says that putting 5 tanks in top of all the big LV is wasteful. I will not say that you don't need that fuel, but if you want to take it you would be better doing drop tanks in the side ( say 2 drop tanks in the side and 3 in the LV proper ). Empty big tanks still weight 2t ( thus less mass for you to accelerate if you drop them soon ) and, more important, makes your rocket shorter and far less susceptible to bending stress failures. BTW that is what you have here: a bending stress failure on the lower side rocket ( the more susceptible to that in your ship when it starts get horizontal ) as soon as the angle of the ship with the horizon reaches a certain level and the center of mass gets low enough while still having that huge mass in the top. The only solution for that are assuring that the center of mass is higher relative to the rocket length ( by reducing the top load and/or making the rocket shorter ), increase the structural strength of the faulty areas ( more strutting and/or reducing the length of the side rockets ) or simply start turning later, when the Kerbin g-force is lower ( I know, it is inefficient fuel wise ... ) P.S Other thing you can do is to put some thrusting in the top part of the rocket at launch, thus increasing the center of thrust and reducing the bending and compression stress due to gravity in the gravity turn phase. You have a lot of open space in between the side rockets and the central stage, so you could in theory fire your nuke engines at launch while draining the outer tanks ( you already have the fuel line work done and all ). I say in theory because nuke engines can gimbal and that might end making that the exhaust hits something, but I've done it a lot with aerospikes in the .16 times due to the weak decoupler issues. In your particular case you would also need to rotate the engines in top to ensure that you don't hit the side rockets

Eve purple can't be iodine Iodine in a oxygen rich environment gives oxo-iodine compounds that are normally brownish ( and we know that Eve has oxygen in the atmosphere because jet engines work there ). I would bet more in a organic compound ...

They work on Laythe ( up to 6 km ) for sure and I heard contradictory statements about them in Eve ( but even if they work there, the high atmospheric pressure will choke them ).

Well, I am pretty sure that both could go with one less fuel tank atleast for Duna and maybe Eve ( I got to Laythe with a pretty low fuel budget ) , but asparagus does not like even numbers ( 1+7 ) :/ Well I could do 1 + ( 1 + 6 ) ... let me try

Well I would like to submit Afrodite IV and Afrodite V from this thread that I dedicated to my 1-way trip ships to celestial bodies with atmosphere as a step for making eventually Laythe and Eve returning ships . As segaprophet above, I delivered a stock version and a modded one ( in my case MechJeb + Protractor ). Just not sure if they will end in the Interplanetary Craft or in the Minimalist Designs

Ok, after some days without playing KSP , even with the new version bells and whistles , I decided to go back to the issue of doing a Eve-going ship ( yeah, I know that there was already someone that gone there and back ... ) ... but I was sidetracked by the more basic problem of making compact and lightweight 1-way interplanetary ships ( by the fact that you need one of those as the return vessel to Kerbin ). I actually had some designs from the .16 time ( I have a unmanned Evenera series to be posted someday that was the basis of this one ), but what really pushed me on this was where he got to Kerbin orbit with enough fuel for a interplanetary burn with a 1m capsule , a big tank ( they call it Rockomat or something in this days ... ) and a aerospike. OFC that if you don't want to end the mission by breaking the ship like he did, you need to add some more things, but the amount of fuel needed became a benchmark for my testings. And I obviously started by testing for reaching celestial bodies with a surface and a decent atmosphere ( because Kerbin is one of those ): Eve, Duna and Laythe...So without further delay, I present you the Afrodite series ( I know for you English speaking people, it is Aphrodite, but in my native language we use a f ), starting with Afrodite IV ( the previous 3 were test versions that were far inferior to this two ): It actually has 12.5% more fuel than Manley minimal rocket but also has more weight due to the things you need for a lander and some you don't ( like the decoupler for emergency use if the rocket gets out of fuel ), so it is a fair trade IMHO ( BTW I tried a version with 1 + 6 fuel tanks ( that is 87.5% fuel of the Manley rocket ) but it came short of my Munar test ( that is: if your ship can land on the Mun and come back to Kerbin it has the dV for a 1-way trip to any place in the Kerbin system so far ... if you don't expect that the rocket fully powers the braking when you get there ) so I scrapped it ). The 8 lateral tanks feed on the central one in asparagus fashion . The ship can get quite unbalanced when you drop empty tanks ( it gets the occasional collision if you're flying manually ) so I would not recommend to use this ship without mechanical help unless you are a good pilot ( I am not that good ). Anyway I sent Bob to do a Eve mission after the Munar and Minmus tests on this ( Jeb and Bill were already testing the Afrodite V ), and after a quite bumpy trip with 5(!) aerobrakes in Eve atmosphere and a lot of unneeded corrections, Bob sent a postcard of the sunset in Eve: ( btw, as you can see, I'm using mechjeb and the protractor mods. Mechjeb because, like I said, the ship can get problematic in the ascent and the protractor not because of the angles ( I can get those from the math or, if I'm lazy, from the web-based calculator ) but because it gives the distance for the closest approach of the orbit you are in to the planets ... and that is invaluable intel for the inevitable corrections for getting to the SoI of anything that isn't Jool ). In spite of successful, the Afrodite IV showed some flaws. The powerful aerospike engine made the slight corrections that were needed to get to Eve SoI difficult to control leading to a lot of wasted fuel and the aerospike mass was a very significant part of the interplanetary stage total mass. Taking that in account, the Afrodite V was developed: P.S By some reason the VAB pics have the parachute in top barely visible. The ships in the saves have it, don't worry It is basically a Afrodite IV with the central engine replaced by one LV-909 for the interplanetary stage, keeping the aerospike for the ascent stage. It has a even lower TWR than Afrodite IV ( that already has a dismal count of less than 1.2 ) and it gets a little less fuel to LKO, but the lighter engine makes up for that. As Bob was already going to Eve, I sent Jeb to Jool ( for a Laythe landing ) and Bill for Duna ( P.S Actually Jeb went out first Bill the second, and Bob the third, given that the devs were cool enough to make that you can do a Duna 1-way mission and then a Eve 1-way mission in the time you take to get a ship to Jool if you launch in the first window possible ( between day 45 and 50 (?) with a gap in between because the Mun and Minmus get in the way ) ). Both sent some postcards of the sunset there: The Duna mission was the least dramatic of them all: one aerobrake and a smooth landing ( Bill will tell otherwise, since he only stopped freaking out after he got in EVA ). I even got the ship up to a Martian low orbit ( 51*51 km ) after that with the ship having 37 L of fuel left. The Laythe one ... well I accidentally got of a Laythe encounter while still in the orbital plane corrections, so I called it a go. Only when I got close enough of Jool, I noticed that the encounter was after the ship passed 15 million Km above the Jool south pole and in a grazing passage in the inside side of the Laythe SoI ( hence it was expected to have 5+ Km/s when entering Laythe atmosphere ). After two very dramatic aerobrakings ( both around 8 g ) I finally got in a decent descent to a small island in the southern hemisphere. And obviously Jeb was all smiles in between all of this To end, things to solve: - Neither of this ships would get out of Eve The TWR in Eve would be less than 1, not counting with the extra atmosphere to drag out ... . It probably would not have the power to get out of Moho and return to Kerbin even if the engines would not melt down ... - Most likely neither of this ships can land on Moho or any of the massive Jool moons that have no atmosphere if you launch it from Kerbin. Like I said before, both of this ships have the dV requirements to get to the orbits of all of the bodies above in a good day, but : a) Moho inclination requires a good bunch of extra dV to compensate and in the tests I made, the fuel left after the interplanetary burn was not enough to correct it ( technically you could always wait for a encounter when the Kerbin and the Moho orbital planes cross, but I didn't had the patience to way for that ), the fuel budget for those bodies is not enough for a powered descent ( well, it might be enough for the Jool moons if you aerobrake in Jool and have the luck of getting a encounter right there, but it will be a tight one most surely ). Bop could work, though ... and Gilly as well, if you could actually land there The final fuel budget in the Duna mission also points to the feasibility of a Ike landing after a well timed aerobrake in Duna. - You can't put anything below a aerospike. To whoever in Squad designs parts ( most likely C7 or Nova nowadays ) for when a aerospike with a casing that allows to attach stuff below, like the other engines ( or, if you want to go basic, for when a aerospike that actually attacks to the other parts without crazy tricks ? ) ? I've seen some motors with casings in the modded parts somewhere, so why not ? Anyway,, this complicates a lot the job of putting a decently performing rocket below any of this ships :/ - Unfortunately you can't just scale up for the 3m capsule. For starters, unlike the 1m tanks you can't put 8 3m tanks around a single one even the lengthiest of the decouplers we have in stock ( the ones from the planes parts ) ... then there is no 3m aerospike ( aerospikes are the more efficient takeoff rocket engine, far surpassing any of the LVs by weight unit ) and the weight ratio between the tanks and the capsule is different for 3m than it is for 1m ... Will need some extra work, definitely Anyway, this is getting too lengthy ... Here are the files, neatly packaged in zip files. Both contain the stock version and the Mechjeb + protractor version I actually used for those pics : Afrodite IV Afrodite V Hopefully I'll make some more of this series I definitely want to make a 3m counterpart of the Afrodite V atleast ... EDIT: Subsequent developments gave us Afrodite VIII and IX. You can find them some posts below

As you didn't excluded RCS ( RCS is not fuel ), it will not take long for someone to post a capsule with a RCS tank and a bunch of RCS linear nozzles

The typical terminal speed of a ship in Kerbin is usually around 130-150 m/s at sea level ( depending mostly of how much fuel you have... by comparison a empty fuel tank has a terminal speed of +/- 107 m/s at Kerbin sea level ( a lot of Kerbals died for science to get this data ) ). So you pretty much only need to have around 150-160 dV in store, nerves of steel for a suicidal burn and a no lag at Kerbin surface computer to do it. Even a 1m capsule + one 1m RCS tank + enough linear RCS will work ( been there , done that --- you will need a surface to put the linear RCS, though. I used a empty small fuel tank )

Good to have you here Makes easier to discuss things I do think that your ascent stage could do with some rework, and not only on the fuel line configuration. You have two sets of the larger LVs and you have only one working at any time ... this means that , if you mounted the 1st liquid stage tanks laterally without the engines and let the 2nd liquid stage to use that fuel, you could save a good bunch of tons in engines. And with some creativity, extra fuel lines and tank repositioning, you could use the aerospikes of the lander stage as well since t0 until the activation of the nuke ones ( increasing the initial TWR quite a bunch ). Neither of this alterations would make the ship more fly-able without mechanical help , but I'm pretty sure that they would increase seriously the fuel efficiency of the rocket as a whole.

Well I do not care much for the "1st to" thing, I just want to do it the more efficient way And that includes the " less CPU meltdowns" part being myself playing in a 4 yrs laptop with some really low Hz Core Duo ( to the point I'm actually considering to start playing in my 10 yrs mono core desktop ( because KSP so far is mono core and as it was one of the last mono cores to get out, it should supplant my crappy laptop with ease in theory ) ). I gave a look to the reddit guy craft file and there is definitely room for improvement there ( not that his rocket is bad ), so I'll probably work in that direction ( that and try my .16 rockets that I made for Eve ... still had no time for that )

Note that I'm not dissing his work. It is clear from his imgur album that he got a almost polar orbit on propose to get there and that alone requires some skill and a bunch of fuel even if you incline the orbit when you do the first aerobreak ( less than to get to 10 km from Eve surface from sea level though ). I was just stating that doing what he did going to 0m in Eve would almost surely require far more punch than the one he had available. Maybe to get to 0m in Eve and back without a ginourmous rocket we need to land in 11 km and then deploy a glider/plane to get to sea level and back ?

Lol , that is what you get by not having the game in front I was confusing the LV-909 with the LV-45 *facepalm* . Anyway the difference in mass is significant ( 0.5 mass units from the LV-909 and 2.25 from the nuke engine ( from memory, feel free to correct ) ), so it might make a great difference if you want to do your ship the actual return vessel to Kerbin ( and IMHO it is well suited for that )

The guy just irradiated his KSC by smashing a nuke engine in it I think that did it basically because of the choice of landing site. Besides having less 10 km to get up he also avoided the worst of the Eve atmosphere by landing high. I'm not sure if he could do that from sea level

Yeah, I meant the smallest LV . I keep forgetting that there are the 2m LVs after .16