Carl

Fair enough, the fact that you weren't trying to do an intermediate stage had me thinking you wanted to do it all in one go. It can be done, but it's cost and mass prohibitive generally.

Moar Booster. Moar Struts. Always the way. Stop trying to do the lift to Orbit on a single stage, it's doable but very tough and excessivlly heavy. My current endtech, (mostly, missing some science, aero, and landing techs), tourist orbiter takes a 30 ton tourist stack on a mun orbit and back. It consists of a Rhino on the biggest 3.75m tank plus one of the quarter 3.75m tanks with 4 Twin Boars with extra Orange tanks wrapped around it with fuel lines rigged so the rhino feeds of the boars and 2 of the boars feed off the other two. Makes orbit, to mun, mun orbit, mun to kerbin orbit, and deorbit with about 400m/s left in that tank. Replace my payload with a lander and viola. Mun lander.

This. Reusable i think can be done with as noted a reusable booster. But single stage is flat out impossible without some kind of propellantless drive which is compact and weight ok.

Official, given some of the issues being reported with the dev releases atm i stuck to the official release. Also keep meaning to mention it, PHJ has a docking issue with MJ on the end of his Space ToG video if you haven't seen it allready.

As i've been doing my station building i've seen more of the docking issues. MJ absolutely has huge issues docking even mildly misbalanced RCS setups. The problem is that on all but perfectly balanced setups the thrust misalignments with CoG produces unwanted rotation during translations. The RCS fires to correct this. This induces unwanted translation. MJ fires to correct it, repeat ad infinitum. MJ eitheir needs to figure out exactly how misbalanced things are and then limit translation burn thrust values across the entire array to what the reaction wheels can compensate for whilst eliminating RCS for rotation. Or calculate individual thrust limits of each quad, (not even sure KSP would support this). Ideally both so if it's more unbalanced in one direction than the other it can combine both. Might even be worth implementing a docking planner where you can do each step one at a time. i think some issues would certainly be fixed by getting the axes more aligned before moving in. Also seen a the odd example of won't dock where it gets constantly closer but never docks. Some i think are MJ goofs regarding bounding box and backing straight back then telling MJ to go in again nearly allways works in those cases. But some are clearly sum rounding errors as they occur only on very low power designs and don;t fix on retries. I suspect from observation that MJ miscalculates the time value by a tiny fraction of 1%, but because thats still tenths or even whole seconds, it creates problems.

An account does make it easier to manage though. Cool base. No not Jeb .

@eddiew Fruitbat. Classic. At least you haven't done the US Lunar lander type 1 yet. (Aka a camera on the end of a missile fired at the lunar surface).

Yeah but a trajectory isn't determined by how you get it, it just is.

I was thinking skycrane to hoist the second stage onto the first, that stays on EVE's surface, maybe a second to help move the first stage around. You can do it all stock that way. Now if we had proper stock propellers... Also since the last two shows missed showing here the lower stage ends, (test flight to check the docking ports don;t suffer unplanned disassembly in flight, they're good):

I'm pretty sure The Voyager probes where on escape trajectories well before that. In fact they're officially outside the solar system and in interstellar space as of a few years ago AFAIK. One of the Pioneer probes may be on an escape trajectory too, i forget.

Ok i went and did some more messing, assuming 2.6kps of DV with around a 1.43 TWR at liftoff is adequate to make 20km of altitude it may just be possibble with a 2 stage design in which both stages can be reused, the first from eve surface each time, (though resetting it will be a copper plated poodle, as will joining the stages on the ground for each flight). If anyone want my test craft file to actually see if it works, (i suck at using the console), just shout. Pics below, (once imgur finishes processing them).

Yeha in fact a quick look at the cheat sheet says you need better ISP than even a vacuum mammoth, (about the same as a rhino), to get 7km/s period at any initial acceleration. Now a 2 stage setup where the booster flies back to eve's surface, (note flies i this case does not necessarily mean wings), might work. But honestly 7kps even in 2 stages would be tough, the limit for eve looks to be around 3.5kps a stage, and thats a pretty massive upper stage all by itself, (MJ is cool for finding your dv on another planet without going there :p).

I spent late last night screwing around and 7kms single stage from Kerbin is flat impossible, never mind Eve.

Nah that sum probably isn't far off at all. The thing is at closest approach the vector will be directly away/towards the sun, and nothing else will apply enough gravity for long enough to distort things in a meaningful way. The thing is i'm pretty sure the suns gravity out at earth orbit and beyond is weak enough it shouldn;t radically alter things. The error is probably under an hour.

You shouldn;t drink and read, you might crash your computer .

I'm guessing he thinks his name is Rory...

I don't recall hearing about it, but then i don't think i've heard of any serious manned mission studies beyond the moon. A lot of wistful thinking and such like, but nothing like a real serious "we can do this" study. Closest that came that i've heard of was immediate post apollo when NASA expected to get funding for Mars and started looking at it before being told, nope, you don't matter anymore and we're not gonna fund you, (for all intents and purposes, the shuttle ended up such a massive debacle bcause it was so horribly underfunded, NASA tried to do too much with too little, though the US military sticking it;s oar in and stirring did not help).

Oh it's been a thign for years. The problem is AFAIK until Vasimr came along the only drive concept ever seriously studied capable of it was fission/fusion drives. Before that it was just horribly impractical.

Get MJ's maneuver node editor, (you can forget everything else exists if you want), you probably need a finer touch on the controls than the stock interface allows, and just because it says your inclination is matched dosen't mean it really is. I often find even after a MJ automated inclination match and telling MJ to do a transfer orbit i still have to tweak the node some for interplanetary shots.

Yeah that would need mods. And nuke planes are probably enough to give certain people fits. You can read about probably the most insane IRL example of the concept here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-madness-of-the-lockheed-cl-1201.219823/ Very kerbal. Also this quote from the thread feel so appropriate too:

EVE's atmosphere does not support jets.

For what use it may be, my Hexdecuple Mammoth: Yes thats 12 FLT800 tanks with a vector on the bottom wrapped around a mammoth. Lots of compact thrust in that thing. Getting it down, getting eough tansk o in a landing stable config, e.t.c. i leave upto you, but may help given the likly low aero compared to 4 mammoths. IMo obvious options for reusable Eve landing craft. 1. Refuel on surface, may not ben enough even with quite big designs though from some locations. 2. With credit it to Wicmillie, a suborbital flight that is caught on the way up by somthing else and then boosted. 3. A 2 stage design in which the bottom stage is actually landed separately on eve from the lander, (which also serves as the eve takeoff upper atmosphere stage), and you dock the two to each other on eve surface, then use the bottom stage to boost the upper stage, whilst the bottom stage lands back on eve to be refueled and used for the next flight, (The Space Shuttle was supposed to be lifted by a booster like this known as the Flyback F-1, but budget constraints forced them to go with reusable solids plus expended big orange tank in it's place). 4. When in orbit, refuel from Gilly, possibly via docking at a station, (my mun/minmus landing is going to be done like this, same for Duna, Dres, Joolian moons, (well at least the three easy ones, not sure how Laythe and the other one will be handled yet), not sure about Moho and Eve yet either. That makes getting up/down much easier as the design doesn't have to go from Kerbin orbit/surface to Eve before landing and taking off again.

Cool, i really should get around to showing off my station soon.

Yeah but if your gonna use twin boars orange tanks are you know sorta required. Well assuming your not running a mostly modded game where you barely use anything stock because mods.

You never use twin boars anymore, seriously?