technion

Thanks! And that's true.. but I didn't want Jeb to know he had a few years sitting on a wasteland in his future

I can't express how long this took. The spaceplane took FOREVER to drop itself, and since landing was a complicated effort, taking three tries took half my day. Eventually, we pulled it off after this nice aerobrake. One of the things I love about Eve is that you can pretty much navigate it in the dark. Which is good, because landing on the lit side seemed to be an impossible intercept for some reason. Once I got this low, and only then, the spaceplane developed an incredible desire to turn. It wasn't a weight or drag thing because the direction seemed random. It was just very hard to keep straight. Flight engineer is invaluable for this landing - you need to see that "altitude (terrain)". The nuke blew off on landing. This occurred twice and I gave up on the idea of trying to land intact. Obligatory shot.

Hey guys, This mission documents my fist ever spaceplane. Its mission - to get Jeb to Eve. He was aware this was a one way trip for the spaceplane, and stage two of this mission will feature a rescue. This is our SSTO. It's amazing how much work goes into a good SSTO. I've never had so many attempts at getting something into orbit. Top jet-assisted speed was around 1600m/s. Here we are seen firing the nuke and dropping the jets. A spaceplane has such a different launch profile. You can see here by the time the ap hit the goal, we had almost already circularised. Planning an intercept. Dealing with inclination.

My two major challenges have been "joolean tour", featuring a landing on all moons in one mission, and a return trip to Eve's surface. I highly recommend both of these for the advanced player.

After crashing down on the dark side of Eve, I've come to the conclusion that the above spaceplane is, with no effort, an infiniglider. I took it a third of the way around the planet without ever accelerating.

Thanks for the help guys. The difficult thing is that nothing's "broken", the plane works, and is perfect at kerbin. It's just sloooooow to land on Eve. Pictures below. It's seriously taken weeks to get something capable of making it from Kerbin to Eve. I'd hate to imagine adding mass to it.

Hey guys, I just got my first space plane on Eve. I'm finding: If I tilt the nose down by more than about 5 degrees, it loses control With the engines cut, it nearly floats The obvious answer is "less lift" but I just got through adding lift to get out of Kerbin. The first descent took me one hour, forty minutes, and if I physics warp at all there's an explosion. Then I reached the ground and exploded. 1. Is there a faster way to land this spaceplane? 2. Is there a mod or something that will allow "quicksave in atmosphere"? I wouldn't be upset if I could just quicksave 2km above the ground and get the landing right.

It may be small by Eve standards but I've driven a rover across roughly 200KM and never saw anything.

It definitely says "crashed into the ocean". I have no mods but flight engineer.

Hi, I'm trying to land a new rocket on Eve. I've found with parachutes, I can land on the ground at 5m/s. It's a bumpy landing but it holds up. If however, I land in the ocean, it explodes on impact. I tried to rocket assist and slowed down to 3m/s... still explodes. Why is the ocean far more dangerous than the ground?

I created this thread because there are a tonne of "How can I land on Tylo" threads. This rocket didn't even use its last stage, which has over 3k dv. And it was dead easy.

Hey guys, When I went to Tylo last, I took a very difficult and complex rocket there due to how difficult this place is. I've got an improved design here. Presenting, "serial asparagus". On the face of it, this is serial staged. A bottom stage, a top stage. I hypedited it into a 50km Tylo orbit. When the engines fire, you can see the radials from both the top and bottom stages firing. A fuel line keeps things sensible. Dropping first stage, you can see we've applied a heap of dv to slow down. Touchdown. Lift off again. Orbit re-established with stacks of dv left. Honestly, in comparison to the eight stage, heavy and complex asparagus unit I originally landed with, this was dead easy.

The transport I took to Moho was built for my Jolean tour. It carried five landers, including landers for Tylo and Laythe, and a science module for each of them, to all the moons of Jool, and then returned. The same transport just barely carried a small lander to Moho.

With all the whinging about career mode that's a very overlooked issue. The game IS overwhelming when it throws a few dozen parts at you, many of which look about the same. Career mode guides you through a progression of that which makes sense. Yes, a seasoned player can work through it very easily. They can also get a mod and make it harder. A new player however, won't start themselves on a return mission to Eve because they read someone's log and had all the parts there.

What are you lifting that's that heavy? My Duna lander (which is capable of return to orbit) uses 3 x 47-8S's. And if anything, it's overpowered, it takes off very fast.

Great - I would swap those engines, or at least the two side ones. This will reduce weight a lot more. I've landed 48-7S's on Duna so I'm confident they'll manage the Mun. As for the science, as another poster just said, your kerbal can EVA out and pick that science up. That kerbal will then place that science in a command module. All you then need to return is that module. This will allow for a much smaller rocket.

I'm not sure if it's the answer you were hoping for, but that rocket can definitely land on the Mun. It can also make the return, although I broke off the lower part of the rocket when the chutes expanded. Regarding the roll, this does tend to happen on certain types of rockets. I'm not sure there's a lot you can do at this point, but replacing those winglets with standard canard once you get them will help a lot. The bigger stability issue imo is the lander that wobbles. It makes it hard to target a manouever node accurately. I would add some struts for this. In terms of making the landing easier for you, is the goal here to do some sort of biome hopping? If this is your first Mun attempt, that's overshooting, and I don't believe this rocket has enough fuel to do it well anyway. There is therefore no point having more than two science kits. One for "in space near" and one for touchdown. You're also set to take them home, and packing a series of parachutes to make that happen. There are lights, stacks of RCS and far more batteries than you need. I'm guessing you don't have the 48-7S engine yet, but I can see fuel lines and decouplers so I know you have those. Finally, those ladders aren't needed on the Mun. There's a probe core in there that would almost allow this to become an Apollo style mission, but the main rocket is out of fuel by the time it separates, and there's no docking port on the main rocket. In short, that's a lot of weight that's making your landing more complicated than it needs to be. I've prepared a variation for you which is stripped back of those components. You can see more how much fuel we get into Mun orbit with. You'll find landing much easier (unless you land on a virtually 90 degree slope like my first attempt). Look at the difference in dv with all the science parts blown. It doesn't even need to use this stage, which has 1855dv. Craft file: https://lolware.net/kerbal/Mercury IVb.craft

The ultimate, definitive answer would be for you to post your craft file and let people actually try it.

The twice I went to Gilly, I did it using an Ion based system. Sit yourself on an Eve orbit which is ideal for your Eve mission. If it costs a tonne of dv to get your Gilly unit out there and land, well an Ion driven system has it. Gilly is the only place I'm aware of where, without even trying, a lander with full science kit will easily have a TWR of >1.

I've just completed this challenge. It was done in .23 career mode, but didn't completely meet the rules for Jebediah mode. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/65421-Jool-5-tour

Putting it down. Science recovered: 8067, plus the extra that was transmitted from Jool.

Finally ditching that big heavy transport and preparing the command module to fly home. Fairly good looking intercept. If there's one thing I hate, it's the anticlimax of landing a mission like this on the dark side of Kerbin. I aerobroke too high and, whilst I could have hit F9 and gone lower, I decided to use what we had. More aerobraking. This large capture is a great excuse to use my auxiliary stage. Ever since an early mission only just ran out of fuel before returning, I've bee packing these. It weighs so little there's very little cost, but it's highly effective at adding just that needed bit of dv.

Capture time at Bop. The inclination here really blow a lot of fuel. Landing however is very easy. Touchdown. Launch, science module blown. Very simple rendezvous.

By this time I was starting to worry about fuel, so we carefully planned the Vall intercept. Went very well. Lander heading down. I underestimated what it takes to land on Vall, this was very close to insufficient. Grabbing all the science. Like I meant to elsewhere, blowing the science bay before launch. Nail biting moment. Turns out we did OK. Doing even moar science while we're here in orbit. We didn't bother with this for any other moon.

Let's not forget Jeb -he's been in Laythe orbit since visiting Pol. Time for him to rendezvous. Moar recovery!