technion

I've done several Eve missions in the past using command seats and probe cores. As much as I complained about this mod configuration, the good thing about FAR is that an aerodynamic top on a lander can somewhat offsets the extra weight, whereas a command seat on a pod is just an aerobrake for the launch. I actually tried this mission a while back and as far as I'm concerned it wasn't feasible prior to the NASA parts - all missions this size only just made Kerbin orbit, then a tug had to go up and dock. Thanks! I did a rescue mission a while back, and the catch was definitely the need to drop a rover, and be prepared for a drive. It's very difficult to do a precision landing in this atmosphere, and no one wants to walk a Kerbal 60kms.

I guess that's what I mean. For a person struggling, simplest = best.

Here's the cool part: The top stage of the rocket was an ion driven unit with 2500 dv. Hopefully enough for the trip home. Coming back in. This is another part that rook about 15 tries. FAR REALLY wanted to turn this over. If it succeeded, the parachute burnt up thanks to DRE. I don't understand what the proper solution is. Placing a drogue chute on the top just creates a chute that will burn up thanks to DRE. Trying to put anything else that made drag at the top ignores the fact this was the top of the launcher and was already very happy to flip. Touchdown. One panel survived - I felt an urge to top of electricity before finishing. Science.

Here's the launch. The whole thing is a disaster really. You have to launch at full throttle or for some reason the rocket won't clear the bottom landing framework from the decoupler, and you'll carry it into liftoff. But you have to throttle back straight away or FAR will immediately flip the rocket. I really feel like it should have had fins, but you can't add fins without having them burn up during entry, even with the seven heat shields I carried the whole way from Kerbin. There are six SAS modules to keep things in check, and while that only just does the job, the rocket can be supersensitive to controls. FAR has a terminal velocity readout, but the rocket will turn upside down if I get anywhere near it. FAR encourages you to start turning earlier than the stock game, but I found it very difficult. The prograde marker has a habit of turning itself to nearly flat with the horizon when you're only 20KM off the ground and the Ap is nowhere near the 100KM it should be. Most of the ascent looks like this. You can note the speed vs the Terminal V, and the lowered throttle. Any more and there's a flip. Yay! Things finally get easier at about this height, when the smaller parts of the rocket kick in. Circularised.

This here is the reason for the first mission failure. The process of decoupling science modules and having them parachute down didn't work under Eve's gravity. They just dropped and exploded on the rocket. In this version two, each science module had a probe core and a small engine. They could decouple, fly a little bit and parachute down. One gathered science in the atmosphere, one was for the surface. Both landed. Obligatory. I don't understand what happened here because the ladder doesn't clip like this on Kerbin. It took a few minutes of jumping and grinding to get over that tank.

Hey guys, Here I am doing something I never thought possible - Eve and back in a single mission. This is also the first time I've performed this with both FAR and DRE installed. Both of these made the environment on Eve an absolute nightmare. As always, I host my images on an experimental SSL server, so feedback about whether they load is appreciated. Here's the rocket sitting there. I liked having a large amount of small SRBs. They only needed to run a few seconds for the TWR on the main lifter to get > 1.1. Dropped the lifter, burn to Eve. I can't tell you how much more interesting these missions are now I don't have 45 minute LV-N burns. This is the deorbit. Step one of dealing with DRE, is to actually burn off as much of your speed as possible during the descent, before hitting the thicker parts. Despite being covered in heat shields, you can see various parts kept overheating. I had to keep making slight turns and rotations to keep things from exploding. You would think that I would drop the heat shields the moment we cleared the atmospheric burn. Actually, they worked pretty well as aerobrakes. If they dropped before the parachutes, the rocket would be going too fast and the parachutes would break off. All my chutes expanded at different levels. We dropped the shields once two sets opened. Touchdown. Daytime.

Thing is, "optimum" may equate to "most fuel efficient", but if you're having issues with transfers, "best" may well be to simply just escape SOI, then find a manoeuvre that gives an intercept.

This is basically why I'm happy to use the inefficient SRBs. They are basically just a surface to mount parachutes on, and it's easier to let them offset that weight than try to decouple an empty surface.

No I did not ever know that.. damn.. that's a fantastic idea. There seems to be a huge amount of SAS required for the launch because A) I am playing with FAR and I cannot bring fins without having them explode due to DRE. By the time we hit around 30km and lose the bottom aerospikes and tanks, we can afford to decouple all that weight. Over all, this was one of those ideas that looks great on Kerbin, but fails on Eve. With the massively increased gravity over there, these manifolds were useless and the parts flew straight down into the waiting rocket below.

To answer everyone's question, yep, it's like you all suggested. I've done some tests and it seems to not affect the weight. Now, if only I could add an XL parachute without losing > 1500 DV

Hey guys, I'm looking to try something different. By "different", I mean "come up with an actual use for those hydraulic manifolds". In this scenario, I have a stage that fires these manifolds basically as a replacement separatron, and has these science modules land on parachute. It seems to work, but it begs the question: These things are heavy. I can deal with that while landing. I cannot deal with that after firing them and trying to ascent from the surface of Eve. Do these still have a weight on the center rocket after being used? PS: Please let me know if you have any issues with the below image. It's running on an experimental SSL server.

This is where I get within 100m, and then switch to the station, and turn it around until the ports are lined up. Then switch back, and bring it in for a dock.

This is the problem with doing this much maths and calculations. If you've been to the Mun, you know the size of the rocket you need to get there. And you can see when you do that, that just a bit more burning will get you there. And you know how easy it is to get home, and that you don't need 4k dv to land on Kerbin. A certain level of engineering is required on larger missions, but OP, I'd urge you just to play the game. If you've been to the Mun, try taking that exact same rocket for a Minmus flyby. If you make it with even a bit of fuel left, you can probably then land.

I tried exactly this combination and ended up dropping TAC. Food for five Kerbals travelling that far, and making that many transfers, ended up being ridiculous to hold.

I just completed my second run at this. Full report here. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/81046-Jool-5-mission I played with DRE which really increased the total mothership size.

Back at Kerbin - look at the capture burn. Due to DRE, this had to be done this way, the approach was way too fast to survive anything else. So, that's 1700dv more than more people needed, and I needed it on the part that can usually be smallest. Look at the G-force when that heat shield pops. The inflatable heat shield handles just about any amount of heat - but look at that G force when it hits atmosphere. Approaching any faster than this would have killed them. Kerbals with habitat coming down. Mission complete. I didn't put a huge amount of effort into gathering every piece of science possible.

Somehow I missed the ground shot again. The science labs on the side decoupled on launch. Flying this with FAR was quite difficult. Because there were no actual wings, it had to go straight up until the air thinned out, to avoid the standard issue of flipping. Here, the top component comes in for transfer to mothership.

The whole mothership has to haul itself to Laythe. It's asymmetrical but surprisingly manageable. Having used that entire orange tank to be captured by Tylo, I got nervous about fuel here. Turns out there was plenty though. I have no idea what this intercept was meant to look like. Laythe orbit established for the mothership. Dropping the Laythe lander now. This is why I use jets on Laythe. Not because it's cool, but because trying to land on actual land is a huge pain. I hated trying to actually target ground in previous missions. Deorbit, then just fly to the nearest island. Due to the low atmosphere, DRE didn't make much of a fuss. Coming down.

Mission repeat, at Vall. On the ground. Vall used a lot more lander fuel than I expected. Docked all over again with the mothership back at Tylo orbit. One last time, at Bop. Same lander and small transport. Touchdown. Just carrying the science back to the mothership, after three cycles of land and transport, the small carrier is done.

This rocket featured a minimal transport tug to take care of the three smaller moons. This was supposed to go to Vall, but I slightly messed up the intercept, and ended up at Pol.... I tried to get every intercept on a good incline. No shots on the ground.. so here's one of a landing. As per a bug thread I made a while back, no matter what, the built-in dock system would also claim I was on target, if I was pointed an engine instead of the actual docking port. Navyfish to the rescue. Back at Tylo, wow that's a bad intercept with the mothership. But this small tug has the dv to meet up. This dock was incredibly hard - again, I had to use Navyfish' mod to pull it off. Success. Now we can refuel, swap kerbals out and pick up another science pack from the mothership.

I still hate Tylo. If you think you've hit this without quicksave/restore... you are my hero. It's also a mission I really would struggle with without KRE's surface altitude readout. Bringing it down slow. Obligatory. This was actually how I planned to gather this science. I could reach the material bays, but not the goo cannisters. If you decoupled the material bays, they exploded, and the canisters were easily harvested. Coming in for pickup.

Now here's what I'm talking about. What good is packing 2km/s of fuel for the ejection, if an insertion is going to cost you 3km/s? The ejection manoeuvre didn't seem perfect, but it did the job. Now this is new... direct capture to Tylo. People talk about the efficiencies of heading straight to Laythe, but then, if DRE is just going to make the ship explode, you might aswell hit Tylo. The capture burn was surprisingly acceptable. I packed T30's on the outside tanks, once it just the middle one, it's nuclear power. This is going to be a slow capture. Still, that's manageable. The 45 minutes ejection estimates when the whole transport was nuclear was completely unmanageable. Getting in a Tylo orbit, Jool in background.

This meanwhile, is the mothership. It has the entire rest of the mission. There's a whole heap of those small boosters to get it moving on take off. Dropping SRBs.. needed to add in separatrons to make that safe. Lifter stage depleted. This thing was a counterweight - except it wasn't. The rocket is properly weighted without it. It wasn't however, aerodynamically symmetrical, and I had to put this on without a nosecone to make it fly straight. Coming in for dock. The completed rocket. I didn't plan on still having fuel in the outside tanks, so there's an extra bit of mainsail power we can start our ejection with.

Hey guys, I did a Jool 5 mission a while back, and wanted to try a completely different process this time. I sent a different Kerbal to every moon, and brought a lot of science kit. That said, we didn't completely meet the "Jeb mode" criteria, so I guess it's just a "normal" run. That said, what I'm doing different this time is two major mods: Deadly re-entry FAR DRE has a huge impact on this mission. We need to haul tonnes of heatshields the entire way there just to haul them back, and the return can't simply crash into Kerbal. More importantly, everyone aerobrakes at Jool - but I couldn't. FAR also had a significant impact on what I could do on Laythe. It took several attempts at a lifter that didn't just flip over. It also meant my original launches couldn't be asparagus staged. The first thing we lifted was the Tylo lander. Thanks to new parts, there was no weight issue including it on the original launch. FAR, however, simply didn't give me an aerodynamic method of doing so. The launch process. Due to FAR, there's no asparagus here. The outside four all feed to the inside, but we need to be out of the atmosphere before they drop or it just flips. Here we can see the Tylo lander, with a supply of fuel to manage a rendezvous with the mothership.

This gets down to the way you want to play. Personally I think Apollo missions are more fun - and they give you a better learning experience for harder missions. Noone's going to try and land on Tylo without having that lander separate from its transport.